Are legacy newspapers for wealthy, older people? How will the next newsroom emerge from blogs? Here’s a discussion on the epicenter of news innovation. What pieces of legacy journalism will survive in the transition? How will paper continue to be distributed? I advocate a social enterprise NowNewsroom(L3C).
Category: Future of News
L3Cs on Chicago Tonight
When the Chicago Sun-Times declared bankruptcy March 31, 2009, I discussed the future of Chicago’s newsrooms on WTTW’s Chicago Tonight with colleagues Chi-Town Daily News Editor Geoff Dougherty and Northwestern Digital Media Professor Owen Youngman. They made some great points about what is to come here and I made a few points about the L3C business model and the Chicago Newsroom of the Future. Here’s the clip.
I also mentioned the L3C and Chicago’s Newsrooms of the Future on a segment on ABC Channel 7 News.
The Emerging Ecosystem of News Delivery
Steven Berlin Johnson over at OutsideIn, which I wrote about in June 2007 for the Chicago Sun-Times, brought wonderful clarity to the situation of legacy news operations yesterday at a presentation at South By Southwest. He envisions an evolving news ecosystem and with clarity places newspapers as a foundational gathering operation. He also cautioned that it is important to move forward to a vision rather than cling to the old.
But in times like these, when all that is solid is melting into air, as Marx said of another equally turbulent era, it’s important that we try to imagine how we’d like the future to turn out and set our sights on that, and not just struggle to keep the past alive for a few more years.
Steve says so well what I have been stumbling around trying to articulate here in Chicago. In evidence of the beauty of the Web, I was able to read his comments and see a video of him presenting the day after he did it – glorious access to information!
At a Poynter Institute event here in Chicago yesterday, the reality Steve describes was coming sharply into focus in the discussion. It is so sad that newspapers and some other legacy media do not see the preciousness of their brands and how important it is to preserve THAT so that they can have a place in the new ecosystem. Could be that they think their brand is a logo and marks, not something organic that emerges from the way that they operate.
Newspapers don’t need to go more deeply into the “swamp” of disinformation or useless eye candy to have a role in the new forest. They need to do a LOT more of what they do well — good local reporting — and spread cooperatively through their value systems to work with partners. Unfortunately, some newspapers like the Sun-Times where I used to work have been sucked dry of their newsroom resources by their business operating model. The Sun-Times is operated by a hedge fund, and all it wants is a dollar return. Hedge funds don’t value one bit the social return that is evident in a well-done newspaper newsroom.
It’s one reason why I am on the soap box for theL3C hybrid for news businesses. It’s great to hear Steve’s vision and here in Chicago, many of us are working to develop a healthy new ecosystem. Below is Steve’s flow chart for news delivery. You can watch a video of the presentation here.
Oh, News of the Future!
I have a new article on the Huffington Post about the death of newspapers, Newsrooms must die, Long Live newsrooms.
The point is the old ways have been dying, new ways have been emerging, and they will come together in something entirely new. Innovations from the web and old line practices that create credibility must inform each other. The split is perfectly expressed in the contingent ideas of Transparency and Image. Transparency sees a flattened hierarchy, and a community bubble up of ideas. Old line Image Makers see creation of experts from the top down by media giants. The new way recognizes that innovation bubbles up and is recognized. Image follows expert form. Imposition of Image (without the community bubbling up) will inevitably fail or be recognized as false.
I see a hybrid (NPO/For Profit) model of operation that will stabilize the staffing needs of newsrooms and deliver information to intended audiences through myriad distribution channels. Newsrooms will deliver by community-based mission and their staffing will be protected by the essential nature of their mission. Yet unlike mission-based non-profits that beg to sustain themselves, the new L3C newspaper will be self-sustaining through profits earned and investors.
Newsrooms must die! Long live newsrooms!
Does a social enterprise hold promise for the future of newsrooms in Chicago?
“Yes,” said Terry Mazany, President and Chief Executive Officer of The Chicago Community Trust.
It was hard to hear Mazany over the din of 400 chattering reporters, editors, bloggers, photogs, commentators and independents from all sectors of Chicago’s newsgathering world present at the Chicago Journalism Townhall (CJTH) Sunday, Feb. 22, organized by perpetual do-gooder Ken Davis and his wife Linda.
