03-13-2025
Simplify, organize and communicate. Those were the overriding strategies in a leadership presentation by David Malpass, Distinguished Fellow of International Finance at the Daniels School and former president of the World Bank Group. Malpass spoke with online master’s students in the “Life in the C-Suite” course taught by Dilip Chhajed, associate dean for master’s and online programs.
Malpass recounted the difficulties he faced when he joined the U.S. Department of Treasury in 1986. “I was overwhelmed because there were 10 times more things that needed to be done than I could handle,” he says. “My approach was to write down all my problems in one place, sort them by priority, and focus on what I could accomplish today.”
That narrowed focus helped bring clarity to his thoughts.
“For me, it was the process of trying to simplify things down to the point where I could explain them to my mother. When I started in Washington, everything seemed incomprehensively complicated, so I focused on understanding one thing at a time, mastering it, and then moving on,” he says.
With knowledge changing at a dizzying pace, Malpass says it’s difficult for anyone to be fully prepared when they take on a new role. He adds that it’s imperative for leaders to have great oral and written skills and the ability to use judgment in implementing new ideas and solutions.
“When I was at the World Bank, I held frequent town halls,” he says. “We used immediate feedback mechanisms after each one to allow people to vote anonymously on what they found useful and what they wanted in future meetings. The immediacy of the feedback helped people get comfortable with the messages they were hearing.”
Malpass told students that defining clear missions is crucial in organizational success.
“At the World Bank, our goal was to achieve good outcomes for people in developing countries. Simplicity is important in a complicated world, and you should be able to come up with one sentence about the problem or issue you are trying to solve,” he says.
Chhajed started the C-Suite course in 2022 with the goal of expanding student access to different leadership styles and exposing them to what happens in the C-Suite.
“The discovery helps graduate students appreciate the demands executives face, improving their readiness to progress to higher leadership roles in the organization. We can keep course content current by bringing in new executives to talk about different topics, and it makes the course richer by reflecting a diversity of opinions,” Chhajed says.
