August 1, 2009
Anna Deavere Smith is best known for playing diverse characters in powerful, thoroughly researched, one-woman shows about events that shake us at the foundation such as the L.A. riots. Smith is among the great observers of our time. She holds a mirror up at an angle that always illuminates and sometimes burns.
I saw her perform last fall in Let Me Down Easy, a show that explores the presence and absence of grace. The characters she channeled ranged from Rwandan genocide survivors to a horse trainer in Kentucky. Some part of me was scared to be less than 20 feet away from her. I wasn’t sure I could handle the truths she was about to reveal. She let me down easy. When I saw her the next day at a gym around Cambridge, it took all of my self-control not to interrupt her stretching and thank her for being gentle.
Smith weighed in on the Beer Summit this week in a blog entry on The Huffington Post. She spends a lot of the post working through her own conflicted relationship with the police, and then lands with a strong challenge to the prescriptions being offered for making good use of this “teachable moment.” She suggests that most of what we’re hearing is too soft, too 1998, a year that no one has examined like Smith. We now need to pivot, she argues, from teaching and learning to action:
What concerns me about the “heated debate” is that as radio hosts and guests talk, I hear the same kind of language that I heard — and studied — in the ’90s. Talk of “safe places to have conversations,” for example. That’s not what we need right now. This is not about conversations and “learning about one another.” We don’t need salons. We need initiatives and resources to spark the work of building a stronger society, one with public spaces that allow for shared excellence.
6 Comments | 
Celebrities, Education, Leadership, Politics | Tagged: Anna Deavere Smith, Huffington Post, Let me down easy, teachable moment | 
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Posted by Anne Morriss
July 7, 2009
Our dear friend Drew Dixon Williams has spent her life in the domains of politics and music, plotting the ascent of voices with the power to move us on all sorts of levels. She weighed in on Michael Jackson’s impact this week, on a website she recently launched called Second Ladies. Second Ladies is designed “to harness and sustain the enthusiasm about our phenomenal First Lady in order to build and support a community of similarly empowered women.” The site is an exciting platform, an explicit mechanism for fostering leadership, particularly among women.
A parade of commentators has tried to articulate Jackson’s influence over the last week, but Williams brings new insight to the discussion of how he changed music and culture forever. And while she says that she is “not altogether comfortable opining on a regular basis,” we hope this post is a sign of things to come. A taste below and the full link here:
As has been said many times in the barrage of media coverage following his death, MJ broke down barriers. He was the first black artist whose videos got played on MTV. His records defied the long-standing precedent of segregated airwaves to get airplay on rock and pop radio stations in the eighties. Those milestones were significant to be sure, but in my opinion, the biggest barriers that he broke down were psychological. His gift was so great that he transcended race, not just in terms of format, but in terms of feeling. All across the globe men, women and children let Michael Jackson get under their skin, even as his own skin morphed towards an ideal image of beauty that he himself was in the process of obliterating.
Leave a Comment » | Celebrities, Leadership, Politics | Tagged: Drew Dixon, Drew Dixon Williams, Michael Jackson, Michelle Obama, Second Ladies | Permalink
Posted by Anne Morriss
May 29, 2009
In a continuation of our series on commencement speeches, I wanted to share Ellen DeGeneres’s address to the “Katrina Class” at Tulane University this year. DeGeneres is funny and playful, very funny at times, like when she reveals that she never attended college: “I’m not saying you wasted your time and money, but look at me, I’m a HUGE celebrity.”
She also talks about the costs and gifts of adversity, including her experience coming out as a gay performer. DeGeneres made a very deliberate choice to walk away from shame and fear, a choice that came at the price of her immediate career. For years she was considered untouchable by the Hollywood community. She spent this period learning to live without apology, and by the end of it she “had a purpose.” And a wildly successful talk show. And access to an extraordinary platform for impact.
Leave a Comment » | Celebrities, Diversity, Leadership | Tagged: Ellen, Ellen DeGeneres, graduation, Tulane | Permalink
Posted by Anne Morriss
May 20, 2009
The NYT Magazine recently did a terrific story on Suze Orman, increasingly known for the tongue-lashing she’s willing to give viewers who aren’t taking full responsibility for their financial lives. Or as Oprah calls these very public rebukes, “Suze smackdowns.” Suze — she’s achieved first-name-only status — is a worldwide phenomenon, and I think it has as much to do with how she communicates as what she communicates.