I am certain Mazany said “Yes” to the L3C idea because I caught him on tape, actually I recorded him in digital. But let’s not get lost in the analog vs. digital, paper vs. web, long-time pro vs. citizen journo, columnist vs. blogger, corner news box vs. click-through discussions that so-much dominated the conversation at the Townhall Sunday. Let’s just say Sunday’s gathering proved there’s reams of tactical knowledge to be exchanged, enough to forge a new cluster or two of media-savvy newsroom start-ups and connect the dots between the points until the Chicago region is a glorious virtuous circle of high-quality news and revenue streams. You can catch up on the sticky details articulated by writers and journalists far more informed and clever than I over at the CJTH blog.
Me? I am excited about the Chicago newsroom of the future, a journalist’s dream come true that could rise from a floor of foundation cash and be sustained by a stream of revenue and profit. My theoretical newsroom, let’s call it The Times Democrat, would be a new kind of company, an L3C, or Low Profit Limited Liability Company.
Mazany added currency to this idea when he said that Information has risen to the level of being a most pressing need for a community in our current democracy. More than ever, a newsroom must be a mission-based place.
Mazany’s comments are useful for anyone thinking big about the newsroom of the future. He said that not only is our democracy at stake, but so is the Chicago region’s competitive advantage in a shifting world. To better understand this viewpoint read Richard Florida on the rise of the Creative Class.
This conversation lifts the perspective up 10,000 feet and takes a shrewd look down. Let’s agree that journalism must live for the future of our democracy. Let’s also agree that the newsroom of The Times Democrat will be an amalgam of the best and most innovative practices we have online and in print, and that it will evolve to be something recognizable as newsgathering measured by a few key virtues. These include a culture of accountability and quality control that includes editors and fact checkers. And in fact, credibility and audience relevance will be the currency that moves the market of readers, or “news consumers,” from news org to news org locally and nationally. In this scenario, it’s likely everyone at the CJTH will get to play at The Times Democrat. Much revered will be those who have learned how to make money from the ads and play of the Web.
But to get there, journalism needs one thing more than anything else to operate well: that thing is money, specifically re-birthing cash. That’s what our L3C newsroom, The Times Democrat, is about.
So, what would the business model of The Times Democrat look like? It would simply be a modified Limited Liability Company that has the primary goal of serving a socially beneficial purpose and as such it could accept foundation money.
Americans for Community Development, a coalition sponsored by our nation’s first L3C – L3C Advisors — says that the L3C is the for-profit with a nonprofit soul. The nonprofit soul of a newspaper arises from the recognition that newspapers are the only business specifically recognized in the U.S. Constitution and that the information they provide is vital to the proper function of a democracy.
The Times Democrat L3C can operate as a business with a social purpose because its structure releases arcane IRS rules related to how foundations like The Chicago Community Trust, the John D. And Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the McCormick Foundation — all present at the CJTH Sunday — invest their considerable sums of money.
Red tape be gone! When The Times Democrat presents its business plan [drawn together by the savviest business people, investors, journos and web innovators far and near to Chicago], foundations will find it that much easier to invest because of the L3C.
A foundation like the Chicago Community Trust, having taken first position in the tranched investment, has also taken on most of the risk, making The Times Democrat a safer investment for others. Other investors like pension funds and private equity funds would more quickly follow suite. But you wouldn’t see venture capital firms. The returns aren’t fast enough or large enough, said Steve Miller of Chicago’s Origin Ventures.
The Americans for Economic Development website says this: Because the foundations take the highest risk at little or no return, it essentially turns the venture capital model on its head and gives many social enterprises a low enough cost of capital that they are able to be self sustainable. “Self sustainable,” two of the most beautiful words in existence today. Not filthy rich, but instead, enough.
And if filthy rich simply happens because The Times Democrat is great at meeting its mission, that’s OK, too. It can reinvest some profits to make the newspaper better.
That means the newspaper L3c won’t have to ask its reporters to work for free or its editors to limit their earnings to $30,000 per year. Unfortunately, we heard a lot of this kind of hope-crushing talk at the CJTH Sunday.
