Dov Seidman
Founder and Chairman of The HOW Institute for Society and LRN
New York Times Bestselling Author of “HOW”
When you hit the pause button on the machine or computer, it stops. But when we pause, we begin. It's a distinctly human capability to pause. When we pause, we can reflect on the world, the challenge before us, and the situation we're in.
Summary
This week on Leadership Matters, Alan was joined by Dov Seidman, a New York Times bestselling author, Founder and Executive Chairman of The HOW Institute for Society and Founder and Chairman of LRN. Throughout their conversation, Alan and Dov discuss Dov’s early life moving between the United States and Israel, his career journey which led him to create LRN, what inspired him to write HOW: Why HOW We Do Anything Means Everything and the subsequent creation of the through the HOW Institute for Society and the many lessons in leadership he’s learned along the way.
Mentions & Resources
The Dyslexic Advantage: Unlocking the Hidden Potential of the Dyslexic Brain by Brock L. Eide and Fernette F. Eide.
Guest Bio
Dov Seidman is a successful entrepreneur, CEO, best-selling author, and teacher. He has devoted his life and career to elevating individual and organizational behavior, inspiring principled performance, nurturing a culture of moral leadership, and building institutions committing to scaling deep, sustainable, human values in the business arena and across all spheres of society.
Seidman is the author of The New York Times best seller “HOW: Why HOW We Do Anything Means Everything.” HOW is much more than a book. HOW is a philosophical framework for changing the role of behavior, governance, culture and leadership in contemporary society. Today, the HOW philosophy impacts how businesses operate, how cities are run, how soldiers are trained, how school systems prepare students and staff, and how professional sports franchises win championships through how they develop team character and build more respectful, trust-filled cultures. Dov is so obsessed with the HOW that he created The HOW Institute for Society in 2019 as a non-profit to build and nurture a culture of moral leadership, principled decision-making, and values-based behavior. The Institute seeks to enable individuals and institutions to meet the profound social, economic, and technological changes of the 21st Century.
In 1994, Dov founded LRN, the leading ethics and compliance management and education company, where he was CEO for 25 years and currently serves as chairman, with a purpose to “help people around the world do the right thing” and mission of “inspiring principled performance in business.” Since then, LRN has helped over 25 million people in more than 100 countries simultaneously navigate complex legal and regulatory environments and make ethical decisions. Today, LRN helps more than 2,500 companies foster ethical, responsible, and inclusive cultures, which, in turn, create sustainable competitive advantage.
Led by a lifelong pursuit and passion for ethical leadership, Dov became the partner to The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity in awarding The Elie Wiesel Prize in Ethics in 2008. This annual competition challenges college students to address the urgent and complex ethical issues facing the modern world. He continues to support the Prize and is also a member of The Elie Wiesel Foundation Board of Directors.
After the collapse of Enron, Seidman testified before the U.S. Sentencing Commission, advocating for corporations to evolve from a check-the-box, compliance-only approach to fostering ethical cultures and behaviors. His proposals were adopted and currently serve as the standards by which companies, cultures, and programs are evaluated.
Dov continues to work with and advise CEOs and other senior leaders to help shape values-based and purpose-inspired corporate cultures, leadership and governance models. Fortune often calls on Dov to write and speak about the moral imperative of modern leadership, recognizing his “ability to take the challenges that CEOs and other leaders face in their day-to-day roles and place them in a broader context of decision-making.” Seidman is also a contributing author for The New York Times and other prominent publications. Dov was named a “Groundbreaker” by The New York Times for “his role in changing the business world.” He has been referred to as a “Game Changer”
and “Principled Prophet” by Time Magazine for helping companies “thrive by pursuing both profits and principles.”
Dov often speaks at leading private and public sector events. He was hired by the NFL commissioner in 2014 to advocate to its owners and head coaches the need for the NFL to create a culture where tolerance and respect were normal expectations. He was the first, non-Apple employee to speak at The Steve Jobs Theater at Apple Park in Cupertino, California. He has talked about issues concerning global leadership in Vatican City. He gave the commencement address, “Doing the Right Thing,” at UCLA’s College of Letters and Science. Seidman is often called upon as a keynote speaker at both private and public events, such as the United Nations Global Compact, The World Economic Forum, The World Business Forum, The Aspen Ideas Festival, and more.
Seidman holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in moral philosophy from UCLA and Oxford—where he served as captain of the Balliol College crew team. He also has a law degree from Harvard Law School and an honorary doctorate from Hebrew Union College. He was also given the Jurisprudence Award by the Anti-Defamation League.
Dov is meaningfully involved in and supports organizations pursuing aligned missions of significance and seeking to inspire positive change in our world. Currently, Dov serves on the board of directors at The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, The 92nd Street Y, The Ellison Institute for Transformative Medicine, and Planet Word.
Dov helps to educate and develop the next generation to become inspirational, moral leaders and principled decision-makers. In the Fall of 2022, Dov was appointed a Hauser Leader at The Center for Public Leadership at The Harvard Kennedy School. Dov established The Herbert Morris Scholarship at UCLA’s School of Law to support a first-year law school student who has a demonstrated interest in philosophy and who aspires to make a meaningful difference in the world.
Episode Transcript
Alan Fleischmann
Welcome to Leadership Matters on SiriusXM and at leadershipmattersshow.com. I'm your host, Alan Fleischmann. Today I'm joined by someone who has dedicated his life to helping individuals and organizations lead with integrity, purpose and moral clarity. Dove Seidman is a visionary entrepreneur, a best-selling author and thought leader who has spent decades elevating the role of value, space, leadership in business and society. He's the founder and chairman of the HOW Institute for Society, and is also the author of HOW: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything, a New York Times bestseller that has shaped the way leaders think more broadly about their own roles. Dov is also on the board of the Eli Wiesel foundation for humanity, the 92nd Street Y, the Ellison Institute for Transformative Medicine and Planet Word.
Today, we will explore Dov’s incredible journey from his days growing up between the United States and Israel to his pioneering work in ethics and his deep commitment to moral leadership. We'll hear also hear his thoughts about what truly, truly matters when you want to lead in a world that demands more transparency, trust and authenticity now more than ever.
Dov, welcome to Leadership Matters. It's a pleasure to have you on the show.
