2005 President-Elect Candidates
Confront the Issues
By Kathy Kowalenko PHILADELPHIA—

 

MICHAEL R. LIGHTNER, LEVENT ONURAL, and JAMES TIEN, all running for 2005 IEEE President-Elect, presented their views on issues critical to the engineering community at the 16th Annual Candidates Night. The IEEE Philadelphia Section hosted the event in June at the Sheraton University City Hotel in Philadelphia, USA. The three will be on this year’s election ballot, each hoping to succeed, in 2006, W. Cleon Anderson, who will be president next year.

The three candidates answered written questions from the audience of about 90 people as well as some submitted earlier by readers of The Institute who did not attend. Topics ranged from the outsourcing of U.S. engineering jobs to the recent ruling by the U.S. Office of Foreign Asset Control and the presence of plagiarized articles in the IEEE Xplore document delivery system. Philadelphia Section Chair John Sudano moderated the event. Each candidate had five minutes to answer each question or group of questions.

Several questions dealt with the outsourcing of U.S. engineering jobs to countries overseas.

IEEE members need to understand that each country has to act on behalf of its citizens, Tien noted. But with so many countries and so many different policies, “there’s no way the IEEE is going to have one policy for all of our sections, we can’t,” he said. “On the local level, every IEEE region and section has to support its members.” But, Tien noted, there are ways the IEEE can help its U.S. members stem the flow of jobs by working to create technologies that bring the United States new revenue sources and economic growth.

“ In the past, engineers have been the engines that helped lift a country’s economy,” he said.

Lightner responded that there were two contributing factors behind the outsourcing issue. The first he called the “commodification of engineering.”

“ We are no longer viewed as skilled professionals; we’re hired help,” he noted. “The view of engineering as a profession is being challenged. That is the case in other countries, but especially in America. Changing that position so that we are viewed not as a commodity, but as a skilled and necessary part of the economy of our countries is one key thing we have to do. If that view doesn’t disappear, then I don’t care what we do, we’re not in good shape as a profession.”

He said the second factor associated with outsourcing from the United States is an issue for IEEE-USA.

“ IEEE-USA, as much good as it’s done, has not reached the mass of U.S. members.”

He called on the organization to immediately start an affiliate program for engineers in the United States who are not IEEE members but who are concerned with the issues. This could increase the profession’s clout with the U.S. government, and could effect change on particular issues.

Onural pointed out that the rising rate of technically competent people in low-wage countries worldwide was the underlying reason behind outsourcing.

He said the IEEE is helping find jobs for members through its job site and continuing education programs and materials.

“ IEEE members are more flexible than the rest of the engineering world; they have the edge in coping with changing environments and changing jobs,” he noted.

He also said that IEEE-USA is best placed to deal with what he calls the “one-way flow of the labor force out of the U.S.”

If elected president, he says that he would not support an IEEE policy statement for one-directional asymmetrical quality of engineers. “We can only deal with symmetrical quality if necessary,” he explained.

Q: If you had been president at the time, how would you have handled the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control regulation that prevented members in Cuba, Iran, Libya and Sudan from taking advantage of member benefits and services except for subscribing to IEEE print publications.

Onural noted that the IEEE is a highly ethical institution and must operate within the restrictions and laws of wherever its operations are located. He has had a lot of experience with IEEE activities in different countries and whenever an event was held, he said he often worried about the IEEE’s compliance with local rules and regulations. He added that running a conference in some countries might be more difficult than running one in the United States because of different technical issues and rules, but “we have to learn them and respect them,” he said.

Onural said he was surprised when he learned that the IEEE was having a problem with OFAC regulations, because “I thought our staff and legal advisors had us in 100 percent compliance with the rules of the United States,” he explained.

He noted that, as in any democratic society, the IEEE may or may not like certain restrictions, but it cannot violate them. It should investigate the issue, and be prepared to take action, possibly legal action, to correct what it doesn’t like.

“ We first should try to negotiate and solve our problems with the government authorities,” Onural said. IEEE did that with OFAC. It took a lot of time but, he pointed out, “that was part of the process. In the end if we don’t like the result, we might continue the discussions, take legal action, or, at the political level, put on pressure to change regulations we don’t like.”

He believes that in the end, the IEEE acted correctly. It took a stand in favor of the free flow of information among scientists with no restrictions whatsoever. Tien noted that the IEEE was living under OFAC for 15 years and doing the right thing.

