Originally posted on eurorscgpr.com.
Earlier this week, I went back to school and back to a CBI—the ultimate distinction at Euro RSCG Worldwide and ERWW PR. That’s our shorthand for Creative Business Ideas, those big leaps that rewrite a brand’s potential and give it new probabilities. Back in the early days of aspiring to CBIs, we defined them as “profitable innovations.”
First, some background. In the fall of 1977, I entered Brown University as suburban and wide-eyed as they come, encumbered by too many sweaters and too few meaningful life experiences—but with a faith that I could navigate life by making nonlinear connections if only an Ivy League institution would certify my insanely sane approach to problem solving.
I sailed through Brown, a round peg in the land of round pegs, feeling lucky that I had arrived at a place where quirky individuality was the norm and scholarship flourished in spite of huge appetites for social lives and social issues. I learned of apartheid when students protested for divestiture of Brown’s endowment—and later knew I was living history the first time I visited Johannesburg, to address a Financial Mail conference in 1996, only two years after Nelson Mandela had become that country’s president.
I knew I was living history, too, as I evolved from mall rat and frat-party lover to serious student of sociology, immersed in questions about gender politics and race relations, family dynamics and organizational hierarchies. The irony of Brown was it produced living paradoxes: people who not just called trends as I do, but who also created them. My friends and I perfected the art of participant observer, recording our next decade as blemishes rolled into crow’s-feet and high times became highlights (of the butter chunk variety). Over the years since Brown, I have lived the life of a pseudo-sociologist, if you count my tenure as a market researcher as field experience and the books I have written as very weak contributions to the world of scholarship. I took the easy way and headed to commerce, found my footing at a place called Chiat\Day and became the most virtual of virtual staff in the first—drumroll—virtual office. I lived and worked a good life around the globe, always learning and craving the new.
My most recent “something new” was a CBI: I suggested to Brown that my client Wyclef Jean could join its Haitian Initiative. On Monday, I confronted my past and the future at the same time as I accompanied him to campus for his first day as a visiting fellow in Africana studies at Brown.
The CBI is getting Wyclef, who isn’t a college graduate, into the world of scholarship and empowered to embrace his fellowship to use the time to learn to be a great leader. “As a fellow,” says a press release from the school, “Jean will attend various campus Haitian Initiative events, including lectures, faculty conversations, classes and other offerings.”
There are so many styles of learning and so many ways scholars can help leaders form new approaches to problems; here’s hoping this is what Wyclef gains from his time on campus. The first day was a preview of what dialogues can be—not celebrity presentations, but seriously challenging explorations about future scenarios for Haiti, a land that desperately needs its people and leaders to learn to speak the language of respect for self, country and place, in the present and beyond.
Good things often come unexpectedly, and I have to admit that this brainstorm, hatched in the shower and formulated in the parking lot of HomeGoods (in Stamford, where I happened to be when I got a return phone call from the office of Brown’s president, where one of her gifted associates genuinely understood our request and what Wyclef needs, and what he can offer), is one of my better leaps. The best innovations let everyone gain, and hopefully the halo for change will morph with Brown’s tradition of commitment to Haitian arts and letters. This week, as we listened to Edwidge Danticat read from her book The Dew Breaker, I was hopeful. Dew and “do” made me believe it will be.