Servant-Leader William Dar. Can't follow, can't lead

Revised 0950 hours 12 October 2009

LOS BAÑOS, LAGUNA - Today, 09 October 2009, the University of the Philippines, UP is honoring William Dollente Dar as '2009 Outstanding UPLB Alumnus' and all I can say is, 'What took you so long?' 100 years. This is the 100th year of the founding of the UP College of Agriculture, UPCA, the mother of the University of the Philippines Los Baños, UPLB. Better late than never.

Never have I anticipated some award for somebody, except for myself. Dar, another Ilocano from Danuman West, Ilocos Sur, a PhD Horticulture graduate of UP Los Baños in the Philippines, and 3-time Director General of ICRISAT in India, is a class all by himself. Alone. Without a doubt, without equal. This is the story of a Pinoy Servant-Leader who has come a long way, and his leadership is a hard act to follow. Do you follow? If you can't follow, you can't lead. You can only follow by un-becoming yourself first. He calls it transformational leadership; I call it good.

We go back to the year 2000; the place was the campus in Patancheru, India of the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, ICRISAT. As the new Director General of the ICRISAT, Filipino science manager William Dar was in a quandary. He knew ICRISAT was down with a dis-ease or two, and if he could not restore that body to health, that body would get rid of him. Where he could not make history, history would unmake him.

There was the burden of leadership. There was the annoyance of finance. There was the stress of staff morale. There was the fatigue of science. Leadership was fading; finances were contracting; morale was declining; and the management of the science was disappointing. The campus was desolate. Where had all the flowers gone?

Notwithstanding, the dreamer in Dar was undaunted. He had always been an innovator and unafraid to take calculated risks, from small to state-sized. He had been Secretary of Agriculture of his country, the Philippines. In his watch, 1998-1999, he initiated a national program to carry out the provisions of the Agriculture and Fisheries Modernization Act and, even with the visit of El Niño, the agriculture sector registered an unprecedented growth of 12% in 1999! (See my 'Drylands Dar,' americanchronicle). As if to show that if you have more in law, you can have more in life.

He had been Executive Director of the Philippine Council for Agriculture, Forestry and Natural Resources Research and Development, PCARRD. This is the powerful national commission for administering knowledge-based agriculture & related sciences in the country. At PCARRD, he initiated the successful Magsasaka-Siyentista (Farmer-Scientist) Program and set up the Farmers' Information & Technology Services (Frank A Hilario, 2007, Team ICRISAT Champions the Poor, page 50). Coming from a poor farming family, William Dar had always been pro-poor.

He had been Director of the Bureau of Agricultural Research, BAR. As the first head of BAR, he guided the Bureau on what policies to adopt and what actions to take to manage the R&D programs and projects of the Department of Agriculture. As it turned out, this was good training for directing the science efforts of a large organization; he was starting to become, as it were, ICRISAT-ready.

He had been Professor and Vice President of his BS and MS alma mater, Benguet State University, BSU. He steered the development of the Cordillera Integrated Agricultural Development Program, a joint project of the BSU and the Provincial Government of Benguet. With a Ford Foundation grant, he upgraded the BSU research capability and manpower and conducted farmers' trainings. He packaged R&D proposals, set up professorial chairs, and formed the BSU Development Foundation for implementing projects. Working with local government and with foreign funding, as well as implementing projects through third parties, he was indeed becoming ICRISAT-ready.

He had been a recipient of the prestigious Ten Outstanding Young Men (TOYM) Award of the Philippine Jaycees. He had received the Achievement Award for Research Management from the Crop Science Society of the Philippines and the Outstanding Science Administrator Award from the Department of Science and Technology. He had received a great many other awards, as if to make him feel that indeed, his accomplishments were less for himself and more for others. He was indeed ICRISAT-ready.

And here he was. So, back to 2000, back to the question: How do you solve a problem like ICRISAT? You have everything to gain and nothing to lose. Now, where should he start? Paradigm shift. He started with himself.