I also think there’s a leadership lesson in her success. Suze doesn’t let empathy get in the way of enforcing high standards. Nor does she let high standards get in the way of empathy. If there’s any secret sauce to leadership, I think it’s this. I think it’s learning how to deliver both simultaneously. A default assumption for most of us is that these positions tradeoff on each other, that you can be supportive or hold people accountable, but not both. The exceptional leaders I know are defying this tradeoff everyday. They are demanding excellence from the people around them, while helping them achieve it with relentless support.
Leave a Comment » | Celebrities, Leadership | Tagged: empathy, High standards, Leadership, NYT, Oprah, Suze Orman, TImes Magazine | Permalink
Posted by Frances Frei
May 17, 2009
Graduation Speech Season is upon us, which may be my favorite season in American cultural life. A whole army of amateur and not-so-amateur speakers takes the stage with the explicit task of helping to unleash the next generation of dreamers and doers. Unexpected magic can happen. And even when it doesn’t, we are still focused briefly on the challenge of our collective salvation.
I want to honor the season’s start with David Foster Wallace’s advice to last year’s graduating class at Kenyon College in Ohio (thank you, Lyn). Wallace finally lost his life-long fight with depression last year, a tragedy on many levels. He may have been the most talented writer of his generation and probably many others.
I’m including a full version of the speech, which the Guardian edited, along with a preview:
…there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the “rat race” – the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.
Leave a Comment » | Celebrities, Leadership | Tagged: commencement, David Foster Wallace, freedom, graduation, Guardian, Kenyon College, speech | Permalink
Posted by Anne Morriss
April 25, 2009
Susan got a makeover. TMZ (TMZ?) is outraged, claiming the transition from “grammy to glammy” has stripped her of her “natural charm.”
The story casts Susan as the innocent object of someone else’s plotting and scheming – the risk that a patronizing Diane Sawyer warned her about on Good Morning America — but this is a women who climbed up on the biggest stage in the world to take her swing. Susan will be fine.
The reaction also speaks to our sometimes tortured relationship with the idea of authenticity. Authenticity is a leadership trait we’ve come to admire, but the pursuit of authenticity can sometimes get in the way of real leadership. When it keeps the leader at the center of the leadership story, when it directs his or her energies towards personal goals, authenticity misses the point that leadership, at its core, isn’t about us. Leadership doesn’t particularly care if we ever find ourselves. Leadership asks that we get over those selves, that we abandon many of our needs and fears and insecurities to advance a larger mission.
That mission may require losing our “natural charm.” We may be more effective by discarding the identities that worked for us in the past. Susan Boyle created a persona that thrived in a small, Scottish village. But her goals have changed radically. She now has a chance to inspire millions with her courage and audacity. If her staying power goes up with a good dye job and a leather jacket, then I’m all for it.
2 Comments | Celebrities, Leadership | Tagged: Authentic leadership, authenticity, boyle makeover, makeover, Susan Boyle | Permalink
Posted by Anne Morriss
April 17, 2009
One of the assumptions at the center of this project is that there is often someone extraordinary lurking underneath the watered-down, apologetic version of ourselves that we choose to offer the world. A leader’s central task, we believe, is to create the conditions for those extraordinary selves to thrive.
Imagining that possibility can sometimes take a leap of faith. If you ever find yourself doubting it, join the the 20 million people (and counting) who have watched Susan Boyle’s audition for Britain’s Got Talent, the UK’s version of American Idol. In a single, transformative moment, Susan stops apologizing.
Leave a Comment » | Celebrities, Leadership | Tagged: American Idol, Britain's Got Talent, Susan Boyle, Transformation | Permalink
Posted by Anne Morriss
April 5, 2009
I find myself needing to spend a minute on The Hug. Apparently, in preparing for a royal audience, centuries of protocol can basically be summed up as “whatever you do, don’t touch the Queen.” Forget the curtsey/no curtsey debate. Forget never turning your back on royalty. In terms of national slights, forget even the last-minute trip to Best Buy last month when the Browns visited, and we belatedly remembered the British fetish for exchanging house-warming gifts. The one thing you don’t do is touch Her.
So what did Mrs. Obama have to go and do? She touched her.
And what happened next? Clive Aslet captured the moment in a magnificent Op-Ed tribute to the Queen in the UK’s Telegraph titled, “Now That’s A First Lady.”
And when Mrs Obama – no Lizard of Oz, as Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating was dubbed when he dared to put his arm around the Queen in 1992 – committed a similar breach of protocol by placing her hand on the royal back, what was the response? Could one believe one’s eyes? A tiny gloved hand crept around the First Lady’s back, the arm attached to it too short to go more than half way. Is this what psychiatrists call the disinhibition of old age? No, the Queen perfectly judged the situation. She wanted the Obamas, two emotionally explicit people, to feel among friends. She bent the rules. She got it right. We knew she would.
