Complete Opening Remarks by
The HOW Institute Founder and Chairman, Dov Seidman

I'd like to frame our day together. Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "In each pause, I hear the call." I believe you are here because you have heard the call of moral leadership for much of your lives, but today, you are hearing it more urgently and intensely. You are here because, deep in your soul, you believe that while leadership has always mattered, it is more consequential now. The decisions leaders make reverberate and amplify in ways they never have before. And we are here together because we intuitively know and feel how difficult the path of moral leadership is. It is hard to walk fine lines. It is hard to maintain moral ambition when practical and pragmatic constraints press so intensely. It is hard. 

At the same time, we must acknowledge the moment we are in. We recently had an election with the second-highest turnout in a hundred years. We are not here to discuss political positions—left or right, right or left. We are here to transcend division and go deeper. But we must also recognize that we are in a time of great transition. In this moment, I find myself wrestling with two competing ideas of strength. One form of strength insists: never back down, never admit mistakes, never apologize, and judge with certainty. It suggests that being "strong and wrong" is better than being "weak and right." The other choice is to reject moral certainty, knowing it is impossible to achieve, and instead strive for moral clarity with humility. A humble person does not think less of herself but thinks of herself less. A humble person does not step aside but makes space for others to come together and do great things. A humble person is curious about others' inner lives and perspectives. This struggle defines the moment we are in. 

In this transition, whether you believe an institution should be affirmed, reformed, transformed, or even torn down and rebuilt, we know that if we are to make lasting and meaningful change, it will require moral leadership. Regardless of our stances on the best approaches to address societal ideals and ambitions, moral leadership is essential to ground us in the deepest human concerns: justice, fairness, liberty, and sustainability. 

So, wherever we stand, moral leadership is necessary. Anyone who wields justice like a hammer rather than a scale will quickly reveal how interdependent we all are.  

We have been divided before, but today we are actively divided. Some people profit—and profit greatly—by pitting us against each other. Regardless of where we stand on this division, we agree that moral leadership is necessary to transcend it. We are here because we recognize that this work has meaning only when done in community. A true community shares deep things. Though we come from different perspectives and life experiences, when we go deeper, we begin to think and feel some of the same things. We have been shaped by teachers, mentors, and supporters, and we, in turn, play that role for each other.

I have been fortunate to have incredible teachers and mentors. Two years ago, I invoked the name of one I miss dearly: Professor Elie Wiesel. I first met Elie when I had the opportunity to sponsor the Elie Wiesel Prize in Ethics. I told him how inspired and honored I was to do so. In that moment, Elie said, "No, you will not sponsor. You will be my partner." With one word, he transformed what could have been a transactional relationship into a partnership and changed my life. Because of that partnership, I continue to promote and support the Prize in Ethics even without him. 

Elie was deeply connected to his tradition and Judaism, yet he emerged from the darkness of his experiences able to see light. Feeling comfortable enough to ask him a personal question, I once asked, "Elie, what makes you a good Jewish person?" He replied, "Dov, what makes me a good Jew is that I get out of bed not to make the world more Jewish. I get out of bed to make it more human." 

No matter our backgrounds—faith, spirit, philosophy, or simply a love for humanity—we can unite in the goal of making the world more human. When I asked Elie what that meant, he simply said, "Ethics, Dov. Is there anything else?" Ethics, in his view, was broad. It encompassed empathy, love, care, and all the virtues that bring people together. But he also acknowledged that we are not always at our best. We can be sarcastic, we can hurt others, and we can act in anger. If we want to make the world more human, we must strive to embody our best qualities—empathy, understanding, and kindness. 

You know, what makes the world more human is when we see the humanity in the other. If you're running a media company and you see a consumer, you'll get them to consume news. If you see a citizen, you're going to give them truth and reliable information so they can practice citizenship. If an employee is a cost, you're going to cut them. If they're an asset, you're going to invest in them. If you're a coach and you see X's and O's, you probably won't win anymore. But if you see a human being with hopes and aspirations and anxieties and pressures, you've got a chance. So, it starts by who we see and the more we see the full humanity and the others, the more we can make the world more human. It also involves how deeply we see.  

