– So, I’m just going to start off. I’m welcoming everybody and before we get into chat with James, I’ve asked everybody, I’m inviting you just to say hello in the chat and state maybe your role, your institution and which country you’re in. It’d be interesting to know. And we’re going to start with a little bit of interaction and the only one that is forced upon you today, which is that it’d be good to know and get a sense how everybody’s feeling today. And I’m asking about this in the context of the webinar itself, so, you know, in the context of leading or working and thriving through chaos. So, feel free to pick an emoji, don’t put it in yet, please. Or, we have in the chat put in a feelings wheel. So you might want to pick a feelings from there and post that, but don’t post anything yet please, because I’d like to do it all at the same time so we get a cascade of emojis and feelings coming through. And so hopefully if they are slightly negative, maybe by the end of it we might have changed those feelings for you. So the other thing in this context is just speaking from OneHE that we are running a survey at the moment with the Pod Network, which is the biggest network of educational developers in the US and that survey is also about emotions and where educators are in relation to how they feel at the moment. So we will post that link in as well. So if you get a few minutes, we will be very grateful for you to complete that survey and we will be sharing the learning from that survey as well.

So, I just wanna say before we start off, thank you for your time and we want it to be like a relaxed chat. We want it to be fun as well. And this is an invitation to you to share, to learn and engage with James and other colleagues as well. So the structure of it is we will chat myself and James for about 45 minutes and then we’ll leave the end session about 10, 15 minutes for open questions from yourselves. And so do put the questions in as they arise in your head, but the team behind OneHE will collate them and they’ll send them to me at the end and I’ll try and pick out the ones that probably haven’t been answered as we go through the chat as well.

So with that, I will go into introductions. So you can see from my name I’m Olivia Fleming, I’m one of the three co-founders of OneHE and for those of you who don’t know OneHE, it’s an online platform for educators in higher education to support professional development in teaching and learning. And we do it in a different way, but I won’t go into all of that. We use micro learning and experts from across the world. And one of the experts, of course, that I have met is James Rhee. Myself and James met in Denver in July, 2022. And James was giving a keynote speech there and I was very taken by his approach and his concept of kindness and math. So I also, I think we clicked on the importance of the concept of social capital and goodwill and really then James’ book came out in April, 2024 and you know, it just is a fantastic book at bringing together all the things that we really need to look at and reflect on in relation to the world and its position at the moment. So I think the other thing that we bonded on is that we have a great appreciation of what our parents did for us and having both of us lost both our parents over the last number of years, it really is something that makes us think about what support and grounding they gave us and how we want to recognize that as well.

So I’m going to introduce James and I’m just going to use what’s written in his website as a starter. And of course as we go through the chat you’ll find out lots more about James. So James is a high school teacher and Harvard graduate who became a private equity investor and unexpected CEO. He bridges math with emotions by marrying capital with purpose. His transformational leadership has been recognized by the leading business and civic organizations. His national bestselling book entitled “The Red Helicopter”, was published in April, 2024 in partnership with Harper One and Harper One is an imprint of Harper Collins and it seeks multi-platform ideas that transform, inspire, change lives, and influence cultural discussions. In his debut week, the book was number one nonfiction book across all channels and medias per USA Today. He is working on related film, music, and television projects. His TED Talk and Dare to Lead interview with Brene Brown has captured the imagination of millions. So, welcome James.

– Hello everyone. This was three years coming and part of the mission of “Red Helicopter” is to shed light on people and entrepreneurs and thinkers that I admire who do things the right way, even though it may take a bit longer. So I’m really happy to do this with Olivia. So, hi everyone and thank you for all of your service to young people across the world.

– So James, I’ve gotta get straight into it and I’m just going to challenge you a little bit and just say, so, you know, you’re a former high school teacher, you now hold unprecedented joint appointments in MIT, Sloan Management School, Duke Law School, and Howard University. And in Howard you’re the Johnson Chair of Entrepreneurship and professor of entrepreneurship. So what are you, you know, are you a teacher? Are you a private equity guy, are you a CEO? How would you describe yourself, James?

– I think I’m gonna follow the language my sister said to someone at camp when they asked her if she was Chinese or Japanese in 1981 and we’re Korean. And she said, “I’m a people.” I think that I… That’s what she said and we all laughed at it as a family, but when as I reflect as a 54-year-old, I’m like, God, my sister was wise, as most children are. I’m a humanist. That’s fundamentally what I am. And I think, yeah, I think by nature I am a teacher. I think teacher is both nature and state of being and skillset, right? It’s both. And so by nature I think I am a teacher. Even when I was doing private equity CEO, I’ve always been a teacher. I think the best teachers are the best leaders because in large part because they’re the best learners and they’re really good listeners. So we’re gonna talk a lot about the vectors being actually opposite. So yeah, I think I’m a really good teacher and people say you’re a teacher again. And I said, no, I kind of always remained this way. It’s just that I’ve been very curious and when I was teaching high school, I realized I didn’t know some things. So then I went on an exploratory journey. I went to law school to be a public defender. I didn’t know enough about money, so I managed money and owned a lot of companies and saw how companies also teach adults too, the good ones. And then, yeah, so now these days I also hold formal appointments at schools and I’m in classrooms, but I’ve never stopped being a teacher.

