Love Leadership

The New Way to Lead in a Fear-Based World

John Hope Bryant

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780470428788
• eBook ISBN: 9780470568231
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

A dynamic young leader shows how leading with love and respect creates success in business and life

Written by the founder of Operation HOPE and advisor to the past two U.S. presidents, this groundbreaking book makes the case that the best way to get ahead is to figure out what you have to give to a world seemingly obsessed with the question: What do I get? Aimed at a new generation of leaders and extremely relevant for today's economic climate, Love Leadership outlines Bryant's five laws of love-based leadership-Loss Creates Leaders (there can be no strength without legitimate suffering), Fear Fails (only respect and love leads to success), Love Makes Money (love is at the core of true wealth), Vulnerability is Power (when you open up to people they open up to you), and Giving is Getting (the more you offer to others, the more they will give back to you).

• One of today's most influential leaders, Bryant has appeared on Oprah and in articles in the LA Times, NY Times, and the Wall Street Journal
• Bryant's bold approach to leadership is well-suited for today's tough economic environment and a world gripped by fear and uncertainty
• Outlines the innovative five laws of love-based leadership

Love Leadership is that unique and powerful book that bridges the gap between solid business advice and pure inspiration.

1

LOSS CREATES LEADERS

Loss is personal for me. I learned the importance of the first law of love leadership—loss creates leaders—when I was a child and my family struggled with money problems. It was my family’s collective loss that led me to become the leader I am today.

The number one reason why families divorce in America is money, and this sad fact became a reality in my home when I was five. Up to that point, my family had been living the American dream. Here was a hard-working, enterprising black family from the South, headed by a mother and father armed only with an eighth-grade education. (My mother would go back to school at age sixty-two to receive her high school equivalency, later marching in cap and gown to obtain her diploma in a sea of eighteen-year-olds.) Within a short period of time, my mom and dad accumulated their own home, an eight-unit apartment building that we rented out, a nursery my mother ran, a gas station in South Central L.A., and a construction company my dad ran.

There was only one problem: my dad was financially illiterate, and too proud to admit it. He would make a dollar and spend a dollar and fifty cents. The more money he made, the more broke we got. Just as quickly, we lost almost everything.

The apartment building went, and the nursery went, and the gas station went, and soon my mother went. There were arguments and then a fight that turned physical. At age five, I had to call the police on both my parents for beating up on each other. One day, my mother went to the bank to withdraw the $4,000 of life savings she had accumulated to send my brother to college, only to find that it was all gone. My dad had gotten there first. That was the last straw. Messing with my mother was one thing, but messing with her dreams for her children, that was something altogether different.

My dad was and is a great man. I loved, even idolized him. It was not common among his generation to show much emotion or even to say, “I love you,” but I knew that he did love me. There’s no denying, though, that understanding the unique language of money and how the financial system worked has always been his blind spot. After their divorce, my dad was able to hold on to his construction company, but he would never build any real wealth or assets to speak of.

Around the ninth grade, I moved out of my mother’s house in Compton, California, to South Central Los Angeles to live with him. Life with my dad was both easier and harder than living with my mom and sister. There were no bothersome chores, but he compensated for that with an obsession that I get the quality education he never received, that I stay away from girls, and that I work in his construction company when I had extra time.

The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said that “a man cannot ride your back if you are not bent over.” My dad was a proud man, with his back straight up. But one day a mortgage broker showed up at our house and began to sweet-talk my father into a refinance of his home.

Unfortunately, my father was a bit too proud, and he failed to ask critical questions that would have guarded him, and us, against financial predators. And when he did ask questions, they were the wrong ones. My dad asked, “What’s the payment?” instead of “What’s the interest rate?” As we’ve seen in the subprime mortgage crisis, when low teaser interest rates later exploded upward and threw millions out of their homes, you should never ask what the payment is when an interest rate is attached.

My father signed what is known in the predatory lending business as “a perfect eyesight loan”: twenty points and 20 percent interest. You get the loan, and you go blind. When the rate resets upward automatically after a short time, you can’t afford the mortgage, and the lender forecloses on your house.

In the end, we lost our family home in just this way.

MY FALL FROM GRACE

I got my work ethic from my dad, but I learned financial literacy from my mother. She worked for many years and retired from McDonnell Douglas, now Boeing. In addition to working at her job, she often sold things to her coworkers, from candy (wonder where I got that idea from?) to a range of handicraft and food products that she would sew and cook herself. This augmented her income and provided her a measure of independence as well.

