episode 03: Leveraging Networks for Democracy with the Leadership Now Project

Leveraging Networks for Democracy with the Leadership Now Project

Featuring Daniella Ballou-Aares CEO, Leadership Now Project and Anoop Prakash, Wisconsin’s Chapter Lead for Leadership Now Project.

Daniella: [00:00:02] Any system you want to change. I think as an individual is really thinking about what your assets are, what are the networks that you have, what is the expertise you have access to? What is the things that you're really great at in the world with leadership now? I did know that an asset was Harvard Business School networks and academics, and there's reasons to worry about elite business institutions being central to the fight for democracy. But I also knew that the best of those institutions and the best of those networks were an incredible asset. So I think owning those assets and then also being clear on what your values are saying, look, we're charting out our way of being business people that really care about this country, and we're going to own that. [00:00:54][51.2]

Tulaine: [00:01:02] You're listening to System Catalysts. Each week you will hear personal stories of change makers who are bringing more inclusive connective system level solutions to our most persistent challenges. I'm Tulane Montgomery. In this episode, Jeff Walker spoke with our guests Daniella Ballew, Ayers and Anoop Prakash. Today we're talking about networks, and it's not as straightforward as organizing a group of people with shared values. Today's guest, Daniela Ballou- Aares, knows all too well that it's not just about the people you know and the people they know, but it's more of what each of them bring to the table and what could motivate them to work together towards a common goal. Networks are a method of how systems change can happen. In 2017, Daniela witnessed American democratic values deteriorating. [00:02:13][71.1]

Daniella: [00:02:15] I did see in my networks from business, from Harvard Business School, some really thoughtful peers and leaders that I'd worked with over time were sharing that concern. [00:02:29][13.8]

Tulaine: [00:02:31] And unsuccessful. Democracy is bad for business because authoritarian regimes are more likely to take control of the markets. Despite this, business leaders don't tend to be front and center in our fight for democracy. Daniela saw an opportunity in this in 2017. [00:02:48][17.4]

Daniella: [00:02:49] We saw in the US this moment of disruption politically where, you know, you obviously had the 2016 election, but you also had a moment where I think a lot of Americans didn't seem to understand each other. We had this shift, this election that was unexpected by many, and it revealed that we had a democracy that was not working for a lot of people or was not trusted by many. And I think that created a lot of questions. And at that moment I was. Really concerned that many people had been not engaging or participating in the system for many years and were not going to be able to respond effectively to the root causes of the problem. And I saw that very much in my business networks. A lot of people who'd done really amazing things in their professional lives but were now asking the question, how did our political system get to this place and what was a meaningful response? [00:03:54][64.2]

Tulaine: [00:03:58] In 2018, Daniela gathered a group of concerned business and thought leaders in a way that might seem surprising, but she knew would be effective. Together, they launched the Leadership Now Project. The group is diverse in their political views, and yet united in one common goal to protect and renew American democracy. [00:04:18][20.0]

Daniella: [00:04:19] I think there was this moment of attention on our political system, a moment of concern, and I saw the need and opportunity for a meaningful response to that. That wasn't just support. This can today go show up at a women's march, etc.. Those were all important things to do in one time or another. But our democracy had much more fundamental challenges that I observed while being in government that I'd seen in other countries. And now we're seeing in the US. And I knew that if the engine of our economy, business people who had built extraordinary organizations elsewhere were not part of the solution, we were unlikely to be able to weather the storm. [00:05:01][42.0]

Jeff: [00:05:03] Well, you talk about the mission and you've mentioned that you're working for democracy. And, you know, I would assert that I don't know a person in America that wouldn't say they're pro-democracy. So how do you define that and how do you think we're potentially losing it? [00:05:17][14.5]

Daniella: [00:05:18] I would define the kind of democracy that we need to protect as one where the systems are representative, right to voters are represented in the outcomes. And you need a strong, robust system that represents the interests of voters. And we have unfortunately faced a crisis and even belief in that our elections are accurate, legitimate, and we've had violence around a transition of power, which are the most basics of a democracy, right? Political violence is a sign of signing democracy, lack of faith in elections as a sign assigning democracy and political retribution is a sign of sliding democracy. The other enemy of democracy is ineffectiveness. Create a democracy that doesn't deliver, that is out of touch. And I think all of the segments beyond the more extremes on the left and right are particularly disconnected from the system and feel like it's not working. So if you're going to really build a democracy that is durable, you have to actually be delivering and reaching a much broader swath of Americans. And I think that's where we see there's opportunity for innovation and ways that we can play a role in strengthening the mobilization talent that can serve the middle better. [00:06:45][86.5]

