Leadership And Negative Entropy

Drew Gilpin Faust, Harvard's president, outlines the most important leadership lesson that she has learned:

The most important leadership lessons that I have learned have to do with understanding the context in which you are leading. Universities have enormously distributed authority and many different sorts of constituencies, all of whom have a stake in that institution. You're always interacting with them learning from them and directing your energies toward helping pull and push them in the direction you wish to move.

I spend a huge amount of time reaching out to people, either literally or digitally, and with alumni networks all over the world, so that I can connect. Leadership by walking around - that's a digital space now, it's virtual space. An enormous amount of my job is listening to people, to understand where they are, how they see the world so that I can understand how to mobilize their understanding of themselves in service of the institutional priorities.

A component of leadership is related to entropy. That's the idea that all things run down, that order is inevitably lost. But if entropy exists, so does its opposite. It is possible to create order. It is possible to take things to a higher state. It is called negative entropy.

An example of negative entropy is connectivity. The connectivity potential is illustrated with the telephone network. Building transferable knowledge and connectivity - negative entropy - is what humans are doing. And the information potential of a network grows faster than the number of connections. It grows exponentially with the number of combinations. Robert Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet, suggested that the value of a network was the square of the number of connections. We are only two years away from having three billion human beings connected to the Internet. Square three billion - it's a big number - making a large network staggeringly valuable.

By "walking around" the digital landscape, Dr. Faust is fundamentally attempting to create negative entropy.