How I realized the incredible impact that great bosses have By Vivek Wadhwa.

I don’t care if you have to take drugs, you have to build it in six months,” said my boss, Khurshed Birdie, when I told him that he was on drugs if he thought my team could create a software development toolset in less than three years. This was in 1986 at Credit Suisse First Boston, one of New York City’s top investment banks. We were rebuilding the company’s trade processing systems to run on a client–server model of computing. This technology is common now, but then it was as futuristic as “Star Wars.”
The result was that my team worked day and night to build a technology that became the foundation of the company’s information systems. It gave Credit Suisse First Boston a competitive edge and led IBM to invest $20 million in a spinoff company that was formed to market the tools we had developed.
I was a lowly computer programmer — analyst when Birdie hired me: a computer geek who didn’t own any three-piece suits, white two-ply cotton shirts, or wing-tipped Oxford shoes — the uniform of investment bankers. Yet I was hired on the spot. I had some far-out ideas about how computer systems could be built — but didn’t believe for a second that I could implement them. My boss did: he believed in me more than I did, and he bet a $100 million project on my vision. He allowed me to expand my team from four to fifty-five people and shielded me from criticism by other teams who had to use my tools to build their systems — and who thought I was crazy. There were a lot of problems along the way, and Birdie allowed me to learn from my mistakes. And then he promoted me to vice president of Information Technology when I achieved success.
Birdie was what Sydney Finkelstein, a Dartmouth business professor, in his new book, Superbosses: How Exceptional Leaders Manage the Flow of Talent, calls a “superboss.”
As Finkelstein explains, superbosses take chances on unconventional talent. Oracle’s founder, Larry Ellison, hired candidates who had accomplished something genuinely difficult, rather than those with formal qualifications, because he believed they would rise to the technical challenges. Designer Ralph Lauren offered jobs to strangers whom he met while dining in New York City restaurants. Superbosses take raw talent and build self-confidence. They hire for intelligence, creativity, and flexibility — and are not afraid of people who may be smarter than they are.
Under Finkelstein’s definition of superbosses, Birdie would be categorized as a “glorious bastard”: someone who cares only about winning. Deep down, he had a good heart — but was ruthless in setting expectations and driving people to work extremely hard. I’ll never forget him telling me that “Christmas was an optional holiday.” These bosses realize that to get the very best results, they need to drive people to perform beyond what seems reasonable and achievable.
Even though I achieved a lot, I hated working for Birdie, because I had to neglect my family for months on end. This isn’t something I would ever do to my employees. My next boss, Gene Bedell was very different. He left his job as managing director of information technology in order to found Seer Technologies, the start-up that IBM had funded. Bedell convinced me to leave my high-paying investment-banking job to join him in a number-two role, as chief technology officer, at the low-paying, high-risk, startup.
Bedell was what Finkelstein calls a “nurturer”: someone who coaches, inspires, and mentors. These superbosses take pride in bringing others along and care deeply about the success of their protégés; they help people accomplish more than they’d ever thought they could.
Bedell managed by a method he called “outstanding success possibilities.” He challenged his executives to set ultra-ambitious goals and then find unconventional ways to achieve them. Instead of managing to what was achievable and possible, we shot for the impossible. And then did whatever it took to get there — without worrying about failure or looking back. It is amazing what you can achieve when you have a single-minded focus. We took Seer Technologies from zero to $120 million in annual revenue and an IPO in just five years — faster than any other software company of that era, including Microsoft and Oracle.
Superbosses create master–apprentice relationships. They customize their coaching to what each protégé needs and are constant fonts of practical wisdom. Bedell taught me how to sell. A year after the company was formed, he sent me to Tokyo to sell IBM-Japan on an $8.6 million deal to fund the creation of a Japanese version of our product. I didn’t think that a techie like me could do these things; he taught me that selling was an art that could be learned and perfected. I helped our salespeople close more than $200 million in software deals. And that is another skill that superbosses have, building what Finkelstein calls the “cohort effect”: teamwork and competition combined. Lorne Michaels, for example, who created Saturday Night Live, judged writers and performers by how much of their material actually went to air — but they had to do it with the support of their coworkers, the people they were competing with.
A common trait of superbosses is the ability to delegate work and build jobs on the strengths of their subordinates. They trust them to do their jobs and are as supportive as can be. They remain intimately involved in the details of the businesses and build true friendships. Bedell often invited my family to his vacation home near the Outer Banks of North Carolina. He took me to Skip Barber Racing School to learn how to race a Formula Ford, and built a gym in his basement so that his executive team could lift weights together.
You will find the alumni of our project at Credit Suisse First Boston and Seer Technologies in senior leadership roles now, at companies such as IBM, PayPal, American Express, and every one of the top investment banks. Many started their own companies, as I later did. There are literally hundreds of people who built successful careers because of my two superbosses. When I became an academic later in life, I was fortunate to have two superboss deans at Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering, Kristina Johnson and Tom Katsouleas, who nurtured me. Superbosses aren’t just in corporations — they can be found everywhere.
Yes, I know that I got lucky in having good bosses; most are jerks who demotivate employees, slow their growth, backstab, and take credit for others’ work. You are usually stuck with whomever you get. But there is nothing that stops you from being a superboss. As you begin to achieve success, start helping others and nurturing your colleagues and subordinates. Show the leadership qualities that you’d like your own boss to have. You will gain as much as the people you help — and build a better company.
KINGSMITH.

