Video Player

Leading Across Boundaries

Peter Senge SM '72, PhD '78 Ronald O'Connor Frannie Léautier MS, PhD Jeremy Hockenstein MBA '99: October 6, 2005; Running Time: 1:28:29

About the Lecture

About the Lecture

“This is a strange and paradoxical time,” says moderator Peter Senge, in which people live “more and more in each other’s backyard”-- interdependent globally but also fragmented by economics and politics. Senge believes “working across boundaries is the defining challenge” of our era.

Ron O’Connor is a pioneer in the practice of crossing boundaries. While volunteering as a medical student in Nepal 30 years ago, he observed devastating mortality rates that could be eradicated if up-to-date public health measures were implemented. But he also understood that Westerners couldn’t simply go in and impose solutions on a different culture. “We’re seen as a big gorilla knocking over small helpless countries.” The organization he founded assists and trains native communities and leaders to put their own health solutions in place. In a Bangladesh family planning effort, O’Connor was “thrilled to see illiterate village women organize themselves” and halve their fertility rate over two decades.

In Frannie Leautier’s job, she’s forbidden to “influence via money….just through ideas.” “I can’t rely on much more than people talking to each other and making decisions together,” she says. So her clients’ perspective and needs come first. In Sri Lanka, for instance, where Leautier’s group lived for two weeks in a poor village, she learned that providing running water was less essential than creating two ponds: one for people and the other for elephants.

Jeremy Hockenstein says he’s “inspired by people who have overcome much more than me and worked harder than I ever had.” A visit to Cambodia introduced Hockenstein to large numbers of poor people “trying to learn computers, and English” but for whom no jobs existed. He decided to launch a data entry business dedicated to providing some of the neediest Cambodians with decent livelihoods. Digital Divide Data trains and hires disabled people and women rescued from sex trafficking, among others. They work six-hour days and go to school. Says Hockenstein, “We measure ourselves by how many go on to better jobs in the future.”

Lecture Details

Location: Wong Auditorium

About the Speakers

Peter Senge SM '72, PhD '78

Senior Lecturer, MIT Sloan Founding Chairman, Society for Organizational Learning

Peter Senge is the author of The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of The Learning Organization(1990), and co-author of The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook: Strategies and Tools for Building a Learning Organization(1994) and of a fieldbook, The Dance of Change: The Challenges to Sustaining Momentum in Learning Organizations(1999).

He received a B.S. in Engineering from Stanford University, an M.S. in Social Systems Modeling and Ph.D. in Management from MIT.

Ronald O'Connor

Founder, Management Sciences for Health

Ronald O'Connor, was President of Management Sciences for Health for its first 28 years. He has also edited books on managing health systems and drug supply in developing areas, and health care in Muslim regions.

O'Connor is a graduate of Yale University, the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University, the Harvard School of Public Health, and the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Frannie Léautier MS, PhD

Vice President, World Bank Institute

Before assuming her current role at the World Bank Institute, Frannie Léautier was the Chief of Staff for the President of the World Bank Group. She is recognized as a leading expert in infrastructure strategy formulation in developing countries. Léautier joined the World Bank Group in 1992, where she also served as transport economist in the Latin America & Caribbean and South Asia Regions, and as a research economist in the Development Economics Department.

She received her M.S. in Transportation, and her Ph.D. in Infrastructure Systems from MIT. Prior to joining the Bank, she taught at the Center for Construction Research and Education, and the Department of Urban Planning, at MIT.

Jeremy Hockenstein MBA '99

CEO/COO, Digital Divide Data

Hockenstein trained as a strategy consultant at McKinsey and Company. He also served as the Chief Operating Officer at a non-profit, Harvard Hillel, where he helped catalyze and lead an organizational transformation to implement a new strategic program plan. Hockenstein earned his B.A. from Harvard College and his M.B.A. from MIT.

About the Host