My mother learned from the loss and the lean years of her childhood, first in Carbon Hill, Alabama, where she and her sisters grew up in a shotgun shack, and then later in East St. Louis, where her parents moved for a better life. When she was a little girl, she would work outside the house to make money for the family: scrubbing floors on her knees and digging up roots to sell to make wild-crafted medicines. Her dad had died when she was very young, leaving her mom to raise six children alone.

I recently asked my mom how she became financially literate. She told me:

I had worked all day and my mother would say, “Baby, you got any money?” She loved to play the numbers and play the horses. But I always had the sense to never tell her how much I actually had. If I had $4, I’d tell her I had $2.

“Let me have it,” she would say. “I have a feeling I’m going to be lucky today. I’ll pay you back.”

And I’d give her the money, and the next day would be the same. And so I learned that charity starts at home. If I was ever going to have anything, I had to make sure I saved something for me and my future, even while I was trying to help my mother and to contribute. I had to accept that while my mother was amazing on many levels, she was not perfect.

I admire her for what she did—she built a house in East St. Louis for $500 in cash money she had saved. In spite of her being a gambler, she still taught me the value of money. I took the bad and made good out of it. I remember saying to God when I was seven years old that if I ever got to be a grown woman and had any children, I hoped I would raise them better than I was being raised.

She vowed never to be poor as an adult. Her children would have the financial resources and the love that they needed to live a dignified life. And we did. She went on to buy and sell five homes, and today she is financially independent, living in Houston, Texas.

My mother understood that life wasn’t about making more money; it was about making better decisions with the money you made. When she said she was going to purchase a car, she meant in cash. The entrepreneur in her would often tell me growing up, “The man will set your salary, but you decide your income.”

Despite her teachings and my desire for a different financial life than my father’s, I ultimately ended up in a similar spot and for similar reasons: losing the roof over my head because I couldn’t manage my money. This is how it happened.

When I was about fifteen, I told my dad I wanted to go to private school. My father didn’t want to admit that he didn’t know how to get me into such a school, so he just said, “You find the school, and I’ll pay for it.”

Being only fifteen, I had no idea how to choose a school. So I took out the phone book, opened it up to private schools, and ran my finger down the listings until I reached the Hollywood Professional School. After the success of my candy business, I knew I wanted to be a businessman. “Professional school” sounded like a business school to me.

When I arrived at the school for a tour, I kept passing all these famous child actors: Todd Bridges, Tatum O’Neal, Griffin O’Neal. I finally realized I was in a school for child actors, not a business school. The Hollywood Professional School held classes in the mornings for kids in the entertainment industry who were actively working. These actors didn’t want to go to school on the set. They wanted a normal life and to be around other kids in entertainment.

At my interview, the ninety-year-old director of the school stared at me for the longest time, trying to figure out which TV show I was on. But it was impolite to admit you didn’t know who someone was in Hollywood, so she just assumed I was somebody. I didn’t exactly lead her to believe otherwise, so she signed me up for school, and my dad wrote the check.

Casting directors naturally found the school to be a convenient one-stop shop for child actors. I got my first few minor acting gigs just from sitting in the classroom as casting directors would come in and announce, “Who’s interested in the next show?” I began to get some bit parts on a number of TV shows, eventually landing minor roles on everything from the hit show Diff’rent Strokes to an episode of The Twilight Zone starring actor Danny Kaye. One thing led to another, and I became a child actor myself.

I was what I call an illegitimate child celebrity. By that I mean I was acting, but my promotion of myself as an actor was far better than my acting itself. This was when I began to appreciate my talent for marketing, but admittedly, my product was still weak. Nonetheless, by the time I was seventeen, at the height of my acting career (such as it was) I was bringing in thousands of dollars every week. The problem was, I was spending a whole lot more than I was making. I had the lifestyle to match: I lived in a beach house in Malibu with Kevin Wilson, comedian Flip Wilson’s son. Eddie Van Halen lived nearby and would come over for our wild parties.

Around that time, I decided I wanted to become an entrepreneur. I started one money-losing business after another. Every entrepreneur wants to be shot out of a cannon, including myself, so it was a bit of “ready, fire, aim.” I had the ambition, but I was impatient. I lost my shirt over and over again. If I had any redeeming quality at the time, it was that I never, ever gave up.

The last straw was a concert promotion business I ran when I was eighteen years old. I was promoting a concert for one of the many former lead singers of the Platters, and the concert was a first-class flop. That was the end-game for me. At that point, I ran out of options.

I went from living in a beach house in Malibu to living in my black Montero Jeep near the airport. I parked my Jeep in a desolate parking lot behind an old Italian restaurant at the corner of La Tierra and Airport Boulevard in Los Angeles, where no one would notice me. Just to be sure, I put my car cover over the Jeep and then dropped it over the back door as I crawled inside for the night. I kept food in an Igloo.