Tulaine: [00:06:47] As you might be able to tell, Daniella is familiar with politics right before launching leadership. Now, she served for nearly five years as a senior advisor to the Secretary of State during the Obama administration and before working in government, she had spent years scaling the global consulting firm downwards. [00:07:05][17.6]

Daniella: [00:07:07] When I joined with seven people in New York and now is more than a thousand people with 25 offices around the world and really a leading social impact oriented consulting and data analytics firm globally. And one of my many lessons from that process of building a new organization is that talent is at the core. And every time we would build a new office, we would succeed or fail based on the leadership in that new region. We opened office in Kenya. We had amazing leadership there. It would succeed and market environment as well. But the talent and the market had to line up. And I do see it's a significant part of the role that I play as we build up our chapters and leadership in different spheres is finding that talent. [00:07:59][51.9]

Tulaine: [00:08:01] This is why when starting leadership now Daniel, his first instinct was to reach out to the many talented and influential people she knew from Harvard. She had a large network as she had received not one but two master's degrees there, one in public administration and another one in business. [00:08:17][16.8]

Daniella: [00:08:19] Went back to academia and really it out across. Business policy law. The leaders we've been looking at these issues for years and had seen things that the rest of us weren't really sick about the erosion of American democracy. So in some ways went back to school for six months or a year, not literally, but spent a lot of time with academics trying to understand the root causes and what they were seeing that we all hadn't seen. And so really did think about who were the people and networks that could be tapped into where there was existing social capital, existing common ways of thinking that led to really having an initial base of members out of Harvard Business School and and my networks and others networks there. And then over time really growing that to include alumni leaders from other business schools across the country that at least had some common foundation of how they looked at problems from their academic backgrounds and how they saw problems in their professional background. [00:09:20][61.7]

Tulaine: [00:09:24] Unlike similar organizations, leadership now doesn't raise money. They raise attention through the business, academic and political networks that Daniela helps bring together. They use a paid membership model for people who wish to become part of the organization. [00:09:38][14.6]

Jeff: [00:09:40] So this is an organization that does not have a fund to draw from, you know, to attract change. Everybody that's a member has funding. But how did you start and decide to do it that way without having, you know, a strategy of of raising a pool of capital and then going to do what you think is right? [00:10:00][19.6]

Daniella: [00:10:01] I think one of my reflections from serving in government was as much as I felt fortunate to play a role in America's foreign policy as an advisor to the Secretary of State, I. Felt there were so many missed opportunities because we weren't able to tap into the influence and expertise that America fully has. So even though we were representing the U.S., even in government, you ended up using a narrow set of expertise and tools. And for instance, the fact that American business has so many ways that it's innovated in the world, we rarely willfully tap into it. When I saw what was happening in our democracy, all of the risks at once, the first challenge seemed to have a committed, influential group of people who were around solving the problem. And so the reality is you can raise money without having that influential base people. And the most important thing was that we were building a group who was willing to use both their money influence and put their brain and really defining the solution. So I think that was it was just a question of what are we optimizing for? Are we optimizing for building a robust base of people who are going to use all of their assets to advance this challenge, which is ends up being inconsistent, at least certainly as you start out with just raising capital, which either you could do from a few people or you could do in a way that's transactional, doesn't really change the way that the funder is part of the solution. [00:11:49][108.1]

Tulaine: [00:11:50] Once Daniela gathered a core group of people, they began putting their heads together to understand where the biggest threats against democracy were coming from. [00:11:58][8.2]

Daniella: [00:11:59] What we found is that as often happens in academia as well, that various fields were looking at this problem from different vantage points, but not necessarily together. And so part of what we also were doing were connecting the dots between the academic fields. So I think that underlying connecting of the dots, I feel like is a consistent way that we've tried to work looking across academia, looking across business, and how do you get those disparate pieces to actually add up to a real strategy, real action. But something I appreciated about business school was a bias towards action and that, you know, I knew that if you could convince business people to get involved in something, it was going to have to be action oriented. I was going to have to be action oriented. You couldn't just build something that was about contemplating what one might do for their democracy because no one would show up for that. So we were able to get granular around where the money was going, who to, etc. in a way that even those operating the system, if you were a candidate, if you were certainly a business person who hadn't spent much time looking at the system, had not looked at it before, and a couple of things were revealing for that. One, that the what I would call older institutions like business associations, chambers of commerce and unions remained a big piece of the pie just in terms of their influence in the system. And at the same time, you also had individuals become a bigger piece of the picture during that time. So I think that helped us contextualize what was happening in the system and helped us identify where were the entry points that would create systematic change. [00:13:43][104.0]

