Kim Clark: living a life of faith-based leadership; A visit with the then Harvard Business School dean shows a path to success not driven by money, power, prominence, or titles

Directors & Boards, Spring, 2007 by Jeff Benedict

OVER THANKSGIVING IN 2004 I received a call from an old friend at Warner Books, executive editor and vice president Rick Wolff. He invited me to be on his Sunday radio talk show to promote my previous books. I try not to let business crowd into my Sundays, the one day I like to reserve for my family. This led to a conversation about Mormons and business practices. I shared that the dean of the Harvard Business School and several of its faculty members are Mormons. Wolff was surprised. Then I mentioned that the CEOs and senior executives at more than a dozen of America's top companies were also Mormons. I rattled off some: JetBlue Airways, Dell, Deloitte & Touche USA, American Express, Madison Square Garden Corp., Black & Decker, Continental Grain, and Harvard Business School.

The notion that Mormons presided over corporations and institutions that are industry leaders in airlines, computers, accounting and auditing, financial services, credit cards, entertainment, tools, food and grain production, and business education had him intrigued. I was offered a book contract to write The Mormon Way of Doing Business.

At a time when regulators and prosecutors are exposing widespread greed and corruption on Wall Street and high-profile CEOs are being indicted for fraud and conspiracy and fired for everything from looting their own companies to extramarital affairs with employees, my editor wanted to know what it is about these Mormon CEOs that makes them different.

There are plenty of exceptional non-Mormon CEOs who have achieved great personal and professional success while holding true to their values and maintaining the highest standards of ethics and integrity. But I examined an unusually successful group of Mormon business executives who have remained true to their values.

I came away convinced that the private character and habits of a CEO have an undeniable effect on how that person conducts his business affairs with employees, colleagues, partners, and competitors. My first visit to the home of then Harvard Business School dean Kim Clark offers an illustration.

'Who I am'

The first time I interviewed Clark he invited me to spend the night at his home outside Boston, a two-hour drive from my Connecticut home. The only time his schedule had for an interview was a one-hour early-morning slot before he went directly to the airport. I arrived the night before, just in time to retire to bed. When I arrived he set me up in a guest room and told me that if I needed anything he would be in his study working on a book. Intrigued, I asked him what he was writing about. He explained it was not something he started for publication, but instead a book for his children and grandchildren. Since age 19, Clark has devoted approximately an hour per day to reading and studying the scriptures--the Bible and the Book of Mormon. Over his lifetime, he has spent thousands of hours reading those two books. Now, he devotes an hour each morning (and sometimes time in the evenings) to composing a book about what he has learned, a book that only his children may read. His purpose is neither to make money nor to preach, but only to leave behind a legacy for his posterity.

I was still thinking about that when I awoke the following morning and went down to the kitchen at the appointed time for my interview. There I found Clark wearing dress slacks and a white shirt and tie. Over them he had a kitchen apron. He was washing dishes and preparing breakfast for me and one of his seven children, a son who was living at home.

When he finished cleaning up the kitchen, he removed his apron, served me breakfast, and sat down for the interview. I noted that the public would be surprised to see the leader of the country's top business school, a man who presides over a $1 billion endowment and sits on the boards of other top American companies, wearing a kitchen apron, doing dishes, and serving a journalist breakfast. "I grew up in a home where we were not only expected to make our bed, do the dishes, do our chores, and go to church and say our prayers," Clark said, "but we were expected to be a leader and to do it well. This has had a significant influence on how I think about the world and what I do and how I do it."

Then Clark told me a story about his childhood. He said that every day before he left for school his mother would grab him by his lapels and say: "Remember who you are." Then she would send him out the door to school.

While running the nation's top business school, Clark never forgot his mother's plea. "There's nothing we do here that's not important," he said. "We are educating people who are going to be leaders in the world."

He takes his job at HBS very seriously. But Clark doesn't take himself and the prestige that comes with his position too seriously. "I've figured out that this doesn't have much to do with me," he said. "It has to do with the position. In a position like dean of HBS, there are lots of opportunities where people will say things when they are really applying it to your position and the institution. If you are not careful you start imagining that they are talking about you personally. You can get yourself convinced that you are becoming something really quite special. So I work really hard at reminding myself every day who I am."