Matthew Barzun
Matthew Barzun reimagines leadership by breaking free of hierarchies. Formerly the U.S. ambassador to the U.K. and to Sweden, he is the author of "The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn To Let Go." Find him at matthewbarzun.com
Transcript
Matthew Barzun:
The people in the arena are fighting it out, victory or defeat, marred by dust and sweat and blood. By TR's framing, it's: you have a choice, people. Do you want to fight it out or sit it out? I just think there's this missing thing.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Welcome to Good Citizen, a podcast from the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library. I'm Ted Roosevelt. Today's episode with Matt Barzun provides a number of unexpected insights. We discuss how markings on the dollar bill and graffiti in a rest stop can provide lessons on leadership, and how his record collection served as a tool for diplomacy. Matthew is the founder of Tortoise Media and the author of the book, "The Power of Giving Away Power." He served as the US Ambassador to Sweden and later to the United Kingdom under President Obama. And interestingly, he has a bone to pick with Theodore Roosevelt. It's a really expansive conversation that I'm eager for you to hear.
Matthew Barzun:
I got to be Ambassador twice, which was fun, first in Sweden, then in the United Kingdom. And the wonderful State Department colleagues I got to work at in both places have this tradition that I'd never done before, but I love it. They walk around with a printout of their Outlook calendar each day on an index card. So I adopted this practice and I would have blue for "government to government," like go meet with the foreign secretary. Doing press and stuff was in yellow, which was not that funny a joke. Then there was cultural diplomacy, promoting trade and investment between the two countries. And so if you look at a given day or probably more appropriate a given week, it's sort of a rainbow of those sorts of colors and activities. You do have a certain amount of discretion. I ended up focusing a lot on... the good folks at Pew Charitable Trust had done one of their remarkable surveys.
Do young people have a more favorable or less favorable opinion of the United States than their parents or grandparents? Fairly straightforward. This is in 40 countries. 39 of those countries, young people had a higher opinion than their parents---except for the United Kingdom where it was significantly lower than their parents or grandparents. And part of that, Ted, is because their parents and grandparents had a very high opinion, especially the grandparents, may've remembered FDR and Churchill and World War II. But for this gang that was not, it was more second Iraq War. It was Edward Snowden revelations around the kind of surveillance we do. And I would do these workshops with a hundred kids at a time asking them what frustrated them about the United States, and we would talk about that for an hour. And by the end, I did 200 schools and I have 20,000 index cards up in my attic of the doodles, because I asked the kids to draw something that frustrated them so we could talk about it.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Have you thought about doing that domestically? I mean, I would imagine that if you did a survey in the United States that you'd get the same results or similar results.
Matthew Barzun:
It was such a highlight of my time over there that I didn't want to give it up when I came home. Home. For me, my adopted home is Louisville, Kentucky, and I went to high schools in southern Indiana, which is across the Ohio River from US and in Louisville. So I asked Americans about America. The number one fear was division. Racial, economic, political division. And number one hope was, and inspiration was diversity. So if you think about that, Ted, the hope and the fear had the same root. It's about separateness. So that's what I actually ended up writing a book about, which is how do we deal with separateness, the good part of separateness, which is knowing who you are, where you come from, what you stand for, and so how can you stand out as yourself and fit into something greater? And that's what sort of preoccupies me these days.
Ted Roosevelt V:
So let's talk about your book, "The Power of Giving Away Power." I want to frame your book and your insights a little bit. The basic idea is around constellation versus pyramid structures. Can you explain what you mean by that?
