John Hennessy is the chairman of Alphabet, the parent company of Google, and the former president of Stanford. He’s also an acclaimed computer scientist and cofounder of MIPS Technologies. He’s just published a fascinating new book, “Leading Matters,” and he agreed to sit for an interview about his experiences.

Nicholas Thompson: In the book you talk about a growing leadership crisis, and you mention some industries that have been faltering. But you don't mention Silicon Valley. Did you leave it out deliberately, or do you think there is a leadership crisis in Silicon Valley?

John Hennessy: The valley has its share of leadership crises. And I think there's also a growing challenge that these companies have now gotten to the size where their influence on the public is much larger. That's creating new leadership challenges that I think are going to require growth and new approaches in our leaders.

NT: What kind of new approaches in our leaders?

JH: Well I think we're going to have to think more carefully about some of the things that have become idioms in the valley, like, you know, “Move fast and break things.” When the number of people impacted when you say “break something” or the impact on their lives is very large, then we've got to think a little differently about that. It’s fine for a little tiny valley company maybe to do that, but it’s certainly not fine for Facebook or Google or Twitter.

So I think that's going to require more self-reflection and more examination of the impact of decisions. And it’s going to require some more long-term thinking. Short-term thinking, which is something that’s entered the tech sector not just the business sector, I think can lead to serious mistakes.

NT: A lot of the people who lead the companies that are implicitly mentioned in what you just said came through Stanford. The head of product at Facebook was a student at Stanford when you were president. Instagram was started by students who were at Stanford when you were president. Snapchat was started at Stanford when you were president. Is there anything else you wish they had all learned when they were students there?

'I think we're going to have to think more carefully about some of the things that have become idioms in the valley, like, you know, “Move fast and break things.”' John Hennessy

JH: At the time that all those people were undergraduates here, we didn't have a requirement on ethical reasoning and ethical decision-making. We now have a requirement for all undergraduates for courses in that. So I think that reflects a growing realization that many people who go into leadership positions don't have adequate preparation in thinking about these problems. And my view has been what tends to happen then is, people are put in situations that require rapid decision making and they have no background in how to deal with some of the ethical issues in that setting. They don't have a reference; they don't have a starting point. And because it's real time, they make mistakes. So I think our goal is to help educate them better so that they'll be a little more reflective and a little more cautious and maybe think about things from a slightly different perspective than they would have otherwise.

NT: I don't want to single out the the four executives I just mentioned. But shouldn’t all the Stanford graduates who have become extremely important in Silicon Valley have gotten a lot of that anyway through the Stanford education? For starters, you have to take liberal arts courses as a freshman.

JH: You do. And I think some of those courses, they help develop some aspects of people's perspective. For example, I think for a long time our curriculum has done a good job of developing appreciation for diversity and different viewpoints. But I don't think we had a course focused specifically on thinking about ethical considerations and thinking about how they might play out over time. And I think that that's something which I think is necessary given the world we live in.