Dov Seidman
Alan, thank you. It's great to be with you.
Alan Fleischmann
I've been looking forward to this for a long time, so this is gonna be fun for me too.
Dov Seidman
Me too.
Alan Fleischmann
You were born in California and you moved to Israel at a really young age before moving back to the United States when you were 13. Tell us a little bit of what life was like, a little bit about the journey. Why California, a little bit about your parents, any sisters and brothers, and what life was like around the house where you live, whether it was California or Israel.
Dov Seidman
Well, the Hallmark definition of a journey, Alan, is that they're curvilinear. They go up and down, and our journey was up and down, and many ups and many downs. I was born in San Francisco. At the age of three, I had a brother, fou,r and a sister to my mother, who was born in Detroit, Michigan. We went to Israel for a 10 day holiday after the Six Day War, and Israel then was in a state of euphoria, having achieved at least a military miracle, and it was a pioneering time. And on the 10th day, she went into a toy store, Alan, to buy us toys to occupy us on the flight home. And in that chance encounter with a woman who immigrated to Israel from Shanghai, China, Mrs. Rabinowitz, who looked up at my mother, who was a towering a larger than life figure, a beautiful, exotically beautiful, tall woman, and said, you know, this country could use your little children. They walked down the street, and we were enrolled in kindergarten. And then my mother called my father and said, I'm not coming home. I feel at home here. So kindergarten, Tel Aviv, first grade, San Francisco, second, Jerusalem, third, San Francisco, fourth, Jerusalem, fifth, Tel Aviv, xixth, Jerusalem, seventh, Tel Aviv. I could go on, but the first time I ever went to school two years in a row was 11th grade. And the reason for that, we were not children of a military family that fanatically moved. My mother would break up with a significant other, and say, we need to go to this town, or she'd miss the states. The reasons for moving were quite fickle, and she was a gypsy in the best sense of the term, incredibly values based person, but quite adventurous.
My father was 27 years older than her. He was a Zionist in Vienna, when socialism was more in and I think in his mind and heart, his family spending time in Israel made sense. They would divorce, but shared a love for their three kids, and really partnered in our livelihoods and upbringing,
I was the middle child with a pretty serious middle child syndrome. If the family went to dinner, I insisted on staying home. If they walked up the street, I crossed the street, I would say I was difficult and probably quite frustrating to my parents.
Alan Fleischmann
And where are your siblings today?
Dov Seidman
They’re both in the States. My brother spent much of his life in Europe and in Israel. But after October 7, after his two little kids spending time in bomb shelters and this and that, they came to the States for reprieve and are still here. My sister, she's in the states too, and I have a niece and nephew from her, and they're wonderful. And my niece just became a nurse, and my nephew is studying history in a PhD program. So its been quite a journey, but I would say that life was a struggle for me as a kid. It's hard enough to move every year, but the first time I ever got an A in school and felt any sense of accomplishment, I got two A's in high school, one in phys ed and auto shop. I got pretty much straight D’s and C's and F's throughout elementary school, just school was hard for me, but I was dyslexic. It wasn't easily diagnosed then, but it was clear that I was.
Alan Fleischmann
I gotta imagine also the moving back and forth must have been incredibly positive, one side of that was the adventurous side of you, the leaning in quickly to get to know people that you didn't know. You go back and forth probably every year when you did, you don't know.
Dov Seidman
And every September, we showed up in a new school and had to adapt. It's one of life's greatest paradox. As a father, I would not prescribe much of any of my life, but coming out the other side, I feel quite blessed by it. You don't sign up to move your family every single year or sometimes in the middle of the year. But if you come out the other side, and you come out in a way with an appreciation of the world and the human condition. In my case, it turned out to be a blessing, but not necessarily going through it.
You know, I remember in fifth grade, just so vividly, anytime we would read out loud, I was so petrified to be called on, and everybody was able to be in the story. And I was just trying to figure out the algorithm, where are we going to be in the story when I get called on, and I would skip ahead and practice that section, and you wind up seeing who else might be struggling in the class, and you wind up spending your whole life, both in life and on the ceiling of life, just appreciating the human dynamics what's happening around you. I think it's informed my career choices, but I survived by trying to be in the moment and trying to figure out what's happening in the moment from above, just as a survival instinct.
Alan Fleischmann
Tell us a little bit about your journey when you started to study, because I there was a part of you that, knowing you must have been very restless, the idea of sitting around in the classroom, being talked at. Dov Seidman
My mother, when she knew that I struggled, she'd hired tutors, “take Dov to the zoo, he can't sit still.” It was all that I always felt that I could think pretty deeply, but I had a hard time expressing myself verbally and in writing.
Alan Fleischmann
In fifth grade, did you know you were just like when you were a kid?
Dov Seidman
Well when in fifth grade your tutor is just holding your hand and you're still working on handwriting, uou know something is wrong. Literally, handwriting. I remember in second grade, I didn't understand what was on the blackboard, so I spent the hour just copying it into my notebook and handing it in, as opposed to understanding that it was instructions. But I felt my mother's love. You know, at the time, Israel imported model airplanes and ships from Japan, and even if the instructions were in English, I couldn't follow them. So I would look at the picture, and I would sit on the floor and reverse engineer and take the parts, and then nine hours later, hand her a plane. So when my mom would get called into school or for teachers to complain about how much I was struggling in school right in front of me. She'd say, you know, my son sat on his butt for nine hours and made a plane. Can your son do that? So I felt that she found something in me to appreciate.
But you know, when I was in high school back in the States, I think I decided to express myself more physically. I played football. I was into wrestling. I became a bit of a jock, and then I was injured, and it was a really low moment in my life where finally, I have friends, and I'm, I guess, popular as a high school athlete would be. And then I had one last choice, that it's time to maybe make a difference with using my head to get ahead, I took the SAT Alan. I got a 970, a pretty humiliating score. I studied another six months and took it again, and my score improved dramatically from a 970 all the way to a 980. I could not crack 1000 on two tries.
Alan Fleischmann
It must have been devastating, too.
