A Meaningful Life, Through Servant Leadership

Work Life Balance and a Meaningful life

Excerpts from an Interview with Kent Keith of the Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership

Kent Keith is a uniquely talented guy.

He is a Rhodes Scholar, a Harvard graduate, former University President who followed that up by becoming a university student and now he is the CEO of the Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership.

He wrote the Paradoxical Commandments which eventually found their way onto the wall of Mother Theresa.

I interviewed him a few months ago for a book on Servant Leadership (The book is still in progress).

If anyone would know something about work life balance it would be him.

Here are some excerpts from that interview:

Kent: “I’ve had a very unpredictable, unusual career. I’ll tell you a couple stories. I went from being the president of a University to being a student at a university. A 17 year old came in and he was really bummed out when he saw that I was his roommate.”

Charles: (Big Laugh.) “Yeah, there goes all the fun.”

Kent: “I use that as one of my jokes.”

Charles: “It wasn’t the same university was it?”

Kent: “No, I went to USC to start my doctoral program. It was in the summer and he came in early to start the cinema program. There are only certain dorms available in the summer so…”

Charles: (Laughs some more).

Kent: “He got stuck with a roommate older than his father. Well, a lot of people don’t do things like that. I voluntarily resigned my position. I felt that I had contributed what I could. It was time for the next person to come in. And nobody believed that.

He must have been fired.

Something must have happened.

Because who would step down from a position of power?

I really, really loved the doctoral program. I learned a whole lot, enjoyed it. I had a lot more time than when I was running a university, I shouldn’t say running a university. When I was trying to lead a university to be more accurate, it was 80 hours a week.

I did study 40 hours a week, but I had another 40 to spend with my family, to read, to write. That’s when I found out that Mother Teresa had the paradoxical commandments on her wall. So I started writing a book about the paradoxical commandments (He had originally written the paradoxical commandments when he was 18). I had them in a book for student leaders in 1968, but the book wasn’t about them. It was just one of the things in the 1968 book which is about how to lead.

So, I started writing the book and one day I got a call from a local reporter who said: “Is this Kent Keith?”
I said: ‘Yes’.

He said: “I would like to interview you.

I said: “Okay”.

He said: ‘I am doing this article about people’s careers that had a meteoric rise and then just fizzled.’

I said: “Oh, who would you like to talk about?”

He said: “You.”

I said: “Come on, wait a minute. What do you mean fizzled? I am back in school. I am getting a new credential. I am young. I’m gonna be out there again. I have a lot ahead of me. I kind of gave him the John Paul Jones, “I’ve not begun to fight” you know routine. So he kind of hung up unhappily and I went back to my room and I was writing a book that when it was published became a national best seller, was sold to 23 publishers around the world for a combined total of half a million bucks. Putnam got me on The Today Show with Katie Kouric They got me on the front page of the New York Times, got me a feature story in People Magazine, all these symbols of success. If I could remember the guy’s name I would call him back and I would say guess what? “

Charles: (Huge laugh.)

Kent: “I told you I got it right. I fizzled, but in his terms I had unfizzled.”

Charles: “It is an interesting point, that whole concept because if you look at me, the personal story about me is that my wife is a physician. We had been in Chicago. We moved back to Indianapolis because the commute one way wherever we lived was one hour and 15 minutes and you can’t have a family life.
So then there were no jobs in Indianapolis. So we moved to small town USA which was not a great place for me. It was just boring mostly, but had a doctorate and my wife is a physician so now I am stuck in small town USA.

Really my life is more about my three boys and the fact that I am focusing on how to raise them. So I’m really going to work part-time. When the babysitter leaves, which they did 17 times, or get fired or whatever, that is what my life is about. But on the other hand it was very meaningful and I really liked it. There was still this whole issue of meeting friends from wherever I went to school and I’d get this:

“So, dude what you are doing?”

“Well I’m working part-time and I am helping to take care of my kids”, but it really was meaningful.

Kent: “Absolutely.”

Charles: “The other part of it was that, now I come back and I am going to push harder in my career, it is still really tempered with this whole wariness of fame. That piece has always been there for me, but yet still wanting to have an impact.

My overall point of view started off with the fact that in my family the question for our family was: ‘What’s the best way to move forward for our whole family?

The best way to move forward was for her to do her job and for me to help out with the kids. That means when I talk to my buddies from grad school or undergrad school they are in a different place than I am based on that measure of power, fame and money.”

Kent: “I am a Rhodes Scholar.”

Charles: “Cool.”