What to Do When You Know More Than Your Boss By Janet Britcher.

Keith was an engineer who enjoyed his role and his autonomy. His boss Eric was also an engineer, but in a different specialty. He gave Keith a lot of freedom to problem solve and create according to his own skills and expertise. This worked well most of the time.
There were two times it did not work well:

1. When Keith knew more but Eric mandated a different solution.
2. At year-end when Keith wanted to be acknowledged for his work yet Eric didn’t have enough information to evaluate it.

Clients I’ve worked with experience knowing more than their boss around mid-career or later. This is most common in industries that require multiple disciplines to accomplish a task, including:

• Computers and hardware
• Biotechnology
• Medical devices
• Medicine and healthcare
• Software and systems

Get Credit

How can Keith still establish priorities, exercise influence and get credit when his boss doesn’t know what he really does?

1. Become exquisitely informed about the company, which is the context of the work. Take every opportunity to invite himself into his manager’s world. It is only by knowing the manager’s point of view that Keith can translate his accomplishments into relevant language.
2. Invite Eric into his world. Keith should not be reluctant to include Eric for fear he will disagree with a course of action. Better to know at the beginning of a project than months later.
3. Keith needs to understand his manager’s motivation and rewards. What accomplishments are expected of Eric? How is Keith a part of that? How can he align his contributions?

No matter how superb Keith’s skills and accomplishments, if it’s not what the company needs, he won’t get the excellent recognition he thinks he deserves. For some, it is challenging and frustrating to be evaluated by someone who has less expertise. Your manager however is the messenger of what will be well regarded by the organization.
Just because Keith has expertise doesn’t mean the company wants all of it. That’s why it is so important to jointly establish expectations. Keith may have more knowledge, but Eric likely has a valuable perspective about what is important, and what will be recognized.

Ongoing Year-round Rapport

Keith should get in the habit of presenting no more than three bullets related to what he wants to convey. When meeting with his manager, give a high level executive summary first. There is a very high probability that a manager with a different expertise can be overwhelmed or can be dismissive of too much detail. Therefore contributions and information needs to be presented with the audience in mind. Not too superficial, but not too technical all at once.
Another delicate area is the dilemma of Keith teaching Eric. This contradicts the explicit hierarchical relationship, so it’s important for Keith to respect Eric’s competence and authority while sharing specialty knowledge. Talk more about:

• what matters about the product or project
• how it impacts the department and company
• why it’s cool technology or process (but at a very high level)
• how and why it’s exciting to work on this
• and less about the details of what it took to achieve the expertise or the outcomes

Connect directly back to the sense of accomplishment, autonomy and commitment as a source of confidence, and be as willing to learn from your manager as you are to teach.
Keep in mind when working for a manager who does not have your expertise, you will have best results when you align your contribution with the strategy of the whole organization. Talk about how your knowledge creates results that benefit the company.

