BRIAN KENNY: Welcome to Cold Call, the podcast where we discuss real-world business challenges through the lens of Harvard Business School case studies. In this episode, we’ll peel back the curtain of the Boston Ballet, one of America’s most renowned cultural institutions. Ballet is an art form dating back hundreds of years. It’s hard to overstate the significance of ballet in European culture and history, yet with such legacy comes the challenge of innovation.
Our focus today is on the journey and impact of Ming Min Hui, who broke new ground as a young Asian-American woman appointed executive director of the Ballet during its 60th season. It’s a case that explores the intersection of for-profit and nonprofit management, the evolution of ballet as an institution, and difficult choices leaders must make to keep art both beautiful and relevant. Today on Cold Call, we welcome Professor Edward Chang and the case protagonist, Ming Min Hui, to discuss the case, “Ming Min Hui at the Boston Ballet“. I’m your host Brian Kenny, and you’re listening to Cold Call on the HBR podcast network.
Edward Chang teaches in the Negotiations Unit at Harvard Business School. He is the case author. And Ming Min Hui, as I just mentioned, is the protagonist in today’s case. Welcome both of you to Cold Call.
EDWARD CHANG: Thank you so much for having us.
MING MIN HUI: Thank you. I’m glad to be here.
BRIAN KENNY: It’s great to have you here. This case was really interesting. I am a lifelong Bostonian. I’ve been to the Ballet many times. In fact, small world story, I actually sang in the boys’ choir at the Nutcracker when I was a young boy. Arthur Fiedler conducted that, so I’ve seen backstage at the Boston Ballet.
MING MIN HUI: Yes, that’s great history.
BRIAN KENNY: And it’s not all pretty. I want people to know that backstage at a ballet, there’s a lot of stuff going on, it’s very busy, but the case is really interesting, so let’s just dive right in. Edward, I’m going to start with you. I want to know sort of what initially drew you to the Boston Ballet as the focus of this particular case study, and what made Ming’s leadership story so compelling to you?
EDWARD CHANG: Yeah. There are a lot of different aspects of the case that I think are compelling that drew me to want to write a story both about Ming, as well as the ballet as it was coming out of both the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the racial reckoning of the summer of 2020. And I think those dual crises were really one of the focal points to highlight. I think one of the things that’s particularly interesting about the Boston Ballet is, as you mentioned in the introduction, there’s this very long history of ballet that it’s also kind of situated into. And so in some ways, these crises are even sharpened relative to maybe what other organizations are facing or other businesses are facing, where yes, they’re still thinking about, how can they commit to racial equity in this time of societal turbulence, but maybe they don’t have the same kind of history or tradition that the ballet is also balancing.
And then if we think about Ming as a case protagonist, I mean, just a really incredible backstory and life story, as well as kind of being this trailblazer of being a woman of color in this lead position in the arts world, which is quite unusual. And so, I think it’s also an interesting kind of parallel thinking about how the Boston Ballet as an organization has to evolve and develop, as well as Ming’s own personal leadership journey to get to the point of where she is today.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. Do you have a cold call that you like to start the class with?
EDWARD CHANG: I mean, like any good cold call, you always think about, what’s the primary decisions that the case protagonist has to face? And the case ends with Ming kind of contemplating, how is she going to lead the ballet in this post-pandemic, post-racial-reckoning story? And so, the cold call that I like to start with is just, what do you think are the top priorities for Ming to think about as she’s navigating the situation?
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah, that’s a good one. So Ming, let me turn to you for a second. You’re a graduate. I didn’t mention that when I introduced you, but great to have you back on campus. And the case notes about the fact that you really didn’t fit the traditional profile. Edward just referenced that as well. How did your background factor into shaping your leadership style as you thought about this opportunity?