He was at the top, so he needed to go down. He started with being a Servant-Leader. This is not a species that those management geniuses like Peter Kotler or John Maxwell or Peter Drucker writes about, not the kind that Barack Obama's hero Rick Warren talks about, assuming that each of these geniuses knows something we don't.

He likes to call himself a Servant-Leader. I believe the single secret of the genius of William Dar as Captain of Team ICRISAT is indeed the theory and practice of servant-leadership. Now, who is a servant-leader? The originator of the concept of Servant Leadership, Robert K Greenleaf, said in his essay 'The Servant as Leader' published in 1970 (greenleaf.org): 'The servant-leader is servant first' and leader next, not the other way around. And how do you differentiate a leader-first from a servant-first? Greenleaf said:

The difference manifests itself in the care taken by the servant-first to make sure that other people's highest priority needs are being served. The best test, and difficult to administer, is: Do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants? And what is the effect on the least privileged in society?

Without being in that campus in any of all the last 10 years, I surmise that that is exactly what happened in the case of ICRISAT as the institution and William Dar as Servant-Leader.

To explain by example. We were at the Hotel Intercontinental in the City of Makati, where I would interview Dar for a book to be published by the UPLB Alumni Association this year. Hmm, intercontinental - by definition, 'having the capability to travel from one continent to another' - he and his wife Betty had just planed in from India. William Dollente Dar is the intercontinental servant-leader, as it turns out.

Betty, of course, had always been the Servant behind the Servant-Leader. She was telling me about her husband's rites of passage at ICRISAT. One quiet day, he noticed that the path from the campus gate to the main building was populated with trash, that is to say, nobody had been cleaning the premises. An international, multi-million-dollar facility and nobody was cleaning the surroundings! What else were the staff not doing?! That was an indication of how the ICRISAT situation had deteriorated. Time to get mad? Time to get the adrenalin going - theirs. What the new Director General did was talk to the Head of General Services and politely asked that the proper cleaning be done. Nice work if you can get it! He didn't.

One week passed, and the litter was still there - and so were the lazybones. Two weeks, same story. The new DG didn't complain and didn't go see the head of General Services and didn't lecture him on civil disobedience; instead, he went to see the Head of Security, and politely asked that the premises be cleaned. 'Yes, Sir!' It pays to be nice, firm but nice. The Security Boys went about cleaning the premises and the ICRISAT staff started to ask questions, and realized that they had a new DG who meant pleasure and business. The two go together, not always in that sequence. The Head of Security explained the situation and said he was doing it because he had been asked by the new DG. Logical, right? The boys at General Services took notice. And so did everyone else. You establish authority not so much by asserting it as by insinuating it.

Don't get mad - get even!' No. rather, 'If you can't solve a problem, change the problem.' To me, what William Dar did is an example of servant-leadership, where the leader humbles himself. The incident is also a great example of the flexible, adaptable mind of William Dar.

Another example has to do with Dar as he asserts leadership - twice, and differently. He had been warned by insiders about trusting someone enough to make him one of his trusted main players, but he was convinced that he was right and went ahead and hired the fellow anyway. It later turned out that they were right and he was wrong - when he realized that, he gathered information and, when he had enough to hang the fellow by the neck, he gave 2 choices: one, the fellow got to leave with a clean record, and two, the fellow got fired. The fellow got the message.

Servant-leadership is neither for the ego-tripper nor the weak-kneed.

2000. That year he began to take control. He asserted his leadership – by serving his staff. First, he saw that the ICRISAT staff needed not only to be reassured of their worth as human beings but of their worth as servants of the people. As the institute was based in India, land of the gods, this Filipino gave the staff a mantra with a contrast: 'Science with a human face,' that is to say, 'to meet real human needs.' The harvest is plenty, and the workers are worthy - if they work at it. Science for the poor, that is, the marginalized, the disadvantaged, not to mention the hungry.