Good Management

Good management is the ability to orchestrate performers who have different kinds of talent. No one expects a conductor to be able to play every instrument superbly. It is the same with management. A manager who did not grow up through the particular functional specialty (engineering, finance, science) will not micromanage. Rather than relying on prior expertise, good mangers:

• Give direction
• Elicit ideas
• Foster collaboration
• Provide support
• Inspire
• Give feedback
• Provide career development

A good tuba player can improve the performance of another tuba player, but good managers ensure a quality result of the entire team, regardless of whether each function has previously been a part of their career. Following these tips provides a greater chance of orchestrating a good outcome.
KINGSMITH.

The Mistakes These Successful People Don’t Regret By Bernard Marr.

The vast majority of new businesses fail — which means, logically, that a high percentage of successful business owners have at least one failure in their past, big or small.
What makes one person pack it in and go home while another tries again? The difference between failure and success is simple: the successful keep trying.
Take, for example, these four highly successful entrepreneurs. Each had one or more major setbacks in their career that could have derailed them entirely. Instead, they chose to learn from their mistakes and power forward to become some of the most successful entrepreneurs of our time.

Vera Wang: Failed Figure Skater

Vera Wang revolutionized the bridal fashion industry, but before that, she was a world-class figure skater. As a young girl, Wang competed in the 1968 U.S. Figure Skating Championships, coming in fifth in the Junior Pairs division and missing her goal of joining the U.S. Olympic figure skating team.
From ice skating, she turned to fashion, and worked her way up to senior fashion editor at Vogue before being passed over for a promotion. She left the magazine and became design director for Ralph Lauren until, frustrated with the choices for her own wedding, she designed her own bridal gown. Soon after, she started her fashion house.
"For me the idea that I could always do better, learn more, learn faster, is something that came from skating,” Wang told Cosmogirl, “But I carried that with me for the rest of my life."

Bill Gates and Paul Allen: Failed Traffic Software Developers

Bill Gates and Paul Allen started a compony called Traf-O-Data, offering a computerized microprosessor that could analyse traffic data for municipalities. When they tried to demonstrate the program for a potential client — it didn’t work. Soon, the program was made obsolete entirely.
But they didn’t let that deter them, and went on to found a second company caled Micro-Soft. Allen later told Newsweek, “Since then, I have made my share of business mistakes, but Traf-O-Data remains my favorite mistake because it confirmed to me that every failure contains the seeds of your next success. It bolstered my conviction that micro-processors would soon run the same programs as larger computers, but at a much lower cost."

David Mintz: Failed Garlic Ice Cream

David Mintz, founder of Tofutti, a line of non-dairy ice cream, rolled out an ice cream called Krazy Garlic. The product was non-dairy ice cream made from garlic — though it didn’t have a garlic flavor.
Retailers sent the product back en masse. They wouldn’t even taste it. Mintz, a garlic-lover, never even considered that people would be turned off by the mental combination of garlic and ice cream without ever tasting it.
"The naming of a product is so key,” he told Entrepreneur. “It has to make the consumer want to try it.”

Barbara Corcoran: Failed Florist

Barbara Corcoran, real estate mogul and one of the sharks on Shark Tank, started out as a florist.
In college, she started a small “flower of the week” club, and delivered bouquets of fresh flowers to customers’ homes and offices. But one of her clients was more than a slow-pay — he was a no pay.
Still, she continued delivering flowers to him — essentially for free — for nine months.
Because her business was so small, only 32 customers, that one delinquent account eventually forced her to fold. "I went out of business because of that one customer. I only had 32 customers, so he represented a big share of my business," Corcoran told Entrepreneur.
Still, the failure taught her how to ask for money, and the folly of building a business that relies too heavily on only one or two customers.
What has been your biggest learning mistake? I’d love to hear your stories of failure that turned to success in the comments below
KINGSMITH.