Tulaine: [00:13:47] Typically, people in Danielle's network who wanted to do something about democracy would simply donate to a candidate. What the research revealed was that there were better ways to spend their money. Leadership now identified a short list of organizations that had the best hope of driving pro-democracy change. One of them was Open Secrets, a transparency platform for campaign data. [00:14:08][20.9]

Daniella: [00:14:10] Not a very sexy investment in the political space. They had a $400,000 gap for their organization in 2020, in a year where lots of money was going to go out and get spent and the transparency was going to be important to the press and otherwise. Our members came together and closed a $400,000 gap in just a few months for that organization. I think showing that our members have come to appreciate that just writing a candidate check was not enough. [00:14:35][24.6]

Tulaine: [00:14:36] That year, it became increasingly clear that the 2020 presidential elections results could be contested. [00:14:42][5.6]

Daniella: [00:14:43] So we were the first mover to come out in October of 2020, saying business leaders have faith in the election and want to work with others to have patience for the results because we expected them to be to lead. And that was with Reid Hoffman, Seth Klarman, several hundred business leaders in our membership and beyond. It was very visible in the press and many of those who we asked to come on board at that time, like the Chamber of Commerce and others, didn't join our statement to begin with, but weeks later came out and ended up being part of a coalition of organizations that we. Kind of quietly measure for the weeks through the election to the insurrection to have a coordinated response by business organizations and business leaders and to reinforce the certification elect of the election. And then when January 6th happened, you would see within the 12 hours after that happened, every major business organization, many CEOs, our organization came out of lockstep to say this assault in American democracy is not acceptable. [00:15:51][68.2]

Tulaine: [00:15:55] In the months following, leadership now helped pass the Electoral Count Act, this law is meant to ensure that the transition of power for the presidency is done in a democratic way. After influencing federal politics, leadership now decided to turn their attention to the state level. One of these states is Wisconsin, where a new Prakash has been mobilizing business leaders in the defense of democracy. [00:16:18][22.9]

Daniella: [00:16:20] Anoop runs a manufacturing company in Wisconsin. He was a classmate of mine. He was Republican squarely. There was plenty of debates we were part of in business school, been held in very high regard each other. And he served in the Bush administration and is a veteran and in the last several years in Wisconsin, became very concerned about erosion of democracy and the lack of faith in the voting system that was occurring in the election. [00:16:49][29.2]

Anoop: [00:16:50] You know, there are a lot of elements in, you know, kind of the public eye and what happens in a in the governance of a state that I think a lot of people can agree on, whether they're kind of center right or center left. And that is really around the idea of fairness and justice and good governance in general. [00:17:08][18.5]

Tulaine: [00:17:09] That's Anoop, as a member of leadership now, he began having conversations with business leaders in the state. [00:17:15][5.9]

Anoop: [00:17:16] There was a lot of interest in, you know, specifically around topics like gerrymandering and fair maps. Lots of interest in topics like election administration and not allowing our election administration system to be tampered with or manipulated or politicized. No matter what party you belong to, whether you were active or passive, that you could say, look, this is not right, that there needs to be some lines here that are drawn. And when these lines are crossed, we need a voice to step into that void and say, you've crossed the line. And we really need to, you know, kind of look at this a little differently. And I think our opportunity was to really galvanize those voices and start to put some gravity behind them by bringing some of the leading business figures in the state forward to speak about these issues openly. [00:18:08][51.7]

Tulaine: [00:18:09] Anoop joined other business leaders to create Wisconsin business leaders for democracy as one of their first initiatives. They asked businesses to encourage their employees to vote in the 2022 midterm elections. [00:18:21][11.4]