MING MIN HUI: Yeah, that’s true. I think typically, arts leaders, particularly in the ballet world, but I think this is true to generalize broadly, often there is a requirement that you have been an artist and have a very deep understanding of the art form that the institution, the organization, is serving. And so in that sense, I am a little bit of a different kind of breed of what an arts manager, arts leader looks like. I did ballet extremely seriously as a kid. It was by far my most time-consuming extracurricular in high school, and my mother had to negotiate with me so I could be in “The Nutcracker” if my grades didn’t slip, so that was sort of the condition of my childhood. But I never became professional. I never had aspirations to be professional. I didn’t grow up in kind of the ranks of a ballet company, which is often kind of a prerequisite for what it means to lead the company.
The structure of the ballet world, though, often has an executive and an artistic director, so the artistic director then ends up really carrying these artistic expertise requirements, and then the executive director is more responsible for the business side. So, at least that window of opportunity existed for someone with a more business-oriented background to come into the role of the executive director spot. But it’s just not as common for someone to be in that role and not have that background at all, and to instead have been a banker, investment banker, an MBA. That was my training ground.
But I think that actually that combined experience of having loved ballet as a child and then subsequently really spending the early part of my career focused on building up my business toolkit means that I can be a very unique type of partner to the artistic director. It’s almost more clear in a sense that we have our own lanes and our own areas, kind of domain areas, of expertise. And it means that while I have deep appreciation for the art form, I’m constantly learning about it too, and developing even kind of newfound later in life appreciation. The thing that I know that I bring to bear is a much more clear-eyed and critical point of view when it comes to executive communication and data and data-driven decision-making, and the things that Harvard management skillsets bring to bear in any career, in any kind of organization, in any sector. So, I think that blend has been really important and critical for the kind of arts leader and manager I’ve become.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah, we actually see this phenomenon in other industries too. If you think about health care, where people rise through the medical ranks as a surgeon or as a physician of some sort, and they get moved into an administrative role, and the challenge that they face from not really having the business acumen. I’ve seen that play out in different ways.
Edward, the case really paints a picture of the changing landscape post-pandemic. It’s hard to believe the pandemic was only a few years ago. It feels like a long time ago, but at the same time, every organization came out of that facing a certain set of challenges. What were the challenges that you identified for the Boston Ballet coming out of the pandemic?
EDWARD CHANG: Yeah, and Ming, please feel free to interrupt. You were living this.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah, you lived it.
EDWARD CHANG: One of the big challenges is that when you think about what is the main product of the Boston Ballet, it’s putting on performances. It’s creating art and putting on performances, and with the pandemic, that was no longer possible. And so, you have an organization where over 50% of the revenue, roughly, is coming from things like ticket sales, or the school that the Boston Ballet runs, and none of those sources of revenue exist any more, kind of overnight. And so one question is, what do you do in that situation? How do you just navigate the fact that, okay, you’re cutting off a giant revenue source, but you still have all these fixed costs, you have all these dancers you’ve hired, the orchestra, the rent that you’re paying on buildings and things like that. How do you just move forward?
But then even as we were coming out of the pandemic and performances were able to resume, things were changing, society was changing. There’s questions about how are people spending their money, both in terms of the audience members, how are audiences consuming the arts? And I think that there’s potentially interesting changes where during the pandemic, in this major time of global uncertainty, people maybe wanted more nostalgia. Maybe they wanted things that made them feel good. And so, a shift in consumer preferences or audience preferences towards things that are maybe more classic, like The Nutcracker or Sleeping Beauty, as opposed to more experimental.
But then when you also think about other kinds of audiences of the Boston Ballet, you think about donors, people who contribute to the arts. And coming put of both the pandemic as well as the racial reckoning of the summer of 2020 is perhaps a desire for people who traditionally have given lots of money to different organizations wanting to have different sorts of impact with their money, and thinking about, how does the Boston Ballet shape itself as an organization that will help these philanthropists have the sort of impact that they want to have? There are kind of these giant underlying monumental forces pushing audiences in different directions, and the Ballet and Ming really need to figure out, how do you address these changes?