Dov Seidman
It was devastating. Andlong story short, I got a job here and there in high school, and then I actually applied to Stanford and to the University of Pennsylvania, and I was rejected by each within a week. I kind of felt that I belong at a place like that, but I had nothing on paper to show for it. But I applied, and I was rejected. I got into UC Santa Barbara as a Californian, and I spent three days going through orientation. And after three days, I felt some dissonance, some picture I painted in my mind as to the difference I want to make in the world just didn't jive.
So I drove back to Los Angeles, and I wrote UCLA a long letter saying that I'm in the UC system and I'm I hereby make a hardship appeal that I need to stay in Los Angeles to continue to detail Lionel Richie's cars with my car detailing partner, Ruben Sloan, who you've already admitted and I am committed to being self made and to paying for my own college life and tuition. And I need to remain in Los Angeles, because we have been detailing Lionel Richie's cars for the last three years. And UCLA admitted me, I think, to their credit, under one condition that I would start college in remedial English. And here I was. I started college in remedial English. And I think my entrepreneurial experience obviously started detailing cars.
Every Saturday we detailed two Rolls Royces, two Mercedes. He paid us handsomely, and I put money away, and that's how I funded my life. An absolutely true story is that when the lyrics to All Night Long, when Lionel wrote the music to All Night Long, he put a cassette in one of his cars, and we listened to it before there were lyrics, and he said, “Guys, what do you think/” I remember that like it was yesterday. He it just a beautiful human being.
Alan Fleischmann
Are you still in touch with him?
Dov Seidman
Not much, no. But I did watch the Netflix documentary that I really recommend on how the song We Are the World was created.
Alan Fleischmann
I saw that too. It was an amazing film.
Dov Seidman
I thought it was terrific. And what I realized from him was an embodiment of leadership. To pull that group of exquisite, exquisite artists together was really something.
Alan Fleischmann
I was actually quite stunned that he was, that he really was 60. I always thought it was a few other folks that he was part of it, but I don't think I don't think I realized that it was really him. So the entrepreneur, he was born. He was born before that.
Dov Seidman
You know, people don't wash rented cars, but when you own a car, you haven't washed, and that's a metaphor for life. How do you create a true sense of ownership in everything you do, because when you are animated by an ethos of ownership, you just tend to care more. Here I'm actually, I know we're on Zoom, but there's just so you see it, there's me, Ruben and Lionel, and you see the twins of Rolls Royces in between.
Alan Fleischmann
You guys. Yeah, amazing. I love that.
Dov Seidman
But you know what's interesting, Alan, in terms of you asked me about my educational background. I was led into UCLA just two days before classes started, and all the popular classes, history, psychology, economics were oversubscribed. What's the one class that was wide open?
Alan Fleischmann
Philosophy. The reason why I know that is because I know that through your study, which, when I saw that, I was blown away, because that's exactly what I'd imagined, knowing you. That is so cool, that was your major
Dov Seidman
I would have flunked history. I couldn't read 500 pages, but philosophy rewarded you for reading just 10 pages over and over and over again, and it was me. So here I am in remedial English and a difficult philosophy class, and I swear to you, I found myself the vernacular, the frameworks, the precepts, the language. I always was fascinated because of my upbringing in the human condition and questions of right and wrong and how the world works. And here I went right up.
Alan Fleischmann
Also, when I went to your office years ago, it was probably not the office you have today, but I went to visit you in New York that you had, like, conference rooms and meeting rooms.
Dov Seidman
We had about 30 different conference rooms named after moral philosophers.
Alan Fleischmann
That's right. I remember that now that you're saying this. I just realized that, yeah.
Dov Seidman
Well, and the main office, the main conference room right outside the elevator on Fifth Avenue in New York City, it was called the Adam Smith conference room, to make a point that here I was pursuing ethical capitalism in the epicenter of capitalism, probably in New York City. And people would say, I thought they're all named after moral philosophers. Adam Smith, wasn't he an economist? He wrote The Wealth of Nations, and most people are taught that that was an economics treatise. He was the chairman of the moral philosophy department at Glasgow University when he wrote The Wealth of Nations, and before that, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. So I made that point to say that even though I'm a capitalist, true capitalism was invented, if you will, the theory of it by a moral philosopher practicing moral philosophy.
Alan Fleischmann
Were you inspired by the fact that so many of those folks that you ended up becoming a student of, and you named your conference rooms after, also probably had dyslexia. I'm always fascinated by how many of the great minds in history struggle with dyslexia. But nobody talked about it.
Dov Seidman
Yeah, you know, there's a there's a book called The Dyslexic Advantage, and I'm one of the folks highlighted in there. And most dyslexics that you know of, they pivot. And all the ones who took honors classes and AP classes and excel academically wind up working for them. You know, I'm saying they, I'm one of the few entrepreneur dyslexics who ran back into the academic fire and tried to figure out how to excel academically as opposed to saying, this is not my strength, I'll pivot. And I think it was philosophy, my loving professors, they said to me, forget about reading and writing. All you need to do in philosophy to be a good writer.
There's three principles, clarity, more clarity and more clarity. If you focus on your thinking and then force your thoughts onto the page, the writing will take care of itself, but worry about thinking. And for me, that's all I needed to hear. And then for a while, I was a student of philosophy. What did Descartes say? What did Plato say, etc. And then at some point, if you really push hard enough, and I had a tenacious love affair with philosophy, and I would go to office hours and sit in cafes with the PhD students in philosophy and talk about things until I understood them more deeply. At some point, you stop being a student of philosophy, and you start doing philosophy as a philosophical discipline. And I think that really liberated me.
I was ready for exams, not because I pulled all nighters or I spent an amount of hours studying. I was ready because things were clear and I understood them. And there's a big difference between studying something and doing it, yeah, and I guess I broke through the membrane and came out the other side, and I've ended a master's degree in philosophy, right? I did a master's in moral philosophy at UCLA, and I wrote my master's thesis on moral conscience. What it means, what is this faculty called that we call conscience? Do what your conscience tells you. Then I went to Oxford and studied, you know, more philosophy and some economics and politics. And then in law school, I think I did nine jurisprudence classes, which is philosophy of law. So trying to get underneath things and above things from a philosophical stance has kind of been my thing.
Alan Fleischmann
And did you want to be a professor at one point?
