Negotiating Representation

Abstract

Leaders must not only focus their efforts on the people they lead, they must also concentrate enormous attention on the world outside their organizations. In fact a constant complaint of many corporate CEOs is that the demands of outside constituents, such as shareholders, industry groups, politicians, government agencies, financial analysts, and civic organizations prevent them from devoting sufficient time to the internal working of the firm and that therefore they feel less connected to their company’s actual business than they should. In my own experience as dean of two different graduate schools over 15 years, the demands of orchestrating and conducting external fundraising, alumni relations, negotiations with university officials, and activities with national and international professional organizations took up so much of my time that I often had to sneak back to the office on Saturday and Sunday mornings to attend to the internal paper work and decisions that I had put off during the week. Equally troubling was that I seemed to be getting further and further away from my professional specialization, international law, which had been the reason for entering academic life in the first place.