Real Leaders: Oprah Winfrey and the Power of Empathy

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Welcome to the HPR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Adi Ignatius. This is Real Leaders, a special series examining the lives of some of the world's most compelling and effective leaders, past and present, with lessons for all of us today. This week, we are ending our four.

Part series with oh, my goodness, I'm at Harvard.

Yes, that is Oprah Winfrey giving the commencement speech at Harvard University back in 2013.

Harvard.

Not too many little girls from rural Mississippi have made it all the way here to Cambridge. My one hope today is that I can be a source of some inspiration. I'm going to address my remarks to anybody who's ever felt inferior or felt disadvantaged, felt screwed by life.

I'm Adi Ignatius, editor in chief of Harvard Business Review, and I'm here with Nancy Cain, the great historian and professor at Harvard Business School. Nancy has written a case study on Oprah Winfrey's life as an entrepreneur and as the leader of a media empire. Hello, Nancy. Hey, Adi and Nancy. That's not the only time Oprah visited Harvard. She also came to your class at hbs, right?

I taught the case for the first time in, I believe, 2005. I talked to her on the phone twice at great length and all of.

Her top staff in researching the case.

In researching the case at Harpo, which was her production company that created and produced the Oprah Winfrey Show. And we had asked her very carefully, you know, with the right protocol if she would come to class on the day I planned to teach the class. And she said, I can't come. I'm somewhere else. And that morning, my assistant called me and said, I just got a call from the guards booth at the parking lot. Oprah Winfrey has arrived in three huge black SUVs. And so I get there way early. And there she is sitting on the sky deck, which is for our listeners is the top row of the Harvard Business School amphitheater classrooms with her producer, her chief financial officer, her makeup artist, her hair person, and three more top people in her circle. And she spoke for about 15 unscripted minutes. And then she took questions. And she was astounding. She was smart. She was warm. She was serious. She knew how to take a tiny story and turn it as a metaphor and turn it into a life lesson or an extraordinarily powerful takeaway for the students. And I think Even some of my very, very skeptical male students who were like, why do we think of Oprah Winfrey as being worth a Harvard Business School case? And I've encountered much of that over the many years I've been working with this material. Even they. Most of them were like, wow.

So a little context setting about Oprah's early life and how it shaped her. I mean, what's unusual for her is that she talks and she doesn't hide and she brings people in, but there's probably a reason why she's talking about this stuff. So.

So she was born in 1954 in a small town in Mississippi. Poor family. And her parents, shortly after her birth, separated. They went different ways. And she spent the first, say, 10 years of her life moving back and forth between her parents. Her father moved to Tennessee. Her mother moved north to Milwaukee. Her father became a barber and built a relatively stable domestic life in Tennessee. Her mother did not build quite such a stable life. The most important part of this existence, shuttling between homes in very different environments, circumstances across many miles, was that she was abused sexually as a young girl. And what pretty quickly happened with her now I'm repeating her words, is she started to make trouble. She said, I could have gone in a different direction and basically become a problem child, a juvenile delinquent. Before she became an adolescent, her father basically said, I'm gonna take my daughter Oprah, and she's gonna live with me in Tennessee. And that was a more stable life for her. And she credits her father and his decision to try and bring her to Tennessee to live with him with being a very important moment of redemption and opening up a much better fork in the road for her. And so she spent her adolescent years, her high school years, in Tennessee and then eventually went to college in Nashville. That was the Runway into college, where she got interested in radio and then television. But she has talked at great length about the scars that were left for her emotionally and physically. Eating disorders and some drug use, very limited. But drug use as a result of the emotional burden she carried, the legacy she carried of the sexual abuse. But all of it turned out to be part of the road that Oprah would travel as a television celebrity, which was my life is my classroom. Your life is your classroom. We're all on a journey of self development. Let me tell you where I started.

