Now that we've looked at the lives and careers of two people from the world of business. We're going to move to the world of public service where our exemplars are Eric Gradents and Michelle Obama. One Republican, one Democrat. Eric Greitens is a fine illustration of all 18 of the skills that we've been studying, and which you're going to know well by the time this course is done. But the three that I want to point to in particular in his case are holding yourself accountable, applying all your resources and focusing on results. Imagine as hell week, and your Navy SEAL trying to get through the training that most people don't get through. 10% of those who start get through it. So, it's 2001 and Eric Greitens is going through Hell Week. And he's leading his team through painful exercises in the SEAL's training facility. He finds a way to get his team to be singing and shouting with joy as they're going through excruciating exercises, that are designed to test, test, test them. His ability to do that and to get through painful experiences. To find joy, to find fun, to find meaning through adversity, is an important aspect of who Eric Greitens is and what he's all about. He founded, in 2007, an organization called The Mission Continues, which is an organization that finds opportunities for wounded veterans to continue to serve the mission of making the world better and safer back home. And in 2016, he was elected Governor of the state of Missouri. This idea of service getting you through the hardest moments in life, how service is a healing experience, it's really defined his adult life. But let me back up a little and take you to his roots, he was raised in St. Louis, Missouri. And when he was young, he would read stories, especially like adventure stories where you make up your own ending. And that says something about him. That he wants you to have an impact and to control his destiny or to make a difference. To be a part of a story where he was to protect and is making something good happen. When I spoke to his high school English teacher, a woman named Barb Osberg, who he still holds as a mentor and guide in his life. She told me about a time when he organized a student advisory board to help the city government figure out how to use Martin Luther King Day as an opportunity for these students to create value for the city as well as for their school. He attended Duke University and was always interested in learning about the sufferings of other people and what he could do to help them, and he traveled a lot. He went to China and met with people who were involved in the resistance demonstrated in 1989 at Tiananmen Square. He took up boxing when he was in school. And his grandfather, like my own grandfather, was a boxer. Not as a full time activity but that was something that he did. And he was inspired by his grandfather's stories about boxing. And so he thought, that's something I could learn how to do. And so he took up boxing. He went to a side of town at Duke University that most of the students didn't go to, and found mentors there who were going to help him to learn, even though he knew nothing about how to box. He learned a lot from the people that he was able to enlist as mentors. Especially about the value of preparation to make yourself strong, to be fit to perform. And to invest with significance, the idea, the rituals of preparation. He visited Croatia and worked with an organization that helped children in exile. He learned from his parents, especially on his mother's side, the importance of the phrase, never again. Was an important part of his youth in the 70s, which is a phrase that Jewish people used, and continue to describe their remembrance of the legacy of the Holocaust. And to be vigilant to ensure that such a tragedy on such a great scale in any scale should never happen again. Never again. That was another part of his rising consciousness as a young person. He went to Bosnia and on a train from Zagreb to Vienna. A humanitarian mission that he was on. He spoke to a woman who said to him, it's great that you're providing humanitarian relief, but what we really need are people to protect us from harm. And he keep hearing this wherever he went. He was increasingly aware of that humanitarian aid, the expression of the heart. Compassion, sympathy, charity, aide, was one thing. But also needed was the fist. And so his great book, he's written a few, but the masterpiece I think is a book called The Heart and the Fist in which he describes his emergence as a warrior following his experience as a humanitarian. He went to Rwanda and saw the Rwandan people, particularly Rwandan women, who were demonstrating great strength and resilience through terrible circumstances. Especially those who had to care for other people. This became an important theme that he kept seeing expressed in many of these war-torn or poverty-stricken parts of the world. That those people who had the obligation, the necessity of caring for others, just like as a team leader in Hell Week at Seals training, those who had to think about other people's needs, and to serve those people. They did better. They survived. They were more likely to get through such terrible experiences because of this idea, that service is empowering, it is healing. He was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, doing this Humanitarian work, visiting Gaza, India, Albania, Cambodia, Mexico, and seeing these many instances of human tragedy and struggle, and deep and intense and violent conflict. Looking to learn from these experiences, what does it take? What does it take? And he came to the conclusion that courageous action is what works, and so he enrolled in officer candidate school. And because he'd been training as a boxer, he learned how to overcome fear, wasn't paralyzed by it. And he was given responsibility for helping some of the some of the people who were younger than him get through the rigors of officer candidate school, which for him wasn't that difficult by this stage. But then in SEALs training, he was in SEAL class 237, six months, 10% make it through. He did make it through. And deployed in 2003 to Afghanistan. And then to South East Asia. Where