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah, that’s a big set of challenges right there, and I definitely want to come back to the one about program choice. How do you show that you are advancing with the times, but you’re still respecting the sort of comfort food of the art form, the classics? But before we do that, Ming, if you can just take us back to probably March of 2020. You’re about ready to launch a new season. You’ve got exciting things that lie ahead, and the pandemic hits. What was the scene like? How did you make those decisions, and what things did you factor in?
MING MIN HUI: Yeah, the date is March 18, 2020, which is how you know it was significant. I was CFO at the time, so I worked for our last executive director, Max Hodges, also an HBS alum. She’s 2010, I’m 2015. And Max was actually coming back from maternity leave, and we were about to open a ballet called Carmen. It had done quite well in the box office. I think Carmen is one of those programs that has a lot more name recognition, so everyone was very excited about this. It was a more contemporary version of Carmen, and we had been watching the public health indicators for a few weeks with increasing worry that this program maybe wasn’t going to see the light of day.
And so, I remember that Max came back from maternity leave on a Wednesday, and the show was going to open the next day, on a Thursday, and she said, “From a public safety standpoint, we probably can’t do this.” And then I said, “Unfortunately, as the CFO, I’ve also run the numbers on what our balance sheet and deferred revenue commitments look like, and we’re in a tough liquidity position if we have to suddenly refund not just this program, but the rest of the spring season.” And so this now begins the trickle-down effect of these organizations, nonprofits, arts organizations are so mission-driven that we often run on incredibly thin margins, incredibly thin working capital lines. And so, the balancing of needs of different constituents, and then our own kind of existential threat within all of this, was very apparent in that moment.
And obviously what ended up happening afterwards is we made that call. We canceled opening night, so the piece got rehearsed, but then everyone went home. And what we thought was going to be two weeks obviously quickly became a lot more than two weeks of being at home, figuring out all kinds of permutations to produce art remotely and in hybrid forms and in pod forms and so forth. And we also worked incredibly closely with audiences, subscribers, donors, to have credits and avoiding refunds, donate back ticket values, and then raise kind of incremental philanthropic funds to get us through this period.
BRIAN KENNY:Yeah, and you know, out of every bad situation can come some good things, so you found maybe new ways to connect with your audience using technology in ways that you hadn’t before. I know that at HBS, we’ve actually done episodes on Cold Call about the switch that we had to make literally within a week to be able to go from teaching in the classroom to teaching online, and every other organization did some variation of that. Edward, let me come back to you. The case does a great job of talking about how the Boston Ballet has to sort of balance the themes of personal identity and institutional identity, this is, as I said, a classic institution in Boston, but also demonstrate change. How do you think that came out and manifested itself in the case?
EDWARD CHANG: When you think about an art form like ballet that has this extremely rich tradition, there is a desire to preserve a lot of that tradition, preserve a lot of the history, preserve the canon. But at the same time, when we have a backwards-looking perspective, we can see that there were parts of this history that maybe were exclusionary, or that there are pieces that in their original choreographies perhaps perpetuated racist stereotypes or tropes. And there’s a question of, how do you stay relevant in the current world? How do you stay relevant in a world where norms in society change, expectations change?
And so, I think that one of the challenges for an organization like the Boston Ballet and for Ming as executive director is to think about, how do you strike the right balance between maybe a perspective on maintaining tradition, maintaining an art form, while also remaining relevant, while also continuing to innovate? And especially when you think about the audience for ballet looks very different now than it did 50 years ago, and it’s going to look very different in 50 years from now. And if the Boston Ballet wants to be an organization that’s going to stay relevant, that’s going to last another 60 years, what are the steps that need to be taken today in order to ensure that relevance moving forward?
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah, so how did you think about that, Ming, as you came in? You’ve held multiple roles within the organization, maybe coming in a little more in your comfort zone and as chief of staff or CFO-type roles, and then moving into the executive director role, where you had to take a lot more care and concern about the creative side of the house. How did you think about that and how did those roles maybe prepare you for the challenges of stepping into the executive director role, particularly at a moment of crisis?
