"The role of courage in the art of management is very important," said Harvard professor Cornel West, who gave a keynote speech to an audience of approximately 550 people at the AASU conference.
"I'm not just talking about business risk."
A professor of Afro-American Studies and of the philosophy of religion, as well as author of 13 books such as Race Matters, West focused his address on the urgency of African-American managers maintaining integrity and an abiding sense of history despite the current economic boom.
"What ought to distinguish a black manager and black leader is a different sense of history, a different set of stories," West told the audience. "Your commitment to management and leadership must equal your commitment to justice.
"I'd like to offer you a few words of challenge," he said. "I hope I say something that unsettles you a little bit amid all this self-congratulation about the economic boom.
"I hope each and every one of you will attempt to be fundamentally true to the blue note that African-American people have injected into harmony," he continued. "That blue note is a moment of disturbance, of dissonance, of defiance when everyone else is preoccupied with sunshine. Don't be a manager during the day and listen only to the blue notes at night. There has to be continuity."
West asserted that managers need a true intellectual connection to their vocation, just like that of jazz musicians. As a model for an artist of management, West cited the examples of Aretha Franklin, Sarah Vaughn and John Coltrane. Coltrane, he said, used to play the saxophone for 18 hours a day, go to bed with it and wake up blowing it.
West said, "Your fundamental responsibility is to be excellent, to be rigorous, to be disciplined. That's what we're looking for — a John Coltrane of management, of leadership: We're looking for people who are dedicated to a vision, dedicated to a life of dignity by staying fundamentally true to the blue note.
"Look forward every day to reveling in your art. You won't be in it too long if you're not in it for the art. But never ever forget about the dissonance, the disturbance, the defiance that helps allow you to become the master of that art."
West said that when he looked across the room at the audience, he could feel the presence of all the people behind the scenes — family, friends, church parishioners — who had encouraged those in the group and sacrificed for them so that they would aim high.
"Someone told you, 'Believe enough in yourself that you can matriculate to the Harvard Business School,'" West said. "The institution wasn't made for black folk. Through the chain of justice, somehow even the Harvard Business School would have to open up for such folk who had been so hated and hunted, so dishonored and devalued.
"So here we are, sustained by people who had injected the blue note."
He told the group that more important than technical challenges in management was the need to have "something profoundly un-American": a sense of history.
"We also have a different lens through which we see the story and the misery of people who are not in the mainstream," he said, adding, "Situate yourself in a set of stories and narratives that are different from those in the mainstream. Let America know there is another set of stories out there than the dominant ones — that the conditions for the possibility of American freedom now are resting in part on slavery and Jim Crow black folk. The construct of whiteness itself was predicated on black folk at the back of the Jim Crow train.
"Black people as a people have always been looking for a way out," West said. "We are a trapped people, and we don't like to deal with that. As soon as you are sent to the highest level — Boom! — America bounces back and finds your sons or your daughters.
"I say this partly in jest," West said, "not to demonize the Harvard Business School or to put down your tremendous achievements as individuals. Just take it by the history, and make new possibilities loom large. You have to move collectively.
"You can't say that people can leapfrog over history and be colorblind," he continued. "Differential treatments are still operating. That's what I mean by keeping track of that historical story and narrative. You're still out on the battlefield even though it looks like there's a relative moratorium on YOU."
Someone else is still receiving those arrows, he said, reminding the audience that even in the midst of the economic boom, 40 percent of American children still live in poverty. "Children are 100 percent of the future," West said. "What do you say to the black children as you celebrate four out of ten of them in poverty?
"Our people are unemployed or underemployed, often though not always drifting, dangling. Forty percent of people have no health care here in the richest nation in the world. Yet people celebrate."
Acknowledging that the market is inescapable and unavoidable, West noted, "We are living in an ice age in which it is okay to be insensitive to other people. It's hard to engage in solidarity when we are preoccupied with bourgeois existence.
"I'm not saying [material success] is not that important," he said. "Not at all. I believe in living decently and in living large if it is part of a story larger than me." West said those in the audience shouldn't fall for the false security of material possessions, but rather use their experiences and knowledge for something greater than themselves.
He then returned to the subject of compassion. "Courage and compassion might cut against the subculture of the managerial consciousness of which you are a part," West said. "Take a stand at a moment when it has major impact. Or do it secretly behind the scenes if you want to be effective but not necessarily visible. Either way, you will still look yourself in the mirror and say, 'I've still got a little integrity. My integrity is still at work.'
"How can any democracy survive, given this wealth?" he asked, pointing out that class divisions are escalating every day, before returning to a jazz motif: "Black folk can't agree on any one issue. But I believe in polyphonic improvisation: no unanimity, just like a jazz quartet.
"There is nothing wrong with the boom," he said. "Just don't overlook the underside of that boom because it will come home to haunt you." He noted that poverty is deeper than ever, and that the poor are poorer more deeply than they've been in 25 years.
"There won't be enough prisons to deal with all that despair," West said. "If we claim to be a democracy, it means that all the voices are heard and we're all on the same ship. While we are increasing wealth on one hand, we still have to have the self-respect to leave the world better than we found it.
"What blows for justice and freedom are you making through the managerial and professional skills you have mastered?" he asked.
"It's gonna take that for a new song to be sung on the Charles."