Matthew Barzun:
So when I was working on it, I knew I wanted it to be about the good things that happen. If you can come up with systems where people can stand out and fit in at the same time and not be forced into one extreme, which is stand out and be all alone or fit in and sacrifice yourself in the process, why can't we do both? The pyramid to me is... think of pyramid scheme: up or down, in or out, ranking, rating, sorting, sifting, winning, losing, sort of this binary, very hierarchical, very top down and counterintuitively very bottom up. Think about CEOs who sort of get the memo that top-down is out of fashion and they say, oh, great, we're going to do a bottom up, fill in the blank. Which sounds like the opposite, but it's the same shape. You're asking every member of your team to think of themselves as above or below somebody else. So you're reinforcing this pyramid hierarchy thing. And then I was sitting there in Chicago, strangely, looking at a $1 bill, which has a pyramid on the back of it. So it's two sides of the US seal. On the front of the seal, there's the eagle famously, and then there's that great motto, right? E pluribus unum--- from many, one. And then there's a strange shape, and it's the constellation, the radiant constellation supposed to represent how we could be 13 separate colonies choosing to be stronger together than they could be apart. We've lost sight of it, how central it was to them as an image to guide us on how we can stand out and fit in, how we can be free through and with one another, what it means for a citizen to be separate but connected. And it's just like, hey, it's a really good image. There's rooms for new stars, there's rooms for new configurations among existing stars. So that's sort of what the book's about.
Ted Roosevelt V:
People that are attached to the pyramid structure, that are used to the pyramid structure, there may be a concern of, well, if we give up the pyramid structure, you have this flat structure, this sort of amorphous structure, and we give away all efficiency and all effectiveness of the organization. How do you respond to that as sort of a knee jerk response to the constellation versus pyramid structure?
Matthew Barzun:
I think you're exactly right, because the pyramid is order. It is a kind of order. It is not the only kind of order. So when you get out of it, some people think, oh, is this anarchy?
Or they think it's like communism or something, like one giant group hug. It's not that either. The largest commercial enterprise in the world structured like this. And I tell that story and it's Visa. 13 trillion transactions a year. It is not a top down culture. It is not anarchy, it is not communism. It is a constellation of small, medium and big financial entities working with each other. The largest knowledge transfer engine in the history of the world, Wikipedia, is a great one, and I love that story because Jimmy Wales back in the day took on the oldest company in the world, which was Encyclopedia Britannica and the richest company in the world, which was Microsoft. Both of them were duking it out for the much coveted encyclopedia space, and neither of them won. We all did with Wikipedia, and it has mistakes, but those mistakes fix themselves. And Britannica had plenty of mistakes too. They just wouldn't reprint the whole bookshelf every time they found one.
Ted Roosevelt V:
I think another place people sometimes go when they think about it is, well, it's going to be some sort of kumbaya compromise solution to everything where it's maybe a pure democracy, but that's not really what you're talking about either. I mean, it's not about just sort of consensus either.
Matthew Barzun:
No, exactly. And the United States of America, think about it. We are a constellation of town, cities, citizens. How do you explain how we all fit together? And if you tried to map it at any scale, it would look a lot like a constellation.
What I love to reflect on is declaring independence was the easy part. People declare independence constantly. What we figured out, not how to be independent. We figured out how to be interdependent within the colonies within the cities, how to be free with each other. That's much harder. That's the thing that very few people have accomplished that as imperfect as our country is, it is remarkable what we have set out to try to do and that we keep trying to improve to make a more perfect union. That's what we really, I think ought to be celebrating. We got free from something. We began a journey to figure out and constantly out how to be free with each other.
Ted Roosevelt V:
So how do you think about globalization through the nineties, through the early aughts and now we're seeing a fairly strong backlash against some of that interdependence. How wide is the aperture when you think about interdependence?
Matthew Barzun:
Constellations are about... they embrace tension and they make it constructive. Compromise and everyone agreeing isn't the point. So the real thing is how you deal with difference, right? So if I had to categorize it, you've got people who want to dismiss difference. You've got people who want to demonize difference. Dismissing and demonizing are really unhelpful modes to be in. And so the real thing in the constellation thing in our country at its best is dealing with it, working through it. If you think about evolutionary biology, if you think about innovation in the business context, every new improvement in our lives comes from difference. We constantly have to make new difference and then integrate it in and then find new difference and integrate it in. That is a really healthy pattern. And tension and difference are critical to it. I mean at the rallies I would go to, you'd see two signs that I know why people wrote them, but they're deeply unhelpful. I think one is "what unites us is greater than what divides us."