Bad Mistakes That Make Good Employees Leave By Travis Bradberry

It’s tough to hold on to good employees, but it shouldn’t be. Most of the mistakes that companies make are easily avoided. When you do make mistakes, your best employees are the first to go, because they have the most options.
If you can’t keep your best employees engaged, you can’t keep your best employees. While this should be common sense, it isn’t common enough. A survey by the Corporate Executive Board found that one-third of star employees feel disengaged from their employer and are already looking for a new job.
When you lose good employees, they don’t disengage all at once. Instead, their interest in their jobs slowly dissipates. Michael Kibler, who has spent much of his career studying this phenomenon, refers to it as brownout. Like dying stars, star employees slowly lose their fire for their jobs.
“Brownout is different from burnout because workers afflicted by it are not in obvious crisis,”Kibler said. “They seem to be performing fine: putting in massive hours, grinding out work while contributing to teams, and saying all the right things in meetings. However, they are operating in a silent state of continual overwhelm, and the predictable consequence is disengagement.”
In order to prevent brownout and to retain top talent, companies and managers must understand what they’re doing that contributes to this slow fade. The following practices are the worst offenders, and they must be abolished if you’re going to hang on to good employees.
They make a lot of stupid rules. Companies need to have rules—that’s a given—but they don’t have to be shortsighted and lazy attempts at creating order. Whether it’s an overzealous attendance policy or taking employees’ frequent flier miles, even a couple of unnecessary rules can drive people crazy. When good employees feel like big brother is watching, they’ll find someplace else to work.
They treat everyone equally. While this tactic works with school children, the workplace ought to function differently. Treating everyone equally shows your top performers that no matter how high they perform (and, typically, top performers are work horses), they will be treated the same as the bozo who does nothing more than punch the clock.
They tolerate poor performance. It’s said that in jazz bands, the band is only as good as the worst player; no matter how great some members may be, everyone hears the worst player. The same goes for a company. When you permit weak links to exist without consequence, they drag everyone else down, especially your top performers.
They don’t recognize accomplishments. It’s easy to underestimate the power of a pat on the back, especially with top performers who are intrinsically motivated. Everyone likes kudos, none more so than those who work hard and give their all. Rewarding individual accomplishments shows that you’re paying attention. Managers need to communicate with their people to find out what makes them feel good (for some, it’s a raise; for others, it’s public recognition) and then to reward them for a job well done. With top performers, this will happen often if you’re doing it right.
They don’t care about people. More than half the people who leave their jobs do so because of their relationship with their boss. Smart companies make certain that their managers know how to balance being professional with being human. These are the bosses who celebrate their employees’ successes, empathize with those going through hard times, and challenge them, even when it hurts. Bosses who fail to really care will always have high turnover rates. It’s impossible to work for someone for eight-plus hours a day when they aren’t personally involved and don’t care about anything other than your output.
They don’t show people the big picture. It may seem efficient to simply send employees assignments and move on, but leaving out the big picture is a deal breaker for star performers. Star performers shoulder heavier loads because they genuinely care about their work, so their work must have a purpose. When they don’t know what that is, they feel alienated and aimless. When they aren’t given a purpose, they find one elsewhere.
They don’t let people pursue their passions. Google mandates that employees spend at least 20% of their time doing “what they believe will benefit Google most.” While these passion projects make major contributions to marquis Google products, such as Gmail and AdSense, their biggest impact is in creating highly engaged Googlers. Talented employees are passionate. Providing opportunities for them to pursue their passions improves their productivity and job satisfaction, but many managers want people to work within a little box. These managers fear that productivity will decline if they let people expand their focus and pursue their passions. This fear is unfounded. Studies have shown that people who are able to pursue their passions at work experience flow, a euphoric state of mind that is five times more productive than the norm.
They don’t make things fun. If people aren’t having fun at work, then you’re doing it wrong. People don’t give their all if they aren’t having fun, and fun is a major protector against brownout. The best companies to work for know the importance of letting employees loosen up a little. Google, for example, does just about everything it can to make work fun—free meals, bowling allies, and fitness classes, to name a few. The idea is simple: if work is fun, you’ll not only perform better, but you’ll stick around for longer hours and an even longer career.

Bringing It All Together

Managers tend to blame their turnover problems on everything under the sun while ignoring the crux of the matter: people don’t leave jobs; they leave managers.


What other mistakes cause great employees to leave? Please share your thoughts in the comments section below, as I learn just as much from you as you do from me.
KINGSMITH.

