To Live & Live Well
By Jaime Caliendo
Great leaders strive to live the kind of life that Ralph Waldo Emerson described, “The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”
The Jon M. Huntsman School of Business is named after such a leader, driven by purpose, principle, and passion, and renowned for his ethical leadership, charitable giving across a broad spectrum of interests, and tireless fight to cure cancer.
The expectation and culture Jon Huntsman established around himself attracted other great leaders to his many causes. In 2010, Huntsman’s personal friend and leadership guru Stephen R. Covey accepted an endowed chair position to help further define the School culture and grow Huntsman School students into leaders of distinction. Now, a decade later, we are pleased to announce that three internationally renowned experts in leadership have joined the School to fill endowed chair positions in honor of the Huntsman and Covey family names.
In 2019, the Huntsman Foundation created a $15 million Fund for Faculty Excellence to attract additional distinguished leaders and scholars to the School and accelerate opportunities for students. Consistent with the School’s continuing efforts to shape principle-centered leaders, the Fund established the Stephen R. Covey Endowed Professorship and the Karen Haight Huntsman Endowed Professorship.
Dr. Susan Madsen, founder of the Utah Women & Leadership Project, has been named the inaugural incumbent of the Karen Haight Huntsman Endowed Professor of Leadership. She joined the Marketing and Strategy Department in the Huntsman School of Business July 1, 2020, with a joint appointment in Utah State University Extension.
The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Dr. Madsen’s is one of the leading voices in the state of Utah for women in business and higher education,” said Huntsman School Dean Douglas D. Anderson. “She is an extraordinary colleague, teacher, public intellectual, and role model. I am confident Susan will have a profound impact at Utah State University as she has had with every other organization with which she has been involved.”
“I know of no one who has been more effective as an advocate for girls and women in Utah during the course of the last decade than Dr. Madsen,” said USU President Noelle Cockett.
Boyd Craig and Lord Michael Hastings have been named the joint inaugural Stephen R. Covey Endowed Professors of Leadership. “Lord Hastings and Boyd Craig are close personal and professional friends, and in addition to their teaching and mentoring responsibilities will be outstanding ambassadors of the Stephen R. Covey Leadership Center at the Huntsman School,” said Anderson. “Through the Huntsman School’s global learning experiences in London, Hastings and Craig have demonstrated an exceptional connection with USU’s students, providing them with unique and transformational experiences that have deepened their understanding and commitment to principle-centered leadership. We are excited to leverage the impact of their influence to the benefit of many more of our students. Both of them, like Stephen R. Covey himself, see the potential in people and have a gift of inspiring others to realize that potential.”
Craig and Hastings will share the honor, among other assignments, and team teach a course, “Leading in a World of Constant Change: The Power of Principle-Centered Leadership,” during the 2020-2021 academic year. Their appointments began July 1, 2020.
“Michael, Boyd, and Susan are great individuals, and their appointment is a huge victory for the entire USU community,” said David Huntsman, member of the USU Board of Trustees and President of the Huntsman Foundation.
Dr. Susan Madsen
Dr. Susan Madsen considers it her life calling to help women and girls realize their leadership potential, because confident female leadership is an integral part of a thriving social system. “It’s important to remember that raising women and girls also raises men and boys, families, communities, and beyond,” explains Madsen.
Before joining the Huntsman School at Utah State University, Madsen was the Orin R. Woodbury Professor of Leadership and Ethics at UVU. A highly sought-after speaker and consultant, as well as a prolific writer and researcher, Madsen focuses on women’s leadership development. She is passionate about helping women establish a leadership identity and develop the confidence to lead, increasing awareness of leadership potential, and raising women’s leadership aspirations. Because education is a key factor in leadership success, Madsen created the Utah Women and Education Initiative and founded the Utah Women in Higher Education Network to help increase female college attendance and graduation rates.
One of Madsen’s greatest professional endeavors is the Utah Women & Leadership Project, which she founded in 2009. Through its numerous events, speeches, and social media, the UWLP reaches nearly 25,000 individuals each year. Madsen explains that the mission of the UWLP is “to strengthen the impact of Utah girls and women…by producing relevant, trustworthy, and applicable research; creating and gathering valuable resources; and convening trainings and events that inform, inspire, and ignite growth and change for all Utahns.”
