Remember Who You Are: Life Stories That Inspire the Heart and Mind [Hardcover]

Daisy Wademan (Author), Kim Clark (Author), Rosabeth Moss Kanter (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 12, 2004

This work offers surprising advice from top business minds on what it really means to lead. Leadership requires many attributes besides intelligence and business savvy-courage, character, compassion, and respect are just a few. New managers learn concrete skills in the classroom or on the job, but where do they hone the equally important human values that will guide them through a career that is both successful and meaningful? In this inspirational book, Daisy Wademan gathers lessons on balancing the personal and professional responsibilities of leadership from faculty members of Harvard Business School. Offering a rare glimpse inside the classrooms in which many of the world's prominent leaders are trained, "Remember Who You Are" imparts lessons learned not in business, but in life. From the revelations on luck and obligation brought by a terrifying mountain accident to a widowed mother's lesson of respect for people rather than job titles - these unforgettable stories and reflections, shared by renowned contributors from Rosabeth Moss Kanter to HBS Dean Kim Clark, remind us that great leadership is not only about the mind, but the heart. Addressing the moral, ethical, and personal dilemmas professionals face as they climb the ladder to success, "Remember Who You Are" will help aspiring leaders everywhere use their time and talents in ways that truly matter.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Wademan, a former investment banker and Harvard Business School alumna, was so affected by her distinguished professors' parting anecdotes and advice to graduating students that she wanted to share their informal speeches with a wider audience. Intimate anecdotes, such as Kent Bowen's recollection of his gifted mother working as a janitor to support her children, and more humorous reminiscences, such as Rosabeth Moss Kanter's claiming a resemblance to Katharine Hepburn during a teleconference, remind aspiring business gurus that character is an asset that can't be taught. The faculty members' anecdotes and wise advice were originally addressed to business students who would likely assume prominent leadership positions in the industry, so most of their 15 speeches advise the ambitious go-getters to remain humble and compassionate. And as Professor Jai Jaikumar urges, would-be leaders must remember that "success is born in good fortune, and obligation is born in success." As a result, this book would be most useful to those who are in management positions, but the stories will resonate with anyone who seeks the fine balance between professional growth and personal development.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author

Daisy Wademan graduated from Harvard Business School in 2002, and was formerly an Associate in the Investment Banking unit of J.P. Morgan & Co.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 160 pages
• Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press (May 12, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1591392845
• ISBN-13: 978-1591392842
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 4.8 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #229,994 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars More than inspiring: wise as well, April 27, 2004

By 

Dennis Littrell (SoCal) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Remember Who You Are: Life Stories That Inspire the Heart and Mind (Hardcover)

The stories are beautifully written, artfully presented, and painstakingly edited and polished. Some of them could win Best Personal Essay contests were they to be presented as such. They are eminently readable; in fact it was a delight to read them.

Let me put it this way: If you have a young person interested in a business career or a thirty-something loved one climbing up the corporate ladder, slip this little gem of a book into their unread copy of the Wall Street Journal and they'll have it read before morning and wake up with amazement in their eyes.

Reading this book is a little like going to the Harvard School of Business. Daisy Wademan has selected fifteen life-changing stories told by business professors at Harvard. She has guided these stories into a form very much like that of the 15-minute personal-experience lecture that typically signals the close of a class before the final exam and before the applause. They are story/lectures from the heart and from the mind, told by people who know what they are talking about. They have excellent ideas and the commitment of true teachers who want to help and to guide.

The first story, "A Fall Before Rising" by Jai Jaikumar is about mountain climbing and the day his foot went through the snow in the Himalayas at close to 24,000 feet, and of the consequent 60-mile-per-hour ride down part of the side of the mountain, and then a 24-hour trek through snow and ice apparently on a broken hip until he fell into the arms of a peasant woman who fed him and then carried him--literally carried him--for three days to a doctor.