– Great, and like what I noticed now is that you are spending a lot of time in education. So I see that you’ve been to Louisiana School, you’ve been to Southern University or LSU, I should say, you’ve been to Southern University, you’ve been to the University of Massachusetts. So you’re up and down the country, you’re involved in speaking with, you know, key leaders in higher education and you also recently addressed 900 business schools. So what brave truths are you sharing and asking that others might hesitate to actually ask or voice? What is it that you’re saying in these contexts?

– Well, I think for the deans, like the keynote, the AACSB Business School Deans conference and, you know, they invited two outside speakers. So it was me and Ethan Mollick, the AI professor at Wharton and “Red Helicopter” and everything I do and live and breathe, it’s about applied agency. And AI is arguably, if used not well, can be deprivation of agency. I hope that it supplements agency, but I worry about that. So, what I spoke to the deans about was asking them, you know, how clear the narrative was about what it means to be in, quote, business school. Like, why are students, why are you teaching them? To be what, right? To be great business people? Or when I asked, I hope you’re asking them to really be great leaders, first of themselves and then of others. And then in the non-business school context, right? So I talk a lot in law schools and I’ve been to maybe 40, 50 universities in the last year. I’m asking the same questions. And so one, I’m giving educators a hug and saying, I know it’s not easy, it’s not easy being in a caregiver, human-oriented line of work or living right now. It’s a calamity.

On the other hand, I’m also saying, listen, now’s the time to not be on defense, to take a breath and like think offensively about what really is gonna be necessary over the next five, 10 years ’cause clearly we’re in a position of systems devolution and to really try to ignite an entrepreneurial spirit in teachers. And I think teachers and educators, sometimes they underestimate how entrepreneurial that they can be. So, I’m sort of trying to get them there. That’s how the book is written, that tone, it’s not a prescriptive or a loud tone. It’s a nudge and saying there’s more in you than you think. And we really need educators right now to join hands and to really work laterally across institutions and less vertically to create orthogonal alliances amongst different schools and universities that maybe historically have worked independently. And I’m trying to show that in action. So when I go to cities, it’s not just one school, like in Louisiana, it was the main local community bank that hosted me and then visited with me at LSU and at Southern. And so, and civic leaders came, and so we mingled all the students. So it was really mingling the entire community around a common sense of what the future of agency might look like and how people might work together to achieve that.

– And then within that context, you talk, and in the book you talk about systems a lot and systems with the emphasis of life, money, and joy. Can you talk a little bit more about what you mean by that?

– Yeah, so I think that many of you, I hope do this. And I didn’t have the benefit of this in my… I went to a great public school and then I went off to private college. But, you know, I wish someone had told me early on, the reason why you’re going to school is that we’re trying to give you all of the various disciplines on how best to sort of put all this together and to exhibit and own agency. You know, it just never taught. I was never told that, this is why you’re learning all these things. And I think for me, like on systems dynamics, so the MIT folks, where system dynamics was invented, the dean who invited me to join the faculty at Sloan is a system dynamicist. And that was not by coincidence, right? System dynamics, it’s all non-linear thinking and just trying to find correlative causal relationships in a multitude of inputs. And we all know that life is not linear and disciplines are not vertical. They all are related. And so that’s why, for me, like the understanding of systems, how the law connects with numbers, connects with physics, connects with civics and sociology and anthropology and the history. And how do you express that in poetry, music, a data table, like these are all forms of knowledge and the key going forward, particularly in an era of AI, where AI will be able to replicate vertical knowledge, like systems dynamics, it’s very difficult to automate that, right?

To understand how the synapses of where all of these disciplines connect and what the relationships could be, particularly when you overlay onto that human emotion, right? And the notion that in most non-neoclassical economics that people are innately human and innately emotional. And how is AI going to be able to do that? So that’s what I’m teaching at Howard, at Duke, at MIT and to give all of you a flavor of this, the course at Howard is called, ‘The Systems of Life, Money, and Joy.’ That’s what my course is called. And at Duke it’s ‘How the World Works.’ That’s what my course is called, ‘Systems of Life, Money and Joy.’ So, you know, I’m just making sure that the students, whatever they’re learning, I’m teaching how they’re connected and that to really insist upon them to say, I’m not asking you to memorize this, apply this to find your balance of life, money, and joy. Like don’t just memorize it, like apply it and use it in your life. And so all of the coursework, it’s all immersive coursework. It’s immersive exercises where they are actively fidgeting and trying to understand what these mean in practicality, so.

– And let’s go to the book now because kind of the book kind of pulls everything together in a story, and it can, as you’ve said before, and I’ve heard you interviewed that it could be seen as a business book, it can be seen as a parable, it can be seen for parents, for students, for those that are teaching. If you’re spiritual, you’ll look at it in a different way. And, you know, the book came out in April, it went number one across all the media channels and it has resonated across different cultures. And what do you think is the most powerful message that you’re delivering that resonates across cultures within the book?

– I think it’s the words that I am not saying. The book itself, it’s written in a, quote, simple way. I wanted it to be universal and transcendent. I didn’t mean to write a parable. When I submitted it to Harper, they said, “James, you wrote a parable.” And I said, “Oh, that means I think I did a good job” because I wanted it to be a universal story even though it’s ostensibly about my wife, the Ashley Stewart women and my mother in the vehicle of a company called Ashley Stewart and a man named James. It’s not why I wrote the book. It was meant to be universal in nature, which is one of the reasons why I think people have been fascinated with the Ashley Stewart story. So, what I didn’t say, what I mean by that, it’s like how I wrote the book. AI will never be able to replicate how I wrote this book. It is a patchwork, a quilt, of 100 different stories, eight different disciplines, you know, with the full knowledge that I’m applying like that, that people will remember stories. We all know the brain science behind it, without me being prescriptive about it, underneath the story. The brain science is underlying how I’m telling the stories, the emotionality of the stories, when they’re told. There’s a great deal of thought put there that, ah, now the reader’s open to a new ready to learn, ready to experience some cognitive dissonance.

