A Talk with John Isaacson

Looking for Leaders

How do you go about finding the right candidate for a job?

The most overrated part of headhunting is the search. It's not hard to come up with a collection of plausible candidates for a job, most of them wrong. The trick is to figure out what the position requires. A job is a solution to a problem, but we often don't take the time to understand the problem. We just look for someone who has the same credentials as the last person who had the job, or else the opposite credentials if we are still fighting the last war. I try to discipline myself and anyone who will listen by asking: "What constitutes success? How will you know you hired the right person after you have hired him or her?"

What kind of problems are you most interested in?

We are interested primarily in the problems facing mission-driven organizations. I use the words "mission-driven" and "civic" interchangeably. All successful organizations, perhaps with the exception of foundations, are disciplined by their missions and their markets. We are interested in civic institutions -- that is, institutions that are disciplined in the first instance by their missions and in the second instance by their markets. Most not-for-profits don't want to really admit that they have markets. They feel they are compromising their values if they have to acknowledge that money also drives them. Most market-driven organizations don't really want to discuss their missions. They feel they ought to be more hard-boiled than that.

We are principally interested in how civic institutions align their missions and their values. If the money and the ethics are all going in the same direction they will win. If they are going in opposite directions, they will lose their shirts. That is where the real leadership comes in.

The civic sector is essential to a durable, democratic, market-driven society. Civic institutions are the "glue" that binds us together. They are the voluntary settings, heavily subsidized by government, where we provide care for one another in times of travail, where we invent new knowledge, and where we use learning to reconcile our disparate visions of the future. Civic institutions are a flexible broad streak of glue; they allow us to adapt without the burden of government authority to new developments in the world. A rich collection of civic institutions allows a society to move faster.

What kind of people are you looking for?

Leaders. Leaders who have seen the client's problem before. They don't have to prove that they have seen every side of exactly the same problem, just that they have done analogous work -- analogous leadership work. We want to know that they have taken on hard work all through their career -- harder work than they needed to take on, work that went to fundamental values, that built market share and solid finances on high purposes. We want to see a great medical center, a leading research institute, a truthful, articulate advocacy organization, a first-class school or a great collection of motivated child welfare workers with a fabulous bottom line attached. When people can do that kind of work -- build or re-build essential civic institutions and make the money and the values both work -- then we believe in them and we want them.

Is there any one character type that meets this definition of leadership?

Not exactly. They come in all forms. They come from every personal history and every culture. They learn, these few characters, to put their very particular history to our common use. We are especially proud that we spot leadership across all the lines of race, class, and gender. We are driven to diversity because we believe in talent and we push ourselves to be open to talent, to seek it and find it, conventionally and unconventionally.

We are proud of the fact that we are the only large search firm in America with a statistically significant record of placing women and people of color in executive positions. We don't just put a few diversity candidates in a pool. We find leadership and our clients hire them.

The kind of leader we seek also depends on the search. We spend a large amount of time with our clients, getting to know them, identifying their needs. Our clients don't want just a warm body. They need to find someone who will show a real commitment to value that will strengthen their particular organization

It's not enough for us to submit a list of names. We have to go through the whole process, be thorough and quick-witted, find people who are not only appropriate but also extraordinary. In many cases, we must "think outside the box" or identify risks worth taking in order to provide our client with the best choices. All of this means we can't do a search by rote. We can't have one fixed procedure that serves all. Each search has to be unique, geared towards a client's specific needs.

Hunger, Speed & Weight

Surely there must be some common traits that your candidates all possess?

I think that's true. They don't look alike, but at the sub-structure they share some broad common qualities. Over the years I have boiled down the general characteristics we are looking for to these three categories: Hunger, Speed, and Weight.

Hunger is fantasy about the self, dreams that a person is prepared to risk in the real world. Everybody has fantasies. Everybody has dreams, but only some people act them out. Hunger, as I use it, means that you're willing to take risks, that you're willing to fail. It is the failure that teaches. We learn from our success but we learn more when we fail. There is no safety net in the positions we are trying to fill, and we want someone who has been swinging on that trapeze for a long time.

Speed means intellectual agility, the capacity to learn "foreign languages" quickly, whether those languages are finance, organizational development, or biotechnology. We look for learners not teachers, people who can listen and synthesize rather than lecture -- people who ask a different question.

Finally, weight means the capacity to use formal and informal power wisely, for moral ends. A heavyweight gets things done, and does it in a way that serves the purposes of the organization and raises its ethical aspirations. Most heavyweights are older; they "gain weight" through experience, but I have met younger people with weight. They understand their power and they understand its use.

Why Choose IM?

Why should a potential client choose Isaacson, Miller over another search firm?

Clients choose us because we are unique in our civic commitment. Other firms compete in this field but they compete in specialties, such as independent schools, with one or two specialties per firm. We recruit for independent school heads and one of our partners led a major independent school. But we also serve the whole K-12 education field, including education school deans, urban public school superintendents, educational advocacy groups, charter school companies, and foundations working in education.

In most firms there are only a few lonely people in specialized practices who do our work. In this firm, we are committed to the entire civic enterprise, to all of the fields and all of the functions. It gives our recruiters a 360-degree angle of vision. We truly believe that our jobs have to contribute to the civic infrastructure and we share with our clients and our successful candidates a formidable value commitment to the sector.

The Future

Where do you see the firm in ten years?

We used to be a small, "boutique" firm. Since nobody else was concentrating on the field, this enabled us to learn and to establish our position around the full spectrum of civic work. We got to treat each client with a great deal of attention; but we were somewhat limited in the scope and reach of our searches. Over the years, we've grown, but selectively and carefully. We now have a powerful nationwide network, made up of former clients and candidates as well as our own professional contacts, including a database of roughly 100,000 names. We are today a big firm in this field, with just over 50 professionals and a steady growth rate, but we are not and are never likely to become a genuinely large firm, comparable to the largest market-driven firms. That suits us. We feel it's important to connect with our clients in a meaningful, in-depth way. We like to think we offer the best of what the big and small firms offer, without succumbing to the great disadvantages of either one.

Will the future be much like the past?

I see us growing steadily and cautiously, roughly 15% a year, which is our historical trend. We are surely going to have to adapt to new conditions in our field. K-12 education will centralize standards and accountability but dramatically de-centralize the authority to manage schools. Our research institute clients will see a huge boom in new science money, public and private. The social services and economic development sectors will move increasingly to community-based organizations with state government contracts as their principal source of revenue. We are going to see an enormous burst in philanthropy that will drive the institutional development field, and launch more foundations in the next 20 years than we have created in the last hundred. That will fundamentally alter the marketplace for advocacy organizations. Every era makes its own civic demands. We have no doubt that the demand for civic leadership will only increase as we stretch the pace of change. You can never have too many people in key civic positions in our society who have strong wills and clear vision. I think we have a lot to be proud of in our last 22 years. We are the premier mission-driven executive search firm in the country, and we have placed many formidable people in visible and powerful positions. But we have to build on this in the future as our institutions change their goals and our society adapts to new challenges. I believe we will, mostly because we are committed enough to try things other people won't do. We'll learn on the frontier and bring it back to the core.