Anoop: [00:18:22] It wasn't Partizan. They could vote any way they wanted. It was just a matter of getting the vote out and ensuring that our citizens were engaged in the process. And so I think civic engagement became a rallying force for us as a broader business community to get people out to vote. As we approached the midterms and we started to see, you know, the dialog between candidates. One of the things we thought we could also do is ask the candidates to pledge their support for key Democratic principles so whether they would accept the results of the election, you know, some fairly, fairly basic principles. Would they accept the results? Would they support the bipartisan election Commission? Would they ensure that they would, you know, accept the 2024 results if they were elected governor and we sent them to both gubernatorial candidates? One was the incumbent Governor Evers. The other was the challenger, Tim Michaels, who's also a business leader. And we sent them this pledge. And our going in assumption was these are fairly basic pledges towards democracy and kind of what we would expect of any elected leader and that we thought we'd they'd both sign them. And, you know, unfortunately, what happened was one of the candidates, Governor Evers, who did get reelected, did sign the pledge and Tim Michaels did not and his campaign didn't even acknowledge it, didn't respond to multiple requests. And didn't want to talk about democracy. So here we had a conundrum. We were faced with two candidates. We were trying to be bipartisan, but we felt an obligation to inform voters that one candidate was going to support Democratic principles and the other would not. [00:20:18][116.2]

Tulaine: [00:20:19] To put this message out. They decided to create an ad. [00:20:21][2.5]

Anoop: [00:20:22] We're job creators, Republican and Democrat alike. [00:20:24][2.3]

Daniella: [00:20:25] We know that a vibrant economy needs a healthy democracy. [00:20:27][2.7]

Anoop: [00:20:29] So we asked both Tim Michaels and Governor Evers directly whether they'd accepted the 2020 election results, whether they'd. [00:20:36][7.2]

Tulaine: [00:20:36] Respect. [00:20:36][0.0]

Jeff: [00:20:37] Your vote, even if it doesn't. [00:20:38][1.5]

Anoop: [00:20:39] Go their way, whether they pledged to certify our states. [00:20:41][2.3]

Tulaine: [00:20:42] Members of Wisconsin's business Leaders for Democracy pointed out the two. Michaels did not sign the pledge. [00:20:47][5.0]

Anoop: [00:20:48] Governor Evers said yes, but Tim Michaels. [00:20:50][2.1]

Tulaine: [00:20:51] Refused to. [00:20:51][0.6]

Anoop: [00:20:51] Answer. At a time when the threats to the sanctity of the vote are as dangerous as ever, Tim Michaels refusal is wrong. [00:20:58][6.6]

Tulaine: [00:20:59] The ad quickly gained some traction, garnering over 4 million views. Two Michaels was defeated in the midterms. This strategy was successful once more for the Supreme Court elections. Former Justice Dan Kelly ignored their questions about democracy and eventually lost the elections as well. [00:21:16][17.1]

Anoop: [00:21:17] It's very easy to point fingers at us and say, you guys are really partizan because you've gone out and you've supported certain candidates. But we've done that on the bipartisan principle of giving every candidate the same opportunity. And that's been an important principle that we continue to hold very firm and it would be very easy for us to abandon those principles and become another political organization. But that's not what we're about. So I think this idea of catalyzing others is being very open to where the ideas are going to come from. You know, we've gotten such great input from some members of the academic world who understand a lot of history and a lot of this what's happening around the state. And that that input has been tremendously informative. And, you know, without that, we could easily ignore that and say, well, we're the business leaders and we know what's right and and focus on business issues. But I think this is a systems problem as as you well know, and being a catalyst requires you to touch every aspect of that system and discover new places where you can learn and and continue to adapt and grow. [00:22:30][72.5]

Tulaine: [00:22:31] Anoop also believes that to become a system catalyst, one must build community. [00:22:35][4.1]

Anoop: [00:22:36] And people don't talk about it. They think about leadership is a very individual sport. You know, I am the leader and I lead other people. But it's really about building community and these issues, particularly that cross multiple sectors and touch everyone really require you to build community. And so the first place to start is start having conversations, start talking to the people who are close to that issue. You know, our first days we were engaging not only with the academic experts, we were engaging with practitioners. We started to have calls with election officials to try to understand what were they experiencing on the ground. And all of that helped galvanize us around what was the core crux of the issue. It wasn't an issue that we fully understood until we continued to iterate on these conversations. And once you iterate on these different conversations, you start to get crisper and sharper as to where you need to focus your effort. [00:23:34][57.8]

Tulaine: [00:23:35] Daniella also believes that systems change is a collective effort. [00:23:38][3.3]