Dov Seidman
I've thought about it. But you know, the person who lived all over the world, the person that was detailing cars, I think I wanted to be in the arena. So more, some people have referred to me as a moral philosopher who wears a suit, I think, being in the rough and tumble world and navigating the real gray and dealing not with just theoretical dilemmas, but real human dilemmas and conflicts, I just felt very drawn to, you know, to the to the messy affair out there called life, but bringing philosophy to it. But it's not an accident that I would start a business that had a philosophical bent.
Alan Fleischmann
And was that in the plan? When did you realize you wanted to, well, you studied in Oxford. How long Dov, long did you do that?
Dov Seidman
I did that for two years, from ‘87 to ‘89 and then from ‘89 to 1992 I was at law school.
Alan Fleischmann
And when you went to law school, was a plan that you were going to bea lawyer?
Dov Seidman
I always loved the law and I think upon graduation, I spent a few weeks in law firms. And I have to tell you, it was an anguishing time. I accepted a clerkship on the Supreme Court of Israel with Justice Aron Barak, and as I was taking the bar exam in the States as that was coming up, and in that time, I had an epiphany. I had the idea for what would become the company that I would found, LRN. LRN is 30 years old this year, and I had this idea that that was philosophically inspired, that in a universalistic capitalist society, you don't know where the next Thomas Anderson is lurking. And not everybody has five, 500 or $1,000 to pay a law firm to help them start a business. Not everybody understands all the legal needs.
And I had this idea that I was going to democratize law by creating a network of law professors and legal experts, and if you would outsource and unbundle information, legal information through Lexus and Westlaw, that we could do the same thing with legal research, that law firms should be focused on complex management of transactions and litigations, and they should be in the business of advice and wisdom and complex issues, but research and analysis should not be done by first or second year associate toiling In the library, cutting his or her teeth on things, because there are expert out there that can do in three hours what a novice takes three weeks to do. And I had this epiphany of democratizing law, and then I did not see law and ethics as distinct. Justice, fairness, liberty, privacy, morality exists in the law. Yes, there are rules that are amoral that specify what you can and can't do, but law also includes with it what you should do. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said there's a difference between doing that which one has a right to do and that which is right to do, and the law should concern itself with both.
And I had this idea, and I called Hustice Barak, and I said I made a commitment to you. I look forward to coming, but I'm on fire with this idea, it's a mission. I think it's noble. I'd like to pursue it. I have $100,000 in debt from law school, and I need to raise some money. I don't know if I'll be successful. If you can find an alternate to take my spot, please release me for my obligation. If you can't, I will show up on time. And he said, I think there's somebody else, young man, go pursue this big dream. But that was a tough choice, but then I needed to pull it off, because I gave that up. And, you know, it took me months, but 42 different angel investors, I raised $2 million in 1994 with a fax machine and this big idea and no business background. And here we are. And 1994, mind you, is before Enron, meaning before it was this practical or fashionable to invest leadership and corporate resources on complying with law and regulation. This industry didn't exist then, but I always felt that it's the right thing to do and good business. So we did it with the Vanguard, and obviously, after Enron and Worldcom and Tyco, then things really took off. But we were ready.
Alan Fleischmann
And what were your offerings then? And are there different ones today? Is it consistently that the what you envision in the 90s is what you realize is still consistently needed today?
Dov Seidman
I mean, democratizing knowledge was the kernel of the idea. Then I should tell you that I took Delacroix’s Liberty, the iconic painting of the French Revolution, and I hired an artist to repaint that painting as the revolution that LRN would lead. We covered up Lady Liberty. The rifle was replaced with scales of justice, and that painting literally depicts how I saw the world back then. And I'm fond of saying that LRN is not a business with a mission, but a mission with a business. It's a mission to help people around the world do the right thing.
So we helped lawyers in the Office of General Counsel in the early days, not put out fire, but architect fireproof enterprises. I'm speaking by metaphor. I would say to the Office of General Counsel, you know this person doesn't know that if they buy that person a pizza and they work for the government, it could be a bribe. Why are you advocating educating your own employees on everything that concerns them, from law, regulation, policy and just doing the right thing, like ethical sales practices? So as we were helping them gain expert legal research and analysis to deal with actual problems, we then started helping them educate the corporate workforce, if you will, on all these issues in different countries and in different languages.
And before the internet came to be, we were publishing handbooks and top 10s and pamphlets. I was in the B to E business, how businesses reach the E – their own employees. So when the internet came, we literally had a business that we could put online. And we raised $30 million from Softbank in January of 2000 to become the first company in the ethics space, if you will, that would educate a corporate employee online on how to navigate regulation comply with laws that relate to their conduct and their business, but go above and beyond what is legally required of them to do what is ethically inspired. And that's the beginning of LRN. And today we have about almost 3,000 clients all over the world, in over 100 countries, 67 languages.
Alan Fleischmann
Well. And you entered very, very different time periods as well.
Dov Seidman
Like all journeys, as I said earlier, there were crises in society and in the world, economic crises, other crises. It's been up and down. But I have to tell you that when I came of age of business, I noticed that behavior was associated with something defensive. Oh, he was let out of prison early for good behavior. We tell a child to behave right after the child misbehaves. And I would meet all these CEOs who took my message in the business seriously, but they would say, this is great. I'd like you to meet my general counsel, my chief risk officers, right? Because I noticed that every CEO wants to have a world class goalkeeper or strong safety. Make sure we keep us out of jail, make sure we don't cross these lines, but then leave business to us. And I noticed that everybody wants the best goalie. They just don't like to play that position.
So the first thing we did is we offered goalkeeping services. We helped the chief ethics and risk and legal officers do their job, but the most enlightened and progressive of them would talk to me about, you know, instead, I'm a world class goalie, but I'm still going to give up four goals. It's a dangerous world. We have 1000s of employees. If just 1% of them slip up, we're going to have problems. So we had these conversations about, how do we keep the ball in offense? How do we concern ourselves with how the entire team plays? So I had this idea that, you know, if you go into the dictionary and you type in outfox, outcompete, outsmart, outproduce, outperform, these are all words because these words are part of common vernacular, because they commonly describe our habits of thought and behavior, how we think and how we behave. But out-behave is not a word. This idea that we can create value through how we behave, how we keep promises, how we engender trust, how we are principled in our decision making, that we could bring excellence to our behavior, was quite new.