And I think in the classroom, that’s how great learning happens is when you create aperture and the students walk in, but you don’t quite tell them what they’re learning. They have to cinch the learning by themselves, which is why a parable is a really good way to teach people because they have to think, they have to critical think, particularly in an era where we have a lot of technologists sort of flooding the media channels and saying to young people, you don’t have to think, let the computer think for you. And I’m just literally pulling my hair out, listening to this. And I think the other thing that why it’s been, you know, it’s in four languages now and it’s spreading very quickly. And then within the United States it’s like, it transcends political partisanship, race and gender and all of these things. The book is written as a piece of music, you know, and music, it is the language of humanity. And so, for those of you who are interested, the original music is on my website on the Immersed tab. I literally wrote the music first and then wrote the lyrics. And that is how I approach all problems. I’m like, how do I communicate the problem, the dilemma, and the solution in a way that people will remember it and feel it and rationally address it at the same time. And so for me, like in a lot of ways with my private sector work, I approach companies almost like they’re like musicals and in the classroom, the curricula is not a linear form. It’s a journey. And so the book is a journey. And so I think that’s what’s resonating with people in a lot of ways. It’s a individual hero’s journey in reading the book. Yeah.

– And, now I’m going to, ’cause you mentioned feelings. I’ve gotta ask people to just post their emoji or how, if they’ve picked a feeling from the feeling wheel, if you’ve come in late, just I asked earlier just to pick an emoji that would demonstrate how you’re feeling in the context of our discussions today. Because, you know, one of the things having, you know, even preparing for our discussion today, James, I reread the prelude and re-listened, actually. I find it easier to listen to the book. Things just chime with me easier. And it really hit me again that there is, you know, everything you have done with regard to your words and your structure is very purposeful in the book. And every time you read it, like all great books, you’ll get more and more out of it. And so I thank you for that. Very, very smart and rewarding to read it and read it again. So just speaking of the book, one of the main things, and it’s in the title itself, is you talk about this approach of combining kindness and maths. Talk about these elements and what do they mean to you and why bringing them together provides a powerful framework for transformation.

– So, the first reason is similar to how in chapter nine of the book I talk about musical counterpoint, where it’s a music theory where you have two melodies and they are beautiful each on its own, but the way that they sing together, they create a third emergent melody. So, kindness and math are ostensibly two separate and distinct and potentially oxymoronic disciplines, right? So it’s really forcing people to pause and to reconcile, you know? And we are increasingly living in a world that wants us to live a linear and binary life. That’s just not how humans are wired. And the beauty of humanity lies not in the zero or the one, it’s in the two. And so that’s number one, right? That’s the first reason, I’m challenging people. And to just pause and to reconcile and to realize that pure reconciliation is never possible. There’s always, like in jazz, there’s dissonance and that’s okay. Like, that’s how life is. And I think that’s why on the Brene Brown podcast, she was teasing me and I said, “Brene, are you calling me a hot mess?” And she’s like, “Yeah, kind of.” And she’s like, “That’s good.” I said, “It is good because life is messy.” Critical thinking’s messy.

And I think the second reason why I chose kindness and math, when I said it in that cafeteria, when it was absolute chaos. And the cafeteria is a metaphor for the United States or the world. It’s chaos. And it came out of my stomach, it came out of the intuitive, you know, out of the wise versus the informed. It’s out of, instead of the deductive, the intuitive. I didn’t know what else to say in that moment when I’m the least qualified person to run the company and the company’s six weeks away from liquidation. And I’m find myself the first time CEO of a Black woman’s company that sells fashion and I’m none of the above. And I just said, you know, can we center kindness and math? And, I just said it. But when you really dig through the history books and really what those two words signify, really what I was really pointing at was truth. Because kindness, the most cited writer about kindness in a secular way was Rousseau. And he used to write letters to Adam Smith when they were sort of conceiving a system of free markets and democracy, which they were made fun of and say, what are you talk, it doesn’t exist. But they wrote about kindness ’cause kindness is fundamentally the underpinning of agency. It’s an investment in someone else’s agency. That’s what kindness is. We just misremember ’cause we watch too much YouTube or Instagram and we think it’s niceness. It’s not. Kindness has a long history.

And then you also realize that the founding father of capitalism, you know, Adam Smith, he was not a vertical thinker. Like, he wrote about morality and about ethics. And for some reason these days we are pushing people toward very vertical specialization when in reality, during times like this, systems thinking, you need more polymaths, you need to have enough grounding in multiple disciplines to understand, which is one of the reasons why I really am emphasizing the humanities. I’m not public yet, but I’ll be joining a very prominent like independent humanities board in the United States that’s independently endowed with a independent voice, not relying on the government because what are we doing? Like, what’s the point of anything other than humanity And kindness is the pinnacle of humanity. It’s agency. And then math is math. I mean, math is a science, math would exist even if there were no humans, right? Two plus two would be four even if there were no humans on this earth. They wouldn’t use those words, but that’s what it would be. It’s empirical truth. So that’s what, I said kindness and math. So really in retrospect, it was quite wise, but it was, trust me, by accident

– And it’s a word that’s used a lot when we’re kids and in primary school, but it just seems to go once the kids step out of primary school into secondary school and it doesn’t seem to be acknowledged or rewarded, vulnerability as well. It’s kind of something that you have to shy away from in order to show that you’re strong. And this really is what this kind of unrestrained capitalism has promoted in a way.

