Recently Al Checchi was invited to speak at the University of Miami’s Cobb Leadership Lecture series. He shared the speech with Open Road Media and we have selected portions of the speech on leadership we believe are particularly relevant to today’s graduates.
Al Checchi in high school, 1966
“I believe we have a leadership crisis. It will be your great challenge to fill the vacuum and fix this mess because no matter how great our natural advantages, the world is changing and will leave us behind as it has every other great power unless we generate the leadership that helps us to adapt to ever-changing circumstances, acts in the best interest of all of us, and brings us together.”
He described leadership as “a form of alchemy” in which “you harness individual creativity, unleash the power of combined effort, and produce something greater than the sum of the parts.”
Checchi goes on to identify the qualities necessary in a leader:
- “First, I think you have to be a malcontent—someone willing to wage war against the status quo —one who, in Dylan Thomas’s words, won’t go silently and will ‘rage against the dying of the light.’”
- “You have to be a truth seeker and be willing to go wherever that search takes you. How can you make things better if you spend your time spinning facts and denying reality?”
- “You have to have courage—a willingness to take on ‘insurmountable’ challenges, a willingness to expose yourself and to fail, then pick yourself up and try again—and if necessary, again and again. Winston Churchill famously said, ‘Never, never, never give up.’ He didn’t—real leaders don’t.”
- “You must have integrity—a commitment to immutable principles and ethical standards. How else can you retain the moral authority necessary to bring out the best in people and enlist them in collective action?”
- “Lastly, real leaders are animated by a personal vision of what should be and a passionate desire to make their vision a reality—Bobby Kennedy often paraphrased George Bernard Shaw: ‘Some men see things as they are and say, Why? I dream things that never were and say, Why not?’”
Al Checchi, author of The Change Maker, former chairman of Northwest Airlines, principal at Bass Associates, and vice president of corporate development at Marriott, encourages graduates today to be leaders—a role he finds lacking throughout the public and private sectors in America.