Dar saw ICRISAT as 'bridge, broker and catalyst' (quoted by G Venkataramani, March 2000, icrisat.org). ICRISAT had generated more than enough technologies since 1972, when it was founded; with those, 2000 was time now to bridge, broker and catalyze farm productivity and reduce poverty in the semi-arid tropics, if possible in a magnitude never seen before. By creating win-win technology transfers, public-private-farmer partnerships, empowering the poor, once-impersonal science was going to put on a happy face. In time and in Dar's hands, science would become, somehow, a public commodity, accessible to the poor.

Dar declared in 2000 that now the science of ICRISAT would help reduce poverty, reduce malnutrition, and reduce environmental degradation. The institute would help increase incomes even given marginal soils, help improve human health with fruits and roots of crops that grow with minimal demands on the cultivators, and at the same time help restore the balance of nature, as much as those were possible.

And in 2001, for ICRISAT to translate 'Science with a human face' from words to foods, from theory to practice, he initiated a paradigm-shifting 'Grey-to-Green Revolution.' A dream as huge as Africa and as wide as Asia. We must make the deserts bloom; we must make the drylands green. With science, we must help the poor farmers of Asia and Africa turn a barren field into barrels-full of peas, sorghum, pearl millets and peanuts. With 'science with a human face,' we don't have to ask the humans to smile - they will. And then with a great team to play, we can turn all those who play R&D games into winners all.

And so Team ICRISAT went on and turned its negative finances into positive, not to mention turned in also some surplus.

And Team ICRISAT went on and turned its low morale into high energy.

And Team ICRISAT went on and turned its R&D from disconnected to disciplined and dedicated.

It was the Team that did it, where everyone was a servant working for the common good. The best servant-leader has a team whose members are themselves servant-leaders of those below them in rank. The Captain inspires the Team with his example. And so, as Greenleaf says it should be, the servant-leader helps them grow as persons; while they serve and are being served, they become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely to become servants. And more likely to serve the poor, as they should.

And as a team, ICRISAT had gone on and won the King Baudouin Award 5 times, 3 times during William Dar's watch, since 2000. The award is given once every 2 years; it is the highest award within CGIAR. And ICRISAT had been rated Superior 2 times and Outstanding 2 times among the CGIAR centers. William Dar and ICRISAT are both hard acts to follow. A great Team deserves a great Captain.

How did William Dar and Team ICRISAT come this far? Already, it's a long story, and I want to start in India in 1972, the year of birth of the Institute, and at the same time in the Philippines in 1953, the year of birth of the one who eventually became its historic renaissance leader. Two countries that have more in common than they think.

Dar was born on 10 April 1953 in Danuman West, Santa Maria, Ilocos Sur in northern Philippines, a poor boy in his pockets but a bright boy in his classes. Even as a kid, he already saw that to earn a college education was his only way out of poverty, and he never lost sight of that goal. Once you hitch your wagon to a star, don't let go.

Now he was the Captain of their ship; he was the Master of his sole. He took his BS in Agricultural Education at the Mountain State Agricultural College, MSAC, near Baguio City in 1973, and taught high school for a while. He changed course (if you will pardon the pun), and took up his MS in Agronomy, also at MSAC (today, Benguet State University). Changing course again, he challenged himself by taking up a PhD in Horticulture and attended many an intensely competitive, terror-filled classes at the University of the Philippines (UP) Los Baños, and received his doctorate in 1980. He needed that. UP was incomparable. Truth to tell, he knew that if you're not UP, you're DOWN.

This year, he is the UP Los Baños Outstanding Alumnus for 2009. This is another milestone for the scholar in William Dollente Dar. 2009 is most historical, as it is the centenary of the University of the Philippines College of Agriculture, UPCA. From a Cow College, UPCA transformed itself into UP Los Baños in 1972; UPCA is celebrating and being honored for its legacy, and so is Dar for his accomplishments not only locally but more so internationally. And not for personal glory but for the country, and the drylands of the world. An international servant-leader.

