James Steinberg Biography

James Steinberg is an American political advisor and former Deputy Secretary of State born on May 17, 1953 in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. He is the Professor of Social Science, International Affairs, and Law at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University.

James Steinberg Age

James Steinberg was born on 7 May, 1953 in Boston, MA

James Steinberg Net worth

James Steinberg has an estimated net worth of $800 million.

James Steinberg Family

James Steinberg was born to a jewish family in Boston, Massachusetts

James Steinberg Wife

James Steinberg married Sherburne B. Abbot who is the vice president for sustainability initiatives and University Professor of Sustainability Science and Policy at Syracuse University. The couples were blessed with two children.

James Steinberg Kids

James Steinberg has two daughters Jenna Steinberg and Emma Steinberg.

James Steinberg Education

James Steinberg attended Philips Academy in 1970. He joined Harvard College in 1973, and later went to Yale Law School in 1978. He served as the Senior Advisor in the Markle Foundation from (2000-2001) and was a member of the Markle Task Force on National Security in the Information Age.

James Steinberg Obama Administration

James Steinberg he served as the the principal authors of Barack Obama’s address on the Middle East to AIPAC in June 2008, which was viewed as the Democratic Party nominee’s most expansive on international affairs he worked with Daniel Kurtzer and Dennis Ross. He was listed as the top most in the post National Security Advisor in the Obama’s list of Candidates. He was appointed as the Deputy Secretary of State by Hillary Clinton in Novmeber 24, 2008.

He as the Deputy Secretary of State and principal Deputy to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton,he notifiably coined the phrase in the “strategic reassurance” to describe the U.S. and China relations suggestive of the idea that the United States should reassure China about welcoming China’s rise while China would reassure the US and its neighbors that it would not conflict with their interests

James Steinberg Israel Strategic

James Steinberg met with Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister danny Aylon in Washington, D.C. In October 2010 where they discussed on the issue of improving regional security and stability through boosting and growing the already strong cooperation between their two nations. During the talks, they expressed their commitment to a lasting peace between Israel and its neighbors and their grave concern regarding Iran’s continuity to the non-compliance with its international obligations through pursuit of a military nuclear program.
They again met in Jerusalem where they took the opportunity to work together to identify the strategic threats in both countries to inorder to face the rapid change in political situation between Middle East and the ongoing Iranian nuclear program

James Steinberg School Deanship

James Steinberg was named as the Dean of Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse Univesity. He resigned on July 28, 2011, as the Deputy Secretary of State and assumed his new position. His term as dean ended in 2016.

James Steinberg Linkedin

The Northeastern University College of Business Internal Business Case Competition (IBCC) provides students the opportunity to hone their analytical, critical thinking and presentation skills by taking their course work from the classroom to a competitive arena. Northeastern University Associate Professor of International Business and Strategy, Ray Kinnunen, has designed and developed the IBCC, modeled after the Business School Beanpot Case Competition held in Boston from 1997-2009 where Professor Kinnunen led Northeastern teams to victory 11 of the 13 years. Alumni say participating in this event has been life changing and inspired success in their future careers.

The IBCC expands the case competition to numerous students in the Northeastern Community the opportunity to compete. Many competitors, though not all, enroll in Kinnuen’s Internal Case Competition Challenge course. The course is designed to take the student’s case-analysis skills, analytical skills, and knowledge of business to the next level and to provide an excellent bridge to the real world. The course comprises an internal College of Business Administration version of the annual Beanpot Business School Case Analysis Competition that utilizes the “Beanpot Way” of analyzing cases, preparing presentations, and working in teams. Students are placed on teams to prepare and analyze business cases based on real challenges facing existing companies.

Students are offered an opportunity to develop superior analytical, critical thinking, team-building, and presentation skills to prepare them for real-world challenges. The goal of the course and the IBCC competition is to develop the skills that will benefit Northeastern University College of Business students throughout their academic and professional careers. The IBCC initiative also provides the opportunity for alumni to reconnect with the college and students while acting as judges for the competition.