Kent: “There are a lot of Rhodes Scholars out there making a whole lot more money than I am and getting a lot more power, wealth and fame than I am. Now, I hope they are really happy, but I have a sense of meaning for what I am doing. It’s really precious. I think it has been hard on my wife. Things that are really meaningful for me may not be meaningful for her to watch me do, you know. “

Charles: (Big laugh). “That’s one of the reasons for this networking group Business Roundtable Network (www.brncommunity.com). I mean the networking community group that theme comes up a lot. (Spouses who do not see the payoff of members of the group starting their own businesses. They just see struggle.)
Kent: “Sure, you can’t expect that to be equal because of different backgrounds and so on, but no I think, I was a member of the Governor’s cabinet, I was the president of a university. I went back to school had more time with my family. I had more time on my hands. I really enjoyed my kids. I had an experience somewhat like yours which was I was much more involved with the family.

So when I went looking for a job I started working for a not-for-profit that worked with families, the YMCA. I spent 6 years at the Y. My last few years were (spent) helping to raise money to build new Y’s in disadvantaged communities, very, very meaningful for me. But it’s not a status, prestige thing. You don’t go work at the Y for power, fame or prestige.

You know I would meet a friend on the street and he would say ‘Kent how you doing?’

He would say: “Are you still at the Y?”

I’d say: “Yes.”

He’d say: “It’s okay, something good will come along.”

Charles: (Another big laugh.)

Kent: “Hey, something good did come along, what are you talking about?”

Charles: (Continues with laughing).

Kent: “He’s talking about power, wealth, and fame. And you know when I was a graduate student, I was a full time graduate student, I’m unemployed with a wife and three kids. We had some investments to draw out on. You’d go to a meeting with somebody and a person would say: ‘Mr. Keith who are you with?” I guess I’m with me.

Charles: (Chuckles).

Kent: “I should print a business card and just put on it ‘person’ or human being.”

Charles (more laughter.)

Kent: “Everybody is just used to having status based upon a title or an organization. So I spent several years with that. So you get some insights as you go. I have a lot of friends at the law firm I started out at who have been there now for 30 years.

Some of em’ happy and this is exactly what they were supposed to do, it’s been great.

Then some of em’ really, really wish they had done something else with their life.

I look at them and say “Well you can.”

They say: “There’s the mortgage, there’s this and there’s that. The income’s good.”

Seriously when I decided to leave the law practice after the partners sold me down the river friends would come to me and say: ‘Kent, you know you’re writing off two million dollars in expected lifetime earnings. That was when a million dollars was worth something back 30 years ago.

I said: “So. I wasn’t raised to believe that’s what life is about. If I’m in the wrong place and there’s another opportunity that means more to me well, go do it.”

They would say: “Well, you went to law school. You practiced law for a couple years. You are throwing your law degree away.”

“Well, first thing, I don’t think an education is a straight jacket. It wasn’t meant to bind me, make me immobile. Secondly, how would I be throwing this experience away? I will use this experience wherever I go?

People are so set in the ways. I talked to a head hunter once after I finished my doctorate. I started talking to people about what should I do next?

So he said: “One of the problems is Kent you haven’t had a career. You’ve just had a bunch of jobs.”

I said: “but they were so great they were really meaningful I am really glad I did them.”

There is a book that I really enjoyed and you might identify with it. It’s by I think her name was Mary Kathryn Bateson. I think she was daughter of Bateson who was a literary professor of literature at Margaret Meade. Anyway, I think her name was Mary Kathryn Bateson and the book is called Composing a Life.
I will give you the punch line and you can decide whether it’s worth reading the book.

What she did was she interviewed five women whose lives changed every time their husbands got transferred and they had to move and she got uprooted. Here are women that are professional and have their careers, but they keep moving to new communities and something in their career might not be available. So they start something else. They just found something meaningful to do and they did it.
She said that men had these traditional careers that are like the search for the Holy Grail. It’s the equivalent of you start at the bottom and you work your way up and get as far as you can to the top and as close as you can to the Holy Grail as possible.

She said that these women were knights errant. The knight’s errant would issue forth from the castle every day and look for something to do like a damsel in distress, or a dragon that needed slaying and do what needed to be done.”

Charles: (Laughs)

Kent: “And that’s another kind of life, it’s a meaningful life, but it’s not gonna say on my tombstone I was the accountant’s account or I was the marketing man’s marketing man. I’m not going to be ‘he gave 40 years to XYZ Corporation and got the golden watch. I like the book because I think I am a knight errant. It’s just, not because my spouse kept moving, but I can’t keep a job! No!

Charles: (Laughter)

Kent: “Because different opportunities came up and I went for them. It’s another way to have a meaningful life, not the traditional career.”

It was good to return to this interview. I will share more later.

I think with the economic decline I have lost some of my wonder at the journey that is life. I have gotten caught in the fame, power and money trap. However, I must say that committing myself to daily blogging seems to have returned me to the search for a meaningful life.

Perhaps this is my way through.

Charles Shinaver, PhD

In search of a meaningful life.

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