MING MIN HUI: Yeah. Well, I’m marveling at what a good student of this organization Edward has been, because that is a very good descriptor of the ongoing tensions that I think exist not just for Boston Ballet, but for the industry writ large. And I’ll preface, too, just to say that the work that I think the organization has done is certainly not driven solely by me or carried solely by me. Now, I just sort of carry a different role within the work, given the position and given a certain dimension of the personal significance, I think, that I carry now as someone who is from an underrepresented racial ethnic background, gender background, for the role that I’m in. And so, that carries kind of with it a different visibility around the work.
But I think Boston Ballet has in many ways been a leader in these ways that you navigate these tensions, because we’ve been, I think, careful from the get-go to not be too reductionist with any of the approaches to these hard questions, where everything requires a real sense of open-mindedness, of nuance and appreciation, that the conversation is ongoing and very contextualized. And so, when it comes to, for example, things like preserving canon, how do you navigate the challenges of some of these works that were made during a time when people didn’t know necessarily what they were depicting, and how that might reflect years later with societies that then that becomes a very inaccurate representation or kind of depiction of a certain group of people, type of people.
What I see in front of us is that there’s often kind of several different tough ways to approach these things. One is to choose to move ahead and just ensure that the work is surrounded with education, with context. It’s part of a conversation piece. But that’s not a great solution for all cases because you, at the end of the day, might be perpetrating a stereotype on stage or among an audience that causes more harm than anything you can put around it. So there’s also a step then around what it means to preserve some great dancing, some of the great classical techniques that these ballets represent, but perhaps strip away some of the narrative components that might be challenging or problematic.
And you know, “Bayadere,” for example, is kind of an interesting example of this. There’s a certain act within “Bayadere” that is very famous. It’s called “King of the Shades,” and it’s really devoid of any of the kind of reductionist Asian stereotyping that pervades a lot of the rest of the ballet. And so for example, we’ve excerpted this act and performed it in isolation of the rest of the main ballet.
And then there’s a third possibility, and it’s often very investment-intensive, that you can just remake it entirely. Put a new narrative, put new costuming, put new reframing on an existing ballet, and then reimagine it in a sense and kind of make it a living art form through that mechanism. But that often requires resources. It requires risk, too, in terms of how it’s going to land with new audiences, so that’s also a factor that doesn’t have … It’s not without its challenges.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah, and you’re never going to make everybody happy. I think we’ve all learned that in different ways over the last few years, is that some of these things are pretty polarizing. You probably have a board that you have to deal with. You have an audience that’s been with the ballet for a long time and considers themselves almost like part owners of the product, and so that creates a whole different set of challenges for you.
Edward, I’m wondering, as you dug into looking at the Boston Ballet, did you note any significant differences between the sort of nonprofit management approach and the for-profit management approach? And what do you think, if we just pull the lens back even more broadly, what do you think business leaders can sort of take away from that?
EDWARD CHANG: One of the things that I really admired from talking to Ming and doing the interviews for this case is, I think the organizations that have been most successful in navigating these moments where you’re not going to be able to make everyone happy are those where they really deep down have thought deeply about, what are the guiding values or principles that are guiding these decisions? And I think for any of these decisions, if you can really boil down to, what are the underlying values or principles that you’re using to make the decisions? I think, even when people disagree with you, even if people disagree with the decision that you end up making or the outcome that comes to be, if they understand what are the underlying values and principles, it’s much more palatable, that they can at least respect that you came at it from a principled place, from a principled decision.
I think where organizations often stray, especially in these potentially controversial societal topics, is that they don’t really have a clear sense of what their values are or what their priorities are, or what are those guiding principles to make these decisions. And then when they make decisions, that they can come across as inauthentic or inconsistent, and that is where I think a lot of the backlash can come from is that you’re really not making anyone happy in those situations. And so, I think one thing that Ming and the Boston Ballet has done well is that when they’re thinking about things like, how do they balance preserving tradition, preserving art, preserving the canon, with how do we ensure that we’re staying relevant? How do we ensure that we’re not perpetuating harm in society? That they’ve really thought about, what are the key components? What are those guiding values or principles guiding these artistic and business decisions?
