Dartblog

Here’s a quiz: would you rather hear Bill Clinton lecture on the importance of marital fidelity or Jim Kim expond on the virtue of being a good listener?

Well “Ol’ Hounddog” Clinton has some pride, so you won’t get to hear that peroration, but despite his busy World Bank schedule, Jim Kim still seems to have time to enlighten us about how vital he finds it to gather information and opinions from those around him. Some excerpts from Kim’s contribution to a LinkedIn series entitled, The Best Advice I Ever Got:

Ever since I was a boy and played on sports teams, I’ve been fascinated by the challenge of leadership. How can you inspire or guide groups of people to success - sometimes to heights that they never dreamed of reaching as individuals?…

But what I’ve come to learn in my career - starting with tackling complex health problems around the world, during my time at the helm of Dartmouth College, and now leading the World Bank Group — is that while everyone acknowledges that leadership is important, few put in the time and effort it takes to become a more effective leader.

Creating a sense of shared purpose within often very diverse groups can be extraordinarily difficult, but when it happens, even large, unruly groups can tackle just about anything. That sounds simple, but it’s not easy…

For anyone who has been through a 360 review, as I have, the results can be humbling, sometimes even devastating. After reading some of the reviews of my performance, I found myself saying, “They weren’t supposed to see that.” I knew that I had a lot of work ahead of me to become a better leader…

So how should you react to this kind of feedback? That gets us back to [Kim’s leadership coach] Marshall [Goldsmith]’s advice: The most fundamental commitment you have to make as a leader is to humbly listen to the input of others, take it seriously, and work to improve. Again, it sounds simple, but it’s not easy. [Emphasis added]

What pap! But I did appreciate the inadvertent honesty of the bolded text above. At least Kim can admit that he has things to hide, that he was faking it a good part of the time. And how good to know that the people around him were able to see through his flimflam.

If there was one thing that members of the faculty can agree upon almost unanimously about Jim Kim, it is that he had little or no attention for anyone and anything that did not have to do with global health. Kim’s eyes would just glaze over, and the impassioned professors in question would see that their words were wasted. Yet now Kim gives us all advice on a subject that he manifestly does not understand at all.

As a larger question, how much of our public discourse is as false as the above? In the entire run-up to Kim’s selection to head the World Bank, I felt like I was reading Pravda: long articles were written that bore no relation at all to the on-the-ground truth that people in Hanover had lived for two and a half years.