The word out behave was not a word, and I just decided that we can take behavior on offense. And just like Nixon opened up China, it was a counterintuitive thing to do. You didn't associate that with them. If you show up with just a thrive message, let's be ethical, uou sometimes get treated that this is a little soft business is a little bit of a dangerous affair, and we need guardrails and rules. But if you have a thrive offering, corporate executives are also more interested in your Thrive offering. You want an anti-money laundering program here, but if somebody goes offshore to money laundering, they might have learned in the program about the perils of doing that. Let's create an ethical winning culture where they don't think to behave that way, wherever they are.
Alan Fleischmann
That's amazing. Are you finding, I'm going to skip around a little bit. Are you finding that of all the ebbs and flows, of all the hills and valleys we've been through at the time, the time today, where so many people retreating from ESG and DEI or they're afraid to speak up, some are actually getting rid of initiatives all together, while others are not sure, speaking up with more clarity and saying, I can't, let me tell you. Why are you finding it more challenging right now? With obviously, it's early, but you find more challenging right now, and you find it to be
Dov Seidman
You know, there was one fundamental idea that, you know, I wrote, it's an irony that I didn't read a book cover to cover until I was 17, and then wound up writing, and it's called HOW and I came of age in business where bosses would say, hust do it. I don't care how. I mean, imagine and they'd get a promotion. I mean, don't get caught hiring child labor or doing something stupid, but just do it. Think of the Nike motto of just do it. There was such an obsession with efficiency and just getting things done.
You know, when we had a pandemic, supply chains were revealed to have been put together in a just do it way. They were fast, they were just in time, they were efficient, they were cost effective, but they weren't always built with resilience and integrity, the wrong places had holes in them. And I always felt that how you do things matters. You know, in our tradition, justice, justice thou shalt pursue. Why twice? The second one is about the how, that the how has always been the X factor. And I always felt that how matters. And I began to see that it was mattering more than ever, and in ways, it did not matter before, as the world became transparent and we saw into the inner workings of boardrooms and shop floors and into the attitudes and mindsets of people who run companies because their emails and their jokes, the funny ones and the off color ones were seen in the light of day. I started to see how much how really matters, and that I was devoting my life to helping others scale the how.
Now we came of age thinking that how as an adverb. How are you buddy? How much revenue, how much market share, there's a financial crisis, and we ask how much stimulus? 1,000,000,000,002 trillion. But I felt that the how is the X factor. It always has been, and increasingly so in business. And I devoted so much of my life to making how a noun. How Metrics, we can measure the how, not just the how much. Because if how is a noun, it stands for an ethos, or an ethic of human endeavor, a way that we operate or relate to society or govern ourselves and lead. And the first line in the book is, this is a how book, not a how to book. What's the difference? Everything. I felt that you can't reduce human conduct to seven habits of how people are three things or four things or five things that.
And I'll date myself. You know, in the movie The Graduates, the Dustin Hoffman character was told the future, young man, is plastics. I think the future right now is frameworks, normative frameworks that guide and animate the how, how we lead, how we govern, how we operate, how we behave, how we keep promises, how we engender trust. I really think that that's where we ought to be devoting time in this age, where so much of the how much and what is being done for us.
You know, with AI and computers can be programmed to do the next thing right, but only a human being could do the next right thing. And more and more individuals are acting on their own behalf and on behalf of their institutions. So how at scale can we help organizations inspire and guide people not to just do the next thing right, but the next right thing, I think, is the currency of our age. You asked me about programs, DEI and ESG. To the extent that these programs were catalyzed by leaders whose heart is in the right place, I celebrate them, but often programs are just programs, and some work and some don't. Some are well executed, some don't. And I have no problem with leaders honorably pulling away from programs that are not having their desired impact.
But I know one thing, you can't pull away from fundamentals. You can't pull away from the how. You can't pull away from a true how question. For example, let's say you're in charge of a company and you truly believe that you've reflected on it and involved others, that employees should work in an office, you still have a how question, do I insist on it, or do I inspire them to come back to the office by giving them an office worth coming to, where they can learn and grow and collaborate? There's always a how question. And leaders today really need to know the difference between that which can only be inspired and that which they can insist on, if you were a subordinate of mine, and that would never be the case, but say you were, I could say, Alan, never lie to me. You must always tell me the truth. But I couldn't say to you in a way that would, that would resonate. You must be loyal to me. Your loyalty I need to inspire truth, I can insist on. So I think these kind of fundamental questions, what do you need to inspire? What can you insist on? Where do rules have effectiveness? And where do we really need to scale values, I really think is the question that leaders really need to get right at scale.
Alan Fleischmann
Which is great, and you find that there's receptivity, obviously, to that over and over again. You have so many clients, and the answer is probably yes.
Dov Seidman
You know, I think leadership is about trend lines, not headlines. If you step back, you know, in national affairs, you see top-down command and control. Autocratic leadership still expressing itself all over the world, but in national politics, it's more likely to express itself there. You're in charge of an entire nation. You control the media, in many ways, the military. I'm hard pressed to find an autocratic Mayor thriving as a mayor in a city. I'm hard to press to find a hockey, baseball, basketball, football coach who's won a championship in the last 10 years with a more autocratic kind of yelling, leadership approach and style. Nick Sirianni just won the Super Bowl with the Eagles, and was interviewed right after the game and said that the team won it because of love for each other in a very difficult fight. The owner and the general manager are Jewish, and he's invoking his Christian faith and how they make it all work in the locker room, but that love was the value that really inspired that team to play for each other and the city and the fans. So I can't think of an autocratic Fortune 500 CEO so there are different parts of organizational, reality, business, sports, all. Other parts of society where this kind of leadership is flourishing, and that's, you know, a source of hope and optimism.
Alan Fleischmann
Amazing. And you take the same kind of vision and leadership to the organizations that you're involved in, like the 92nd Street Y, the Elie Wiesel Foundation, Planet Word you mentioned.