Oddly enough, whenever I get driven to the airport these days, now by a car service and not in an old Jeep, I pass by the location where I was homeless all those years ago. Every week I am reminded of where I could end up if I were to make those same stupid mistakes again. You never get too big for your britches.

My dad lost his house and much of his wealth because he didn’t know enough about managing his money. In contrast, I knew better: my mother taught me valuable lessons about making a living. I wanted to avoid my father’s financial mistakes, but I was young and full of pride, not paying attention to both making and keeping my money, and I landed right where he had.

LEADING FROM LOSS

I regularly meet with executives of powerful companies in my work on behalf of Operation HOPE. People sometimes ask me how I deal with the ever-present possibility of rejection from these high-powered CEOs. I say, “What are they going to tell me, ‘no’? I’ve been homeless for six months. I’ve been on the floor of life, and you can’t fall from the floor. What is ‘no’ after that?”

I lost almost everything when I was homeless. But the interesting thing is that once you understand what loss really is, once you lose someone dear to you, or once you lose yourself, you gain the world.

Once you learn that the world didn’t come to an end and that you could work your way back to being whole again, you gain enormous confidence and wisdom about how to live: how to have humility, what matters and what doesn’t, how to succeed against all odds. It builds up an enormous strength inside you.

Most people find strength in things that are outside them: money, power, titles, wardrobes, cars. But most of the things that make a leader are on the inside: integrity, wisdom, confidence, vulnerability, joy, passion, compassion, intuition. These things come from life experience, from life’s trials, from the deepest part of a person’s soul. You can’t fake them, and you can’t buy what’s not for sale.

My mentor Rev. Murray says, “Life asks a question of every leader that gauges their effectiveness and wisdom: ‘What have you been through?’ Following battle, King Arthur would have his knights line up before him, asking of each, ‘Show me your scars.’ If none existed, he would say to the warrior, ‘Leave me and go get your scars.’”

I have learned that authenticity counts, and that the best route to an authentic life is through your scars. As you earn them, you learn to drop the B.S. in your life and to attach yourself to the substance in your life—and to the substance in those around you. Precisely because of that history of loss, you never take yourself too seriously or get needlessly seduced by short-term materialism. In other words, loss helps ground you as a person.

There’s a hard lesson in life’s setbacks: just as steel is forged through fire, leaders are forged through loss. There can be no strength, no real inner growth, without the pain of legitimate suffering. It’s a scientific fact: you cannot have a rainbow without a storm.

That’s why I believe that the first law of love leadership is that loss creates leaders. If love leadership means learning to think clearly for yourself, putting others first, and banishing fear, it is loss that lays the groundwork for the kind of growth that leads to a love-leadership perspective.

Loss creates leaders with a competitive advantage earned in the school of hard knocks. The advantage comes from the tremendous personal and professional growth loss generates. And rarely does that growth lead in directions you could or would have predicted.

The storms of life offer an opportunity to respond in one of three ways to personal tragedy or failure:

1. You can give up.

2. You can try to cope using whatever dulls the pain most, be it alcohol, drugs, sex, work, money, or success.

3. You can grow and create something useful out of your experience of loss.

The choice lies between legitimate suffering now and illegitimate suffering later. The first two options are what I call illegitimate suffering. Giving up and coping are code words for avoidance, and the story of avoidance never ends well.

Only the last option allows you to harness fear and turn it into the strength to lead with love. The route to real growth is through legitimate suffering. Managing your personal sense of loss gets you there strongest, fastest, first.

Loss is wisdom acquired early.

Wisdom comes from dealing with your mess. All of it. But few people want to do that because it is just too much: too much work, too much acknowledgment, too much remembering, too much pain. But I have found that there is freedom in surrendering to this work, to saying “Yes, that happened, but it doesn’t define me. What does not kill me will only make me stronger. I made a mistake, but I am not a mistake.”

The net effect of saying this over and over again in your life, of reaching a wall and climbing over it, is increased confidence in yourself, and faith in others and this world of ours. As strange as it s...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 - LOSS CREATES LEADERS
• Chapter 2 - FEAR FAILS
• Chapter 3 - LOVE MAKES MONEY
• Chapter 4 - VULNERABILITY IS POWER
• Chapter 5 - GIVING IS GETTING
• CONCLUSION: GOOD CAPITALISM AND LOVE LEADERSHIP
• LIST OF INTERVIEWEES
• NOTES
• Acknowledgements
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• INDEX