“ If OFAC told us we cannot publish papers from members living in those countries, I think that would have been fine,” he said. “But instead OFAC said we could not edit and help these particular authors write a better paper. We help edit because it’s good for us too, it’s not just good for the authors.”

Tien quoted Churchill, “It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.”

Lightner noted that as Vice President of Publications, he was involved in the discussions with OFAC.

“ When we know we’re breaking the law or highly likely to be breaking the law, it’s incumbent upon us to examine that and understand how to go forward,” he explained. “You can agree or disagree with this advice, but you can’t ignore what’s put in front of you. That is not appropriate for an institution like ours.”

The IEEE’s goal has always been to support the free exchange of scholarly information, he noted, and the collaboration of colleagues around the world. The tactic the IEEE took was to work within the confines of OFAC, and ask it for an exemption. After much negotiation, “I think we got something pretty good,” Lightner noted.

“ The important thing is how we communicated, and the fact that we really were right in what we were trying to do,” he said. “We were approaching the issue from a good position technically and from the moral high ground.

“ We were criticized by others in the publishing community and so we may have looked bad. Going forward, the IEEE needs to be much better at communicating its position to everyone and not be made to look like we have “mud all over our faces when we’re actually doing the right thing,” he said.

Question: What action do you think is appropriate to take against an IEEE member found to have plagiarized another’s work?

Nowadays plagiarism is easier than ever to detect, said Tien, noting that universities and high schools have for many years run a software program to detect such incidents. “Plagiarism seems like a big problem because it sounds like it’s new, but it’s not,” Tien said. “The way we detect plagiarism is new and much more powerful. The IEEE has to deal with it right away and not let it go on. We ought to give each person a chance to know plagiarism is against our code of ethics.”

In some countries, Tien explained, plagiarism and copyright issues are not of great concern, and he suggested the IEEE encourage those countries to “get their houses in order.”

Lightner noted that the IEEE has written a new plagiarism policy, along with policies on how to handle the same paper submitted to multiple publications.” The IEEE Publication Services & Products Board passed the plagiarism policy in June, according to Lightner.

He explained that the policy takes into account different levels of plagiarism from sloppy writing to authors’ names being taken off the original paper and replaced by the names of new authors.

“We have in place what I call the ‘Scarlet P’,” Lightner said. “In our electronic database, a plagiarized paper receives a violation notice that is associated with that paper forever. The paper, along with the notice, won’t go away. It’s not pulled out so it disappears; it’s out there for the public to see.”

In extreme cases, the Publication Services & Products Board has recommended that the person who committed the publication violation, if a member, be brought before the IEEE’s Ethics and Member Conduct Committee for a hearing.

The IEEE is a highly ethical society and cannot tolerate plagiarism, Onural stressed. He agreed with Tien that in some parts of the world, copyright infringements are a routine part of doing business.

“ Therefore, we also have a mission to educate people,” Onural said. “The IEEE should do more to raise awareness, and to educate people that plagiarism is not accepted, as well as how to recognize it.”

“If somebody detects that his work is plagiarized, it is not an easy matter to fight,” Onural explained. “We have to make it easier for people to come forward and say their work is plagiarized, show proof, and identify the journals so that, in turn, their problem becomes the IEEE’s.”

Question: IEEE membership has not significantly increased in the last 10 years. What would you try to do about this?

Tien agreed that membership has stalled at 360,000. He noted that Region 2 Director Moshe Kam is leading a team that is considering attracting more members by changing the membership structure and offering new benefits.

Citing the membership turnover in his own society, IEEE Robotics & Automation, which loses and gains about 20 percent of its members every year, Tien said he would focus on retention.

“ Why is there this revolving door?” he asked. “I’d like to deal with the membership issue, but from the strength of the organization being a resource of choice. Let’s make sure our benefits can attract people.”

Lightner said, given the confluence of several factors, he was concerned that the IEEE membership could go into a “tailspin.”

Noting that a recent study, called the “ 2003 Member Segmentation Survey,” showed the top two reasons members join the IEEE is to be technically current and to access publications.

“ Through our online publication products, many members are able to get access to the papers, to the technical information they want, without being members of IEEE,” Lightner noted. “What that says to me is we have to change the top two reasons for joining.”