Obviously small newsrooms and no pay don’t sit well with Bernard Lunzer, president of The Newspaper Guild, which represents Chicago Sun-Times employees.
“The problem,” Lunzer said, “is academia and a lot of people are saying we will have these new operations of 10-15 people and that will replace what we formerly had as major newsgathering organizations.”
“We will keep pushing the conversation,” Lunzer said.
Lunzer has been visiting the Hill to forward Federal legislation related to the social purpose of newspapers and L3Cs.
Draft legislation called the Program Related Investment Promotion Act of 2008 is being considered by staff in the Senate Finance committee, and is currently looking for sponsors.
Here in Illinois, Bill SB 239 creating the L3C hybrid was introduced to the Illinois legislature Feb. 4 by Sen. Heather Steans (D-Chicago). I’ve not yet had an update on that.
“Our goal is to get our communities through to the other side,” Lunzer said. “We believe the L3C is an important vehicle.”
“The beauty of the L3C is its simplicity;” Lunzer said. “You accept that you will not have high profit but you will have some profit. And at some point [once a newsroom is recovering, it] could move back to a normal LLC.
“For democracy to work, we need transparency in government. We need credible info and that has always started on the news side with print,” Lunzer said.
Can a newsroom like the Sun-Times be reborn?
“For the Sun-Times, what’s got to happen is you have to find a way to separate the product that is the Sun-Times from the debt that was incurred by business owners,” Lunzer said.
That echoes something Mazany said at the CJTH. To be fair, organizer and moderator Ken Davis said it first, rather gruesomely.
“Is there a point at which someone could wait until the Sun-Times (or the Tribune) either dies or can no longer survive, [and then] plucks out the beating heart of the newsroom and makes that a separate company, a new newsroom?” Davis asked.
After some thought The Chicago Communty Trust’s Mazany answered in the affirmative. He rephrased it to me this way later.
“Is there a way of bringing in some intervention for the shuttering of a newspaper and creating some dollars that could go into an endowed fund or to support the transition to new forms of journalism and community information?” Mazany asked. “Yes.”
Could that happen despite the fact that the assets are not desks and chairs and buildings and paperclips, but instead intangible assets like institutional knowledge and people?
“Yes,” Mazany said.
So how can those of us who care help make that rebirth happen?
The Newspaper Guild’s Lunzer has some ideas.
“We need people to try and find real investment in the Sun-Times,” Lunzer said.
“It will take community will and political will but that is what must happen,” he said.
“And we might have to open ourselves up to the idea that government could flow money into newspapers. It may well be that we see a situation where we see some government aid to get through the worse of this.”
Lunzer said that all over the country, newsrooms are emerging in different forms.
Certainly the L3C would allow foundation money to flow in, he said. But it’s just one of many ways including co-ops and ESOPs that The Guild is working with.
Read More: Bernard Lunzer, Bloggers, Chicago Journalism Townhall, Chicago Sun-Times, Chicago Tribune, Chicago-Illinois, Death Of Newspapers, Democracy, Future Of Journalism, Heather Steans, Journalism, Ken Davis, l3c, Low Profit Limited Liability Company, Main Stream Media, Newspaper Industry, Newspapers, Social Enterprise, Terry Mazany, The Chicago Community Trust, The-Newspaper-Guild, Chicago News
Chicago Journalism Townhall and L3Cs
To the Panel of the Chicago Journalism Townhall:
A low-profit limited liability company (L3C) is not a non-profit (NPO). An L3C is a for-profit business that gets a kick-start from foundation funding and then welcomes investors to follow in, or vice versa. It has rules around making a profit and those rules include the fact that if you are getting foundation money to meet your social mission, you cannot neglect your social mission to make a bigger profit. That would mean in the case of a newsroom, that you could not lay off the staff because they cost too much, not as long as the staff is meeting their social mission.
The panel of expert journalists at the Townhall Sunday — sage and talented as they all are — would benefit from expanding their thinking. The non-profit model works well when it has achieved scale and is able to tap into the passion of the news consumers – good example WBEZ.
