Penn welcomes 'America's mayor'

Convictions. Courage. Relentless preparation. Teamwork. Communication.

Yankees and Pope jokes aside, these are the pillars of leadership which former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani shared with an eager Penn audience last night at Irvine Auditorium.

After introducing Giuliani as Time magazine's "Man of the Year," Provost Robert Barchi turned over the podium and allowed him to make his entrance.

"On September 11, the rest of the world found out what New York already knew," Barchi said. "He became, in essence, America's mayor."

And the students in Irvine gave "America's mayor" a warm reception -- an extended standing ovation.

When the applause subsided, Giuliani began, outlining his speech as "the five principles of leadership and getting through a crisis."

"The first and most important principle in getting through a crisis is having a set of beliefs and knowing what they are," Giuliani said.

That is the principle, Giuliani said, upon which two of his personal heroes -- former President Ronald Reagan and Martin Luther King Jr. -- based their careers.

But beyond those grand convictions, Giuliani pointed out the need for the courage to see them through -- his second criterion of leadership.

"A leader has to have courage," he said. "Courage is not the absence of fear."

Giuliani turned to the events of Sept. 11 to illustrate his point, focusing on the firefighters' exemplary courage at Ground Zero.

"A firefighter who walks into a fire and doesn't feel fear is insane," Giuliani said. "A firefighter who walks into a fire and feels fear and overcomes it -- that's courage."

Continuing to reference Sept. 11, Giuliani recalled the moment when he knew his own convictions and courage, paired with the years of relentless preparation for such an event -- his third pillar of leadership -- would be called into action.

After initially finding out about the attacks, Giuliani rushed to the scene.

"I was looking up, and I saw a man jump from the 102nd or 103rd floor of the first tower," Giuliani said. "I said to the police commissioner that this is uncharted territory."

He also offered advice for the threat of future attacks.

"We need to prepare for an attack," he said. "We need to do a lot more than we have done. We need to assume that we will be attacked again."

The fourth part of excellent leadership which Giuliani mapped out for the audience was teamwork.

"No leader ever operates on his or her own," he said. "It just appears that way.

Take even Giuliani, for instance.

"I'm resting on the shoulder of giants," he said, referring to his mayoral staff in the wake of the attacks. "It's not all about you."

And that teamwork largely depended on what Giuliani cites as the fifth fulcrum of leadership -- communication.

"You've got to be able to talk to people," he said. "If you do the other four things that I just said, then it's just talking to people and telling them what you really think. Communicating ideas you believe in, and communicating them honestly and directly."

Giuliani insisted that communication is vital to leadership -- and not necessarily in the most apparent sense.

"Communication is not just verbal," he said. "You have to be there for people when they have troubles, when they have difficulties."

As the formal speech came to a close, Giuliani welcomed questions by saying, "There's not a question I haven't been asked or a demonstration I haven't seen."

And the questions certainly were diverse, ranging from policy issues to the Yankees' failed run at the World Series.

In response to the first question -- "Do you consider Osama bin Laden a leader in his own depraved way?" -- Giuliani responded, "Being a leader is not a moral judgement. You can lead for good or for bad."

Another question, which many Penn students said resonated more deeply with them, involved what Giuliani would do with the now-barren Ground Zero area.

"I think the site should be exclusively, or at least primarily, devoted to memorializing what happened there," Giuliani said. He then suggested a library or a museum, along with "some beautiful structure that adds to the skyline of the city."

But while Giuliani eagerly fielded the questions posed, when the clock struck 9 p.m. a staff member quickly whisked him away.

And students said they were disappointed by this sudden abruption.

"I don't think they should have taken him off when he was perfectly willing to answer more questions," Undergraduate Assembly Chairman and audience member Seth Schreiberg said. "It's a black eye for Penn."

But that blemish -- caused by Giuliani's tight schedule -- did not spoil the event.

"Overall, I loved everything about it," Engineering sophomore Joey Fehrman said. "I was very satisfied with the speech. He focused on his topic, so it was good he didn't diverge to something else."

The Social Planning and Events Committee's Connaissance branch sponsored Giuliani's Penn campus whirlwind visit in partnership with the Provost's Spotlight Series.

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