With his beer-garden summit, President Obama managed to turn a divisive and attention-diverting comment into a national feel-good moment. What are the leadership lessons from Obama's handling of the Gates-Crowley affair?
Benjamin W. Heineman Jr., a business ethics expert and senior fellow at Harvard's schools of law and government, was assistant secretary for policy at the Department of Health, Education and Welfare.
People could lock onto the Gates-Crowley saga because it was vivid and human and ambiguous -- and raised, though hardly answered, emotional and important issues about racial prejudice, the privacy of the home and proper methods of law enforcement.
Yes, the president deserves some credit for the "beer summit" as successful damage control. But, overall, his personal intrusion into the Cambridge arrest was very damaging: He diverted attention from health care, and he failed to teach the nation a lesson on the critical importance of getting the facts right before rendering judgments. The public will have largely forgotten the matter by September.
Then the question of humanizing the health-care debate -- the subject of the ill-fated news conference and a great leadership challenge -- will return. As the sausage-making proceeds apace, can the president mobilize concerned citizens with tragic stories about health care without doing violence to the complexity of the subject?
Can the administration find personal health-reform stories that can be discussed at dinner tables and around coffee pots? To me, that is the most important immediate question to emerge from the incident.
Howard Gardner is the Hobbs professor of cognition and education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and senior director of Harvard Project Zero.
This affair is one where "everything has already been said, but it has not yet been said by everybody." I would like to make one observation, which was helpful to my own thinking. The affair is one that is elucidated by two of Malcolm Gladwell's books. "Outliers" tells us how, with thousands of hours of practice, one can become an expert. Crowley has expertise in being an effective police officer; Gates has expertise in transcending racial boundaries; Obama has expertise in reconciling opposing points of views.
Yet, in this case, each of the participants relinquished his hard-won expertise to the Blink phenomenon. That is, each behaved on the basis of impulse, not of expertise: Gates getting angry at a possible racial categorization by a "rogue cop"; Crowley getting angry at an uncooperative person when a break-in was on his mind; Obama adopting a stereotype of overzealous cops. With hindsight, each could block the Blink instinct and reestablish expertise.
Roger Martin is dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto.
In this case, Obama succeeded by not encouraging his followers to think he is fundamentally more perfect than them. Rather, he was "leaderly" by showing them what they can do when they make a mistake.
There is broad business application for this thinking. Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts has a reputation for having the best luxury-hotel service worldwide. People think it is because they make fewer mistakes than their competitors. That is wrong. They make mistakes. But they have a deeply ingrained culture of recognizing and making up for the mistake in ways that make the guest thankful for the mistake.
Which do you think Crowley would prefer: A) never having been mentioned on national television; or B) being called stupid on national television by the president, then apologized to on national television by him, then invited to the White House for a beer? I would guess it is "B" by a large margin.