“This is hard work. It’s a bit like moving mountains sometimes, and in fact, that’s the new slogan of our initiative, ‘Moving Mountains for Utah Women,’” says Madsen. “It evokes our state’s unique pioneer heritage and our history of climbing mountains toward something better. It renders a visual of the monumental effort required to accomplish our work, and also the monumental impact women can have.”
Madsen’s 2015 policy brief titled Why Do We Need More Women Leaders in Utah discusses the impact of gender diversity in the workplace. It states, “Organizations will increasingly thrive when both men and women hold management and leadership roles […because men and women] exhibit different leadership characteristics and attributes. These are not necessarily better or worse, merely different. […] Both sets of attributes can add value to a situation, strategy, or effort.”
The brief explains that gender inclusivity has a wide range of positive effects on an organization including improved financial performance, a stronger organizational climate, increased corporate social responsibility and reputation, a more effective use of talent, enhanced innovation, and greater collective intelligence. “When there’s gender inclusivity, there’s greater innovation, creativity, improved problem-solving ability, new products, improved methods and procedures and processes in business. Gender inclusivity enables us to make better collective decisions because, together, we explore the full range of possible options to choose from.”
“There’s a need for complementary strengths,” explains Madsen. “If we only have one gender making the decisions, we’re only half as strong as we could be. In reality, there’s enough for all of us to do to make a meaningful impact.”
There’s a need for complementary strengths. If we only have one gender making the decisions, we’re only half as strong as we could be. In reality, there’s enough for all of us to do to make a meaningful impact.
— Dr. Susan Madsen
Madsen is excited about bringing the UWLP to the Huntsman School and USU Extension because it will provide a broader platform to educate both women and men in how to utilize women’s voices more effectively. “Leadership encompasses influence across the whole dimension of things our lives touch, so we need to influence the influencers—educators, fathers, mothers, both present and future,” says Madsen. “Women’s voices are often not utilized due to unconscious bias. Education is key in changing that. I want to help men and women in all areas change existing processes, systems and practices that inhibit the influence of women.”
Boyd Craig
Dr. Stephen Covey gave the young Boyd Craig The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and Principle-Centered Leadership, and an invitation to reach out to him with his thoughts once Craig finished reading the books. Craig finished reading both books within the next 72 hours, and what was meant to be a 15-minute chat between appointments turned into hours of productive discussion between the two men, and ultimately became a lifelong partnership and mission to unleash human potential by teaching individuals to lead lives of contribution and principle.
“I could sense the fire of Stephen’s dedication to teaching people around the world that principles ultimately govern our happiness and the most important outcomes we seek in life—in business, in relationships, in education, in society, in government, in families,” says Craig. “Universal, timeless, self-evident principles (natural laws) govern human effectiveness, relationships, and success in life just as much as natural laws such as gravity govern the natural world. His principle-centered leadership framework resonated deeply with me, and I wanted to help him achieve his mission.”
Covey famously defined leadership as the ability to communicate to people their worth and potential so clearly that they are inspired to see it in themselves. “He walked the talk,” recalls Craig. “Those eight words, ‘You can do it…I believe in you,’ became a theme and pattern of my work and partnership with Stephen. Time and again, Stephen gave me significant opportunities to lead and contribute to projects way beyond my experience. At every stage Stephen saw in me far greater potential than I saw in myself. And his affirming belief combined with the greatness of the need in the world stretched me to become equal to the challenge.”
Boyd Craig served as Executive Director of the Stephen R. Covey Group and Vice President of Higher Education at FranklinCovey for 23 years, and was also Stephen R. Covey’s collaborating partner, writer, and editor of 10 major books and more than 100 articles published in the New York Times, USA Today, Huffington Post, and Harvard Business Review. He is a Trustee at Intermountain Healthcare, a member of the National Advisory Board of the Jon M. Huntsman School of Business, and Vice Chairman of the Stephen R. Covey Leadership Center at Utah State University.
“Leadership is the enabling art,” says Craig, who is now dedicated to helping children worldwide develop the mindset, skills, and tools to unlock their own unique potential. “Every field of endeavor shows that leadership is the highest of the arts, simply because it enables all the other arts and professions to work.”
