Leadership Lessons: A Week’s Review
Since Jewel and I are in the business and practice of leadership development, we are keenly attuned to examples and expressions of good and bad leadership. As we close out August and summer 2023, I’ll share instances of both from this past week of online and television viewing.
A Heroic Father
Robert Carter’s journey from foster child to father of 5: on CBS Mornings this past week, we saw an instance of dedication and paying it forward that touched us. Robert Carter, 33, became a foster child at the age of 13 and was never adopted. His mother, who had nine children, struggled with alcoholism. His dad, who he didn’t grow up with, also fell prey to substance abuse. Today, Carter’s ownership of a hair salon in Cincinnati may qualify him as an entrepreneurial leader, but his leadership as a father most impressed us.
In 2020, he adopted three boys, Robert, Giovanni, and Kiontae. When he learned that the boys had two sisters in the system, Marionna and Makayla, he adopted them, too, bringing together all five siblings.
Although he didn’t experience being fathered growing up, he turned that negation into an affirmation. How? Carter says “I give my children everything that I wanted, from love to affection and attention. Everything I wanted from my dad as a child, I do with them to make sure that they have that and more . . . . I used my trauma as fuel to keep going and want better and to help people and do better in life.”
Click the link above for the story, which has even more depth, twists, and turns than my summary. Make sure to have some tissue nearby.
Anti-Heroic Drug Dealers
Netflix’s Painkiller, a dramatic depiction of the opioid crisis and the Sackler family’s greed and deceit is a prime example of horrific corporate leadership. The Times reporter who broke the story upon which the series is based, Barry Meier, wrote in The Free Press that the pharmaceutical firm owned by the Sackler family, Purdue Pharma “. . . turned OxyContin, a drug valuable for treating severe pain caused by cancer or chronic health issues, into a billion-dollar blockbuster by launching the biggest-ever pharmaceutical marketing campaign for a powerful and potentially addictive narcotic.
It was built on the lie, pushed by Purdue’s sales team, that OxyContin’s special formulation made it safe to use for back pain, dental pain, and other common problems. In fact, a single tablet of OxyContin contained up to sixteen times the amount of oxycodone, a powerful narcotic, than found in traditional painkillers.”
Hundreds of thousands of lives were lost and destroyed, with untold damage to families across the United States, yet it took government authorities over ten years to go beyond relative baby steps to address the opioid crisis in earnest. To this date, not one member of the Sackler family has been jailed. When greed and profits override the value of human life, unethical leadership is primarily to blame.
A Menace to Democracy
Speaking of potential jail time, one shouldn’t insult ideas like morality and ethics by having them in the same sentence as Donald Trump. The sociopathic narcissist has 91 counts in four cases against him, yet he remains the front-runner in the Republican presidential race. Mind you, I critique the far left for the excesses of identity politics and Critical Race Theory, which I studied in graduate school in the late ‘90s. But what’s good for the goose is good for the gander: I criticize the mis-leadership of the political right for defending the indefensible traitor to democracy, Donald Trump, and for displaying what conservative critic and author Jonah Goldberg calls post-modern “Critical Trump Theory.”
Trump violates norms and the immediate conclusion is that the norms are wrong. Trump says or does something outrageous and the blame lies in those who are outraged. The institutions—law enforcement, Congress, the media—that try to hold Trump accountable are at fault.
What you are seeing is a novel form of critical theory, call it ‘structural anti-Trumpism.’
The irony is delicious. For years now, the right has been denouncing ‘structural racism’ and similar notions as antithetical to American values. For what it’s worth, depending on the specifics, I agree with many of those denunciations. . . .