– [James] Yeah.

– So-

– Yeah, it’s ultimate, you know, toxic masculinity, it hurts men in the long run, too, because men, you know, they look at all the factors. You know, men are the loneliest, they’re lonely, they have no friends, and no hobbies. They’re angry and it’s an injustice that’s been served upon men, too, like to say you can’t talk about your feelings?

– Yeah. And it’s lonely. You know, the world becomes very lonely if you don’t lead or recognize through your emotions or understand your emotions and the impact they have and be able to share them. And that leads to the fact that capitalism does create a lonely environment. And really what we’re finding from the results coming back from our survey is the importance of community and, you know, really embracing that and going back to the values and working in a very networked way and not the capitalist way of more and more and more with less, less, less.

– Well, let’s be careful, like in the extreme forms and demented forms of capitalism, yeah, right? So like what I write about in the book is, you know, it’s a real like pray gospel to the theory of mutualism, right? So the whole book is about connectedness. So, whether it’s synaptic connectedness in terms of your brain, how it works, it’s connectedness in terms of systems dynamics, in terms of encouraging interdisciplinary understanding. It’s connectedness in terms of human empathy and the Korean word ‘chong’, which is, there’s no western equivalent of that word, is the connectedness that made this Korean private equity man and millions of Black women who had never met each other become very close and ultimately the chair of entrepreneurship at Howard, right? It’s this connectedness that exists at a very human intuitive level in that we devised a system in the private sector that enforced and reinforced this mutualism and connectedness, which enabled us to make a lot of profits to even grow and pay people more, support childbirths, buy better health insurance. It’s possible, right? So this is what the book is about. It’s really questioning and saying, I think for those of you who haven’t read the book, one of the most important things that, the measurements that I had in the business, I counted family formation, I counted babies because a lot of the families weren’t forming. ‘Cause you can imagine that I had a predominantly female workforce and they were nervous about starting families because the company was not doing well. The leave policy was terrible, the health insurance wasn’t good enough.

And so I made it a point to say, I really, if you want to have families, we’re going to encourage you to have families and we’re gonna make it possible. So it required a systemic change in 20, 25 different policies at the same time. You know, I measured, the second measurement was safety. I was like, I really can’t conceive of you getting hurt at work. That means I would be a terrible CEO and I meant it. And so, changed all those policies and we ended up breaking all the actuarial tables like, if you think about what actuarial tables mean, it’s predictive of the future. It’s a metaphor for algorithms and AI, right? That this is what is predictive of the future. We completely snapped with the past and it was such that the mathematicians came into our office and said, “We’ve never a business change like this.” And they asked, “How did you do this?” I said, well, it’s operationalization of kindness. It’s not flippant words. It’s literally like we’re rewarding the behavior, pro-social, pro-mutualistic behavior. We are rewarding it and we’re tracking it. And this is not a kindness day. This is not a kindness Instagram. It’s like we’re expecting this kind of behavior. And if you don’t want to behave like this and realize that you’re connected to your colleagues and your communities, then you can’t work here. Then don’t work here. And so that’s what was said.

– And so if we move this into the education context, like we know that it’s tough to be a teacher, an educator now. Education is under attack. Educators, like I can see through the emojis here on the right, you know, they feel demoralized by public criticism. There’s political attack. They’re surrounded by it at the moment. So how do we start to, in the corporate sector where if you work with a company, if you work at the top, you can influence change. Now put yourself in the education sector where it’s sitting in a very difficult critical environment. We’re speaking to educators here as are those that are influencing and supporting educators. What is it that we can change or what practices can we start to take on in order to affect some positive change here?

– Gonna interpret your question. So I think it’s two different. One is people in the classroom and then their peers. And then there are people I think probably on the Zoom that are not in the classroom itself. They’re in administration, right? So, it’s different. So I think that, look, there’s no silver bullet, right? So a lot of it does, number one, leadership is critical. Leadership of, you know, like university president level, dean level, provost level. Those are critical. Those are critical positions. And I think what we’re finding, unfortunately, you know, and we all still see really bad forms of leadership, good and bad leadership make all the difference. We got lazy into thinking that maybe humans didn’t matter. Leadership makes all the difference. Which is why I started off this Zoom saying, isn’t school to create great leaders of yourself and of others? Isn’t that sort of why we want people to come to school?

I think the second thing that I’ll tell you practically what I’m doing is that at Howard, I am working with different schools and faculty members and the administration altogether to take baby steps. This is not 100% wholesale change, but baby steps to nudge partnerships with different faculty from different disciplines to work together, to create new ideas, to create potentially experimental seminars, right? To really create laboratories where people work together and converge in ways they haven’t done. And it also creates excitement, right? Because some of this is that, you know, with all the hardness and sort of sometimes difficulty, I know that everyone’s tired and has limited bandwidth, but like sometimes carving out an extra hour or two a week, even though you’d rather sit in front of watch Netflix, I get it. Me too. But, like these new projects, it’s to spark, right? It’s fun. Like, it’s like why not? Why shouldn’t we just try it? And that’s what’s happening in the schools that I’m associated with, that there’s just, let’s just try, like why not? Right? And it takes one administrator, one other faculty member to sort of make that happen. And then a few students, you know, they come, they volunteer. So that’s what we’re doing.