The dimensions of his achievements for an international institute and, consequently for the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, CGIAR, and consequently for himself, is unmatched in the history of the alumni of UP Los Baños. Because of his consistent and outstanding performance in a major role as Director General of ICRISAT, inadvertently he had raised the standards of CGIAR excellence even higher. And the ICRISAT Board of Trustees rewarded him with not only 2 but 3 terms, the 3rd to begin next year yet - without equal in CGIAR history. When the Ilocano is good? He is the best!

He is a Team Captain par excellence that the geniuses of UP Los Baños would be hard put to emulate. There is no Team UPLB as far as I can tell, and I know they need that - or I've been around too long.

He had received the high-status 2009 Outstanding Professional of the Year in Agriculture award from the Professional Regulation Commission. Dar is difficult to appreciate by UP geniuses because he is not UP-loquacious. Well, that applies to this genius too. I'm a UP Los Baños graduate myself, like Dar with a BS in AgEd, but my first impressions of him was that he was your average guy. And herein lies a short story, and it's mine. I was very proud of myself when, a long, long time ago, I applied for a writer position and William Dar did interview me when he was Director of the Bureau of Agricultural Research, BAR - but, horrors, he did not hire me! On hindsight, did he sense that I was not a team player? No, I wasn't. Even today, you can ask me to do anything, including the impossible, and as long as it has something to do with words and I can use the personal computer to produce it, I will bring about the miracle, and in a matter of hours if you want. But don't ask me to work in a team.

About 20 years after I wasn't hired by William Dar (how can I forget?), I published in the American Chronicle an article on Santiago Rigonan Obien, SRO, himself an outstanding head of office, Director of the Philippine Rice Research Institute, PhilRice, the one that he almost singlehandedly made world-renown, that he started from scratch with. I called SRO the Wizard of Rice, and he liked it (see my 'Management: Relating Is Everything. Or, The Wizard of Rice Who Cultivated Minds,' americanchronicle.com). After that, SRO had a strange request: 'Isuratmo man met ni Willie Dar.' Please write too about William Dar. Strange because I didn't know Dar from Adam and, yes, I thought he was ordinary, but I didn't tell SRO that. I only said, since I didn't know him, I'd like to interview him. And so we met at the Dars' house in Quezon City, and I asked some innocent questions - after all, I was innocent as far as Dar and ICRISAT were concerned - and he showed me published reports and books. While browsing, I was shocked to realize that I had misjudged the man. And so I was inspired to write about him and his team, first 'The Yankee Dawdle. On Discovery Sorghum, The Great Climate Crop' (04 February 2007, americanchronicle.com) and eventually called him 'Al Gore of Science' (24 June 2007, americanchronicle.com). I was thinking of him pushing sweet sorghum as feedstock for the making of commercial bioethanol as partial substitute for gasoline to help mitigate climate change - and give poor farmers a rich crop.

The rest, as they say, is history. It's great to write about great stuff. ICRISAT has since published among others, 2 books authored by me: Team ICRISAT Champions the Poor (2007, 128 pages) and THE SMART REVOLUTION: ICRISAT Partners in Research for Development (2009, 154 pages), both with many photographs in full color. Both books are collections of my essays published in my blogs and American Chronicle. 2 books to give credit to whom credit is due.

Today, I rather think that the titles of those 2 books can summarize what the staff of the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics took it upon themselves to do, and how they did it. With the leadership of William Dar. Remember, they're a team.

In 2002, William Dar emphasized 'the centrality of partnerships and the need to maintain scientific excellence' (2002 ICRISAT Annual Report). There were the needs to promote the adoption of new crop varieties, to strengthen extension services, strengthen private sector marketing channels for farmers, to establish fish storage as well as credit facilities for fisherfolk, and to encourage transparency in the bureaucracy. The Adarsha watershed model came out of this via a multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional consortium approach.