It's like, I don't know. I don't know that that's true. But that's okay because what our differences--- we should not be scared of them, we should not dismiss them. They are incredibly powerful. Deal with them. And then the other sign is "we need bridges, not walls." And the people who carry those signs go back to their houses, which guess what? Have four walls. And it's like, come on, bridges to nowhere are stupid and walls that needlessly separate people who need to be connected are stupid, but walls can be really useful and so can bridges. So let's judge them by their fruits.
Ted Roosevelt V:
I want to go back to the first one though, the "what unites us as greater than what divides us." Because that does seem to be a central tenet for why you stay interconnected, I think. And so can you just talk more about that? Why is that not necessarily true?
Matthew Barzun:
I know, and I may be wrong, but there's just a kind of a pandering condescension.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Sure.
Matthew Barzun:
And so here's a story that brings it to life. Tell me if this is outside of the world of politics. I'm mindful that you are dialing in from New York City. So I'm really from Boston, Massachusetts. Now there is a public bathroom on I 95 between New York and Boston in Connecticut. And on the wall on the mirror, someone had scrawled in like a Bic ballpoint pen, "Yankees suck." Someone else had scribbled it off and wrote "Red Sox suck," and then they scribbled that off. So you can see, it takes up a foot of space next to the mirror. So then someone had come in with a big green sharpie and they'd circled the whole mess and they'd written in their sharpie, "and we all love baseball." So Mr. Green---I assumed it was a Mister---Mr. Green Sharpie is onto something, but not really. Mr. Green Sharpie is basically saying, "Hey, what unites us is greater than what divides us. And I didn't go back, but my suspicion is his intervention, with "we all heart baseball," didn't solve anything. And in fact, there's probably additional Bic pen commentary on what Mr. Green Sharpie can do with his pen.
Here's what I think is misunderstood. It is condescending about the rivalry and the difference and the animosity that exists between Red Sox and Yankees fans. And if you minimize that or sweep it under the carpet, you don't really understand baseball.
You don't understand what's going on there. You're trying to be above it all. So here's what I think. If I had my choice, I would bring in a purple sharpie. I would circle the same discussion and I would not make a statement. I would ask a question, and the question I would ask is this---and apologies for people who aren't baseball fans. I would say should the American League---of which the Red Sox and the Yankees are both part--- should the American League eliminate the designated hitter rule? Now that's sort of a geeky rules-based question, but it would be interesting to be like, I don't know, maybe. And you could find Red Sox and Yankees fans thinking you should keep the designated hitter. You'd find others thinking you should eliminate it. The point is, if you could get people engaged in spirited discussion around mending and amending rules of a game they love, that would be a really good thing. Because that's what I think we've lost in so much of our politics, local, state, and federal, is this sense of, "hey, these are the rules of the game. We made them. We should mend and amend them. That's the work we signed up for as a democracy."
Ted Roosevelt V:
What's interesting about that analogy---and I don't want to pull it apart to death---but I was a huge Yankees fan for a while, and I find it very uniting to talk to Red Sox fans. Even though we are on other sides of the spectrum, it is connective tissue despite the fact that we're on two sides of it. But I worry if you apply that analogy to American politics today, it is no longer connective tissue. It is actually a source of division and the belief that we are---you are maybe not an American because you believe this side of the political aisle, but I worry that if you lose the kind of core tenet of "we're all Americans, we're all fans of sport here," that becomes really destructive. And that was what the green Sharpie person was trying to illuminate, even though I hear your point.
Matthew Barzun:
Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, I think the thing that will help heal what ails us, and this gets to TR and the editor of my book was like, do you really want to pick a fight with Teddy Roosevelt?
Ted Roosevelt V:
It's an uncommon position to take, but I love it.
Matthew Barzun:
Everybody loves that guy. I was like, no, no, I do too. And so I hope maybe we could get into this. So the famous "in the arena."
Ted Roosevelt V:
Yep.
