Warren Bennis: John Gardner, one of our—
Frances R. Hesselbein: Great heroes.
WB: Icons; John Gardner. And when I interviewed him about how he got from where he came from, humble origins, Roman Catholic, he thought he would end up his career, he said, teaching girls at Mount Holyoke, boring psychology, and look at what that guy did; Common Cause, first Republican on Lyndon Johnson’s cabinet, a man that really—he provided some of the path for us to follow in, certainly in my case.
FRH: In my case! One of my three heroes.
WB: So when I met him I said, “John, how did you get from that background to now, to here?” I will never forget what he said. He said, well, I guess, these are his exact words, “Well I guess”—these are his exact words— “there were some qualities there that life was waiting to pull out of me.”
FRH: Yes.
WB: Now, how do you deal with, that’s a question that haunts me, I think of that almost everyday that life—okay, so I became a provost, and I suddenly began doing things that I never thought there were in me. How did I? How did I know? I would watch my dean at MIT, Howard Johnson, who later became MIT’s president, and I would watch him at a faculty banquet, and he would get up, and make a six, seven minute speech that was funny, relevant, resonant, sit down. I said, “Geez, I can never do that. Oh boy, whew!” But I put myself in the situation of being provost and then guess what, I will be asked to give a short speech, and I learned, perhaps not as well as Howard could, but I learned how to be good at that. How did I know? The philosopher, the German philosopher, Habermas talks about possible selves. The question about development of any kind, Frances, is how do we know all those possible selves?