He noted that increasing professional education courses, professional certification programs, and networking are going to be key new member services in the future.

“ We have to build a greater sense of community and interaction to provide value to our members,” he warned. “Otherwise those top two reasons, which are no longer associated with membership, will not just keep us stalled, but will put us in a tailspin.”

Onural said the IEEE should look at membership numbers as a “report card.”

“ How the IEEE is doing is reflected in the number of members it has,” Onural said. “If the number is going down, it’s a good indicator that we’re not doing things properly. Instead of trying to search for members and ask them to join IEEE, we’d better do the right things to attract and keep them.”

He also pointed out that the IEEE is facing many obstacles, from a drop in society memberships to easier access to IEEE technical information that many engineers have through their employers’ subscription to the IEEE/IEE Electronic Library.

“Therefore, to keep membership growing, we have to offer other things as well, like the ability to network and share ideas on important issues,” he said. “We also have to concentrate on entrepreneurial and small companies in the world, and also individual consultants and their needs. “

Onural said the IEEE has to develop attractive products for an audience that it has not addressed in the past, the engineers in new emerging technical fields.

“ We can survive at any level of membership,” he said. The number of members itself is not important. But it’s important that we do the right things to attract members.”

Question: Many members outside the United States do not feel the IEEE represents their interests. What changes would you recommend the IEEE make in products and services, for example, for it to become a truly international organization?

Lightner said he believes the IEEE is already an international organization but he noted that the challenges the organization faces are with its non-technical benefits that are, fundamentally, only for those in the United States. Currently the IEEE is investigating financial, insurance, and credit card programs for members in different parts of the world.

As for access to technical information, he pointed out that “the first thing we’re doing correctly is providing Web-based access, and working with countries to put together consortias that can afford to buy a subscription to the IEEE/IEEE Electronic Library,” he said.

The next thing to be done, he said, is to explore whether members want to have regional Web sites in local languages, not in English. Some experiments to do this are taking place in Region 9 (Latin America).

“I think respecting the reason that people join is key,” Lightner explained. “We’re doing that by adding services that provide localized and culturally sensitive access.”

Onural believes the IEEE is a successful transnational organization, probably one of the most successful. However, he questioned whether the membership ratio was at the desired balance between U.S. members and members from other countries. “We can definitely move the transnational structure of IEEE to a much better place,” he said. He noted that approximately 35 to 40 percent of IEEE members live outside North America. “The answer to having more members from other countries is to invite people in with open arms,” he said.

“ Make them feel like they are a part of the IEEE and make it easier for them to get into leadership positions,” he continued. “There are volunteer positions in local sections that are easy to get, but there are also other worldwide positions through societies. We have to make it easier for people living outside of North America to get involved at the leadership level and they will contribute significantly in return.”

Tien emphasized that members should be involved globally for the engineering profession and locally to lobby for membership advantages.

“ And I include getting involved locally not only through their technical societies, because in a sense, local for them are the technical areas in their country that they are focused on, but also locally in the regional sense through their sections,” he said.

He noted that the IEEE has failed to help the profession at the global level.

“ For example, the IEEE does not take global public positions,” he said. “We should be able to do that within the scope of our profession. Others should come to the IEEE about technical issues, seek our opinion; we’re the knowledgeable experts,”

Tien suggested that the IEEE issue public policy statements at its corporate level, because that would span cultures, countries, regions, and areas. He believes engineers would support such positions because each would feel that “I’ve got to go with my profession and help it make the right decisions on a professional level.

He sees nothing wrong with IEEE-USA focusing on H1-B visa issues in the United States while other countries focus on their immigration-related H-1B issues.

“ If we want to be global, we’re going to have to deal with issues like immigration,” he said.

Question: The current program for naming IEEE Fellows favors members employed at universities and research facilities—75 percent of the 2004 fellows fit this category. How would you change the Fellows program to encourage more nominations of members working in industry?

Onural noted that changes addressing this situation were made to the Fellows program last year. The changes improved the overall fellow nomination process by, for example, making it easier to file an application and find nominators for fellows.

“We have to see if the changes are working in the right direction and attracting more fellows from industry,” he noted. “If they’re not working, a solution might be to publicize the Fellows program more heavily so that we reach nominators and encourage them to nominate their deserving friends in industry.”

Tien agreed that the recent changes to the nomination process should make it easier to nominate someone from industry. If it fails, he said he hoped a quota system would not be implemented.

