You know the expression, it really does take a village well, you know what it does. It's not just one of these throwaway lines and I've seen it time and time again. How about Michael Jordan, not the actor, the legendary basketball player. He was rookie of the year and first team all star in the 1984, season. In his second season. Despite an injury that made a miss much of the regular season. He set this still unbroken record for points in a playoff game with 63. And that was in game two of the 80 five, playoff series against the Boston Celtics, who are actually one of the greatest teams in the history of the NBA. The following year, Jordan scored more than 3000 points, the most of any player other than Wilt Chamberlain. But the bulls, Chicago Bulls his team only won 40 games Outside of 80 games and were swept in the first round of playoffs. The next three seasons, the Bulls got a little closer each time, but they lost to the Detroit pistons in the Eastern Conference finals. Finally, in the 1990 -9091 season, Jordan and the Chicago Bulls won the NBA Championship the first of three in a row. A feat replicated several years later in 1995 to 1998 when Jordan returned to basketball after trying his luck as a professional baseball player. So what changed what accounted for the breakthrough? Well, Scottie Pippen, another great basketball player was by the time we get to 1990, 1991 in his fourth season and he had begun to develop as a top layer. Not only that, but there was a new coach Phil Jackson with his legendary coaching techniques and game plans now in his second season with the team. So even for perhaps the greatest player in the history of professional basketball, getting to the pinnacle of his profession, it took a village. Even Jordan couldn't do it on his own. If you're a fan of cross country skiing, nordic skiing, you might know the name Kikkan Randall in 2018 at the Korean Olympics, which was for key can her 5th Winter Olympics. She won the women's team, sprint, she won the gold medal and I had her on my podcast and of course she's pretty famous. If you know something about cross country nordic skiing, you might you might know of her, she's very inspirational, very impressive. And when we were talking about podcast, I asked her to describe that day the Championship day, gold medal day and what it was like. And she said, you know, we had the best skis that day and I'm wondering the best skis, I mean better than the Norwegians who win pretty much everything better than any of the other top nordic countries. And she said yeah, and the reason is that they had a team. The U S Olympic team had about a dozen different people on the team that were tech experts, that was their job. They were not trainers. They were not performers or athletes they were they were part of the tech team. And throughout the day they're measuring, they've got all these different techniques of measuring the quality of the snow and different ways of assessing the snow. And then the wax that you use the skis you choose and the wax that you use have to be matched up perfectly for the conditions that you're in. And she said we had, I had the best skis that day because of that team. And this is despite 20 years of training so someone who's so dedicated who finally made it to the pinnacle of her career, her athletic career. She won, she got that gold medal because of her village because of her team. I mean it happens time and time again. I have a colleague Ella Bell who is a great professor who does a lot of work on women and minorities in leadership. And she's talked about co conspirators when we want to support minorities and women, not allies, which is important, it's important to have allies but co conspirators. And by that she means someone that's going to be that's going to take action that's going to do something not just be a mentor not just advised but someone who's willing to be in the driver's seat with others. And another word we we could use for for that type of behavior, that type of action is sponsoring. When you have someone who sponsors you, they're not just advising you in a company. They're not just supporting you, they're actually going up to your boss and your boss's boss and banging the proverbial table and saying, you gotta make room for Sid, Sid's ready. You gotta make room for Carol, Carol is ready for this opportunity and that's what's needed to get more women and minorities into more senior positions. You've got to have those co conspirators, you've got to have that village. Many universities have made a big effort in recent years to increase the number of students that they have from very underprivileged backgrounds, which is great. I mean these are kids that happen to be born born smart, but they come from places where they barely knew what Harvard or Dartmouth really were. Actually, I could speak to this with some relevance because when I was a kid, I never knew I'm at Dartmouth college for 28 years, I didn't know it even existed. When I went to college I went to a local college and I lived at home and that's what I did, I didn't even know there were other opportunities. And my conditions growing up were middle class or lower middle class, but there's kids in much, much more challenging situations that they just don't know. But with some help in navigating the application process and the cost. Some of these kids get accepted into university and that's when they are left alone job. Well done, congratulations, Harvard and Dartmouth. You brought in some underprivileged kids. But what happens then? Well, first of all, they probably never learned to study the way that kids from top public and private schools did. They don't have very much money, very much loose change to spend, so they end up working more than others. Often the work is less likely to be in research, it's often unpaid, might even be actually often is in the dining hall because that's more consistent with their life experience. It's made them more familiar with work that's done in the dining hall than in the lab and of course that puts them behind the eight ball again with their peers. And they're all alone, they're trying to fit in, there easily, feeling overwhelmed. And why would we be surprised that some of those kids are going to struggle? Look, if we're going to admit kids from underprivileged backgrounds, we need to consider that only step one and use the metaphor of the village to provide the practical and emotional support, they need to have a chance. It's not that this never happens. Have you ever heard of the posse program. It's really a great example of a philanthropic effort that that is designed to do exactly what I'm talking about. They help kids navigate the process, the application process and if they get accepted, they get a big scholarship where they don't have to pay for school at all. But what they do in addition to that is that they create this cohort of 10 students. That all get to know each other, interact with each other before and they're all going to the same university. So they have groups of 10 and multiple universities and all of a sudden when you show up on campus, you have a peer group, you have a support group right from the start. And that makes an incredible difference. And you look at their data and it shows you how the four year graduation rates are comparable to any other kids coming from any other background. So this idea of it takes a village has a lot of kind of tentacles. It can happen in a lot of different ways. I think it's a valuable thing to be thinking about and for each of us, as we think about what we want to help, how we want to help other people, how we might want to support other people, adopting this mindset of the village. It's not only a humble thing to do, it's actually the way the world really works and why not think about how we can enhance and create and support people as they create their own villages.