But in an L3C, passion is built into the model. It is initially monetized by the presence of foundations and investors who expect a return in money and mission. Unlike the NPO mode, profits are welcomed and encouraged. But mission trumps profits.
I will be writing about this more in the Huffington Post tomorrow.
Meanwhile read through these excellent materials American for Community Development.
And as I said a few weeks ago in my article on L3CsHuffPo article, the Peoria papers are looking at it.
How to save newsrooms
Chicago’s newspapers could find a lifeline to solvency and a return to social purpose in a new kind of business structure called an L3C, or low-profit limited liability company.
Why is that?
Illinois foundations have $350 billion in assets and they are required to invest 5% of that, or $17 billion, in programs that serve a social purpose each year. If the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune were to be reborn as L3Cs — a structure that encourages foundation investment while allowing a profit –they could tap into some of that $17 billion. With foundation heavyweights on board, other investors seeking a decent, but not excessive, return might contribute to the coffers.
Bill SB 239 creating the L3C hybrid was introduced to the Illinois legislature Feb. 4 by Sen. Heather Steans (D-Chicago). Prospects for the bill are good, supporters say.
The L3C structure was signed into law in Vermont in 2008, and into law in Michigan and the Crow Nation in January. Legislatures in Georgia, Montana, North Carolina and Oregon are also expected to pass L3C legislation this year.
In Washington, D.C., draft legislation called the Program Related Investment Promotion Act of 2008 is being considered by staff in the Senate Finance committee. While many types of businesses–from community yoga centers to affordable housing–could benefit from L3Cs, the successful creation of newspaper L3Cs is largely contingent on passage of the Federal law, which would effectively expand charitable purposes to include newspapers.
The L3C structure plays well in Peoria where the Peoria Newspaper Guild, and a coalition of
Journal Star employees and community leaders have been quietly looking for two years at alternatives including co-ops and employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs) to operate the Peoria Journal Star.
The one idea that really clicked was the L3C.
“We are looking at long-term ownership that puts journalism first,” said Jennifer Towery, President of the Peoria Newspaper Guild and also Neighbors Editor for the Peoria Journal Star. “[The L3C] just resonated. It has so much potential.”
Because it can tap into foundation money, an L3C is sustainable, and because an L3C business must meet a social purpose, it realigns newspapers with their mission of community service.
“It insists that serving the readers is your mission,” she said. “If it doesn’t serve the readers to cut your newsroom staff you can’t do it.”
While good news judgment is essential to accomplishing the social return, the L3C structure has significant sweeteners to generate returns for investors.
“The participation of the foundation, which is seeking high social return but low monetary return serves as a catalyst for high investor return,” said Marc J. Lane, a Chicago-based attorney who authored the Illinois L3C legislation and last year launched Chicago’s chapter of the Social Enterprise Alliance, which believes in investing in businesses that do well by doing good. “You can end up with a blended financial return that is fairly modest but skewed toward the private sector investor.”
“Capital is formed,” Lane said. “Social purpose is achieved.”
The L3C is different from a typical nonprofit because it can earn a return, but the social purpose must trump the financial purpose.
Lane says that he expects the Illinois law will pass with little debate. “I see it sailing through,” he said. But even if it doesn’t, Illinois news gathering organizations could incorporate in Vermont or other states that have legalized L3Cs.
The creator of L3Cs, Robert Lang, CEO of the Mary Elizabeth & Gordon B. Mannweiler Foundation, says the Federal legislation is essential for any of these good news scenarios to play for newspapers.
Lang, an economist and businessman by trade, devised the L3C structure to address the problems he was having while trying to invest family foundation money in a sustainable and effective way.
“Historically, the IRS has not accepted newspapers as nonprofits,” Lang said. “The Federal legislation mentions L3Cs specifically and it lists newspapers specifically.”
The problem newspapers are dealing with today is that investors turned news-gathering into Wall Street product.
“The Peoria paper still makes money,” Lang said. “The problem is it cannot make enough profit for all the games normal for-profits get involved in.”
But in the L3C scenario, newspapers can make “enough” money.
“What we are looking at is the newspaper as a self-sufficient entity,” he said.
“It will not be a high profit entity.”
