Next on stage was Warren Bennis, founding chairman of The Leadership Institute at the University of Southern California.
Keeping with the leadership theme of the conference, Bennis told attendees what it meant to be a leader. "Leadership is having inspired followers, because without inspired followers, no amount of leadership will work," he said.
The four basic factors to determining a successful leader, Bennis said, are passion for what he or she is doing, the ability to both respect and honor others, character, and adaptive capacity.
By adaptive capacity, Bennis said a leader has to be "open to the unbidden," which he defined as watching for opportunities relative to what the leader's team does. Adaptive capacity also includes the expectation of future success, and contextual intelligence, which means knowing the territory and especially knowing who the clients are.
