Leonard A. Schlesinger
President, Babson College
Who wants to play?
Len Schlesinger says that his first year as the president of Babson College in Massachusetts has been “an absolute gas.” The huge smile and breathless pace he brings to the position are only outmatched by the tenacity with which he adheres to the Babson motto: “People, Planet, Profit.”
“Many people would think this is a bold statement to the point of being outrageous,” Schlesinger says of the motto, “but this is our time. If we don’t seize it, we will spend the rest of our lives regretting the missed opportunity. Entrepreneurial thought and action is at the core of much of what ails us in the world.”
Babson is consistently ranked number one in entrepreneurship by U.S. News and World Report. And Schlesinger knows that future graduates will have to grasp global markets quickly and confidently if they expect to shine.
This upbeat sense of urgency has served Schlesinger well in his long career on both the academic and private sides of business. In addition to teaching at the Harvard Business School for 20 years, he has held executive positions at Limited Brands and Au Bon Pain. He has also authored or co-authored nine books and numerous articles on organizational management. He thrives in new situations where he has to figure things out quickly because the world is changing fast and he’s keeping pace. He says he’s so productive because he has a short attention span.
“At the end of the day, on the things that need to get done, my orientation is to get it done before it’s not interesting,” he says.
When he worked the night shift at Procter & Gamble thirty years ago, Schlesinger realized that many of the fundamentals of a successful manufacturing operation could be applied to the service profit chain as well. Ten years later, and with a Harvard doctorate under his belt, he began translating manufacturing-based innovations and replicating them in a multiple-location retailing enterprise as chief operating officer of Au Bon Pain.
“I was intellectually convinced that I had cracked multi-location firms,” he says. “I absolutely fell in love with the extension of this stuff—being an observer and a researcher.”
And if you’re going to spend a huge amount of time and energy on something, he says, you’d better love what you do.
Schlesinger believes that his drive and motivation to try new things are a result of his natural curiosity combined with the unconditional support given him by his parents when he was young. Both of his parents were Holocaust survivors who “completely lived through their children,” he says:
“They reinforced whatever confidence I had, probably to the extreme. I was given lots of latitude to do lots of things when I was younger without someone looking over my shoulder critiquing everything I did. So when I got to college, there wasn’t much I thought I couldn’t do.”
This unbounded sense of potential saturates every part of Schlesinger’s personality. To say he is full of life is an understatement, and he expects the same liveliness from others. He believes in “stretching people.”
The uphill challenge he faces now is to keep Babson financially strong in the midst of a recession and a changing educational environment. A decade ago, colleges and universities attracted new students with impressive new construction. But those days are gone, according to Schlesinger, and schools have to find new ways to stay competitive. Babson’s new Fast Track MBA, for instance, requires only 30 percent of face-to-face class time. It has been a major booster of the college’s enrollment and tuition dollars.
But the creative ideas can’t stop there, Schlesinger says. He is determined to get every student, staff and faculty member he can find at Babson to pitch in and keep the college moving forward at a vigorous pace.
Just don’t show up unless you’re ready to play. Only “naïve organizations” try to get everyone on the bandwagon, but Schlesinger says you only need a large enough critical mass to get things done.
“What I’m looking for is an emotional connection that spurs behavior,” he says. “You can’t just talk about an idea once. You have to get people obsessively involved in it. No matter what other leveraged source you have, without passion and hard work, you get nothing.”