All right, so let's fill in a little of her early professional bio. Oprah starts her career at a local TV station in Nashville while she's still in college. She becomes the first Black female TV correspondent there. Then she gets recruited by a Baltimore station to co anchor the 6pm newscast. So this is 1976. This is a huge move for her career, but it doesn't go well. After two years, she gets demoted to co host the local morning show, which actually turns out to be something of a breakthrough.

Yes, it does.

Because she discovers in a talk show.

That she can be much more authentic, she can be much more herself.

And she realizes, I found the right place for my work here.

All right, so things are looking up for Oprah. People are starting to notice her on that morning show in Baltimore. And then she gets a call from Chicago.

She does.

Dennis Swanson at WLSTV in Chicago hires Oprah to host their morning talk show, AM Chicago. The show is a hit, and they quickly rename it the Oprah Winfrey Show.

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So this is a long time ago. The Oprah Winfrey show started in the mid-80s. So it's hard to remember what life was like before that, but this thing takes off. Can you sort of explain what this was like when she was experimenting with the format and how it just kind of took off?

If we parachuted back to the mid-80s and Oprah being recruited to come and do a talk show in Chicago, Chicago am, we would see a landscape of television talk shows that look quite a bit different. There were a few women that had done something like television talk shows, like Barbara Walters, but most television talk shows were Meet the Press. There weren't television shows or other venues in the mass media that were primarily about emotional issues or primarily about difficult life experiences in which talking about something like even divorce was common. The only exception to that, and this is important for the Oprah Story, was Phil Donahue, who was really, in his own way, a pathbreaker. Right? He was the first person in any kind of talk show, in almost any kind of television live format to talk about divorce. He talked about the difficulties of being Catholic. He talked about birth control. All of those topics in the early 1980s were generally considered verboten, forbidden. And what happens is really quickly, she out Donahue's Phil Donahue by orders of magnitude. And within a quarter a season, she's bested him in the Chicago market by the ratings calculator. And she's off to the races, so to speak, with this new format in which she's going to vastly expand the spectrum of acceptable topics for a talk show, she's just gonna. She's gonna blow it up. And she's going to by doing that with great immediate success in terms of audience reaction, first in Chicago and then nationally. Cause pretty quickly there are calls and interest in moving her national and syndicating the show. Pretty quickly she's gonna start laying the groundwork, if you will, for all kinds of talk shows that today we consider absolutely standard fare.

So Oprah has said that her empathy, I guess, kept her from being a good journalist. And I guess that means that the cool detachment that at least in the past we thought of as necessary for serious journalists to do their job just didn't suit her. She couldn't report on a devastating crisis and keep her sort of emotions and everything out of it. Let's talk about her. The need to be true to yourself. I mean, that's not always easy to do, both professionally and socially, to say, no, my personality is not suited to this, so I'm going to take a different path. As you look at that decision, how do you think about the decision she made? And can anyone else make a decision like that?

I think the way she came to that decision was that she got moved from more hard news. This is in Baltimore. This is the stepping stone to Chicago and the beginnings of what would be the Oprah Winfrey show in the mid-80s. She got moved because she had so much empathy. She wasn't able to stay so cool and detached from hard news to a talk show that she was co hosting in Baltimore. And she said after the first show, oh, my God, I felt like I came home. And I think. So she stumbled into it. It wasn't that she started off thinking, I have this empathy. This is who I truly am. I need to do something that's aligned with that. She stumbled into it. She had this realization, and that's the direction she started to steer her own ship in. And it turned out to be a very smart decision.

So I feel like probably Harvard Business School, certainly Harvard Business Review, we talk a lot about the need for high EQ and empathy, that that's what makes good leaders. On the other hand, the narcissists seem to be doing pretty well, too. So maybe empathy is a trait we like. Does it necessarily correspond to good leadership? I mean, good leadership looks different depending who it comes from.

I think the unbridled narcissists may end up with power. We know they do History proves that. Right. That's not the same thing as worthy leadership, worthy impact. Right. I'm a historian. History judges. It's the nature of looking at the past. There are very few unbridled, unabashed narcissists in history that we look back and say, wow, they were great leaders. Because great leadership turns out to correlate, as we now understand, pretty highly with self development. And that means transcending pure, raw, unsheathed narcissism.