“I hope we’re innovative enough to try other approaches,” he said.

The issue is not necessarily quotas nor the application form, Lightner said.

“ It’s that people in industry don’t have other fellows to act as nominators for them or write the letters of support,” he said. “We don’t have the network of fellows in industry and that’s the fundamental challenge.”

He noted the IEEE needs to actively seek fellows to support nominations at the section and chapter levels.

“ Once we get enough Fellows from industry, the problem will take care of itself,” he said. “We’re at a point of change, and we have to go after the nominators and the people who would support the Fellow nominees from industry in a serious way.”

Question: What are your views on the free movement of professionals across borders? Should we encourage or restrict it?

If it’s related to the H1-B issue and things like that, Tien believes this topic is best handled locally.

“ I wish we would act like a family, like a global network,” he said. That is, if an IEEE member is out of a job and an interviewer knew that a prospective employee was an IEEE member, it would mean certain things—that he’s professionally active, and he’s continuing his education and updating himself. From that point of view, an IEEE member can cross borders without having to feel like, ‘nobody there knows me’,” Tien said.

Lightner cited three ways to approach the issue and broke them into three categories of activities.

The first is through education.

“ I think that expertise knows no global boundaries and that we should support students and even professionals crossing boundaries to continue their education,” he said. ”We have done that for years in the United States, to our benefit historically, and to the benefit of the world.”

The second is through professional activities. He believes that it is inherent in the IEEE’s global mission that it support professional interactions across the world, such as members being free to attend a conference or workshop held anywhere.

Lastly he pointed out that because the issue of work and economics affected the well-being of a country, quotas exist already for various countries, and they can exist and should exist as needed and as judged by that particular country.

Onural found the question to be irrelevant to IEEE activities.

“ The IEEE will never be in position to have governments ask it whether they should free their borders or not,” he noted. “I don’t think we have to spend our resources to find an answer to this question.”

His personal view was that personal freedom is above every other freedom, so he is in favor of allowing people to live wherever they want. For IEEE members specifically, they should be able to move to wherever it’s easier for them to get jobs.

Question: How does a president affect, influence, or change the operation of the IEEE?

Lightner noted the most frequent answer given is that the power of the president is to set the agenda of the Board of Directors, but then the board changes it at its will. This gives a limited view of the presidency, he said. He noted that 2004 President Art Winston is showing that one of the most important ways to implement change is by his asking the Board to begin strategic planning to address the major issues facing the IEEE: improving access to IEEE’s information and intellectual property, increasing industry support for IEEE membership and volunteerism, encouraging more members to volunteer their time to the IEEE.

“ Those assignments are given out on an ad hoc basis,” he said. “The people involved in these activities are posing fundamental questions to members, directors, and societies leaders and are pulling together teams to study the answers, propose actions, and then bring them to the BoD and the major boards for discussion and, ultimately, implementation,” he said. “It’s in making such a wheel turn that the president has the most power to effect change.”

The IEEE president has significant power to change a lot of issues at the IEEE, explained Onural.

“ They can change the agenda, and I’m not talking about a meeting agenda,” Onural said. “I’m talking about the real agenda of the issues that we struggle with at the IEEE. Therefore, he can set priorities and bring some of the issues up front so we can act quickly.”

As a Board member for three years, Onural said that whenever he had to make a decision, he always thought about the members.

“ I tried to consider the point of view of members and see how my decision would affect them, rather than thinking about the entity involved with the issue, or the volunteers, or the IEEE staff,” he said. “The president should do exactly that, think in terms of the members’ viewpoint whenever there is a decision to be made.”

Tien believed the president can only accomplish things through collaboration and bringing people together to work through issues. “Having been a dean and department chair, I don’t push anybody, I try to lead by example because that’s what it’s going to take,” he said.

Tien noted that the IEEE’s “3-P” structure where the past president, current president, and the president-elect all have leadership roles is a good one.

“ I think we ought to work within that, because one year is nothing. It takes one year just trying to figure out where you are,” he said. “We have to work with the three presidents and think of it as a three-year activity. None have enough power to do it alone.”

Question: How will you increase revenues so that budget cuts will be unnecessary?

Onural noted he’d spent a lot of time pondering this question and believes the answer to balancing budget is to increase the IEEE’s efficiency.