Matthew Barzun:
Right, it is beloved, right? I remember President Obama, who I'm a big---used to work for and big fan of, he read it at John McCain's---put it in the eulogy to John McCain in one of the beautiful and sadly rare bipartisan moments of the last decade. So I understand why people like it. If the choices are, fight it out, victory or defeat or just be a bystander. And it's gladiatorial, right? That is what's going on. The arena is a gladiatorial arena and the people in the arena are fighting it out, victory or defeat, marred by dust and sweat and blood. By TR's framing, it's: you have a choice, people. Do you want to fight it out or sit it out?
And I just think there's this missing thing, which is do you want to work it through? Do you want to build it out? And so the act of building something together is the best thing to help heal because magic happens when you build something together. And I think the limits of TR's framing, he knew because later in the speech he talks about the importance of group activity and doing things together as citizens and not just individualism. So it's about how to be good citizens, and he's like, you should team up and do things together you could never do alone. So he covers it all. It's just slightly less poetic because he wasn't drawn to that, I think. I don't know if you would agree, I'd love to get your take.
Ted Roosevelt V:
I absolutely agree. I mean I think it's the language that TR loved, but it is a call to participation, not a call to be adversarial with everyone. Even that passage that gets, is: don't sit on the sidelines, participate, be involved, is what he's saying. Now he uses, you're right, gladiatorial language, but if you widen out and read the whole speech, it's very much a comment about leadership and the citizens of a country. And if you're going to be an active citizen of the country, you cannot stand on the sidelines. If you're going to be an active leader in a country, you can't stand aside when your country goes to war. There's a quote of, "We remember the soldier. We don't remember the princely lord who would've fought, but for all the vile guns."
Matthew Barzun:
Exactly. And so I think he saw the scope of what needed to be done and the fact that we have this blind spot, we keep factoring that out. It's like, Hey, would you win or lose a marriage? I don't think you would ever win a marriage. You might lose one by trying to win it. Parenting---you don't win parenting. Even your career. So these things we value most aren't about victory or defeat.
Ted Roosevelt V:
And just to go back to "The Man in the Arena" speech, it's actually what he's getting at in that quote in particular is that there's glory in defeat too. There's glory in having tried and failed is far better a path than having not tried at all.
Matthew Barzun:
I'm with you on the hey, trying---It's a call to try. Absolutely. But there's an added thing because what he does is he groups, with the bystanders, critics, and this I think is worth reexamination. "It's not the critic who counts." It's like, yeah, but we're in a democracy, so we have to account for critics. We cannot, as annoying as they can be, dismiss people who are critical of us personally, of our political party, of our plans, whatever it might be. We have to have a mindset that thinks not dismissively about criticism because criticism contains difference and we have to be on the lookout for and come up with creative ways of constructively getting at that difference. There's so much destructive tension out there that we've come to think that tension is destructive and it's like, no, no, no. We should seek out tension and just make it work for us. That's the whole key.
Ted Roosevelt V:
I want to talk about music for a second to pivot here, because looking at the records over your right shoulder behind you, which our listeners can't see, but I know music's a pretty important part of your life. What's behind you?
Matthew Barzun:
Well, what the listeners can't see is it's like a record store display case for records that used to be in the front hallway when you walked into Winfield House, which is the official residence of the American Ambassador in London. So I put in a record player when I was there, like a turntable. So I would just have records out there. And so when people came in, if they were let's say from Newcastle or the northeast of England, I would put out Dire Straits and bands that I knew were from there, just as sort of chumming the waters for engagement. And so I'd say, well, before our meeting, do you want to put on a record? People could flip through. And they're organized here by United States, United Kingdom, United Nations.
And I just found that music gets people's body--- like, the shoulders go down, it just sort of relaxes you so that you're in a better position to talk about difficult or important things that you might want to do. So I would do all these fun musical events at the embassy. We had The National come and play in our living room. We had Ed Sheeran come and play and we had Squeeze and we had Bastille. It was amazing. Duran Duran---we tried to hit for the different age groups. So that's what music kind of does for me.
