Things went dark last week at Tall Ships Today! because I was away participating in an extraordinary leadership program at the Aspen Institute. I originally thought I would be able to keep up with regular postings but the demands of the program made that impossible.
Founded in 1950 by Chicago businessman Walter Paepcke, the mission of the Aspen Institute is “to foster enlightened leadership and open-minded dialogue. Through seminars, policy programs, conferences and leadership development initiatives, the Institute and its international partners seek to promote nonpartisan inquiry and an appreciation for timeless values.”
I participated in the Aspen Institute’s signature program, The Executive Seminar which is “a forum based on the writings of great thinkers of the past and present. Through reading and discussing selections from the works of classic and modern writers, leaders better understand the human challenges facing the organizations and communities they serve.” The Executive Seminar was inspired by philosopher Mortimer Adler’s Great Books Series at the University of Chicago. “The Executive Seminar was not intended to make a corporate treasurer a more skilled corporate treasurer,” said Paepcke, “but to help a leader gain access to his or her own humanity by becoming more self-aware, more self-correcting, and more self-fulfilling.”
It was an incredible week with an super talented group of diverse individuals that included leaders from government, business and the nonprofit sectors. The intellectual power in the room was at times exhilarating and intimidating. Discussions, always thoughtful and respectful, explored a wide range of subjects from a variety of perspectives. Much of the week we kept coming back to the nature versus nurture conundrum and lot’s of time was spent exploring the concepts of equality, liberty and democracy. The reading list included the following authors:
Aristotle, Hsun Tzu, Jean Jacques Rousseau, James D. Watson, The Declaration of Independence, Thomas Hobbes, John Stuart Mill, William Gardner Sumner, Milton Friedman, Virginia Wolfe, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Harriet Taylor Mill, Horace Mann, Arthur M. Okum, Simone de Beauvoir, Herman Melville, The Bible, John Locke, Alexis de Tocqueville, Francis Fukuyama, Plato, Thucydides, Niccolo Machiavelli, Martin Luther King Jr., Wole Soyinka, Mary Midgely, Amartya Sen, the Universal Declaration of Rights, Hernando de Soto, James Madison and Isaiah Berlin.
We also performed a very “interesting” version of Sophocles’ Antigone.
Over the course of the past year, I have had the honor and privilege of participating in a Fellowship Program sponsored by the Rhode Island Foundation. It has been an amazing experience which started last October with another great leadership program at The Wharton School at The University of Pennsylvania called The Leadership Journey. Led by Professors Mike Useem and Greg Shea, two of the foremost experts on experiential leadership, this program dealt with the nuts and bolts of leadership and addressed the question: What makes an effective leader? From team building exercises to Shakespearean drama to a Gettysburg Battlefield visit, the program presented an amazing collection of experiences and perspectives to study leadership.
What does all of this have to do with Tall Ships Today!? The sail training experience is a powerful proving ground for creating future leaders. For hundreds of years and up through today, tall ships have been used to build character and for the past 50 years, since the first Tall Ships Races in Europe, young people from different countries and cultures have come together to foster international understanding and goodwill. These twin pillars of sail training, individual character development and international/cultural understanding are the characteristics that shined most brightly in both The Leadership Journey and the Executive Seminar. In a world where technology greatly influences human interaction, sail training is more important than ever in creating experiences that are real and that advance understanding and goodwill amongst our young people. Clearly, this is one of the main reasons that Sail Training International was recently nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.