Dov Seidman
I'm on the board of the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, and every year for the last 15 or so years, I've been the partner, first with Ellie and Marion Wiesel, and we sadly just lost Marion a few weeks ago. We give a prize in ethics every year to five college students who write an essay on a topic concerning humanity and human and human flourishing in the world through the lens of ethics. I promised Ellie that I would spend the rest of my life contributing to sustaining that effort, I remember like he was yesterday, sitting in his office on his couch with Ellie and Marion, and as the CEO of LRN, running an ethics company, I expressed to Ellie and Marion what an honor it would be to sponsor the prize in ethics. And Ellie interrupted me, and he said, sponsor, no, you will be my partner. And just with his choice of words, sponsor, no, you'll be my partner, he implicated me in a deeper relationship, and he treated me as a partner in the prize and ethics. And now with his son, Elisha, we continue to work on that and other things.
You know, history creates leaders of conscience of the world, like Elie Wiesel. But the problem that I'm working on, you know, Ellie was a world voice, a world conscience. But we live in an institutionalized world of institutions, of schools, of teams, of companies. So if you ask me, what is the leadership challenge that I'm really focused on, I frame it this way. I don't think you could run a world without institutions, because they provide order, valuable services – governance. But I think I know that you know that I know that a human institution really works when individuals with formal authority lead with moral authority. So I can't imagine a school without a principal, or a football team without a head coach, a country without a president and prime minister, or a company without a CEO or divisions of vice presidents. And in the opaque, more vertical, less transparent world, we often assume that if somebody got to a very high, formal place, they must be a great man, and he was usually a white man or the board would not have put them there, and they would not have been able to climb so high, but in this era of disruption, we're seeing that authority itself, Alan, is being disrupted. We're seeing that formal authority could be won in an election. You could seize it. Silicon Valley entrepreneur might try to lock it up with 20 to one super majority shares.
But moral authority is a function of who you are, how you lead, what you stand for, how you behave, how you relate to others. So I think we need to nurture a culture of moral leaders who lead with moral authority. But that's just step one, and then we need to ensure that they're in charge of formal positions. And in many ways, that's kind of what I'm spending a lot of my time on today, and moral leadership is not about moralizing. It's not about becoming moralistic. It's not about wrestling with moral dilemmas. It comes down to the how, how do you wield power over people or through people? How do you have conversations one way or two way? When a meeting is over, do you say, whose call is it emphasizing power? Or do you say, what do we think is the right call? It's when a decision needs to be made. Are we just expedient and pragmatic, or are we being principled? So it's about having a playbook for behavior, what you embody, and how you scale it in institutions. It's about your relationship with a purpose. For example, are you doing something in a self-regarding way? Let's do this in order to be number one, or let's do this because it's valuable and it helps others, and if we do it with excellence, we will be number one as a byproduct. It's about getting all those you know dynamics, right?
Alan Fleischmann
That's very cool. You're obviously a great role model and mentor to others. What’s the role mentors play in your life?
Dov Seidman
I wouldn't be here without mentors. I had some very loving mentors who I hope to pay it forward. One of them was obviously Elie Wiesel. Was a mentor professor, Herbert Morris, was a dear mentor of mine, and that's –
Alan Fleischmann
Talk about him for a minute.
Dov Seidman
So he was a PhD in moral philosophy, and he wrote the seminal book on punishment. So he was a law professor and a philosophy professor, and I wound up in his graduate seminar on guilt and shame, and it was just 12 of us, and I would go to his office hours, and my paper for him in that seminar became my master's thesis that he advised me on. And then from letters of rec to graduate school and law school to stay, we would write each other letters. And when I came back to Los Angeles to start my business, we had dinner pretty much once a week. He was also a trained psychoanalyst, if I went through a difficult breakup with a significant other, which I did a few times back then, I sat on his couch and we talked life and Alan, he used to say to me, the most valuable thing you have is your attention. Your attention. Think of children today, how their attention is being hijacked by powerful forces beyond their control, social media platforms. And he said, what you devote your attention to, a set of ideas, relationships to love is the most precious thing you have. And he taught me how to be attentive and to try to get things right more deeply, I founded a scholarship in UCLA in his honor, called the Herb Morris Scholarship. Last year, when we lost Herb Morris. The scholarship is for a law student who is pursuing not only a career in law, but a law student who was trained and educated in philosophy.
Alan Fleischmann
The great combinations which you're living every day, the combination there and then, you're obviously a mentor, I would argue to many other people, obviously indirectly, indirectly. How big a part of that in your life is that mentor?
Dov Seidman
Just, I just wind up in a lot of conversations about life. And you know, the more connected the world gets, the more we have an opportunity to get things right, more deeply. If everybody's saying they're sorry, you know, you tell a child say you're sorry, you're you've taught them a verbal escape route, just say you're sorry and move on. So the more connected the world gets, the more things get performed at the surface, which means you can stand out by getting things right more deeply. Don't just say you're sorry, make amends. You know, I'm saying there are ways, and instead of just being connected, because it's so easy to connect, how do you meaningfully connect? You know, the the the secular world of business, you know, and we used to talk about it as the business of business is just business.
You know, if the only reason somebody works at a company is what they're paid, they should switch loyalties the minute somebody comes along and pays more. If the only reason you buy a product is price, the minute the price is undercut, you should move over there. That's right. The more you take friction out of the system, and everybody's on the move, the more we need to compete with human glue. We need to find the deepest source of adhesion, right? So the secular world is hanging on to its relationships by deploying and embedding the best human glue ever invented, when people share a mission, when they share a journey worthy of their loyalty, when they share values, when they share a sense of purpose, they keep going, even when the going gets tough. So it's not an accident that the way the world is being reshaped, the secular world and the world of business and performance, has to start using thoughtfully what really gets human beings out of bed, a sense of hope, a sense of making a difference. And if you do that, well, nothing wrong with making more money as a byproduct of that.
Alan Fleischmann
That’s your point. Your point is, you can make money, you can be capitalist, but do good and do right and bring others along the way.
Dov Seidman
There's nuance to that point. You know, the Johnson and Johnson credo, which I think is one of the best, you know, capitalistic manifestos ever written, when General Johnson took J&J public, he wanted to codify their animating ethos. And our first responsibility is to the doctors and patients of the world and the nurses. And it goes on through what they're about. Some version of let's make the world a healthier place. And then it says, at the end, if we live according to these principles, our shareholders should make a fair return, not will. What a brilliant use of the word should. Well, let's make the world a healthier place and make money, but let's not make the world a healthier place in order to make money.