Daniella: [00:23:39] In graduate school, Heifetz was one of the leadership methodologies that I thought was really interesting, which was about, you know, there's leadership, which is you have an answer and you're going to kind of lead people to it. And stereotypically, that would be a little bit more of a business school kind of, okay, you know, we're going to make 10,000 more widgets and I'm going to like help mobilize my team to be really good at the delivery. Right. And the leadership style that Heifetz talks about is adaptive leadership, which is where you have a really difficult challenge that a group needs to address together. And it's only through that group themselves seeing the challenge and being part of addressing the challenge that you could succeed. Like I can have an answer and just be like, okay, the answer to Democracy Now is we're going to like these five people and we're going to change these five lives and please come along with me. And even if I was right, I would have a hard time mobilizing against it, and I probably wouldn't be. And I think the balancing act is I think the role in system change is to kind of reveal the challenge and help a group work together to solve it with some sense of, you know, not totally open ended, right? There is some boundaries to what that challenges, to what success looks like. And I feel like the balancing act for me in that which I, you know, sometimes get right I'm sure sometimes I don't, is one of the times where you say, look, this is the thing we're going to focus on. We have this election. This is really important and we just need to get real act now together versus. Recognizing that the collective wisdom of this group is extremely high. And sometimes the thing that keeps me up at night is like, am I using this incredible asset? Well, enough of all of these smart, committed people who have incredible resources. And so I, I think I do okay with that, but it's still going through that process in a systematic way. Is it still messy? Right. Systems change is like it's not purely linear and you have to find some linear things within it. So you keep I mean. [00:25:58][139.3]

Tulaine: [00:25:59] In a rapidly changing political environment, leadership now hopes to replace the old systems that aren't serving us. [00:26:05][6.0]

Daniella: [00:26:06] We are in challenging times. We are. You know, democracies are declining in multiple countries. We have climate change as a real threat and we have divisions of polarization. And we have technology that we don't know exactly what to do with. I mean, there are there are a lot of things to deal with. But I really do believe it is in our ability to tackle those challenges and turn them around. But we have not yet designed the systems to respond effectively. We're in the process of designing them, right. Our old systems are not being effective. And so in the big picture, we need to like rethink the way we work on a lot of things. But the best way to make sure we don't solve those problems is to not start in it. And I don't think we can accept that like. We're not going to solve these problems because where does that leave us and where does that leave our children and our grandchildren, etc.? So I think we need to be courageous, willing to take on the challenges and just start doing the work together. [00:27:12][66.2]

Tulaine: [00:27:16] And now for a Rapid Fire segment. Here is Jeff with Dan Young. [00:27:19][3.5]

Jeff: [00:27:22] What's been one of the most gratifying moments along this journey? [00:27:25][2.9]

Daniella: [00:27:26] Essentially, when you're able to enable people to have courage to do hard things? With their influence. [00:27:34][7.7]

Jeff: [00:27:35] Yeah. It sounds to me like helping people be brave together. [00:27:37][2.9]

Daniella: [00:27:38] Well said. Yes. And I think having courage is foundational. And what gives people courage is doing it together. [00:27:50][11.6]

Jeff: [00:27:51] Exactly. What about your organization? Keeps you up at night? [00:27:54][3.2]

Daniella: [00:27:55] Three things. Mine is we have these incredible people. Are we figuring out the most effective way to activate them and help enable them to be part of solving the problem? Second I think it building an organization, the getting your systems right and attracting the right talent who are going to stick with this with you is not easy. And in politics, there's a lot of unkindness. There's a lot of. You know, it's not an industry often that people find a lot of mutual trust. And so I'm trying to create a team, an environment that is like a bubble of trust and excellence and commitment. And, you know, that's that's a lot of work. [00:28:49][53.5]

Jeff: [00:28:49] Welcome to being a good leader for listeners who aspire to be a system catalysts, where and how do you think they should start? [00:28:57][7.1]

Daniella: [00:28:58] Any system you want to change, I think as an individual is really thinking about what your assets are, what are the networks that you have, what is the expertise you have access to? What is the things that you're really great at in the world? Who else do you know that is really great at that, right? So, you know, you have to have something that you're passionate about changing, but the way that you can actualize that is really. Knowing what the assets you have are, where you could get them from others. So for instance, with leadership now I did know that an asset was Harvard Business School networks and academics, and there were reasons not to create a democracy organization like the Harvard Business School. Right. There's lots of reasons that business to begin with can be questions and its intentions with some merit. There's reasons to worry about elite business institutions being central to the fight for democracy. But I also knew that the best of those institutions and the best of those networks were an incredible asset. So I felt willing to take the risk that there's baggage that comes with all of that. To benefit from the positive sides of those equation and just be okay with that. So I think owning those assets and then also being clear on what your values are that might differentiate you from the things that people don't like about business or business institutions and saying, look, we're charting out our way of being business people that really care about this country and we're going to own that. [00:30:39][101.0]

If you want to learn more about leadership now, head on over to leadershipnowproject.org