James Steinberg Syracuse

Tell me about early leadership experiences. When I was graduating from high school, I had an opportunity to work for Boston Councilman Tom Atkins, who was the first African-American elected to Boston City Council. Tom was an incredibly important leader in a difficult time in Boston history that just speaks about busing and desegregation and the like. To work with somebody like that, who was a great thinker and a great political leader, was a very important early experience. I went from there to work for Kevin White, who was mayor of Boston while I was in college (Harvard). Kevin understood the leadership importance of trying to bring the community together. His young chief of staff was Barney Frank. So for a young guy just finishing high school and going to college, it was a chance to get exposure to leaders, to see how they did it, to see that mix of idealism and pragmatism that you have to have to be a leader.

They really influenced me. Notably, so did Ted Kennedy, a guy passionate about his principles to social justice, but he also recognized that it’s not just theoretical. You mentioned several people. Who else was influential? I clerked for David Bazelon, who had been the chief judge of the D.C. circuit. Bazelon was a path-breaker in many ways — issues of mental health, criminal justice, the environment and the like. He had been an assistant attorney general in the Truman administration and was one of the youngest judges ever appointed to the Court of Appeals. He had this wonderful mix of deep passion from his own upbringing and his own exposure, and yet the ability to get things done, to work with other colleagues on the bench.

And Sen. Kennedy. This was a man of deep heart, deep passion, and deep humor. What advice would you give somebody moving into a leadership position? The first thing is study the history of the organization. Understand its past, its values, its traditions. When has it been successful? What brought you to it? Each institution is distinct and different. To be successful as a leader, you have to understand the tradition. We learned this from the military. One of the reasons they are successful is they study the culture and history of their own institution. Emerging leaders in the U.S. Army know the history of the U.S. Army back to George Washington and understand who has been successful and how they have been successful and what has worked in that culture.

The second thing is to get out and meet the people you are going to work with. You can come in — you should come in — with a lot of ideas about what needs to be done, but you need to listen first to others and understand what they think and their perspectives. You are not always going to go along with that — part of leadership is to change — but you are going to be more effective if you understand what others think. You are also going to learn more when you do it and respect the fact that the people who have been in the institution know it well and are committed to it. If you are going to succeed, you have to bring them along. Leaders without followers don’t succeed. The third thing is you have to communicate. You have to find a way to share and engage with people. It’s a challenge because we live in a busy world, people are inundated with information, especially in a large organization where it is harder to engage one on one. You have to explore different tools and techniques, so you can communicate and engage with people. Even if they don’t agree with you, they understand what you are doing and why you are doing it.

Some leaders do not start off listening and communicating. They come in and bark orders. There are few settings in which that can be successful, even in settings where there is a lot of authority at the top. In businesses, where the CEO has the authority, you’ll get passive resistance. You won’t get the kind of success you get when people buy into your vision. Even when the authority exists, there is a limit to how successful you can be. In the military, there is command authority, right? Great military leaders will tell you that if they don’t win the trust and support of their troops, then they are not going to be successful. Can leadership be taught? You can talk about the tools and the techniques, but I think part of it is to have people do two things. One is to study people who have played these roles. Who has been successful? How did they do it? Who do you admire? There is an element of idiosyncrasy; each leader brings his or her own strength.

The other thing is experience. One of the things that we do at Maxwell, at both the graduate and undergraduate level, is experiential learning. In the classroom, people do group projects where they learn what it takes to get a group to move forward and to make things happen. Then, they also get out into the real world, through internships and experiences so that they see it themselves. There is a limit of how much you can do by reading books on leadership principles. You got to see it in action. You have got to succeed and fail. To see what works and what doesn’t and that is why our capstones, our practicums, all those things are an important part of the learning experience here. Failure is sometimes seen as the end, not part of the path to success. First of all, you are going to fail; nobody is entirely successful.