Years ago, I came across this study: you're driving in a car with your best friend, and you're speeding in a school district, and you run somebody over. The police show up and they ask you what happened. I'm not saying what you would do, but I'm saying what you would tell somebody you would do. Would the passenger of the friend tell the police that his friend who was speeding was speeding? 80% of Americans – truth, justice, the American way – said "Of course we would," and then you go around the world and you ask people in faraway countries, and in some countries, they said absolutely not. So, you ask the Americans, what do you think of them? "They don't respect truth and justice." And then you ask them, what do you think of us? "They don't respect loyalty. They don't respect friendship."  

The point of me telling you this is that it's important for us to understand that people always come from very deep places and it's our job to get that deep, to see where they come from. And finally, moral leaders don't shift people. We just experienced billions of dollars shifting us – vote left not right, right not left. If you put a product on sale, I could get you to buy it now, not later, more not less. What makes us human is our capacity to be elevated. Moral leaders elevate others, and they understand important distinctions. I can insist that you always tell me the truth, but I can't insist that you always be loyal to me. So moral leaders command you – "Always tell me the truth," but they try to inspire loyalty. Moral leaders understand the intent behind empowerment, but they go beyond empowerment because when we empower people, people run around mindful of what they can and can't do. I could spend $4 without getting four signatures and then you scale a culture of rights where everybody knows what rights they have, but do they have an ethos of What is right? What is our way? So moral leaders elevate, always focusing not on doing the next thing right, but the next right thing. At the same time, we are trying to elevate people against the backdrop of unfamiliar and ever powerful forces that are not just rapidly changing our lives, which they are, but they are dramatically reshaping it. The world operates differently, and it's being reshaped faster than we have yet been able to reshape ourselves, our institutions and our leadership. I'm just going to take a few moments to outline three profound ways in which the world is being reshaped that lead to profound implications for us and imperatives for us as leaders.  

The first is the world went from connected to so hyperconnected that it's now zero distance. The philosopher David Hume said, the moral imagination diminishes with distance. It follows that as distance decreases, the moral imagination increases. More people on more days today therefore are morally activated. They simply see things in terms of right/wrong, good/bad, sustainable/not, responsible/not, jerk or not. And the reason I'm using these binary choices is that social media is inviting us to choose just one or the other, when so much of life is gray. And if you go from a state of moral activation, even if your outrage is appropriate, because outrage sometimes can inspire progress and sometimes it can regress progress because outrage is met with somebody else's outrage that you're outraged. If you go right from a state and you don't reason and you go right for a demand – tear down the statute; fire this person; divest; boycott. If you go right to that, that's all you're going to achieve.  

Human progress depends on the second step. Somebody framing a thoughtful conversation and leading it; where we wrestle and split fine hairs, and bring in a sense of history and perspective and thoughts about the human condition and justice. And, then we can go forward together. The world is so connected that it's become fused – biological, religious, ethical, geopolitical issues that were once kept away from the agenda are inescapably part of it. It's always been practically hard, but we went for it. But it's always been philosophically misguided to say, "the business of business is business." "the business of sports and sports." To create these separate spheres that are governed amorally just by specifying to people what they can and can't do. And we did that for a long time, but in the fused world, cost benefit analysis thinking, just specifying what you can and can't do is starting to not be up to the task.  

In the fused world, we must be normative. We must be mindful and respectful of all of our requirements – what we must and must not do – but more importantly, we've got to get good at what we should do, what we ought to do. We are in a normative time because the world is fused. 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. They're both important. We are amazingly good at the former. Now we need to be as good at what we should do, and we have to find ways to harmonize them. And there's a lot of pressure to avoid the crosshairs these days, to be neutral, but even the decision to be neutral is a values-based decision. When do we put moral clarity first and when do we decide that neutrality is still appropriate? Both choices are fine in certain circumstances, but they're both choices that have to come from a framework.  

The third force, the world has gone from connected to interconnected to hyperconnected to interdependent. We in fact do rise and fall together. Interdependence is a condition. Moral leaders have the courage to describe the world in moral terms as a condition of interdependence and therefore the imperative comes – How do we forge healthy interdependencies, so we rise together and do not fall? That's the challenge. And healthy interdependencies are always a function of the how – how we treat each other, how we show respect, how we build, not transactional but deep relationships.  