Ted Roosevelt V:
It's so fun. And we talked to Dan Levitin on this podcast about this, who's a neuroscientist who studied the power of music, and one of the things that he brought up was that music has actually been a part of diplomacy for at least---probably since humanity, but certainly in the modern era, you had sort of Louis Armstrong and the jazz ambassadors and the Berlin Philharmonic went to Japan, and all these instances where music did exactly what you just described, it created this connective tissue across cultures. And I'm curious how much of that was... you thought about this very scientifically or you were just like, "I like music, I think other people like music. Let's put it into the room and see what happens."
Matthew Barzun:
Two things come to mind. One, American diplomats are very good writers, many of them, but they kind of tend to think--- it's sort of, people think pyramid is the only kind of order. People think writing is the only way of explaining something. I think in a similar way, what can music do that the written word can't do, that visual things can't do? And clearly the answer is a lot. And the second thing was this wonderful mentor of mine, right before I went to be ambassador to Sweden, he had done public diplomacy and his whole career, and he was retired, his name was Carl. And he said, you're going to find that people really like America and they don't much like the United States. And I sort of fell for his--- I was like, what do you mean? And he's like, America is the idea. It's diversity, it's freedom, jazz, it's sports, it's all these positive things people who aren't from here like about America. So the United States is foreign policy. It is like troops deployed in Europe and in Asia, it is our intelligence gathering, operations, all sorts of things that like, ugh. And so his advice was he said, look, you can spend your whole time just getting everyone to talk about America and the happy stuff. Don't squander it by just doing feel-good stuff.
Talk about difference, what they don't like about the United States and our foreign policy. Don't waste this moment. And I thought that was really good. So the music was a means to an end. It wasn't just sort of like, let's stay in happy land. It was like, let's lighten up. Let's get into a mode where we can disagree constructively.
Ted Roosevelt V:
There's so many ways in which we communicate that are beyond language, that are equally---in fact, maybe even more important than the language that we use. I'm going to take a point of personal privilege here on this podcast. And you mentioned The National coming to play and they are my favorite band. I know some of the band members personally, and I would say it's probably the only instance in where the term fanatic is appropriately applied. I just absolutely love them. How was it to have 'em come play for you?
Matthew Barzun:
When they came, they're like, oh, we're called "dad rock." And I was like, oh. I hadn't heard that phrase back then. I was like, oh yeah, guilty. They came in early the day before, they played this amazing session in our living room, and then they stayed. We had a party all night, spent over, had breakfast the next day. It was a weekend, summertime. And then above and beyond, they let us use a recording, because we made a beautiful recording, but they gave us permission to use a song, that song "England," and to press it onto a 12 inch that we made as a goodbye present for people we served with. So I got to quote, "make an album."
Ted Roosevelt V:
In my book, it's about as cool thing as you could do if--- in the position that you're in. So let me pivot again here because I want to talk a little bit about the relationship between civic duty and media. And the reason I ask this question is that your company, Tortoise Media, recently bought The Observer and I think about Laurene Powell Jobs, who owns The Atlantic, Jeff Bezos, the Washington Post, and to some degree even probably Elon Musk and his head owning Twitter. These are really difficult businesses. I think the Washington Post is losing like $50 million a year. It's tough to turn them around. I don't want to speak for them, but I think their motivation, at least in part, is this idea that media plays a very important civic role.
Matthew Barzun:
Yeah, I mean, it's this amazing brand: 1791, Sunday only. It's always been a Sunday newspaper. Two of my favorite quotations from studying the history of it, the first was that George Orwell, who famously used to write for it, he was asked to summarize what it stood for, and he said, "The Observer is the enemy of nonsense." And you look around, there is nonsense all around. So I love "the enemy of nonsense." Living up to that tagline is meaningful and worthwhile work.