he ran a special operations. Body was commander. And one of the things that happened there was as he was on a mission that required secrecy and camouflage. He remembered something that he learned watching the fishermen in Cambodia, when he had been there a number of years before, a way in which they camouflaged themselves in order to get close to the fish that they needed to catch. He used the same idea to do the work of intelligence gathering that he needed to do in the Philippines, here in Southeast Asia, a special operations mission. And it's an interesting example of learning from his experience in one part of his life and using that later on to good effect and meet a goal that mattered to him. On another deployment in Kenya, he saw very quickly some of the reasons for why the mission there was fraught with tension, in the relationship between his unit and the villagers in Kenya. And he understood that to breakthrough that tension and to establish a relationship that was going to be fruitful, that was going to enable the locals. To speak to them, to Greitens and his people, about what they needed to know about what was really going on on the ground, that they had to build trust. And so he, instead of wearing sunglasses and driving rapidly through the villages where there were children and animals walking about, he insisted that his men take off their glasses, drive slowly, go to the fruit stands, talk to people, buy fruit, and ask them about their lives. And that had a very positive impact on their relationships not surprisingly. And they were more effective in getting information that they needed to perform their mission. 2007, on his third deployment there was a truck bomb very near by where he was stationed. And this was just a few days before he ultimately left. And one of his comrades, Travis Manion, as they were responding to the bomb, said, I got your back, sir. Which is the expression that is often used to describe how people in the military are conveying to each other, I'm covering you. Well, he gets home a few days later, an unemployed sailor is how he described himself to me. And a month after that he found out that Travis Manion had died, which was a great loss for Greitens and he was kind of aimless at that time. What Barb Osburg described to me as a barrenness of omission. He didn't know what to do. While he was visiting some of his compatriots in various hospitals And What he found there was a desire to continue to serve. That people who were disabled beyond the capacity to return to battle still had the desire to do something to serve. And that's when the idea of Mission Continues was born. Let's figure out a way for these disabled veterans to do something back home. And that's the core idea. Let's give these people a chance to be of service, to create value. And thereby to feel better about themselves because many of course are suffering from all kinds of terrible after effects of having been in battle. Not just physical but also psychological. That idea was a powerful one and it grew, so finding fellowships for wounded veterans to serve here at home is the purpose of the mission continues, and since 2007 it has grown. There are many, many, many people who have been fellows, and who are now involved in helping to further cultivate the mission continues. He's since handed it off, and last year ran for governor. The state of Missouri and won that election, so he is serving now as Governor. But a few years ago, before his political run, he was giving a speech at the Harvard Kennedy School and talked about a number of the lessons that he have learned. One of which, this is notion of commander's intent and the importance of being really clear about the golden mission. And then being very flexible about how the mission is pursued and give a number of examples of how that played out. But the big idea was to be as clear as you could in making sure that everyone who was under your command understands your intention and then to give them freedom and support for adapting their tactics depending on what kinds of resistance or obstacles or opportunities that you encounter along the way. He told stories of his own experience which helped them to recruit people to his cause and to gain funding. And the idea captured the imagination of many people, including JJ Abrams, the director of Star Trek, and Star Wars now, and a number of other important Hollywood productions. And when I spoke to Abrams about Greitens, which I did because Greitens was a part of Star Trek Into Darkness which was dedicated to veterans, in which Greitens and a couple of other veterans have a cameo appearance. Abrams and his foundation were supporting Greitens because he saw in the Mission Continues a kind of [COUGH] clarity in the idea of the Mission Continues. Clarity of purpose as Abrams put it, I love solutions to multiple problems. One thing that solves a lot of different problems, and that's what he saw in this very elegant idea. Give people an opportunity to serve back home. After the failure of his first marriage, he got married to a woman that is now the First Lady of Missouri, who is herself a scholar in international relations. They have a couple of kids. Every morning he's getting his butt whipped in taekwondo training before the crack of dawn so he maintains that discipline. And as he said to the graduates at Tuffs University where he was the commencement speaker in 2012, the question, the challenge that he offered to the graduates was, what can you do to use your talents to be of service? And that is real the essence of Greitens' philosophy of leadership. So he's the youngest of the set of six that I'm talking about in our course. And when you ask him about his accomplishments and all the adventures of his amazing life, he's very quick to first credit his mentors and about the value of service. And how he learned by paying attention to what was around him and to discover from the terrible experiences of people that he was trying to help, the power of how to develop resilience which is the topic of his most recent book, through taking care of other people. So, let's get into the three skills that Greitens, is such a great exemplar of.