Don’t Use These Words on Your CV or LinkedIn Profile By Bernard Marr

If you’ve ever gone house-hunting or looked for a flat, you know there are certain words that act as a kind of code: “cozy” means it’s about the size of a postage stamp, “rustic” means there might be mice, and “fixer-upper” means it’s probably going to fall in on you.
Similarly, there is a certain style of language that tends to pop up on resumes, CVs, and LinkedIn profiles that HR and hiring managers cringe to see.
In general, most of these terrible terms are so vague or jargony as to mean practically nothing. At best they suggest you might be padding your CV or profile because you’ve run out of things to say; at worst, they suggest you haven’t achieved much of anything in your career worth talking about.
Replace them by heeding that ages-old writing adage to “show, don’t tell;” use active words and concrete examples instead of these tired terms:

1. “Responsible for…”
   This is such a blanket statement when describing your job duties, it tells nothing about what you actually did. It brings to mind someone just doing the bare minimum to get by. Instead, use active verbs like created, achieved, improved, or led.
2. Problem-solving skills
   Did you sit around doing crosswords or solving rubik's cubes all day? Instead, list an accomplishment that demonstrates your problem-solving skills.
3. Detail oriented
   One typo on your resume (and they happen to the best of us) and this statement rings false. If being detail oriented is a key trait for the job you want, put it into practice by paying particular attention to details when you submit your application and during the interview.
4. Intelligent
   Being intelligent and saying that you’re intelligent are two different things. Putting it on a CV or saying it in an interview can come off as egotistical or awkward. (This also goes for words like successful, likeable, humble, etc.) Instead, talk about the way you think or approach a problem with words like logical, quantitative, or synthesise.
5. Proactive
   This is a business buzzword and has been used so much it has very little meaning left in it. What are you actually trying to say? That you are self-directed? That you can spot problems before they happen? Demonstrate this with examples.
6. Team player
   Something about this feels wishy-washy, as though you couldn’t come up with anything better to say. “I don’t have any actual accomplishments, but I’m a team player!” If you want to convey that you work well in groups, again, give specific examples.
7. Obsessive
   No matter how passionate you are about your work, saying that you are (or, in fact, being) obsessive is not a good thing. Passionate is a pretty good replacement word here.
8. Strategic thinker
   Before putting something like this on your CV, ask yourself how you would demonstrate it if asked to in an interview. It’s pretty difficult to back up. If you have a concrete example, use it instead.
9. “Experience working with…”
   Experiences happen to you. They are passive. Instead, talk about achievements.
10. Salary negotiable
    On a resume or in a cover letter, this just sounds desperate. Unless the recruiter specifically asks for your salary requirements in your cover letter, avoid it altogether until the interview. Then, do your research and have a specific number in mind when you get the question. It is mostly understood that salaries are negotiated, so saying it on your CV is redundant as well.

In a survey from CareerBuilder.com asking hiring managers and human resources staffers to rank the best and worst words to use on a resume, the best words all had something in common: they convey action.
Avoid cliches, jargon, and passive terms in favor of active descriptions of your actual achievements, and your CV or LinkedIn profile will definitely stand out from the crowd.
What are your personal resume pet peeves? Any forbidden words I should add to my list? Let me know in the comments below.
KINGSMITH

How to Thrive on Stress By Jo Marchant.