The latter doesn't inspire, the former does, and how at scale be so the the greatest paradox, one of the greatest paradoxes in philosophy is the paradox of hedonism, that if you pursue happiness directly, it eludes you, but if you do something of meaning passionately, you create the possibility for happiness to find you. I think the corollary to that is the paradox of success, that if you pursue success directly, let's do this to dominate, let's do this to be number one, I think it increasingly eludes you. But if you pursue significance, if you do something that's other regarding and you do it with excellence, then success and money ought to find you.
I think leadership today is not just about having a purpose, but it's having this paradoxical relationship with purpose, right? You do it to honor the purpose, and you make money, but you don't do it in order to make money. And those who can really get that nuance right at scale are going to be the winners. And the other is, I think Alan, you and I, like all people, have gotten one message since we were kids. Life is a journey, so get really good at going up and down. You fall down, get back up. Think of all the messages we've received about life that it's a journey. But in our professional lives, people love linearity. Through budgeting, planning, control, we're taught to superimpose straight lines on the future. All revenues have to go straight up, right? All misconduct needs to go straight down. The world is so fused today that leaders who can enlist people on an up and down journey in their professional lives, as though it's real life, are the ones who are going to win. I think business today is about going forward and going up and down, but going forward nonetheless.
Alan Fleischmann
That's right. And how do you get back to the how? How do you build that, not really confidence, but that, that agility, stability and strength?
Dov Seidman
Well, you need to get philosophy right at scale. For example, of course, I believe in empowering employees, but if you translate a good intention of empowerment into something that sounds like this, I push decisions to the front lines. I delegate authority, then everybody knows what rights they have. I have a right to spend $10 without getting my boss's approval. I have the right to spend $1,000 so three years later, you are a kind, benevolent, looser version of who you were, where everybody knows what rights they have, but nobody knows what is right, what's our way. So I believe in employee engagement, but asking somebody, does your boss take you to lunch is kicking the can up the road. That's still the question we ask in engagement surveys, if he yells at you at lunch, I hope it's zero. If it's a great lunch, every day is even better. So I think Alan, it's important to take deep commitments. Let's take values. You can't pay somebody for integrity. You can only pay for the behaviors that someone with integrity exhibits. So we need to do the hard work of translating values and principles into the right policies and practices and behaviors. And there are three forces that bear on the behavior of individuals and institutions, governance, the rules, the policies, the procedures, the approvals, the authorities, how money is made and measured, bears on behavior. Culture bears on behavior. How things really happen around this place. Are our lore, our traditions and leadership, bear on behavior. Is it collaborative? Is it transparent? And they're often in a schizophrenic relationship. I trust you to innovate, and somebody runs away inspired to innovate, and then they got to get four signatures to spend $22 to innovate. If your company is attacked, go on Facebook and defend us. I trust your voice. And then the social media policies refer everything to corporate communications. These three systems need to be harmonized into what I call a human operating system. When did Microsoft Word beat [its competition]? Not because Word was better than WordPerfect, even if it was, it was Windows the operating system. Because Windows allowed PowerPoint and Word and Excel and email to all work together.
Organizations today need to architect a human operating system, where their governance and culture and leadership are in harmony, where we go to a bowling alley by analogy, and we have guardrails to keep the ball out of the gutter, but then we use values to throw strikes. And I think that's what we've got. To figure out how to do it in a deep way and doing it at scale. And what I love about organizations, CRM, HRS, ERP, you mentioned ESG, all these acronyms were invented because somebody tried to systematize some aspect of corporate life. Because to do what I love about business is it tries to do great things at scale. To do something at scale, you need a system and a framework. We now need a system and a framework for human conduct. How at scale can we specify for people what they can and can't do, but also help them come together around what they should and should not do, in a world where machines are going to do a lot of the former, and only human beings can do the latter.
Alan Fleischmann
And you think there'll be enough need for those human beings, need for them?
Dov Seidman
Yeah, I think we're living in a once in 500 years [opportunity]. You know when the scientific revolution happened? 500 years ago. Human beings were sent back to the drawing board when they figured out if the sun revolves around the Earth or the Earth around the sun. And once we got that right, we went on a inventive journey, right? Biodiversity. Scientific Method was created. Thomas Paine wrote man's Bill of Rights. The very idea that we could have rights that Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations, modern democracy and capitalism was built. But it was really what I call 500 years of Revenge of the Nerds. It was called the Age of Reason, the Enlightenment. As we looked around the world as human beings, and we said, we're the smartest, because human beings love to be top of the food chain.
Descartes said, I think, therefore I am, and in many ways, we've used our head to get ahead and create enormous progress and prosperity and find ways to alleviate poverty, live longer. This technological revolution that's happening right now is sending us back to the drawing board to ask a new fundamental question, what does it mean to be human in the age of intelligent machines, when the answer is no longer we're the smartest because our monopoly on intelligence is no longer, I don't know what the answer is, but I know the source of the answer. It has to be something a machine does not have – a heart, the ability to feel, to dream, to ask important questions, to care, to lead, to enlist. And you know, in the industrial age, we favored strong factory workers. We hired strong, brawny hands. We could have hired for weakness, but we hired for physical strength in the knowledge economy, we could have hired for ignorance and a lack of knowledge. No, we said we need specialization knowledge, expertise and wisdom. In this more human age, we could hire for what makes us human at our worst, our capacity to not get along and be divided and to be outraged and enraged or harmful, or we could solve for what makes us human at our best, our capacity for ethics, to do the right thing, to care, to collaborate. And I actually think that's where we're in this human age. And I think we need the kind of leadership that elevates that which makes us human at our best, because it's not preordained, that we will always be at our best. We often get divided. As you know, Alan, your business helps people deal with all sorts of challenges out there, but one challenge we have right now is we're not just organically divided. We are being actively divided by powerful forces, the capitalistic motive has gotten behind division, and some people are making money pitting people against each other, so we have even more work to do as leaders, to pull people together, because people are being pulled apart, not just organically, but inorganically and artificially.