In 2012, Craig founded Leader.org, a non-profit organization that seeks to develop habits of leadership in the world’s underserved children. His foundation’s transformative work in influencing public education has brought “The Leader in Me” process, Covey’s 7 Habits geared toward children, to nearly a million school children and youth in poverty—profoundly impacting their lives, their families and communities, and their futures. His work expanded internationally in 2020, beginning in the Middle East.
In the last few years of his life, Stephen Covey came to believe this work with children would be his most consequential contribution to the world, and I am honored to carry on that tradition.
— Craig Boyd
“In the last few years of his life, Stephen Covey came to believe this work with children would be his most consequential contribution to the world, and I am honored to carry on this mission,” says Craig, who will begin teaching courses in principle-centered leadership at the Huntsman School in Spring 2021.
“There is no one who understands the leadership principles my father taught more deeply or broadly than Boyd,” said Stephen M.R. Covey. “He was my father’s most intimate collaborating partner for nearly a quarter century. He was not only deeply influenced by my father, Boyd’s insight and thought leadership greatly influenced and enabled my father and his work.”
Mr. Craig is looking forward to the opportunity to work with Huntsman School students. “Over the next five, ten, twenty, fifty years, I believe the students and graduates of the Huntsman School of Business at Utah State University—and particularly those who become engaged in the Huntsman School’s Stephen R. Covey Leadership Center—will become known as leaders of the finest character and competence in the world. Lord Hastings and I are dedicated to the realization of this vision and will give our very best to this end.”
Lord Dr. Michael Hastings
Born in northwestern England near Liverpool, Michael Hastings moved with his parents and older brother to Jamaica in the mid-1960s. Within a few years, political tensions in Jamaica led to crumbling education and economic structures and a scarcity of goods and services. The once-peaceful people absorbed the toxic atmosphere of the leadership and turned to violence. Ongoing turmoil made it difficult for the Hastings family to obtain even the most basic food items and necessities. Young Michael’s earliest observations of hunger and poverty provided a profound lesson in social responsibility and the freedom of giving away the things he didn’t need, as he watched his mother dividing a box of food and supplies from relatives in Canada into equal piles to distribute to her friends and neighbors. She kept only one apple, one onion, and one bar of soap for their family, because that was all she felt they needed.
By the time he was a teenager, Hastings had seen enough of hunger and poverty that he knew his purpose in life. Speaking of purpose in a TED talk in 2014, Hastings said, “This is what will matter to me forever: to bend the power of the prosperous towards the potential of the poor. To open doors. To engender enthusiasm. To empower change.”
For Hastings, leadership is inextricably tied to purpose. It’s about engagement, activity, commitment, sacrifice, and working to ensure other people’s freedoms. “We find purpose in bending ourselves to the interests of others. We find purpose in identifying the reason for which we were born. We find purpose when we choose to move away from the self-indulgence that perpetuates our modern society. We find purpose when we work and we give. But we start first of all with the call that lies upon all of us which is to choose life, and in choosing life we get the greatest of it, which is to give it away.”
This philosophy has carried Hastings through a distinguished career in education, government, television broadcasting, business, and public service. He has worked extensively on inner city employment and development issues, crime, and racial equality, and has served as the first head of Corporate Social Responsibility at the BBC, as a trustee of the Vodafone Group Foundation, and is currently a vice president of UNICEF. In 2017, he was installed as the chancellor of Regent’s University London.
Hastings was awarded a Commander of the British Empire (CBE) for services to crime reduction, awarded a life peerage to the House of Lords, and received a UNICEF award for his outstanding contribution to understanding and effecting solutions for Africa’s children.
From 2006 to 2019, Hastings was Global Head of Citizenship at KPMG, a network of financial services firms across 147 countries with nearly 220,000 employees. His primary objectives there revolved around three ways the company could improve the quality of life for others: take the climate seriously, support the poor, and create a leadership culture where everybody knew how to give themselves away.