The IEEE spends US$240 million a year and must try to find ways to reduce its spending.

“ Just by considering simple alternatives to what you’re doing, like checking the price of the things you buy, I think anybody can easily reduce their budgets by five or ten percent and still get the same benefits,” he said.

Tien said that instead of continued cost cutting, the IEEE should develop more ways to generate revenue.

For example Tien referred to the pilot program now being tested, called XELL (Xplore Education Learning Library), which converts short courses given at conferences to courses for online delivery, and then makes them available over the Web. He believes that XELL will “rival the IEEE/IEE Electronic Library in terms of revenue.”

Lightner agreed with Tien that further cost cutting is not the answer and increasing revenue is the key. He cited that the IEEE generates 19 percent of its revenue from membership fees, 50 percent from publications, 28 percent from conferences. But he noted that all three areas face challenges, and he did not necessarily believe the income projections from XELL.

He said the key was working creatively on membership and member products and sevices.

“ How do we increase our activities, get more people to participate, get more companies to purchase our products for our members who are part of those companies?” he asked. “That’s the key way we’re going to raise income, and the only way that we’re going to maintain our strength.”

Question: Do you think the number of IEEE societies, 38, is too many, too few or just about right?

Lightner noted that when he was Vice President of Technical Activities, and ran meetings with more than 60 people, the number of the attendees wasn’t the issue. It was the “asymmetry of membership.” That is some societies having 3000 members and others 100,000 and all having the same vote in TAB. The needs of the different societies are very different. The impacts of changes in product revenue and infrastructure distribution formulas are also very different. This asymmetry makes effective decision-making and governance very difficult.

A bigger problem he noted, was that both in the societies and in the IEEE there is no history of strategically stopping or combining activities, the concern is always on starting something new – a new society, publication, conference and so on. We must be able to start new activities and this includes new societies, but we must be willing to find measures of viability and stop those activities that are no longer viable.

Onural noted that no IEEE policy exists that caps the number of IEEE societies.
“ My answer is yes, the number is the right number since we have that number today,” he said.

Onural noted that many societies are too small and getting smaller, and are thinking about merging with other societies or shutting their societies down. But he noted the IEEE does a poor job of promoting its societies.

On the other hand, many societies have too many members, in the range of 70,000 to 100,000.

“ If its right to have such a large membership within a society, I have nothing to say from the IEEE point of view,” he said. “However, if a group of leader volunteers believes it has too many members, and believes it is better to split their societies, therefore creating more societies, I see nothing wrong with that either.”

Tien noted that the technical societies were responsible for discovering emerging technologies, holding conferences, publishing journals, and providing the IEEE’s intellectual property.

“ I would like to unleash them even more,” he said. “I think in the last three years we’ve let them even spend their own reserves. They have to get back to what they do best, which is be entrepreneurial.”

Tien said he had no problem if the number of societies increased to, say, 80, but did agree with Lightner that there should be a way to “kill off those that are just hanging on.”

“ I don’t think size matters as much, because obviously if we want new, emerging ones, they’ll all be small,” he said. “I don’t want size to kill them off before they can get born. But we’ve got to be smarter about the way we grow them or change them or merge them. They’ve got the ‘feel of the street,’ they know what’s going on. We can’t centrally control that, and if we did, I think we’d kill their entrepreneurial spirit.”

Question: When will we get practical literature from the IEEE that can be read by practicing engineers? Most cannot read IEEE’s transactions.

“ Supporting the needs of practicing engineers will require diversifying our intellectual property.” Lightner said.

To do this, he believed that journals and magazines should retain practicing engineers to write articles. This is difficult because practicing engineers are extremely busy and they lack support from their company and are not paid to write. Lightner said that the IEEE must either pay these authors like professional magazines do, or work with the author’s company to demonstrate that the work is valuable, not only for the individual, but for the company to have their name in the literature.

Another solution could be to invest in professionally edited magazines for practicing engineers in different areas.

“ That’s what our competitors typically do,” he noted. “That’s how they succeed. There’s enough content from our own IEEE experts and sufficient advertising revenue. But it’ needs to be managed and written by a paid staff of professional editors. Exploring this question is one of the things that’s part of the strategic planning effort that’s going on right now,” he said.

Onural pointed out that unlike a business, which must maximize efficiencies by giving up unprofitable operations, membership operations have to be effective, not necessarily efficient.