As Aslet suggests, the moment that mattered was not Michelle’s “mistake,” but the Queen’s response to it. In a culture that is still coming to terms with the truth and pain of its racial history, the royal gesture was packed with meaning. The Queen is a living symbol of the worldview that all men are not really created so equal, a worldview that has done more damage to more people on a global scale than perhaps any other, particularly on the continent of Africa. And she chose not to enforce her aristocratic prerogative with this couple of African descent now at the helm of a former British colony.
Michelle invited the Queen to make a basic human connection. Premeditated or not, it was bold. But the truly revolutionary part was that Elizabeth took her up on it.
Leave a Comment » | Celebrities, Culture, Leadership, Politics | Tagged: Best Buy, Clive Aslet, Culture, First Lady, G-20, Gordon Brown, Michelle Obama, Queen Elizabeth, royal protocol | Permalink
Posted by Anne Morriss
April 2, 2009
The NYT coverage of Facebook offered another example of a common source of customer tension — not all of your customers want to hang out with each other:
“People usually spend a lot of time trying to be separate — parents and children are a good example,” says Danah Boyd, a social scientist who has studied social networks and now works in the research department of Microsoft, which has invested in Facebook. “You are already seeing young people sitting there thinking, ‘Why am I hanging out with my mother who is reminiscing with her high school mates?’ You are seeing some reticence with young people that wasn’t there two years ago.”
This is a particular risk for brands that compete on youth and glamour. In the market to feel young and vigorous again, Grandpa shows up at the nightclub and ruins it for everyone. But the tension between age groups can work both ways, as Build-a-Bear workshops — a highly successful toy service — discovered when the 12-year-old customers stopped playing nicely with the 6-year-olds. The younger crowd was thrilled to be able to mingle with the older kids, but the older kids were horrified.
Tiffany’s learned a similar lesson when it tried to serve both mass market and high-end customers. The high-end segment did not necessarily want to spend time with the masses, since it ruined all of the elite fantasies wrapped up in the little, blue box.
If there is a separate physical location for each segment, this problem is easily solved. But if a single location attracts multiple segments, then the challenge becomes reducing the antagonism between segments, which typically runs in only one direction (think celebrities in rehab with the rest of us), or tailoring the service away from one segment. The act of actively dissuading customers, often profitable ones, is anathema to most senior management teams. The trouble is, in certain contexts it is essential to maintaining service excellence. Facebook may be one of them.
Leave a Comment » | Business, Celebrities, Customers, Service | Tagged: Build-a-bear, customer segments, Facebook, service models, Tiffany's | Permalink
Posted by Frances Frei
March 13, 2009
“Funny,” at it’s core, describes some variance between what you expect to happen and what actually happens. A monkey is dressed like a baby. A prehistoric man has trouble buying car insurance. A prepubescent kid headlines a meeting of serious conservative thinkers. On some basic level, these things are funny.
Over the past few days, I’ve heard myself saying “that’s funny” more often than usual, despite the growing absurdity of our economic moment. Even with the world upside down, I didn’t expect most of these things, which I’m deciding is a hopeful sign. Some facts still have the power to surprise:
- Sears has had an open CEO search for 13 months and is now soliciting people to apply for the job if they feel “up to the challenge.” Apparently there is very little interest.
- Almost all of the top posts under Geithner at Treasury are still vacant — the Herald Tribune reports it’s because the White House has become so worried about potential tax problems that it has nominated only a handful of people. It’s hard to find more compelling motivation for a flat tax.
- Ryanair is considering charging passengers for use of its in-flight bathrooms.
- Michael Steele is pro-choice.
- Ryanair is also launching a new transatlantic service. Bring your quarters.
- David Brooks is using his extraordinary platform to attach meaning to Michele Obama’s arms, and has named them “Thunder” and “Lightening.”
- Ryanair is also pressuring pilots to fly with less fuel. Don’t assume the flotation device will be free.
- After playing an active role in pushing plastic on America, American Express is paying some customers $300 to close their accounts and walk away.
- Jack Welch calls the obsession with shareholder value the “dumbest idea in the world.”
- Real estate may also be crashing in Second Life.
Leave a Comment » | Business, Celebrities, Leadership, Politics | Tagged: American Express, David Brooks, Geithner, Humor, Jack Welch, Michael Steele, Michele Obama, Politics, Ryanair, Sears, Second Life | Permalink
Posted by Frances Frei
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