The idea of the Newspaper L3C is to bring back those journalistic contributions like neighborhood reporting, music reviews and book sections and make them part of the community service. And ads are part of the mix too.
“I think there is a lot of viability to newspapers still,” Lang said.
Could the L3C save Chicago’s newspapers?
“Somewhere you still need a newsgathering organizations,” Lang said. Newspapers still drive much of the news circulating on the web, he added.
“I’m not saying that we can save the Chicago Tribune and make it what it was 10 years ago,” he said. “But at least the money that’s made today can go toward improving the product not paying off leveraged debt.”
Meanwhile back at the Journal Star, which has an owner and is not for sale, Peoria Guild President Towery says, “We are all interested in finding models that others can replicate. It’s not saving the paper, it’s saving journalism. ”
“One of the bright spots is that [newspapers] have lost so much value that it is now feasible for communities to buy their newspapers.”
Read More: Americans For Community Development, Chicago Sun-Times, Chicago Tribune, Doing Well By Doing Good, Heather Steans, Jennifer Towery, Journalism, l3c, Low-Profit Limited Liability Company, Marc J. Lane, Mary Elizabeth And Gordon B. Mannweiler Foundation, Newspaper Industry, Newspapers, Oregon, Peoria Journal Star, Peoria Newspaper Guild, Program Related Investment Promotion Act Of 2008, Robert Lang, Saving Newspapers, Social Enterprise Alliance, Chicago News
What’s so special about the number 50?
By Sally Duros, Real Estate Editor
Chicago Sun-Times
Why do we have so many aldermen? New York City has one City Council member for every 159,000 residents and Los Angeles has 1 for every 226,000. But here in Chicago, we have one City Council member for every 56,000 residents. That’s a lot of politics per square inch of neighborhood.
So why is that?
“It’s a legacy from when Chicago was an aspiring immigrant city,” said Paul Green, director of the Institute for Politics at Roosevelt University. “It’s from when people couldn’t speak English, and neighborhoods had their own ethnic everything — from grocery stores to restaurants to political leaders.”
Green says the immigrant population at the turn of the 20th century put an indelible stamp on our form of government and the way we get things done.
“In 1890, almost 80 percent of the people living in Chicago were foreign born,” Green said. Up until the 1920s, Chicago had 35 wards with two alderman per ward, each alderman serving a two-year term.
The way things were organized, Chicago politics ran around the clock, with an election continually on the horizon.
Neighborhoods were ethnic enclaves that wanted their own alderman, police, firemen and community leadership, Green said.
In this city of little villages, we were full of diversity, but also ethnic segregation, Green said. The advantage of having so many wards was that everyone was ensured some representation, some jobs and their own piece of the action of a growing, vibrant city.
Chicago’s alderman are famous for their antics — legal and otherwise, according to Green.
It could be a case of too many cooks spoiling the broth or, viewed from another perspective, many players making a more flavorful stew.
In some ways, having all these alderman might help us fulfill our municipal self-talk of being “The City that Works.”
Green said that it’s important to remember that by law, Chicago City Council has tremendous power.
Left to their own devices, all of these alderman could run the city into the ground, Green said.
So “what you wind up with, what you need is a politically strong mayor to keep the alderman in line.”
So if we had fewer alderman would we have less corruption?
“If you reduce the City Council by half, would that reduce the chance for corruption?” Green asks. It’s more likely we would “give alderman a chance to double their fun,” Green said.
Copyright (c) 2007 Chicago Sun-Times, Inc.
Stedman Graham on how to build a platform
I interviewed Stedman Graham for International Women’s Day in March 2004. Stedman Graham is chairman and CEO of S. Graham & Associates (SGA), a management and marketing consulting company that specializes in the corporate and educational markets.
In this interview, Graham discusses his methods, his passions and how his famous life partner, Oprah Winfrey, inspired his own personal development.
Q: What is your nine-step process about?
Stedman Graham: Most of us don’t focus on personal development because we are so programmed to buy into labels and titles in our daily lives. Then we do the same thing every single day. We become so busy doing stuff that really has nothing to do with who we are
Real freedom is about being able to take information and make it relevant to the 24 hours you have every day.