Alan Fleischmann
What would your advice be to those listening to us right now who are CEOs or aspiring CEOs or others who want to help lead, or help leaders lead at a time when it's looking like the trend is going to get away?
Dov Seidman
That the forces that are not just rapidly changing the world, that are dramatically reshaping it. We're there before this moment, we're in this moment that we're in. We're all trying to process those forces that are accelerating. They're reshaping the world, and they were there before, and they will be there after. And that leadership is about passing judgment on the future with humility and boldness. Where's the world going? Where ought it to go, and how do I point at that horizon, even when it's going to be up and down and difficult, we got to stay that course and get things right fundamentally and build a human organization that can pivot, that can be resilient. We've never needed an organization to be simultaneously propulsive and resilient, hopeful and risk oriented. You know, in the past, we would have a boom and bust cycle. So if we were in a boom, we would relax and just release controls and just go for it. And if it was a tough time, we would batten down the hatches and watch our competitors go out of business. We're going up and down every 10 minutes or every 10 days or every 10 weeks. So we need to simultaneously really be resilient and propulsive and creative. And the only thing ever invented that can do that as a human being. Values do double duty. They control against unwanted conduct and outcomes, and they animate towards what we need to do. I'd say the most important thing to do in times like this. I'm going to say something counterintuitive that I think might be the most practical thing I'll say in our time together, that the more that comes at us, the Stranger Things are, the more we experience FOMO, fear of missing out, the more always on the world is, the more we need to pause.
Alan Fleischmann
You spend time assuring that you have time for reflection each week.
Dov Seidman
Yeah, you know, I'm fond of saying that when you hit the pause button on the machine or computer, it stops. But when we pause, we begin. It's a distinctly human capability to pause. When we pause, we can reflect on the world, the challenge before us, the situation we're in. We can reconnect with our voice, our conscience, our convictions, what matters most to us, we can rethink some of our assumptions. What got us here? Will it get us there? How are we operating? And only after we reflect right and reconnect and rethink can we then reimagine a better email, a better negotiation, a better conversation, a better path. And I think that there's no ethical conduct that's not enabled by a pause if we don't stop to ask, how would I feel if I were treated this way? What would happen if I do it this way and not that way? Why am I not making eye contact with that person when I pass them in the halls? This pausing and interrogating yourself is, to me, is the hallmark practice of really leading and thriving in this world that's in our face.
Alan Fleischmann
How have you incorporated that in your life? How did you do it? What are you doing?
Dov Seidman
Well, I'm trained. You know, it's not about taking a walk. You can take your anxiety and pressure with you as you're counting your 10,000 steps. It's about learning to have that conversation with you. Why did I start the meeting by saying what's on the agenda? When I could have started by saying, how do we want to connect and collaborate to get this done? It's about being in a conversation. It's what Plutarch said, only that which we achieve inwardly can affect outward reality, it's always being on an inward journey of interrogating yourself and having a conversation with yourself that you then embody out there and making the time to ask deep questions. You know, you could say to somebody, let's say somebody's had a great year and you want to enlist them in a new role, and you go, isn't this exciting? I've been taught to close the deal. Let's do it. I often say, You know what? This is great. We ought to do this. But nonetheless, go sleep on it. Call me tomorrow. What a way to show some patience or extend trust to somebody outside my energy or charisma. You'll come to your own decision, or hopefully it'll still be the same one, and the more you kind of think things through that way.
But I think leadership today is simply about those who put more truth and trust in the room. So to speak, are the ones who will create the most value. I don't think you can do anything without shared truths about what we believe the world, how things are going, and high trust. And I tend to avoid acronyms, but there's one acronym I really emphasize. I noticed that everybody wants progress and prosperity, and everybody admits that in order to have progress, you need to innovate. And I also noticed that many innovation programs don't succeed. They hit a wall because we focus on the innovation. Because we don't we are not as mindful that in order to innovate, somebody needs to take a risk. You need to spend some capital at the risk that you won't get a return. If you speak in a meeting, you're taking a risk that somebody's going to judge you to be a bozo.
So it's risk that leads to innovation, that leads to progress, and so far, when do people take risk? When trust is high. So I call that TRIP. So trust leads to risk, which leads to innovation, which leads to progress. Alan, we've measured it. When trust is high, you get 32 times more risk, taking 11 times more innovation and six times more progress. And it's not about innovation. It's about creating such a high trust environment that people innovate in it. And then we've been taught to go looking for trust. Can I trust Alan? Can I trust those folks? Trust and verify, I learned studying philosophy from Aristotle that trust is a virtue. When you give it away, when I trust you, I'm giving you the power to betray me or do right by me. So if you want trust you have to give it away. Thoughtfully, I don't give trust away to people who've already lied to me or let me down, but if you thoughtfully give trust away, I call it a legal performance enhancing drug. If you give trust away, oxytocin is literally released in your brain, whatever makes you leery or where somebody subsides and you reciprocate the trust. If you look at who's winning in the world, they have found thoughtful ways to go first and to extend trust and create a virtuous cycle of trust, beginning more trust.
Alan Fleischmann
Well, that's the core of what you build in your day job. And that's core where you build with the HOW Institute for society.
Dov Seidman
You know, when Domino's was really struggling, they took out ads and they had their own executives eating their pizza and saying, wow, this pizza really sucks. It tastes like cardboard. And they trusted their customers with the truth of what they shared around the state of their pizza. It's amazing the future they had after they trusted everybody with the truth, and then they can tell people what they liked about it.
Alan Fleischmann
And do I believe that it and do I believed it was not likable.
Well, you're listening to Leadership Matters on SiriusXM and leadershipmatters.show.com. I'm your host, Alan Fleischmann, and we just spent the last hour with Dov Seidman, Founder and Executive Chairman of the HOW Institute for society and the legal research network. It is such a pleasure to have you on the show. I think we'd have to have you back on because we should talk a little bit more about your life philosophies next time as well. The guiding principles when you do pause that lead you to take that risk. Because honestly, at the end of the day, I love that idea that you can actually, unlike a machine, it stops. We need to hit the pause button. It only begins. There's something about that that is deeply profound, so let's spend some time together again, talking a lot about what that beginning could be once we hit that pause button,
Dov Seidman
I would love to. Alan, thanks for having me. This was awesome.