Coming back to the military, failures are a chance to learn. You do the after-action report. You do the lessons-learned studies. That is where your success comes from. What worked? What didn’t? Take that seriously. Failures are instructive. It is a little bit like the scientific method. If you do an experiment, and the results are consistent with your hypothesis, it doesn’t prove anything. It is only when you do something and the results aren’t consistent and you have disproved the hypothesis that you have actually learned something. Failure teaches. It is also about risk. You can’t be fully successful if you are not prepared to take some risks. It is in the nature of any kind of leadership enterprise, that to move forward, you have to have some confidence in your judgment, but you have to understand that you are taking some risks when you try something new or different.

What’s your leadership style and how do you get things done? Universities are a unique kind of place because they’re not top-down organizations. I’ve had the privilege of being a dean twice. You recognize that, in the end, it’s a collaborative enterprise. There’s shared governance with the faculty, you have to engage the full range of constituencies — faculty, staff, students and the administration. You have to lead with ideas and you have to be compelling, not because of authority. Deans have almost no authority, but through persuasion and through exciting people and listening to them and understanding their perspectives, but also sharing your own and trying to share a sense of vision.

To be effective in government, you have to bring people together. There are always diverse voices, diverse interests, and so that ability to work collaboratively in groups, to be persuasive and to realize you achieve your goals not by dictating them or insisting on them, but actually persuading people and bringing them along, finding compromises. That’s part of the reason I talked about the models that I’ve had. These are people who recognize that if you’re going to get things done, you have to be open to taking into account the views of others, to recognize that they have their own valid perspectives and you’re not going to just have your own way.  It is the genius of democracy. Results are better, because you learn from others if you take them seriously, if you listen to them. You recognize that their perspective can help inform and educate your own. That thinking seems to go against the grain in some corners of government now.
It is a concern. I think that what we are seeing is a little bit of getting away from the sense of the need to find common ground and collaboration and compromise. Again, going back to Sen. Kennedy, his greatest achievements were when he worked with people like Sen. (Orrin) Hatch and other Republicans.

Whether he was in the majority or the minority, Sen. Kennedy recognized that you have to find common ground. The country governs better, not just when everybody is demanding total adherence to their principle, but understanding that you have to take into account the views of others. Which is not to say that these are not deeply held principles. I respect the fact that many of the members of the Freedom Caucus believe deeply in their principles. But, this is what Madison created for America in the structure of our government. It was the profound insight behind the pluralist structures that our founders created, which is the need for people to understand and to find common ground across diverse interests.

It is E Pluribus Unum. Out of many, one. That is the genius of our country, and I think it is very important that the members (in Congress) think about that. It is not just having your view prevail, but finding a broad base that allows the country to go forward. We have been at our most successful when we have been allowed to do that. One of the things that brought me here (to Syracuse University), was the uniqueness of the Maxwell School. Especially this value of citizenship, which I think is enormously important. We at Syracuse and at Maxwell have an important role to play in the public debate about the responsibilities and roles of citizenship. This is part of leadership, to remind people that the country has succeeded because of this broader sense of community. It is not just the formal structures; it is the willingness of the people to get involved, to be engaged. It is the whole de Tocqueville idea of civil society.

If there is any area that leadership is needed, it is the sense of civic responsibility. Of people feeling that they have a responsibility that this society can only succeed, that America can only sustain its greatness, if its own people commit to it and understand that we are more than the sum of our parts, that we have that sense of responsibility. I think it is a great privilege to be at a school that has that commitment and we need to generate more leaders. That is what we are about here, training that group of leaders who believe in the Athenian Oath that we have on the wall here, to make this city more beautiful than you found it. It is a powerful message, and I believe our greatest achievement: For 90 years, we have turned out leaders who come from this school, who not only have the technical skills as leaders, but have in their heart that message, the Athenian Oath. That, more than anything else, is what leadership is.