Amazingly, many on the right have embraced this logic when it comes to Trump. According to the Critical Trumpist Theorists, it’s long been obvious that the electoral system is rigged against him. The proof? He lost. And any contest Trump loses must be rigged. Polling too, is saturated with anti-Trump bias. But virtually every institution and individual not firmly pro-Trump is now systemically anti-Trump. When then-Attorney General William Barr told Trump the election fraud stuff was ‘bullsh-t,’ his boss replied, ‘You must hate Trump.’ Indeed, structural anti-Trumpism explains why Trump speaks of himself in the third person so often. He is a concept, an abstraction, and opposition to him is the ghost in the machine of the system. Some of his defenders sound like Ibram X Kendi. Neutrality on Trump is not enough, you must be either anti-anti-Trump or pro-Trump.
Again, I have profound disagreements with critical race theory, but at least the arguments for CRT rest on centuries of actual racism, from slavery to Jim Crow. The problem with CRT is not that it is wrong about everything, but that it thinks it’s right about everything. I don’t think CRT radicals are right about the need to tear down all of our institutions and the rule of law, but I can understand why they feel that way. What I can’t understand is why you’d feel that way for the benefit of Donald Trump.
—Jonah Goldberg
We can’t understand that either.
The Mystic Traveler: Wayne Shorter
Wayne Shorter: Zero Gravity – This three-part Amazon Prime distributed documentary is a must-see series. Jewel and I were riveted by the filmmaker’s creative use of animation and black-and-white footage to reflect the imaginal depth of the mystic, cosmic traveler of music and life, Wayne Shorter. To us, Wayne exemplifies artistic and spiritual leadership: as a musical artist, was a sui generis saxophonist and composer par excellence whose contribution to American and world culture was, as Duke Ellington would say, beyond category. His spiritual leadership was rooted in Buddhism as a practice and in his commitment to a belief in “no beginnings or endings,” which implies an appreciation for infinity as a foundation of consciousness, his and, by extension, everyone else too.
We urge you to check out the series, especially to discover how Shorter confronted the many tragedies throughout his life and to see and hear those who preceded Wayne in joining the ancestors: Jimmy Heath, Curtis Fuller, Wallace Roney and Greg Tate.
Beyond Business to Civic and Cultural Leadership
Finally, as Jewel and I foretold from our very first blog post four years ago, we use our platform to highlight not only how jazz provides creative insights for business and organizational leadership, but to enhance cultural and civic leadership more generally. That’s the context of the three-part series with John Vervaeke I wrote about two weeks ago.
Here's a link to the second episode, “Democracy as Antagonistic Cooperation for E Pluribus Unum.”
In the third episode, we tackle Race vs. Cultural Intelligence. To get an idea of the flow of the conversation, here are some time-stamped subjects:
00:00:00 - Introduction and Discussion Overview
00:02:40 - Philosophical Implications of Blues and Jazz
00:05:00 - Existentialist Impulse of the Blues
00:09:14 - Four Principles of Jazz Leadership Project
00:13:15 - Pragmatist Pluralism and Democracy
00:17:25 - "Agent Arena Relationship" and Cultural Intelligence
00:20:00 - Concept of Niche Construction in Culture
00:26:47 - Culture, Race, and Ralph Ellison's Perspective
00:30:55 - Historical Impact on Collective Memory
00:38:46 - Colorblindness and Societal Interactions
00:41:40 - Recontexting and Cultural Innovation
00:47:40 - Music as Psychotechnology and Collective Interaction
00:53:00 - Five Steps of Racialization
00:58:12 - Addressing Stereotypes and Essentialization
01:01:01 - Necessity of Slow Thinking in Understanding Human Nature
01:07:40 - Understanding Identity in Cultural Terms
01:09:57 - Moving from Understanding to Action
01:13:20 - Emphasizing Good Faith and Sophistication in Discourse
01:19:00 - Solutions from Participation, Power, and Wisdom
01:22:40 - Importance of Language and Racial Identity Separation
We’re taking the Labor Weekend off to enjoy ourselves at the D.C. Jazz Festival, so we’ll be back in two weeks. Here’s wishing you the very best in the meantime.