And I think the other thing to sort of also just acknowledge this is not, you know, one of the things that it may not sound wonderful to say, I said it 12 years ago during the beginnings of Ashley Stewart, when I was trying to convince people to support us, which no one did, a lot of the world that we’re living in now, it’s not surprising to me. We said this was coming. This is, if you watch, read history every 80, 90 years, there’s like massive systems reset. That’s plus de-leveraging, plus a geopolitical reset. We are in that we’re not immune to the cycles of civilization, right? This is what we’re in and this systems reset that’s happening in this country, it’s not the fault of one man or, it’s been happening since the last 15, 20 years. It almost all got reset in 2008. This isn’t going away. And so this is a fundamental change in how we live, right? It’s not just tech, it’s all of it. It’s a fundamental in how we live and education’s part of how we live. And we’re, as educators, not immune from having to change. We’re not, you know? And so when I think about the skill sets necessary for the students going forward, it’s hyper agency, hyper agency, right? Because if it’s not hyper agency, a computer will do it better.

So, what does hyper agency means? To me, that’s why the book is structured as life, money, joy. It’s that balance between all three of them. They have to choose that balance. They have to focus on where they all connect, the skill sets that are multi-discipline, they’re hyper creative. They then combine like orthogonal things like kindness and math. They’re gonna have to really forge their own way. And I think that as teachers, you know, I started off before saying, you know, I think great teachers are the greatest learners. So I think all of us as adults are gonna have to learn and relearn and challenge ourselves. And I know that that can be exhausting, but a lot of that book is about me going through an experience and unlearning a lot of things and relearning and it’s really honest and it’s painful sometimes. There was a lot of loss in the book and a lot of ego death in the book and, but I really learned a lot of new things, too. Made a lot of new friends. And the book is sort of nudging adults as well to sort of have that, can you experience a second childhood almost, you know? And I’m not saying it’s easy.

– No, and you talk about hyper agency, but in order to support the students to have hyper agency, educators need to have agency.

– [James] Yeah.

– Is there anything from your experience then with Ashley Stewart, because you saw a change of mindset in the time you worked with them, that you would say, okay, there are things that we can take out of this that you’d like to share with educators or kind of where to start because sometimes that impetus just has to be found. And I think that what we found in OneHE is there are a lot of like-minded people out there. We are here to put them together, to facilitate people finding agency and educators, one of the things that is dear to my heart is that educators are, we all are in a privileged position that we can help others learn. So, it’s kind of reminding ourselves of that internally for that to come out in order then to hold that agency and to retake that agency, which I think the system has kind of drained people off. What’s your thoughts on that, James?

– I think, you know, with all due respect to the administrators on the Zoom, but like, it really does start at the very, very top and the board level. And this is a statement of sympathy for those in the classroom. It’s why at the Business School Dean’s conference, I said to everyone, I had 900 deans, right, across the world, “What’s the point of business school? What is it? To make a lot of money? Like, what is it? To get donations, build a new gym?” It’s to create great leaders, like, it has to be, right? And then we define leadership. So I think that’s number one. So for those of you in the classroom, yeah, I think that there are schools, I’m sure, just like with companies, with not great leadership, and, you know, the boards have to do a better job and realize that schools are not meant to be fundraising machines. They’re places of learning. And I’ll leave it at that, right? They’re places of learning and experimentation and wisdom and not power and not money. That’s what schools are. I think many schools have lost their way on that. So I hope that the schools re-find their way and those that don’t, they won’t make it.

And the second thing I would say in terms of like on the education side, you know, I’ve found that with Ashley Stewart for instance, or my students anywhere, like I come a lot to the word emergence, you know, it’s belongs in the same family as intuition and wisdom. It’s getting the wisdom and that the dynamic of it is the teaching. It comes from almost within. You’re creating an environment or you’re speaking in some parable form that then it comes out, like the understanding or the learning, it’s like inside, outside, you know? And so that happened at Ashley Stewart because a lot of the women there, like my mom as you know, Olivia, like, they tended to doubt themselves and say, oh, I don’t know. I don’t play well in the systems of this I’m losing. And I’m like, well that’s because the systems are designed for you not to win. Like, it’s not you. And that’s why systems dynamics is so important, so people can see the game, chapter four, “Monopoly”. And then once you sort of do that, a lot of it is you’re doing social psychology/therapy in the classroom because some of this, when you unlearn and you start seeing things that way, it’s emotional. So I really do allow emotion in the classroom, laughter and tears. And that’s just neurological. When you have those two emotions, you feel safe. It’s the ultimate expression of safety and/or you experience some safe cognitive dissonance where you’re willing to take a different view and learn.

And so that’s what I do a lot. It’s emergence theory and like having the students realize that they had a lot of this wisdom inside them already and that maybe they didn’t have a word to it, a name to it. And, and that’s what happens. And I also find by doing that, I learn a lot from my students or when I was CEO, I learned a lot from the, quote non CEOs. I was like, why wouldn’t I, that’s my job. Like, I’m not supposed to know everything. And so that’s the other thing that, you know, as you know in the book, all my armor came off, was basically walking. I still am walking around the world naked. I’m like, I’m not supposed to know everything. How fun is this? Permission to learn. And for some reason as adults, like we feel like we give ourselves no permission to learn anymore. Like after you graduate college or maybe grad school, you’re not supposed to learn anymore? Who can stand up to that scrutiny of perfection as a human? So like, I’m like, good, I don’t know anything, so teach me.