And when you think about that, I think from the questions of, what can we learn from nonprofits for the for-profit world, I think in a lot of the research I’ve done, organizations are probably more similar than we think. That when you think about these questions about, how do you guide an organization or help an organization navigate, or lead an organization in these times of crisis, a lot of these things about focusing on, what are the core values, what are the core principles? That this is relevant, not just for deciding which ballet to stage, but things like, when you’re going through layoffs or when you’re downsizing, how do you communicate that? What are the underlying central ideas or tenets they’re going to use to communicate to your employees, to communicate to your shareholders in ways that are going to be authentic? Those, I think, are lessons that any organization, that any leader, can take.
But of course, there are differences between the nonprofit and the for-profit world in that in the nonprofit world, there is this much more explicit fact that there is a mission besides just profit manifestation, right? That as a nonprofit organization, the Boston Ballet has this social mission to create art. And I think that that is one of the interesting things about it being a leader in many ways, and where for a for-profit organization, an overly simplistic perspective is that you’re just about trying to maximize shareholder value. I should caveat that, because the rest of the LCA teaching group will admonish me if I say that there is no legal requirement to do that in the US.
BRIAN KENNY: LCA, by the way, being Leadership and Corporate Accountability. It’s a course that we teach here to all of our first-year students.
EDWARD CHANG: Yeah, but an overly simplistic perspective on capitalism is that as a leader for a for-profit company, you’re just trying to maximize shareholder value. And I think what’s really interesting in the nonprofit space is that you do have to still think about the finances, you still have to think about the management perspective, but you also have to think about mission fulfillment.
BRIAN KENNY: Of course.
EDWARD CHANG: And so in a way, the question of leading a nonprofit organization, there is a much more explicit tension, because it’s part of your mission. Both the organization has to exist as an ongoing matter, but then you also have this social mission to fulfill, whereas in the for-profit space, maybe a lot of organizations nowadays are thinking more actively about that social mission, but there’s at least not necessarily that explicit charter in the US context.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah, yeah. What is the mission of the Boston Ballet? I didn’t ask you that before, but I’m curious now.
MING MIN HUI: Yeah. I mean, there’s a very long mission statement somewhere on our website, but the way I like to capture it is that it really is to make dance for everybody. And so to Edward’s excellent point, I think that’s been a lot of the driving force behind how we think about what we choose to do and why is the access mission is a central focus, then, of everything we do. And if the dances that we’re putting on stage, the ballets we’re putting on stage, or are expressing through our educational commitments, if there are populations that are not feeling a sense of belonging or are not feeling like they can see themselves as part of this, we have, on some level, failed some amount of our mission, then.
And so exactly to Edward’s point, there is maybe kind of a symbiosis of some of the financial sustainability that is actually in lockstep with the access mission, right, because this question of existential relevance and audience development. I mean, of course that is something then that we should be taking as a practical, doing right and doing good, and is not at all kind of irrelevant then to the question of what it means to also just be doing well financially and sustainably. But you can see how core that is, then, for us to be grappling with these questions just because it is in the DNA of what the programs are supposed to be doing.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah, and you gave some examples earlier about the way that you’ve adjusted some of the programming. I’m wondering, this is a two-part question, what are some of the other changes maybe you made to the business process side or to the structure of the organization to support this view of making dance accessible to everyone? And is this a sector-wide trend? Is this happening across not just dance organizations, but other types of arts organizations?
MING MIN HUI: Yeah. I mean, I think this question of accessibility for particularly classical art forms that have kind of a more Eurocentric history, it’s actually been really a conversation point long before the George Floyd kind of racial reckoning of 2020. I think that series of events just accelerated what was already an underlying series of conversations in that sector, acknowledging that if we are not grappling with these questions, the irrelevance problem becomes increasingly real.
BRIAN KENNY: Sure.