We all know that being stressed at work is bad for us. Quite apart from making us aggravated and miserable, stress chips away at our physical health, increasing the risk of chronic conditions from eczema to stroke. But scientists are discovering that stress isn’t always damaging: in the right circumstances it gives us a boost that improves both our mental performance and our physical health. What’s more, by changing how we think about stressful events – an exam or work presentation, say – we can shift our physiology from a harmful state to a helpful one.
Feeling afraid or stressed has a dramatic impact on the body. If you face a threat, whether it’s a hungry lion or angry boss, your heart beats faster. You breathe more heavily, and your pupils dilate. Blood is diverted away from non-urgent areas such as the gut and sexual organs and towards the limbs and brain. Digestion slows, and fat and glucose are released into the bloodstream to fuel your next move.
This fight-or-flight response is controlled by stress hormones released into the blood stream, including adrenaline and cortisol, as well as the sympathetic nervous system, which connects the brain to the body’s major organ systems. It has evolved to help us survive in emergencies, and in most animals it switches off as soon as the threat has passed. But humans have the ability to worry all the time, even about things that have already happened or may never happen at all.
Such chronic anxiety leaves us on constant alert, and over time this can damage the body, increasing the risk of high blood pressure and heart disease, for example. Stress also triggers an immune response called inflammation, which acts as the body’s first line of defense against infection and injury. That’s great in an emergency but if switched on all the time it can eat away at healthy tissues, exacerbating conditions from diabetes to dementia. Inflammation is even thought to accelerate cellular aging by wearing down the ends of our chromosomes.
The good news is that stressful events don’t harm us directly. What does the damage is our psychological response to those events, and this we have some control over. In my book, Cure: a journey into the science of mind over body, I investigated the scientific evidence behind a range of stress-busting techniques. For example, mindfulness meditation aims to help us distance ourselves from our worries. We’re encouraged to recognize that negative thoughts are fleeting and don’t represent reality. Trials show that mindfulness training reduces stress and anxiety, protects against depression, and improves quality of life. There’s some evidence that this in turn has physical health benefits, such as easing pain and auto-immune disease, and reducing our susceptibility to infections from the common cold to HIV.
I was surprised to discover, however, that not all fight-or-flight is the same, and sometimes it can actually be good for us. Psychologist Wendy Mendes of the University of California, San Francisco, uses the example of a skier who unexpectedly comes across a steep icy trail; it’s her only way down the mountain. Her heart rate will rise, but depending on how experienced she is, she might feel either fear or exhilaration. And those have different physiological effects.
Psychologists call these contrasting states “challenge” and “threat”. “Challenge” is the mindset of a hunter closing in for kill, or a fighter who knows she’s going to win. To put that in a work setting, imagine giving a talk or going into a job interview where you’re confident of success and keen to show off your talents. Your sympathetic nervous system goes into overdrive, causing your peripheral blood vessels to dilate. This allows your heart to work more efficiently, pumping oxygenated blood to the limbs and brain. People experiencing this type of response perform better than normal, not just physically but mentally too.
Fear, on the other hand, causes the body to go into damage control mode as it prepares for defeat. You’re being hunted and there’s no escape, or fighting a stronger adversary. At work, going into that presentation or job interview, you feel underprepared. Instead of focusing on the potential rewards, you’re terrified of embarrassing yourself or losing out.
In this state, psychologists have found that the sympathetic nervous system activates to a lesser extent. Instead of dilating, your peripheral blood vessels constrict and your heart beats less efficiently, meaning less blood is pumped around the body. From an evolutionary perspective this makes sense: it minimizes blood flow if you’re caught or injured. But it also impairs performance and strains the cardiovascular system, because the heart is forced to work harder to push blood around the body. A threat response also triggers inflammation, as the immune system prepares for injury and infection.
When it comes to longer-term health, challenge responses are generally positive, while threat responses are damaging. Mendes has found that people who experience a challenge response bounce back to normal fairly quickly. Mild to moderate bursts of such “positive’ stress, with time to relax in between, are thought to provide a useful workout for the cardiovascular and immune system.
But people in a threat state take longer to recover, physically and mentally. They worry more about how they performed, and remain more vigilant for future threat. Their blood pressure stays high. Over time, the extra strain on the heart can lead to hypertension, while high levels of stress hormones contribute to chronic inflammation.
Crucially, it turns out that thinking differently about stressful events – focusing on what we have to gain rather than what we might lose, for example – can help us to shift from a threat state to a challenge state. In fact, Mendes has found that a change as simple as how we interpret our physical response to stress can have dramatic results.
In one study, she subjected volunteers to a stressful public speaking task. She told one group that if they experienced physical symptoms of anxiety during the test, such as a racing heart, this was a good sign. It meant that oxygenated blood was being delivered to their brain and muscles, she explained, and this would help them to perform better. Just knowing this shifted these volunteers towards a challenge response – with greater vasodilatation and cardiac output, compared to those who were advised instead to ignore the source of their stress, or who received no instructions at all.
In another study, Mendes found that reframing the body’s responses in this way didn’t just shift volunteers’ physiology, it improved their performance too. She asked students preparing for the Graduate Record Exam (a high-stakes test required for admission into graduate school) to sit a fake test in the lab. Compared to a control group, those advised to interpret their stress as positive had physiological benefits as in the other study. But they also scored higher – not just in the fake test but in the real GRE, which they sat weeks later.
Changing your outlook isn’t a magical solution to all work stress. If you’re overworked, badly treated, or doing a job you don’t enjoy, consider what you might do to change that. Meanwhile employers have a responsibility to treat their workers well. But all jobs worth doing will challenge and stretch you, and you have more control than you think about how you respond. With even a small shift in attitude, you can start to perform better under pressure. And that may improve your long-term health too.
KINGSMITH.