– Yeah. And we force children.

– [James] Yeah.

– Sorry. We force children to make decisions about the rest of their lives between the age of 14 and 18. It’s crazy. Crazy.

– [James] And adults in the age of thirties and forties, right?

– Yeah.

– So Like, we’re all living longer. I think that we’ve listened to the narrative of society that we’re supposed to be stopping learners at the age of 20 something, know exactly what we’re gonna do. That’s just not true and that’s why the trope of the helicopter, it’s not just the red helicopter toy, but I also teach my students and the people I work with in the private sector, I’d rather you be a helicopter than an airplane. I don’t need you to be a high flying powerful person that wants to fly everyone and be the pilot. I’d rather you be a helicopter that’s very agile, can fly in six different directions, can land anywhere, can reset, have vertical lift, can hover and pause and think. I think being a helicopter, that sort of agility of being a helicopter, is a really great trope for hyper agency. I think planes have much less agency because mostly when you fly an airplane, it’s on autopilot. Helicopter, there’s no such thing as autopilot in a helicopter. It’s constant small adjustments. And I think that’s by definition the definition of being a human. It’s constant small adjustments. And helicopters, people have been trying to make helicopters irrelevant for a long time because they’re inefficient. They’re loud. They’re clumsy, right? But they persist. And I think that’s what humans, humans are not meant to be perfect. And I hope human beings persist too, even though they’re not perfect like a computer.

– And keeping things human and being human centered and the use of AI to support us in doing our best job is a way to look at it and not be scared by it in a way, you know, to take control. So James, when you look forward, what is the legacy across, your legacy, across the business side, the education side, the culture? Where do you want have the most impact, particularly in these days to this counterbalance, this polarization that’s going on? What is it that you would feel, yeah, I did this.

– Well, I think that… the reason why I wrote the book, I mean, you know, not to spoil the book, but I lost both my parents during the course of the book. Not an easy time. And I was gonna go off quietly into the sunset. And I wrote the book because the timing of the book is purposeful given everything that’s happening in the world. I wanted to show people that what you think is impossible is possible. That’s number one. You had a twice bankrupt company, one of the largest businesses, if not the largest serving and employing predominantly Black women in this country. You had a private equity Asian man with no prior retail experience. And, without the use of money, it was like the third form of capital, we put in a system that actually worked because it centered human wellness. And it was backed by a lot of knowledge and sophistication from math, and from law, and all the disciplines. But it really centered the humanities and social sciences. So number one, anyone who says it can’t happen, I’m just like, I beg to differ. I wish you were with us at the cafeteria in 2013. There are a lot of people who wanted us to fail. And, I think, that legacy is already – now the book is out, it’ll live forever. The stories of these women and my mother and my dad will live forever now and I’m grateful. I think the second thing, you know what “Red Helicopter” is, it’s not just a book, it’s a way of being, it’s an operating system, right? For your life, for an operating system, for a company, for a school. It’s a structure of a curriculum.

So I hope that, like “Red Helicopter”, over time will just become a very high permission but very strong metaphor or symbol on what it means to be human. It’s a heuristic. I’m reminding people, I’m like, remember this little red helicopter boy who gave half his sandwich away and got a toy? What do you think? Like, stop believing all of the AI’s gonna fix everything. Who needs teachers? I mean, come on. It’s just nonsense to me. And I really hope that the people on this call and the people who do work in this way, my dad was a pediatrician, my mom was a nurse. So people who invest in humans, we have to be audacious too. There’s a lot of audacity coming from people who think the opposite, right? Tech, power, loud. Why can’t people who believe in the opposite, humanity, teaching, caregiving, why can’t we be as audacious, too? And I’m encouraging us to have the audacity, to have courage, to be brave and to speak, right? And so we were audacious at Ashley Stewart. The world laughed at us and we said, disregard, we don’t believe you. And this book is audacious. The TED Talk’s audacious. People said, “You wanna really do a TED Talk on a book about kindness?” I’m like, what else is there to talk about? What else will we have in five, 10 years? Why can’t kindness be audacious?

– And I think the fact that you naturally wrote a parable as opposed to a business book is totally right, is totally right that it actually ended up that way because I’m a firm believer in storytelling. And storytelling is what makes the world go around. It’s been with us for eons, since the beginning of time. And we need to be able to be people to relate to how to do things, how it can relate in their context. And I think the way to do that is through stories and to keep telling stories and that’s where community comes in. And if we share that things work in our context, people maybe are brave enough to try it in their context. And then it’s just a domino effect to further change to happen and change to emerge.

– Yes – And we need to recapture the story of education, right? I mean I think there’s a lot of, you know, arrows and slingshots being taken at teachers and educators and there’s no doubt there’s some change, there’s some systemic changes that will happen in ed and change is always good. It’s a part of life. That said, some of the things and the narratives are coming out of the mouths of others, they just have to be counteracted very forcefully and say, “What are you talking about? Like, really? Like, you really think that this is like the emotional wellness, the whole wellness of a person can be done with AI?” Like, it’s ridiculous. And I’m not sure if the level of like that tone is being, we need to be stronger in the language.