The second story by Jeffrey F. Rayport is about a stuffed bird only partially displayed that served as an unusual final exam for a zoology course that taught him to be prepared to expect strange challenges; indeed the bird symbolized the nature of what we can only partially see, making us realize that what we need to know to succeed in business may be characterized by "extreme uncertainty and accelerating change."

The third story is unusually striking in its advice: "be like yourself," with the emphasis on the word "like." Professor Richard S. Tedlow advises his students to assume a public personality that is neither too remote from who they are nor too familiar. He relates how we might seek "a balanced identity." Just as we balance time between our personal and profession lives, so too might we balance who we are at home and at work while keeping a "porous boundary" between the two personae.

The fourth story is about understanding who you are, "your background...and your prejudices, and [that] you must understand how each element from your past shaped your thinking..." Thomas K. McCraw recalls Kierkegaard, who said that "we understand ourselves only in retrospect." How truth that is, and yet (McCraw adds) "we must live...[our lives] going forward"--always going forward in a partial ignorance that is only dispelled after the fact, sometimes long after the fact.

Notice how the power of these thoughts comes from a broad understanding of history and ideas, from the application of an academic understanding to the practice of life. These stories can be seen as examples of how education works to improve out lives and to help us understand how to live.

If I had to pick one story that stood out for me personally it would be Stephen P. Kaufman's "A Bad Meal, and the Truth." What he learned when he became a CEO is that you are still the same person but everyone around you sees you differently and treats you in ways that can isolate you and make you ineffective if you are not careful to devise ways of getting around their insulating and frankly sycophantic behavior. A fellow CEO summed up the situation by saying, "Steve, there are two things you'll never get again--a bad meal, and the truth." I would like to add that this is a danger that can threaten heads of state as well.

I could go on--and I will. One more. This is from Thomas DeLong (story #12). He took his 11-year-old daughter on a bike trip to Mount Rushmore and she asked him what he calls "The Mount Rushmore Question." He had told her that the men on Mount Rushmore "were courageous" and "had made a difference in people's lives." She asked, "Do YOU make a difference?" One can see the little girl comparing her father to the men on the mountain. DeLong felt this powerfully and it lead him to formulate two questions he employs to teach others the lesson that he had learned. The first question is, "How do people experience you?" and the second is, "How do people experience themselves when they are with you?"

Try those two out. You might surprise yourself.

The keynote story is the final one in the book, "Remember Who You Are." I think we can imagine how these words from a proud mother guided and inspired Harvard Business School Dean Kim Clark over the years.

Wademan provides an Introduction about the genesis and the nature of the book, and she introduces each of the stories with a short biographical note.

This is no ordinary book of inspiration and reading it will make you feel very good about the state of business in America, and make you realize that what happened at Enron and ImClone are aberrations.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Defining Moments of Harvard Business School Professors, April 30, 2004

By 

Donald Mitchell "Jesus Loves You!" (Thanks for Providing My Reviews over 110,000 Helpful Votes Globally) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Remember Who You Are: Life Stories That Inspire the Heart and Mind (Hardcover)

This book was inspired by the Harvard Business School tradition of sharing life lessons with students in the final class. Ms. Daisy Wademan, a recent graduate in 2002, collected a number of these stories as shared in final classes and in many cases rewrote them to fit into this wise volume. In other cases, the professors wrote and polished the stories themselves.

At its best, the essays in this book are among the most compelling that I have ever read. At its weakest, Remember Who You Are's essays remind me of the most boring moments I have spent in a classroom. With stronger editing, this could have been a knock-out of a book. As it is, the book is very valuable . . . and will be a five-star offering for any Harvard Business School graduate who wants a quick course in key life lessons. I graded the book down one star as being less relevant for those who did not attend Harvard Business School. To have met that standard, the book's stories would have had to have been geared for those involved in less exalted roles than Harvard Business School professors and alumni. As a side note, I took two courses there in marketing while studying law at Harvard Law School so I have a foot inside the camp as well as one outside of it.