He pointed out that in the past, many attempts were made to publish a readable publication for the practicing engineer. One recent example was the IEEE-USA’s Today’s Engineer, but it didn’t survive because of its high operating costs.

Membership dues would have to be increased to support such a publication that could be helpful to everybody, said Onural.

Tien believes the XELL product will meet the needs of practicing engineers since it will present tutorials given at conferences, not articles. “They’ll learn more than reading papers they can’t understand,” he said.

Question: In these times of difficult finances, what is the justification for having IEEE Executive Committee meetings this year in Krakow, Poland, and next year in Paris; why can’t ExComm meet in Piscataway, N.J.?

All three candidates believe that as a global organization, it is important for IEEE leaders to visit members around the world

“ If we want to be global, there’s a cost,” Tien said. “We need to do this outreach, otherwise why are we called a global organization? Krakow was part of a regional meeting and those members appreciated hearing from IEEE leaders on what’s going on with education, publications, and other issues.”

Lightner pointed out that IEEE finances have stabilized and that last year’s operating budget came in quite positive and 2004 is expected to do just as well. He agreed with Tien that there is a cost to being a global organization.

“Having the ExCom go to different parts of the world once a year is a key mechanism whereby the vice presidents, treasurer, the president, president-elect, and past president can hear firsthand the good and bad things facing our members worldwide. I think that’s worth the expense,” Lightner said.

Onural said he was not in favor of an isolated ExCom meeting at the same place all the time. “Instead, ExCom and other top-level committees should be in touch with the volunteers,” Onural said. “They should travel wherever the volunteers have a meeting.”

Question: Why do you want to be president? What can you do that the other candidates can’t? And what is your leadership philosophy?

Lightner, who has been a member for 34 years and for the last 10 has been quite active, moving from society president to division director to TAB VP and PSPB VP, said he has the ability to make changes and improvements and solve problems.

What sets him apart from the other candidates, he said, was a level of creativity he can muster when faced with problems.

“ I have an ability to look across different areas of an organization and see where you can bring pieces together to create something new,” he said. I have experience across the society structure, and the conference structure. Not as much on the regional side, but I’ve learned much more over the past year.”

He said his leadership style is to bring people together to enable them to be creative and address important problems, while freeing them from the constraints of a particular answer with a particular dollar figure. They can create new solutions and new possibilities, he said, which we can then work to implement.

“ My style is one of enabling the power that exists among our colleagues to address the challenges and the opportunities of the IEEE,” he said.

Onural noted that running for IEEE President Elect isn’t by choice. Instead, a nominating committee approaches someone to run.

“ That was a great honor, and a clear appreciation of all the things I’ve done for the IEEE,” he noted. “This is a unique opportunity to lead an extremely prestigious organization.”

Onural said he brings a transnational flavor to the IEEE. Among the more than 100 presidents who served the IEEE and its predecessor societies, not one has been from outside North America, he noted.

“ I’m proud and honored by being the first nominated person outside of North America to that position,” he said. “Therefore, my presidency will be beneficial for members living everywhere. That includes U.S members, Canadian members, North American members, and members outside of North America equally by establishing that IEEE is a transnational organization.”

Onural emphasized that he is confident when making important decisions and believes they will be the right ones.

“ Whenever it’s time to make a decision, I will think as a member of the IEEE, not as the president of IEEE,” he said. “Opinions could be different, but if I think in terms of members, then I believe I will make the right decision whenever I’m called upon. You will get confident leadership from me.”

Tien noted that he never sought leadership positions in the IEEE, he was always asked to take them on and it was no different for his President-Elect candidacy.

“ Once asked, I have this problem of being unable to say no if I feel that I can make a difference,” he said.

Although there were similarities between all three candidates, Tien said—they’re highly competitive, creative, innovative, and dedicated to IEEE—but his vision of the IEEE is different from the others.

“ I’ve always seen the IEEE as my global resource of choice,” he said. “It’s helped me in my career, and I’d like to turn around and help other people in the same profession.”

In terms of his leadership style, he said a leader is a servant.

“ You don’t beat people and say ‘follow me’,” he said. “They’ll follow you if they have respect for you, trust you, and they think that you lead by example. I’ve always been part of the action. To me the greatest part of being a leader is to be in the action and see other people following you. Not because you say you’re a leader, it’s because you act like one.”