One thing, and I don't know if there's pushback on the Oprah mystique or not, but like Oprah Magazine, O Magazine, not only is her name on the magazine or picture on the magazine, her name and picture are on practically every page in the magazine. That seemed to be almost the definition of narcissism, as opposed to this kind of selfless, purpose driven sense that people have about her when they talk about her. I've never been able to kind of square that exactly.

I think what she understands is that people are interested in identifying with her and people's ability to say, oh, Oprah's learned that. I can learn that. That's relevant to me. Yes. Is it narcissistic? Sure, we can frame it that way. But its purpose is not primarily to make, I think, Oprah more glamorous or Oprah more excited about herself. I don't think it's primarily about a quest for validation that is the primary driver of clinical narcissism. Right. The quest for validation in the face of a deep, innate sense of unworthiness. That is not, I think, what she's up to in the world. I think what she understands is my brand is all about me and my life and how people pick away at that and use it and peel away things for themselves. And that is how she's basically navigated her leadership journey.

Coming up after the break, we'll talk about some of Oprah's high profile mistakes, how she handled them, and what we can learn from that process. Welcome back to Real Leaders, a special series of the HBR IdeaCast. I'm Adi Ignatius with Nancy Cain. Hey, Nancy.

Hey, Adi.

So as I think about Oprah and her life and try to draw lessons from it, it's hard because in some ways she is unique. She's this person who has had so much success, has made so much money, has had so much power and influence, and yet people seem to think, yeah, she's like one of us. There aren't a lot of people that you can say that about. So let's look at Oprah Winfrey, businesswoman for a second. What lessons would you draw from the way in which she has grown and developed her business empire?

One, this incredible ability back to empathy. Adi. To understand where your audience is headed before they even know themselves emotionally, practically, spiritually. She'd say, Howard Schultz, lots of great entrepreneurs. Estee Lauder, lots and lots of great entrepreneurs that developed really interesting, innovative, market making products, did this. She's in a different business, but it's completely analogous. She's in services, media, entertainment, education, self development. But she knows before her customer knows. In a sense, we can learn that you can lead on the demand side if you have very good antennae for understanding your audience and your potential audience. That's the first thing. Second thing, she's exceptionally strategic about how she built her empire, her pillars of influence. So she starts with the television show. She's very, very calculated about what's our portfolio of shows across five days every week. They don't do five days of how to pick a comfortable high heel. They do a very interesting mix. So Tom Cruise comes on one day, and then we do a show on campaign finance reform or money in politics. And then we do a show on how to buy a bathing suit, and then we do a show on climate change, and then we do a show on managing your sugar intake. So she's been very calculated about what she offers in what combination. That's just like organizing the shelves of your store. Great merchandising. The third thing I think that's really important is within her show, she's chosen these very interesting vehicles, all with her name and picture in them that are really important, like the book club. The book club didn't start off to create bestsellers. It started off to create this piece of individual activity that Oprah thought was important. Literacy and getting people to read books. And so she created a book club that then becomes its own kind of engine for authorial success. Oprah's favorite things. That was Oprah's idea that every once in a while we're gonna talk about something I really love that you might love too, like a celebrity endorsement. And that became this again, this vicarious, ooh, almost like a fashion magazine or sports player saying, I love these Nike basketball shoes. So that was a piece of it. Then her magazine, when she starts to broaden her media footprint, the television and movie production. All of these occurring not in a kind of lockstep chronology, but in this more organic sense of where do we need to be to keep people interested and to build our audience and Then, of course, her own website, that really became the prelude to her getting interested in her own television network, the Oprah Winfrey Network, own network. So she's been very, very good at what we'd say at the Harvard musical, leveraging the brand, acquiring or creating, like, assets.

Her show was also, from early moments, was sort of purpose driven. And that, you know, that's table stakes now. Oil companies are purpose driven. You know, tobacco companies are purpose. Everybody's purpose driven. But there was sort of a standard, you know, this is appropriate for the show. This isn't even as she was sort of breaking down barriers.