I have developed a process to use the world’s resources to build your own life. It is a nine-step process of understanding and discovering who you are. And second, developing who you are. My process has been well received in the United States, Canada, South Africa. Corporations like it, and I have spoken at Harvard and Wharton about it.
Even at Harvard and Wharton, students wind up, when they are done, simply sitting in a room somewhere. They might get paid more but still they’ve learned little about how to leverage their own intellectual worth.
Most of us are never engaged in the world because we wind up doing the same thing every day. We can work at a job and after 30 years look back and see that we have no more than we had in the beginning. That’s Ok if that’s what you want.
This process is for people who want a better life.
Q: Do you see a trend in time of life or gender related to when individuals become earnest about connecting with their authentic cores?
Stedman Graham: Women are in special need of the process because they are defined so much by the external world. They live in such a small box, and it is so programmed. They have such an expectation of what they should do. Their programming is very difficult to break out of without any help. It is very difficult for anyone to break out of if you don’t have the network, if you don’t have the information, if you don’t have the good old boys club, if you don’t have the ability to exchange information with other people who really know how to do it.
Unless there is an alignment of your talent, your skills and your passion with a process for developing them, you are not going anywhere. It doesn’t matter what you want to become, how determined you are, how smart you are. It is impossible to do it unless you come from a core competency that will allow you to grow.
It is a problem of self-empowerment and how to take responsibility for your own actions – which is really centered around personal excellence, results and performance.
You can’t possibly brand yourself unless you have a personal understanding of who you are.
I know that there is nothing that you can’t do. It doesn’t make any difference what your background is, whether your parents had money, etc, you can become equal to anybody following my process. Q: What was it like for you growing up?
This belief system that I could do it is different from how I grew up. I grew up in a small town, part black and part Native American in New Jersey. I grew up believing that it was all about white America, race and government control. I did not understand my own potential as a human being.
It took me 30-something years to understand that my potential was predicated on my skills and talent. I did not know how to self-actualize. My parents told me to go to school and go to work, that was it.
This (blindness) is about not knowing how to process or how to think. It is not centered around other people.
This is about taking responsibility and being able to transcend bias. It is about all those things that will allow you to look at yourself and learn what you need to know about yourself to become more of a leader.
You have to align yourself with the resources of the world.
You have to create a platform that will create some opportunities in the market that you are residing in.
It is a process that blows me away every single day. It closes the achievement gap.
Q: Was there a specific aha! moment for you?
Stedman Graham: It was a combination of things.
I was in a relationship with a very powerful woman, Oprah, so I had pressure every single day to prove myself.
Most people don’t have that kind of pressure so they become comfortable where they are.
Because of the pressure I had to define myself under an umbrella that was bigger than life. That was one influence, and so was understanding business, and how business worked. Having a lot of different mentors was an influence too. I also am a person who is organized and I like that. It helped me come up with a program that I think all successful people have.
I did a comparative analysis of where I came from and where these people were going. And I saw a huge difference. I put that difference into my nine-step program.
It was like this… You’re a man in a relationship with a very powerful woman who reaches 20 million people every single day. You don’t get any respect for that. So the idea of having to find that was part of the catalyst. Being in that circumstance allowed me to look within to survive in that setting. From there I discovered that it is all internal. .
Q: What is your favorite part of your work?
Working with companies and working with business is something I do very well. I really enjoy being able to work with people who are smart. People who are a-plus folks and who are trying to maximize their potential in all spheres. That is what I enjoy most.
Q: What will you be talking about at ChicWIT’s International Women’s Day?
Stedman Graham: I will be talking about the nine steps, and internal and external branding. I do this work with Merrill Lynch working with small businesses and high worth individuals. We change the trajectory of people’s lives.
We go into the idea of success circles. We teach them how to organize their lives based on three areas: education, career development and community development. As a core base of organizing their lives, we want them to be branded as an expert; we want them to make as much money as possible; we want them to be able to give back. We organize their lives around their passion – what we call their life theme.
It really does change the entire financial landscape when you are able to understand what legacy they want to leave and what kind of brand they want in the marketplace.
Lots of people have financial tools. But a lot do not have alignment. That’s what I bring to the table. We give them the process for owning their world.