In 2003, Dar told Team ICRISAT:

There is very little we do, or hope to do, that does not involve partnerships. Partnerships are the keystones of success in agricultural research.

Dar learned that lesson long ago, in the boondocks. The lesson on partnerships is one that UP Los Baños has been trying to learn year after year for the last 100 years, the same which has been logjammed with the continuing emphasis on disciplines. There is synergy in partnerships; there is only statistics in discipline-based projects. Team ICRISAT should know.

You can see how William Dar's mind works just examining the titles of the annual reports of ICRISAT from 2001 to 2008:

2001 AR, Grey to Green Revolution
2002 AR, Research for Impact
2003 AR, Building a Strong ICRISAT
2004 AR, Sowing Seeds of Success
2005 AR, Germinating Seeds of Success
2006 AR, Nurturing Seeds of Success
2007 AR, New Horizons of Scientific Excellence
2008 AR, Innovations for a Changing World

Starting with revolutionizing agriculture and ending with changing the world even as it changes us - somehow, all that acknowledges the fact that the only constant thing in the world is change.

The annual report titles indicate the point of convergence for the specific year under review. This is the workings of the mind of a Servant-Leader planning as a leader first and as a servant second. Whether the succession of institutional centers of action was written down or merely existed in his head is unimportant - it's nice to know that as a team you have been doing great over the years.

And so 2007 was the year Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC won the Nobel Prize for Peace, the year that suddenly 'Climate Change' became the talk of the town and not only of the town crier named Al Gore. He was no longer the boy who cried wolf and, to change metaphor, he was no longer a voice crying in the wilderness. And so, the years 2007 ('New Horizons of Scientific Excellence') and 2008 ('Innovations for a Changing World') had been spent by Team ICRISAT challenging itself to come up with more high-tech advances to help low-tech farmers in the lowlands and drylands of Africa and Asia.

ICRISAT Champions the Poor is the title of my first ICRISAT book; not that the Institute wants the poor to be always with us, but for the drylands poor to be always presented with options out of African poverty and out of Asian scarcity.

Good, but how? Here are some of the hows generated so far by ICRISAT for the poor farmers of Africa and Asia:

(1) Give them crops that are misers in fertilizer. Crops that grow with a pinch of fertilizer and yield pails-full. With the ICRISAT micro-dose technique, a little fertilizer goes a long, long way.

(2) Rebuild the watershed. Revive water harvesting. ICRISAT has developed the Adarsha Watershed model that many countries have since adopted or adapted.

(3) Breed them crops that give even more with even littler water. ICRISAT chickpea is drought-resistant, and the farmers of India have taken advantage of that.

(4) Sweeten the crop and marketing arrangements. ICRISAT encouraged Rusni Distillery to build the world's first sweet sorghum-based ethanol plant that now buys feedstock from farmers.

(5) Ration out the water. ICRISAT has the small-scale irrigation model called African Margin Garden and it's out in Africa. The AMG is a package based on low-pressure drip irrigation, requiring just $60 to outfit an 80 square meter area, and pays for itself in the first year: date palm, papaya, table grapes, figs, citrus, pomegranate and vegetables.

(6) Build up the soil. With ICRISAT pigeon pea hybrids, the Chinese have been building hillsides into rich, non-erodible soils. Advice for the harshest of environments such as acidic soils: Plant pearl millet, then when it's about half-size, knock it down and incorporate it with the soil, thus creating a soil-protecting mulch. You grow your next major crop of, say, soybeans, through the mulch. With the slow-rotting mulch, you have not only a soil protector but also slow-release fertilizers - plant nutrients coming from the decaying organic matter.

(7) Distribute seeds through the women. Do not give away seeds, because you are bypassing the traditional traders. Instead, provide breeder seeds and let the women sell them on consignment.