– Yeah, and that’s why kindness and emotions need to be brought into it because it’s a holistic approach, you know, instead of what we’ve been channeled into thinking and believing success is, you know, and I think that’s why we have the two of us in particular, we’ve talked about appreciate what our parents did because they are lifelong educators no matter what role they did and they gave back so much and great roles in doing that. So James, where to next for you? What’s on the agenda for you?

– Well, “Red Helicopter” continues to just roll out. I just got back from Korea where the education system needs complete reform because it was based fully on memorization and testing versus actually application. So there’s a lot of interest in just the principles and operating system of “Red Helicopter” in Korea. It will be heading to Brazil in a few months. It’s in Portuguese and Spanish, it’s coming out in September. So it’s a lot of teaching and sort of introducing the book and the principles because it’s a parable, it requires people to read it and to think and then they call me and say, “Can we talk about it now?” And I said, “Sure.” And then I come armed with all of my music, movies, curriculum, I show people, and then it’s like, oh my gosh, that’s what this is. So like there’s gonna be a lot more teaching, a lot more sort of seeing if it can be synchronously, asynchronously delivered. I’m teaching it through, you know, there’s some movie and musical projects that are in the works as well. So think about conveying the story like on massive scale. I am teaching these principles within businesses, actively, because businesses have a responsibility to teach adults, too.

Adults can continuous learn as well. So just think about “Red Helicopter” as just sort of like a set of principles and it’s being applied to humans, whether they’re young humans, older humans at work, humans who are entrepreneurs and starting a business like Olivia, you know, it’s wherever humans are. I think what you’re gonna find in reading the book, which is much more from sort of maybe more Asian philosophy, it’s like, it’s just the oneness of a human. I don’t treat people differently just because they’re in school or at work. Like it’s one holistic being and we’re all very complicated. So, “Red Helicopter” will continue to expand and a couple more books coming and you know, maybe even a television show, like, think about Mr. Rogers meets Trevor Noah, that type of show, you know?

– Yeah, very good. Sounds really exciting. I don’t see any questions coming into the chat, but guys, it would be great to, if you wanna share something, make a comment, ask James a question directly, you can put it in the chat or you can raise your hand here, you know, use this time to ask that burning question that you might have for your own context or maybe James’s thoughts on where things are going with education. Like, we do really recognize this is a difficult, challenging time for education, particularly the North American context, but, you know, change is required for all of us really in the world because that’s how the world is, what’s happening to us. So I think for me, what I took out, well there’s so many things I took out James’s book, but one of the main things I think, for me, in the context of OneHE, is about agency. How can we support educators in re-finding, supporting, strengthening agency so people feel empowered to do the great job that you’re doing and continue to do them. So yeah. So I’m just gonna pause for a minute to see if there’s any questions, any hands being raised here. Okay, we’ve got one from Charlotte. Given the importance of senior leadership in making changes in an institution, do you have strategies for individual educators to nudge upwards, nudge leadership in a different direction?

– Yeah, I get this, so, you know, in different context, too. So picture the same question of a person running a product line in a company, but they have a difficult CEO, you know, so the dilemma is if you’re not the ultimate, ultimate decision maker, what do you do? Right? And I think there’s no easy answer. The first one is in terms of in the spirit of agency, you’re never fully in control of anything in your life. Like, that’s the irony about agency. It’s that it actually requires like its serenity now and there’s a huge amount of surrender involved in actually achieving a state of agency. And so the first advice is that you can’t control what the senior leadership is doing. This is not the same as learned helplessness, but just bear with me. So you can’t completely control what they’re doing, nor can your university president also that he or she has a board, and alumni and all of these things.

And so the advice I generally give is just in your classroom, in your department, it’s hyper agency there and you can’t put off things or say what’s gonna be the reaction. You just have to put your best foot forward and you have to sort of innovate and move forward as best you can. That’s number one. Number two, in terms of I’m dealing with this. I’m not president of a university, I’m not full-time faculty at the universities. It’s a lot of conversations and it’s a lot of nudging and trying to show people where things are going in two to five years anyway. And so I spent a lot of time visually showing this is where we’re going to end up in five years. Should we not take the lead now? And it’s hard for people to sort of words and anger it doesn’t work. I mean it’s just, that’s why I speak in these lots of questions and lots of hypotheticals and I ask leaders to sort of answer the questions and say, what do you think about this? What’s the logical conclusion to this?

– And just link to that, James, where do you see things going now if people don’t have agency? What will be forced upon higher education or education in general?

– Well, I think that from a consumer standpoint, like, ’cause let’s, again, it’s different in different countries. I’m speaking from the American’s perspective where the cost of education is very different relative to other places in the world, right? So, meaning really high. We forget that students, they are consumers, they are, and this is a big investment. And most students for many decades didn’t think about twice that if you were sort of in a certain path, you’d pay for education, you’d go. Clearly, that’s not happening right now. And people are starting to make investment decisions about is it worth spending this much money for four years to get, what, what’s the incremental pay? What am I learning? And it’s already happening now, like skills-based hiring or like non-degree hiring. These are trends that have been happening for the last five years. So yeah, there’s gonna be a lot of pressure.