Absolutely. That was something that she, from the very beginning, thought, why are we doing this show? What's the purpose? She said, in the case when I interviewed you, she said, I never go downstairs to tape a show, any kind of media appearance that I don't have a conversation by myself alone. I need time alone. And I say, what's my intention here? What am I doing here? So this very conscious, very emotionally aware set of software that she's developed in herself and is using or calling on in order to advance what she sees as a worthy goal. And there's this moment that she described in my class and in the case where she said, I realized early on that we were actually. We hadn't thought about how low we could go in terms of what we would explore. And when I realized that we actually had to set limits on acceptable topics. Everything that was emotionally intense or that was somehow had been forbidden and was. Now we were going to try and discover whether it wasn't, was not okay. And she says, I remembered this. I realized this one day at a break in the show. We were interviewing Nazi sympathizers, folks, members of a Nazi youth group. And they were talking all about the uses of violence. And at the break in the show, when they tape. I've seen the show taped a couple times, you know, they stop and. And the cameras stop rolling and the audience takes a breath and anything goes. Then, because you're off camera, she said, the young men started doing high fives to other people in the audience as if, yeah, now we're getting our message across. And she said, that was it. I realized there's a floor beneath which you don't go. And we were enabling, empowering, a message. We actually didn't really want to get out. So she changed the game. And then she realized how you change it and how much you change it and where you draw lines is really important. And she backed up. And so we're going to Be real careful about the subjects we cover. And that continued for the rest of the run of the show. And I think it's been something that she's been very diligent about, thinking in, thinking about in the ensuing years.

I think if you look at her career, you could find examples of missteps, of empowering voices on her show that, you know, whether it's medical quackery or, you know, your example that you know you don't. Doesn't look good in hindsight. What's interesting with her though, is that she has often owned it. Actually, one of the great examples is James Fry's memoir, A Million Little Pieces, which she recommended. She has this incredible power. She recommends a book. It is a bestseller. I'm not sure if there's ever been an exception to that in all these months and years. It turned out the memoir largely made up. She initially sort of doubled down defending that book and defending him. So that's a mistake. But what's interesting is when she makes a mistake and people point it out and she realizes, okay, that was not good. She knows she has the power. All right, let's have a conversation, let's have a national conversation about that and her power, I guess, both to convene and to be a kind of moral authority. There aren't many people who have that, who have had that. And she completely changed the conversation and in a sense put the book publishing industry on notice that you can't be so sloppy with what you define as a memoir because we're actually paying attention. We're actually rallying people to say, no, we're not okay with this.

You're right. I mean, she starts off by apologizing, saying, I was wrong. So that. Let's not underestimate the power of that self acknowledgement to then begin this conversation that she has. So it's not. Oh, this was really Nan Talais, right? The person who. The editor from. Who was in charge of A Million Little Pieces. This is. Let me begin with. I was wrong. I should not have. I should have done better fact, we should have done better homework on this book before I embraced it. And there's some other issues here. Let's get down to publishing. Publishing memoirs that are fake is not good news. So I give her, I think part of her power is about her willingness to apologize and say, how do we make this better next time and avoid this mistake?

So it's kind of what you do with that power. There is that Oprah fact. She has this army of people who will buy what she suggests we'll read the book.

She suggests March on Washington.

We'll march on Washington if that's it. And we really take her cues, not in a, well, maybe in a culty way, but not simply in a culty way. And that is sort of the test of leadership. Okay, you have that power, you have that success. What do you do with it?

I think that is. I mean, you're answering the question. I think you're absolutely spot on. Adi. I don't think she has made very many moves, including the missteps where she hasn't owned and the apologies for those where she doesn't own the responsibility of the power. Now, we're living in an age when in all kinds of spheres, from government to religion to business, lots of leaders with lots and lots of power don't own the authority. I mean, the great debate now, what will big tech, the most influential companies in the world and in our lives and in our polity, from Amazon to Google to Facebook to Apple, what will these big companies do with the extraordinary authority and power that they have to affect everything from the environment to wages in towns where there are Amazon fulfillment centers? What will they do with that power? Will they own the social, environmental, political responsibility that is inescapably, irrevocably attached to that power?