Q: Many people talk about this kind of personal development. One of the most interesting aspects of your work must be seeing the switch go off when people finally get it… Can you give me a good example of having seen that?
Stedman Graham: There are a number of switches and everybody’s different. Some women may have been held back by their lack of understanding that they can be anything they want. That’s the first switch. Once that switch gets turned on then there is another switch that needs to be turned on and that is “how do you do it”?
Then there are the switches of discovery, planning, being able to integrate that with financial tools, and further alignment.
The idea of being able to change the way you think about your possibilities and about yourself, that is the big switch.
That’s the key to owning your world.
For my own personal life, I wasn’t a great student in school because I never turned it on. Once I did, I realized that I could do as well as everyone. There was unlimited opportunity for me.
Q: Has your relationship with Oprah changed since your switch went off?
Stedman Graham: It doesn’t make any difference about anyone else. It just makes a difference about what you want to do in your own personal life to develop your own potential. The thing that you bring to any relationship is the fact that you are able to be your own man, to be your own person. That is the greatest gift.
You don’t ever have to rely on anyone else because you know how to make things happen, end of story. You can share, and you can talk and you can advise and you can help each other. But you stand alone. That is the greatest gift. Wherever you go you stand alone. And you can hold your own.
You never have to apologize anywhere, anytime for who you are. And you understand how to build and to grow and every day you become better than yesterday. If you get that, that’s freedom.
Regardless of how the world might define you or how other people might see you that’s not the real world you. That’s an illusion.
Q: What do you say to nay-sayers, to those who focus on circumstance?
I say it is harder at the top than at the bottom. It is harder when you have to think. It is more difficult when your life is in the limelight.
Leaders do not have it easy. People at the top know that. Success is not an easy thing to deal with. It is difficult to deal with from the family aspect of it. People change. It is much easier when you are playing softball at the lake.
The naysayers don’t understand what it’s like to be in the limelight. How the media can destroy you.
So it’s not what happens to you. It’scan you handle it. Do you have the capacity to deal with it every single day?
Q: How do you deal with questions of perceived scarcity vs. abundance? How do you counsel or help a kid in the projects recognize the resources around him when he sees pain and disappointment?
Stedman Graham: It’s a process that takes a long time.
You have to have the capacity – what it has taken me to get to this point. Serving in the US army, playing ball all over Europe. It’s taken me graduate school. It’s taken me four years in undergraduate school. It’s taken me working five years in the prison system. It’s taken me working in public relations. It’staken traveling around the world, traveling to South Africa. It’s taken me seeing Winnie Mandela’shouse being burnt down and being right there. It’s taken me almost losing my life in a couple of situations.
You are not here (at this level of awareness) because you have just arrived. You are here because you deserve to be here, not because someone gave you anything. For example, I can tell that your life as a journalist is based on countless hours of writing and developing and reading and working on your craft —- otherwise you couldn’t do it.
You are where you are because you deserve to be there. People might look at you and say, “Oh yeah, you have it easy because you work for this newspaper or that newspaper.” They don’t realize what it took to get there. And you can lose that in one second. Or in one week or two weeks, your life could change.
Q: Many women attending ChicWIT’s International Women’s Day have experienced the tiny little box you described at the beginning, and they have also been through repeated loss related to their careers. How would you counsel them to handle those ups and downs?
Stedman Graham: You have to have gone through that to be the success that you are. You had to have had failures. If you don’t know what it’s like to worry about missing payroll then you can’t appreciate when the money comes.
You are not at the top because you are given anything. You are at the top because you have processed your way through. Most people don’t see the process. They see “A to Z” and think that you have gotten there because of such and such.
What they don’t know is that it is impossible to do (get to the top by maneuvering or circumstance). You can’t maintain the posture. You won’t last. People who are experienced, and people who have gone through the process, and people who have earned the right to be where they are understand that.
Because the determination, the work and the perseverance that it takes to make it – you’ve got to have that. Otherwise you won’t make it.
It’s the never quit and never give-up syndrome. If you don’t have that, no matter what you get involved in, you will never make it.
Q: Many of us fare well at the small victories, but these days sometimes it feels as though you have to be heroic – any advice for that?