I would be remiss when we talk about these forces to not talk about the murder of a CEO right in this city last week. And I bring that up because it's disturbing to have experienced and witnessed in living color. Because in this world that's fused and morally activated and interdependent, we experience life viscerally and visually in tiny screens in our hands, in video and in living color. And, we are not just morally activated, we are morally aroused and however disturbing it is, we also must confront what gets laid bare. If the election, for example, laid bare, whether we in fact have enough winners or not in this society and the road to winning is wide enough for more and more people. We are now seeing how this world works. We are really seeing it. We're seeing McDonald's employees being called rats. We're seeing 85,000 out of 90,000 individuals react to an earnest message of condolences with "haha." We are seeing decisions as to whether to fund a defense fund, be appropriate or not, because it's funding a defense fund for a murder. We are seeing some people call an individual a murderer and others call that individual a hero.   

This is just one example of the world we're in. Which leads me to one more aspect of this world. It is really hard to see how many people are comfortable with their name and faces to express whatever it is they're expressing, even if it comes from deep places that I do respect. Impunity is a new phenomenon of this reshaped world. When people in high places do things that bring harm or that are wrong, but they do it with impunity, "I would do it again. I'll never back down. My words are perfect." We not only get the harm that comes from people in high places,

disproportionately reverberating harm, they erode the norms because they send the message to everybody else that norms are not for me, and they don't need to be for you. The easiest way to live is without a sense of shame. You could be light on your feet. It's very liberating.  

Moral leaders affirm, celebrate, strengthen, and scale norms. We are going to spend the rest of the day together talking about frameworks for scaling norms so that we don't scale my norms or your norms, but norms rooted in sustainable deep human values and principles. But we've never lived in a time where being normative matters so much.  

And this leads me to what I deem to be the single greatest leadership challenge of the 21st century. We live in an institutional world. Every person here has a big title. You're in charge of something, my friends. And we know that we can't have a world without formal authority. Without formal authority, we would have disruption and chaos and no possibility of order and governance. But we know in our souls that what makes any human system and world really work is when individuals with moral authority occupy these positions of formal authority. And in the non-reshaped world, we often conflated the two. He must be a great man or how else would he have gotten so high? The board wouldn't leave him there if he weren't a great man. But in this era of disruption, authority itself is being disrupted, and we are seeing that formal authority could be seized, it could be won. A Silicon Valley entrepreneur could lock it up with 20 to one super majority shares. Formal authority is a status you can attain, but moral authority is not a status. It's not something we strive to achieve. It's a practice and we never perfect it, but we're always learning and trying, with humility.  

Moral authority is always a function of who you are, how you lead, how you wield power, over people or through them. How you make decisions, rooted in principle or pragmatic considerations. How do you harmonize them? Because after all, Aristotle said that "a good decision is both practical and principled", but we've got to get that tension right.  

The HOW Institute exists to do our part, to contribute, to support, and to help meet this challenge. Meeting this challenge involves first and foremost strengthening our own moral leadership. It then involves trying to develop and nurture it in others, and then it involves scaling it in our institutions. It involves making how we do things matter because it matters more than ever before, in ways it never has before. Moral leadership is not confined to a set of skills, just how you walk the talk or conduct a meeting. It's how we govern. It's how we shape cultures. The reason culture was invented was to transmit norms from one generation to the other. Obsession with culture is an obsession with being normative. And moral leaders scale. And they realize that they're always in realms and spheres and they have the possibility, at least in their sphere and their realm, to infuse it with the kinds of considerations that make us human.   

So going forward, I want to offer that this is a journey. Journeys are human because they go up and down, they're curvilinear. A lasting feature of the reshaped world is that it's curvilinear. It goes up and down. But go forth we must, nonetheless. So, we just have to get really good at going up and down. It starts with Plutarch's adage that "only that which we achieve inwardly can affect outward reality".  So, we have to go on the inner journey and then together find ways to manifest it outwardly. 

It takes courage to frame the path ahead as a journey and to invite people to go up and down. We love through budgeting, planning, and control to paint linear, futuristic pictures and then execute. The world will not accommodate that. So, if we can embrace the fact that we're going to go up and down, but we're going to get good at going up and down and when we're in the valley, we will see the light out of that valley. It's a privilege to be on this journey together. Let's go up and down together. Let's wrestle together. Let's get better at this together. It's a privilege and an honor.  

Let's have a great day. Thank you.