So help me understand the concept of Oprah Winfrey as leader. I mean, she certainly has been incredible, a pioneer, really reinvented the talk show format. Very successful businesswoman. You've written about Abe Lincoln and Frederick Douglass and Ernest Shacklin, people who you'd say, oh, yeah, that fits my standard definition of leadership. Place Oprah then on that spectrum.

So let's go back to David Foster Wallace's definition that I use a lot and that we've referenced in this series around effective leaders as individuals who help us overcome the limitations of our own weaknesses, laziness, selfishness and fears, and get us to do harder, better things than we can get ourselves to do on our own. Oprah Winfrey has done that in spades for most of her life as a media figure, as a talk show host, as a speaker, as an entrepreneur in her company and her choices about distribution channels, as an author. That's what she does. That's what she's interested in. She's interested in how do I help people do the hard work of becoming their better selves. And she would say their best selves. That's a term she likes a lot. I know from teaching this case in scores of venues. I can't tell you the hundreds of people that over the years have raised their hands to tell a story about how Oprah made a positive impact on helping them or their family members. You know, the son in my MBA classroom who said, my mother has said for 10 years she could never have gotten to a horrific divorce without Oprah's inspiration and Oprah's guidance. There are millions of people who consider her someone, I think, with good justification, who's helped them do harder, better things than they could have done on their own. That's all. That's all, aside from if Oprah can do it, maybe I can do it, which is the role that lots and lots of leaders play as a kind of unacknowledged inspiration or North Star for people.

So, Nancy, this episode concludes the first run of this special series, Real Leaders. I have to say these conversations have been a total pleasure for me and.

For me as well.

Adi, you studied all of these people a lot. I guess I'm wondering if you're analyzing someone's life and something happened, somebody in the family died and then their life turned out this way. There's a temptation to say, well, their life turned out this way because their parent died. How do you deal with trying to extract real lessons as opposed to what somebody could say is cherry picking from the life stories of these important leaders?

Well, you begin with trying to reconstruct the journey as carefully as you can. You don't go down the byways and highways that they didn't travel, so there.

Aren'T any what ifs.

You follow the breadcrumbs of their path and then over that process, which is really all about detective work, inevitably something really interesting and what I've learned, something really relevant to today is emerges. And that's the essence of the work. That's the essence of a historian's craft.

And is there some way, let's take the four episodes we've done where you would say, okay, these four leaders are all alike in some fundamental way, or is every story and every journey unique?

Well, everyone's journey is unique. But there are themes or threads that connect these four. And I think one of the most important is that consciously or unconsciously, each of these people early on in their life decided to get better, to work on themselves and then using that learning to make a positive impact on the world.

And some of this comes back to the point you made a few episodes ago, which is that, you know, the greatest leaders in the world are not born that way. They are made.

They are made. And a lot of it is self making. We can all get better by working on ourselves and by using our experiences as classrooms or as petri dishes for that learning.

So as we wrap up this mini series, I want to thank our listeners for tuning in. Nancy and I hope to return before long with more episodes Profiling more leaders and their lessons. If you miss the other episodes in this series, please find them. Give them a listen. They cover the polar explorer Ernest Shackleton, writer and environmentalist Rachel Carson, and US President Abraham Lincoln. And please tell us what you think of this series. Send us your reactions and questions, and let us know which leaders you would like us to cover next. Our email address is ideacastbr.org that's IdeaCast spelled I D E A C A s T@HPR. This episode was produced by ann sani and edited by kurt nickish. We get technical help from rob eckhart and adam buchholz is our audio product manager. I'm adi ignatius, editor in chief of harvard business review. I want to thank you for listening to real leaders, a special series of hbr ideacast.

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