Stedman Graham: You have to keep going. You have to have the determination and keep going and not have your spirit broken or give in because it’s hard.
—Sally Duros
Consultant, Editor, Writer and Member of WorldWIT Steering Committee
An interview with
Steadman Graham
WorldWIT
International Women’s Day
June 25, 2004
BY SALLY DUROS
Passion – it’s on the ceiling!
First Published in Sally’s World, April 2003 www.worldwit.org
By SALLY DUROS
In the 80s, we worked hard. In the early 90s, we worked smart. In the late 90s, we worked fast. But now, firmly established in the first decade of the new millennium, we are working all three, but most of all we are working passion.
Today many of us have switched careers or spun out of traditional organizations into smaller more intimate ones – maybe even our own. It’s a realignment of values – we are giving up what doesn’t matter for what does matter. In seeking to live from our hearts in our work and personal lives, we are responding to the irresistible tug of passion.
When passion is present, we don’t stop simply because something goes wrong. We feel the pain, yet we keep going. Having passion doesn’t mean that we will succeed. It simply means that our endurance and resilience are boosted by the power of our authentic presence. Working from passion might improve the likelihood of our success, while most certainly changing our definition of success.
But don’t mistake drive for passion. Drive is a push, not a pull. It takes us away from, not into our hearts.
Sometimes I can’t believe what a wonderful life I have because as a writer and a journalist, I often get to experience mind meld with fascinating and insightful people. Because of a book project that I am working on, I had one of those conversations the other day with Randy Komisar, author of The Monk and the Riddle: The Art of Creating a Life While Making a Living.
Komisar, who is a long-time practitioner of Buddhism, integrates his life and his work with a powerful core belief: Time is short. Don’t squander any of it. Invest your time in only those things that are important.
We were talking about passion and its role in start-up business. Komisar believes that women are better at recognizing and following passion than men are.
I agree.
To live from passion, you have to listen to your intuition and be open to hearing the beat of your personal drummer. Komisar says that women are more open-minded than men in this way, in part because men are slotted into the breadwinner role that women have traditionally been excluded from.
“Women – it’s the other side of the curse, the curse being that they’ve not had the opportunities,” Komisar says.” Women because of that are open-minded about finding what matters. They are empowered because they are disempowered in the traditional sense. Women are much more creative, I think, and much more courageous in terms of looking for those things that really matter.”
“If you think about it, (passion is at the core) of the traditional dilemma of being the super mom,” Komisar says. “You have your family and you have your career. What you see (in the struggle) is balancing two passions.”
“Most of the women involved in the dialogue about balance of life and career are involved because they care about both, because they have passion.”
Men are suffering more than women in this equation, Komisar says.
“Talk to a 50-year old man about what he wants to do next, and he looks at you (lost) … I”ll play golf. There’s no dimensionality. Their whole identity is in one thing.
Komisar, who teaches classes in entrepreneurship at Stanford, says he has learned much from students pushing against his ideas. He now more fully understands the multiplicity of passion. You may have many passions, and you will follow different passions at different times in your life.
Personally, I have been giving passion free rein in my work for a while now. I can attest that it’s difficult, financial lunacy, and often lonely. But I can also attest to the breathless creative flow that occurs when I and my passion are working side by side. There’ s nothing like it.
Except maybe this.
When I was a 10-year-old kid, I and my best friend of the week would do shoulder stands on my living room couch and imagine that we were walking from room to room on the ceiling. We would step over the tops of door frames, whose structures formed little barriers between the rooms, creating an archipelago of ceiling space, and walk from island to island, checking the treasure that laid in the bowls of the glass light fixtures.
Maybe it was the blood rushing to my head, but I used to wonder if my friend were seeing the same thing I was seeing as we explored the upside down world. I would fantasize that I was inside her brain, looking out from behind her eyes, walking on the ceiling from room to room, until it was time to go and I walked down the walls and out the door and across the street to eat dinner with her family. I would be me, but inside her head for just an hour or two, just long enough to understand what it was like to be her.
I haven’t learned yet how to get inside the mind of another, but I have found the next best thing – the wisdom I am exposed to in a great interview and the fact that I can pass it on to you. What could be better? That’s passion!