The second was David Astor, who's this great sort of Anglo-American family, and he owned and edited it in the forties, fifties, sixties. And he had this great line. He said, "journalism is too important to be left to journalists alone." And so back then he had Anna Freud in psychotherapy contribute. He had business leaders write things, tried to bring in voices and perspectives. And that's what I think media, certainly the part that I'm trying to do in it, can shift perspectives and mindsets. And that is the most powerful way to help mend what's frayed and broken.
Ted Roosevelt V:
I agree with you that there's a deep thirst for that type information right now, and it seems to be coupled with a deep distrust for anybody that's producing that information right now.
Matthew Barzun:
Well, there's a wonderful story---I've gotten to know Ken Burns a little bit. Talk about an American treasure, and I'm a big fan. He knows this, right? He's done Muhammad Ali, he's doing the American Revolution now, Civil War, Baseball, Brooklyn Bridge, blah, blah, blah.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Jazz.
Matthew Barzun:
Jazz, right? So amazing. I think I've seen Vietnam...
Ted Roosevelt V:
Probably should say the Roosevelts.
Matthew Barzun:
The Roosevelts! The Roosevelts, right? And I got to ask him a question and I said, what's your secret for not ever talking down to your audience? You never pander to your audience. You don't sort of suck up or talk down. And he said, I never want to sound like a math teacher. Math teachers tell you what you need to know. And I tell my team, we can never sound like a math teacher. He said, that is not what I think my job is. He said, my team and I are explorers.
And we're just sharing what we've learned on the journey. We're not above you. We're not below you. We're not talking up, talking down. And then the second thing he said was in the editing booth where all these important decisions get made, there'll be lots on the cutting room floor and make those cuts knowing that it is always more complicated than you possibly know. And I think those are great. Don't be a math teacher and tell people what they know and acknowledge that there's more nuance and complexity than you know from where you sit. Thinking of yourself as an explorer who is acknowledging complexity that is lost on you--- if we brought that mindset to every encounter, then I think that just increases the odds of making things together and building things together. That's just a good stance.
Ted Roosevelt V:
We ask everybody on this podcast: what is it to be a good citizen?
Matthew Barzun:
It has to do with the word "also." When I was at the State Department in Sweden, learning about the State Department culture and the role of diplomacy and trying to learn from all these wonderful people, what I would do is I get up on the whiteboard and in all caps I would write "ALSO." And I would say, everyone here is really good at arguing. We're good at lecturing, we're good at strategizing, and we're good at organizing. And those are all important. They're all kind of pyramid-y kind of things. And I said, so I don't want you to give those up. Good for you, good for us. And then I write the word "also" in lowercase, and I was like, I would like us to take a journey of trying to get good at these other things that also spelled "also." And it is asking other people about their hopes and fears. That's the "A." Linking them to your own hopes and fears, that's the "L." Serving in whatever way that overlap you can find between them, and then open up, be vulnerable. And so in that context, you think about asking, linking, serving, and open up. Those are kind of acts of giving away power. You're not pretending you know everything.
It's a mindset. It's a body language, it's a set of language. It's kind of small, and I hoped memorable because it's spelled also. So that's how I think about a good citizen should be asking their other citizens about what they hope and fear, linking it to their own sense of hopes and fear, being fine with the fact that there'll be lots of things that don't overlap and lots of things you don't agree on. That's fine. Find the areas where you do, work on those. Serve it and open up and be open to changing your mind. Be open to change others' minds by working through and serving that overlap. That's how I think about it.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Matthew, thank you so much for joining us today. I could keep going for another 12 hours here, but I'll be mindful of your time. But thank you again.
Matthew Barzun:
I loved it!
Ted Roosevelt V:
It was such a pleasure having you on the show, Matthew. Thank you again for taking the time to chat with me, for sharing your thoughts on leadership. Your ideas are smart and inviting, and I'm always happy to take on "The Man in the Arena" with you. Listeners, get yourself a copy of "The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go," and see how it might change your perspectives. Good Citizen is produced by the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in collaboration with the Future of StoryTelling and Charts & Leisure. You can learn more about TR's upcoming presidential library at trlibrary.com.
