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Paul Argenti: Leading in Troubled Times

On September 11th, as Tuck students, faculty, and staff clustered around televisions and radios throughout the school, the first-year class was in the middle of the first Tuck Leadership Forum module. In the days that followed, I spoke with many first-year students about the changing nature of leadership in the wake of this horrible tragedy. Those who are in our program today face challenges that Tuck students haven't experienced since the Second World War. I would like to discuss here what kinds of skills leaders will need to manage successfully during difficult times, why Tuck students and alumni are in a unique position to be great leaders, and what we can all do to inspire those around us in the months ahead.

Skills for a New Era

Just as those in my generation will never forget where they were when President Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, young people today will never forget what they were doing when they heard and saw that the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were under attack on September 11, 2001. It was a defining moment for a generation that had come of age during one of the most prosperous and peaceful periods in American history.

Now the same students who applied to business school during a boom time will have to scale down their expectations about summer jobs, full-time employment, and perhaps even their entire careers. This requires them to develop new skills for this new era. For example, they will need to think more about what kind of contribution they want to make to society rather than how much personal wealth they can amass. They will need patience as they look for the right place to make a contribution rather than simply sit back and count the offers during their second year. It will also force them to mature as business leaders much more quickly, given the needs of our society over the next several years. And finally, our students will need to be more flexible in this radically changed environment.

Tuck Students and Alumni Uniquely Positioned

Fortunately, Tuck students and alumni are uniquely positioned to meet these challenges. No graduate school of business, and perhaps no other school of any kind, prepares students to become leaders as effectively as we do at the Tuck School. The Tuck Leadership Forum, with its emphasis on basic general management and analytical skills, communication, and entrepreneurship, is designed to create leaders, not just for a dynamic economy but for any economy. We do that through our focus on managing during turbulent times, our emphasis on having command over all the facts, and our determination to make students personally accountable for what they say and do. This gives Tuck students an incredible edge as potential leaders. Indeed, our entire program is focused on creating strong general managers rather than one-dimensional, functional specialists.

What We Can Do to Inspire Them

While I feel confident that the Tuck faculty is committed to giving its students the best education, we need to do even more in the Tuck community as a whole for those who are studying here today. We need to inspire them. We need to encourage them to have patience when the going gets rough, which it will in the next few years. We need to offer them opportunities to make a contribution. We need to give them hope as they enter a world that has greatly changed.

Alumni already out in the real (and much scarier) world also need to continue to think about how to take care of those who work for them, to demonstrate true corporate concern, to be role models as leaders, and to concentrate on what they do best, rather than spread themselves too thin.

In the coming months, although all of us at Tuck want things to go back to what we once considered normal, we must face the reality of the current situation head-on both in Hanover and out in the wider world of our alumni population. I encourage all to get involved in helping Tuck students make it through these difficult times in their job searches, their classwork, and their personal journeys to understand what has happened. Tuck's community is in a better position to help one another than any other organization I can think of. We encourage today's Tuckies to become all they can.