Each essay describes a defining moment in a professor's life, and the epiphany that resulted from that defining moment. Unfortunately, the defining moments sometimes had a little too much to do with being a good student . . . and becoming a good professor rather than focusing on how to become an effective person in a business career.

The most universal business story in the book is "A Bad Meal, and the Truth" by Stephen P. Kaufman a professor since 2001 who is the former long-time CEO of Arrow Electronics. He describes the way that organizations form around their leaders to shelter the leaders from difficulties and bad news (or even the truth). He provides excellent advice on how to overcome those tendencies. This idea and its development are worth being the subject of a whole book.

There are two stories that are so compelling that I defy anyone to forget them. The first, "A Fall before Rising," opens the book and recounts a life-threatening fall during a climb in the Himalayas by the late professor Ramchandran "Jai" Jaikumar. He has a beautiful reaction in terms of the karmic debt involved in all of our lives which should echo forward into future generations. Ms. Wademan has given us a great gift by capturing this story.

The second remarkably compelling story is "The Mount Rushmore Question" by Thomas J. DeLong. On a motorcycle journey to Mount Rushmore with his young daughter, she asks him if he makes a difference in people's lives. The essay goes on to encourage you to ask two questions for becoming more effective in these dimensions. One, "how do people experience you?" Two, "how do people experience themselves with they are with you?" I thought that those three questions are among the most perceptive ones that I have ever run into. I wish I had heard them many years ago. Please pass them along.

One of the most intriguing sections is "The Oath" by Nitin Nohria in which he expresses the moral and ethical responsibilities of the manager. This essay should receive much wider dissemination as well. I am always struck by how many people see business leadership as solely a personal opportunity rather than as a social responsibility to create positive results for all stakeholders. The management oath in the essay is a good step in the right direction of redressing this fault. Peter Drucker has often said to me that management has few problems that becoming like a profession wouldn't solve. He points out the many differences between how physicians advance medicine and medical practices versus how business managers perform. I hope that this thought process will receive more attention in the future.

Many of the other essays reminded me of those dreams we all have about impossible tests that we cannot complete. Some of the more memorable ones include "The Stuffed Bird" by Jeffrey F. Rayport, "Katharine Hepburn and Me" by Rosabeth Moss Kanter and "The Race" by Henry B. Reiling.

With due nostalgia for my two courses at Harvard Business School, I remembered that two of my biggest career lessons came from brief moments in class that were not the final class. In one, Professor Marty Marshall told us about friends of his who ran a small video company in New Hampshire that had a great life style . . . while providing New York quality work at New York prices. In another, I heard a McKinsey partner describe a consulting assignment in which he solved the problem by moving beyond the charter the client had given him. I have drawn on both stories successfully many times in my career to become the head of my own strategy and financial consulting firm in suburban Boston.

The lesson that I learned from this book is that it would be a good idea to ask people who have more experience than you what the defining moments in their lives have been . . . and what they learned from those experiences. I hope that Ms. Wademan will consider writing other books using this format that focus on thoughtful, ethical business leaders.

Nice job!

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good, short motivational lessons for leaders, May 2, 2004

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Harold McFarland (Florida) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Remember Who You Are: Life Stories That Inspire the Heart and Mind (Hardcover)

At Harvard Business School one of the traditions has been to spend some time on the last day of classes delivering a talk to your students about how to create a good life as a leader. Often these speeches leave the students encouraged and with a deeper understanding of their role in business and in life. Author Daisy Wademan, a graduate of Harvard Business School, has collected some of these talks into her new book "Remember Who You Are". It is a collection of fifteen of what she considers the most influential speeches from her professors. For each one there is a short vignette about the professor followed by the actual speech. Each speech is only a few pages long and takes only a couple of minutes to read but could influence your leadership skills for years. "Remember Who You Are" is a recommended read for anyone in a leadership position or who hopes to be there.