There’s gonna be fewer and fewer people electing to make the investment for an education unless there can be a more tangible argument that this investment, quote, pays off. I saw it particularly in the business schools and in that degree, you can see like, I think 25% of HBS kids are unemployed. This is Harvard Business School. And I really hope that there’s gonna be opportunity for sort of modified different programs and collaborative programs among schools that are new ways to teach, new vehicles, new products that are go beyond like summer school, like continuing ed, right? There are other markets that are not tapped yet. Like, if you believe that adults should keep learning and that companies should keep doing that, maybe you’ll see more and more partnerships between companies and educational institutions. More. And so it’s not all doom and gloom, it’s like maybe there’s gonna be a drop off in 18-year-old enrollment, but maybe there’s gonna be a lot more enrollment of 25, 30, 35, 40-year-old adults learning. And there’s a huge market for that so-

– I think that’s where Harvard sees a lot of its future as well. It’s in the lifelong learners.

– Yeah. It’s Exec ed to the alum, right? The alumni base. Everyone’s living longer. You have markets, I’ve been spending time in senior care. So how about their senior care facilities in terms of their partnering with higher ed, too? And so the senior residents are keeping their mind sharp by taking master’s level classes at universities and then performing like adjunct faculty type functions for students for themselves. So there’s all of this, it’s future of living. I think that when I think about the future of education, I first start with how are we going to live? And then, where does continuous learning fit in?

– [Olivia] Yeah.

– And so I think it’s very exciting. Like if you have the content, there’s so many places to put the content, so many new learners. I think that we’re only thinking the addressable markets, young people. It’s just not.

– Yeah. The old way of working and retiring at a certain age just is gone. And that requires us to continue in lifelong learning. And, for me, I find that really exciting. You can evolve and do so many different things with your life. Yeah, it’s exciting and-

– And, by the way, like it not only is exciting and fun and stuff to also put another argument, you know, for it, for some it may be economically mandatory to do it, right? Retirement is not going to be an option for some and we’re gonna live longer. And so you may have to get re-skilled in your fifties and sixties and it may be you have to.

– But working longer keeps your brain more active anyway in your learning. So, you’re doing both.

– [James] Yeah.

– So we are up against, we’re just over time. James had said earlier to me he was happy to stay around if there was any further questions. I know some people have joined us late. I think there was a mix-up on the Zoom times earlier on, so I apologize if anybody has come in late. This is being recorded. It will go up in a couple of days everybody – with open access – so everybody will be able to join in their asynchronous way into the webinar. I’ll just hang on and just say, is there any burning question for anybody? Does anybody wanna make a comment? James is here for another few minutes if people so wish. We’ve some positive comments for you.

– [James] Can I say one more thing, too?

– Yes.

– It wasn’t asked. One of the things that I’ve found to be very, you know, and, upon reflection, in a lot of ways “Red helicopter”, it’s one third Western European philosophy, one third Asian, specifically like Korean philosophy, and one third philosophy that I was immersed in with my predominantly Black American women friends. And it’s a blend of all of those three philosophies, in particular, that we sort of picked and chose and sort of connected them and devised a way of living and learning. And I know that from my experience in my personal life, just having been born here, I sing Bruce Springsteen, by the way, with a steel string guitar. Okay. This is how I grew up. My parents were obviously Korean, just I’ve traveled a lot. I’ve been in countries that I didn’t speak the language, I wrote for a travel book in Austria in 1993 when I looked like this, hiking the Alps. I just think for me, being in new areas where I had to start over again or knew no one, was in a position where I needed other people’s generosity and kindness to really get by, has been so important in my life. And Ashley Stewart obviously was, even though I was the CEO, I was not, the women were the CEO. I helped channel a lot of things and I’m very grateful for what they did for me. So, I think, that just both of you all as humans, but then for your students, just to encouraging you all to sort of look at some of this discomfort as opportunities for growth, for asking for help when you need it ’cause I certainly was not very good at that. And you’ll read in the book, I learned the hard way how to ask for help in a very difficult time for me. I just hope that you find and can be the friend that does that for other people to make it easy for someone to ask for help. And then on the education side, I really hope that more study abroad programs are implemented. And that form of like continuous education, continuous learning, like being immersed in a two, three week program in a country you don’t speak the language in and having universities partner across oceans, that’s very exciting and I think it’s gonna be a huge growth channel, ’cause I think great leaders are gonna have that global perspective to understand, sort of pick and choose from different ways of living and philosophies to thrive in a global economy. I didn’t say that during, I’m sorry, I like asked myself a question. I’m answering the question. I think there’s multiple in that, what I just said. I’m hopeful and I also think it’s very exciting, too.

– And, you brought out an emotion there. You know, you put yourself out there. It’s about vulnerability and I totally agree. And when you are vulnerable, when you open up, you get kindness. So, we can tie it all back together. And, it’s just great and I totally agree. I studied in France. It was the toughest thing I ever did in my life and I felt very vulnerable, but boy, did I learn a lot from it. And it set me up for a lot of things. So yes, putting ourselves out there, trying new things, stretching ourselves a little and putting ourselves in other people’s shoes. And it really made me appreciate international students in the context of when I was learning through English then, and what they were going through. So yes, totally, totally agree with you. So James, I just want to say thank you so much for your time. I think the work that you’re doing is amazing. I’m excited that there is a lot more to come. And I would say to those who have hung on and it’s in the chat, read the book, listen to the book. Listen to the book again, read the book again. Each time you’ll get more and more out of it. So, thank you very much for your time and thank you for those who stayed on.