(8) Don't change the soil - Change the crop. What do you do when the soil, drained of water, becomes hard as rock? Plant it early with a crop like chickpea that can penetrate as deep as 1 meter into the hardpan - and that you can harvest before the soil hardens after the rainy season. Chickpea can be grown in areas where nothing grew before.

(9) Don't leave the desert dry. Do the Desert Margins Program, which covers fertilizer micro-dosing, community-run credit plans.

(10) Put up a Sahelian Ecofarm. This is an integrated land-use system that incorporates high-value multi-purpose crops with soil and water conservation - fuelwood, forage, cash, plant nutrients, biomass for mulch and protection from wind erosion: trees, hedges, grass and annual crops. The Garden of Eden on Earth.

2003. Village seed banks for groundnut (peanut) in Mali, Niger, Nigeria and Senegal were initiated, with 45 locations for trial plantings. From these, varieties were selected for their higher yields as well as resistance to the devastating groundnut rosette disease.

2004. ICRISAT is the first CGIAR center to tap significantly the resources of private seed companies for public research on hybrid crop parents' development.

2005. ICRISAT scientists are studying how climate change can be understood, measured and therefore predicted, for use in determining policy, defining research, and minimizing the risks in agriculture.

2006. ICRISAT R&D is shown to pay off in dramatic fashion. The Voice of America reported in June 2006 that in Kenya, the ICRISAT pigeon pea 'demonstrated its superiority during a severe drought - several families we visited survived solely on pigeon pea as it was the only crop that made it in the fields.' Survivor Africa.

2007. ICRISAT reports successful commercialization of pigeon pea by dryland farmers of Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi and Mozambique, from production to output marketing and utilization. In northern Tanzania, contract farmers grow high-quality seeds and these are marketed through producer marketing groups, so that small farmers enjoy economy-size collective action.

2008. ICRISAT dreams up a 'Hypothesis of Hope,' whereby through computer modeling of crops, weather and soils, climate changes have been simulated. For instance, it has been tentatively predicted that climate change will have a negative impact on crop production more by way of higher temperatures and less by way of changes in rainfall. If confirmed, this will call for more varieties of crops that can withstand more severe droughts.

But wait a minute: Is all that part of servant-leadership? All that is product of servant-leadership.

And no, you can't survive if you are unable to shift perspective from being a servant first to being a leader first. From thinking critically to thinking creatively. From always forgetting to remember the least of your brethren.

Whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. - Mark 10: 43-44 (NRSV)

Our 2009 UPLB Outstanding Alumnus is a man of many firsts:

(1) Secretary of Agriculture, the first alumnus of UP Los Baños ever to become one.

(2) First Filipino and Asian to be Director of an institute of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, CGIAR

(3) First Filipino and Asian Chair, Alliance Executive of the Alliance of CGIAR Centers

(4) First Filipino and Asian Chair, Committee on Science and Technology, United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification - In his 2 years as Chair, he succeeded 'in injecting the spirit of science into policy and decision-making for combating desertification.'

(5) He already has been appointed for his 3rd term as Director General, to serve from January 2010 to December 2014.

Do you follow so far? These are very hard facts to swallow. His is a very hard act to follow.

The letter from UPLB Alumni Association President Sim Cuyson informing him of the award was very curt, and I quote more than 50% of it:

We are pleased to advise that you have been selected as 2009 Outstanding UPLB Alumnus Awardee for your role in transforming ICRISAT into a responsive institute and global center for scientific excellence in agriculture for the semi-arid tropics.

That is putting it too mildly.

I have always heard William Dar himself say he is a servant-leader (caps or no caps). Servant-leadership is less about rising to the top of the ladder and more about service above self. It is less about excellence and more about relevance. It is less about charity and more about character-building. It is less about being the star and more about building a team. Up there, if you can go down, you can be above all. If you can be a good and faithful servant, you can be a good and faithful leader.

Yes, as he puts it himself, 'he belongs to the new generation of Filipinos who are proud of their country and have a dream for its future.' We should all be proud of our country and be dreamers like William Dar!