Differences, Equality, & The Oscars: A Reflection on Stacey Dash's Comments By Wade G.Morgan

What Does It Mean to be American?
Yesterday, I watched an interview featuring actress Stacey Dash in which she expressed her opposition of calls to boycott the Oscars. For the second year in a row, The Academy released a nominee list that exclusively featured white actors & actresses in the major categories, which prompted people like Jada Pinkett Smith & Spike Lee to call for a boycott, as they felt people of color should have been better represented in the nominations. In her interview, Dash stated the following:

"I think [the boycott] is ludicrous... We have to make up our minds.

Either we want segregation or integration, and if we don't want segregation, we need to get rid of channels like BET, and the BET Awards, and the [NAACP] Image Awards, where you're only awarded if you're Black.

If it were the other way around, we would be up in arms; it's a double standard."

She continues,

"[T]here shouldn't be a Black History Month; we're Americans. Period. That's it."

After hearing her statements, I reflected on an idea Dash implies, which I have heard popularized in many conversations other than ones about Oscar nominations: the idea that difference disables equality and cohesion. From this premise, Dash implies several ideas. First, Dash suggests integration requires invisibility. Second, she equates a celebration of difference to an act of exclusion.
What Does It Mean to be Different?
Like most people, Dash appears to aspire for a world in which people of all backgrounds coexist peacefully. To achieve this goal, she advises us to forget about our differences, embrace a singular identity, and move forward from there, together. While her intentions may be noble, I offer a simple critique to the premise of her advice.

Rather than assume that differences disable cohesion, what if we assumed that differences enable cohesion?

For me, this question stems from two similar questions. First, what does equality mean, and what would it feel like? Second, what does difference mean, and how do we understand it? If we understand differences to be insurmountable divisions, then yes, acknowledging differences may prevent the kind of society that we aspire for.
But, if we understand differences to be the qualities that make us unique, allow us to approach problems in new ways, and encourage us to offer our perspective when something goes awry, then no, differences do not prevent the society we envision; rather, they enable that society to occur. Ironically, if we understand differences to be the qualities that bring us together, then avoiding our differences would preclude the exact harmony that it would have appeared to bring.
What Equality Looks Like To Me
So, when I think about institutions like BET, the BET Awards, Black History Month, and other similar establishments, I do not see them through a lens of exclusion; rather, I see them through one of celebration. Similarly, I do not see our world as a zero-sum game in which celebrating one person's accomplishments prevents us from acknowledging and celebrating another's.
I think it is fair to question why marginalized groups can collectively celebrate their identities without reprisal while majority groups cannot - I have asked the same question myself. The answer lies at the intersection of context, history, and cultural subjugation. In short, majority groups have historically used their difference to both exclude and subordinate other groups. Being "different" alone did not disable marginalized people from interacting in majority spaces; rather, being different and "less than" did. On the other hand, marginalized groups accent their difference to regain the humanity and dignity that was previously deprived, and to remind group members that to be marginalized is not to be less than.
I don't think I want a world that ignores my Blackness, my masculinity, my height, my weight, my family, my hometown, my language, or anything else that makes me, me. I want a world that acknowledges those qualities, embraces them, challenges me to constantly critique and improve them, and allows me the freedom to pursue my dreams precisely because I am all of those things and more. I want a world that understands the following:

It is often the acknowledgement & celebration of our differences that enables & enhances our humanity.

We have the opportunity to create a world that cherishes each person's unique take on humanity. We have the opportunity to create a world that values each person's unique identity equally. We do not need to ignore our differences to accomplish either of those goals.
KINGSMITH.