Initially, the board at KPMG didn’t understand the meaning of Hastings’ third objective. But then he discovered Pemba Island—a destitute, disease-ridden place near Tanzania—that the rest of the world had forgotten. With no specific plan in mind for how to remedy the situation, Hastings asked the board to take a chance on his third objective. They were stunned that he would present a multi-million dollar proposal to an audit, tax, and business services organization with no business connection to the place. “They said, ‘Why should we do this?’ My response was simply, ‘Because we can—and because we can, we should. I gave them no other reason than that,” recalls Hastings. “They told me, alright, then go and do it!”
Under Hastings’ leadership, KPMG invested nine years and three million dollars into the tiny island. “We built toilets, put in the electricity, created a working environment, a seaweed farming industry, reconstructed properties, redeveloped the fishing industry, and recovered the schools. Female attendance in the school went from around 20% to nearly 90%,” says Hastings. “We built a community of thriving, economically free people.”
Quoting theologian and philosopher John Stott, Hastings observes, “Perseverance is an indispensable quality of leadership. It’s one thing to dream dreams and to see visions. It’s another to convert a dream into a plan of action. It’s yet a third to persevere with it when opposition comes, for opposition is bound to arise. Real leaders have the resilience to take setbacks in their stride, the tenacity to overcome fatigue and discouragement, and the wisdom to turn stumbling blocks into stepping-stones. Real leaders add to vision and industry the grace of perseverance.”
Lord Hastings’ sense of purpose and perseverance propels him forward in his current efforts to eradicate hunger and poverty. When he received the Stephen R. Covey Principle Centered Leadership Award at USU in 2019, Hastings remarked, “I’m still at the beginning of the things I must do and the challenges in life that I need to fulfill and the calls that I haven’t yet made right, so to receive an award of this nature is exceptional; it’s beautiful, it’s compelling. But, it’s fearful because it carries with it a burden that goes deep into my own heart.”
Age is not the boundary of our potential. Principles, purposes, commitments, covenants, determination, the acts of the spirit and the will, these are the things that decide whether at 70 we have something useful to be, or at 17 we’ve given up.
— Lord Dr. Michael Hastings
“Age is not the boundary of our potential,” he continues. “Principles, purposes, commitments, covenants, determination, the acts of the spirit and the will, these are the things that decide whether at 70 we have something useful to be, or at 17 we’ve given up.”
Hastings closed his address at USU with a plea that leaders everywhere express increased love and consideration for humankind. “In taking on the choice to be people of principles, values, determination, and perseverance, we can love to deliver and deliver to love. All of us sit with this huge potency which, when an open-hearted people give themselves away, creates a society that is known for its extremes of significant and meaningful generosity.”
Dr. Susan Madsen, Boyd Craig, and Lord Dr. Michael Hastings share a desire ‘to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate’ that is immediately evident in their work. They bring with them a lifetime of striving to lift and develop the underserved, the disadvantaged, and the defenseless among society. For the countless individuals already touched by their collective work, and for those whose paths they will yet cross, it makes a difference that these great leaders live, and live well. Their unique examples of compassion and brilliance will help Huntsman students to find their own purpose and unlock their limitless potential.
What Gives Life Purpose?
Karen Huntsman
Philanthropist,
Huntsman Foundation
"Our founders framed the American experience as being one of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is in working this unique template that we find purpose and ultimately employ our God-given talents to lift and serve others. This is where true happiness is found and something we’ve always tried to use as our foundation for life."
Noelle Cockett
President,
Utah State University
"My decisions, both professionally and personally, are guided by an emphasis on honor and compassion. An expectation for myself and people on my leadership team is that we act altruistically—that decisions we make are done for the good of others, not because of any apparent return benefit to the individual making the decision. The COVID-19 pandemic is a very real example of how our individual and collective actions affect other people. USU students, faculty, and staff are demonstrating every day that they are shifting their perspective from “I and me” to what they can do for others. I am so proud of the members of our Aggie family."
Scott Anderson
President and CEO,
Zions Bank
"In a letter to his granddaughter (Caroline Amelia Smith de Windt, January 24, 1820), John Adams defines what I believe to be the purpose of life and how we should live it. “Do justly: Love mercy; Walk humbly; This is enough for You to know and to do,” he wrote. “The World is a better one than You deserve; strive to make Your Self more worthy of it.” As one strives to live by the advice of Adams, they will have truly lived well and made a difference."