MING MIN HUI: And so it’s still, I think, true to this day that ballet and opera and symphony, a lot of these classical Eurocentric art forms, do suffer from a broad perception of being elitist or of being very white. And how much of that is based in truth versus generalized mindset is, I think, something that’s just playing in progress right now as it stands.
So at Boston Ballet, you’re right to indicate that we think a lot about what we’re producing programmatically and how these themes show up in what’s deeply core about the art-making, but it certainly shows up in just organizational practice writ large that I think applies beyond ballet, beyond the dance sector, art world, into organizations and companies, regardless of tax status. And so we’ve investigated just how to think about approaches to hiring processes differently, recruitment processes differently, in an effort to make our staff and board make-up more diverse. And that is best practices drawn from not at all a nonprofit-specific context. That is best practices drawn from much broader organizational context and thinking about what creates bias in these processes. That’s the kind of other example of ways that this just showing up well beyond the stage or in the studios.
BRIAN KENNY: Another tension that we alluded to earlier, and I’ll come back to you on this, Edward, is this tension of heritage or legacy versus forward-thinking and innovative, and sometimes those two things can chafe against each other. We grappled with this a little bit. Harvard Business School’s been around for a long time, but we are certainly very innovative. We know it. We know that we innovate here, but the brand maybe doesn’t show it in the way that we need it to all the time. How should organizations think about grappling with that tension?
EDWARD CHANG: I mean, I think it goes back to one of the things I was saying earlier about what I think the Boston Ballet does really well is to focus on the underlying values or principles. And that I think that tradition for the sake of tradition probably doesn’t serve anyone, and innovation for the sake of changing things also doesn’t serve anyone.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah, good point.
EDWARD CHANG: And so, it’s really about thinking, “What is important about a tradition? What is important about a history that we’re trying to preserve, and why does that matter for our mission?” And the same thing for when we’re thinking about innovation, what is the purpose of the innovation? How is this going to serve our broader mission, serve our broader values for an organization? And I think when you frame it not so much in maybe a juxtaposition between tradition and innovation, but really thinking about, what are the actions that an organization can take that’s going to help drive the mission forward, that’s going to align with those values and principles, that hopefully a lot of those things that at least on the surface maybe appear to be intentioned, hopefully, that some of those tensions go away by focusing deeper down on the core values.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. Does that ring true to you, Ming?
MING MIN HUI: It does. I mean, the example that comes to mind for me, I think that we are really proud of a lot of the innovation that we do in the art-making and through new commissions of works by voices that are alive and well today, up-and-coming artists, choreographers. And so, certainly a lot of that is kind of pure innovation in the sense of, what is the movement vocabulary? What is the dance and artistic product that people are seeing on stage? Does it challenge a lot of conceptions of what you think ballet is? So, that’s sort of the more obvious programmatic way that we deliver on the innovation logic. But then one of the examples that came to mind in accordance with what Edward’s talking about, things like The Nutcracker are sort of this preserving of tradition, preserving of nostalgia.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. You can’t mess with The Nutcracker.
MING MIN HUI: Really can’t mess with that. The Tchaikovsky score is preserved in a very intentional way because it’s just such a perfectly architected piece in so many ways. But for example, this past Christmas season, holiday season, we introduced a new Nutcracker head for one of our dancers who’s black and was in the role of The Nutcracker Prince Cavalier. This head was modified so that the, I think, original Nutcracker head is sort of this very pale skin with ruddy cheeks and blue eyes, and so that we updated and had an alternate head that he could wear where the skin tone is darker. You have olive eyes. It’s just sort of more representative of his underlying true racial expression. And so this dancer, Danny Durrett, he is one of the few Black men, I think, who’ve gotten to play this role, to dance this role for a major ballet company. And by doing this, in deep conversation with him, because you want to be very respectful to whoever it is who actually has to inhabit the role in the space.
BRIAN KENNY: Sure. Yeah.
MING MIN HUI: It was incredibly meaningful for him to feel like the character, the dance role, kind of belonged to him in a way that historically, it maybe hasn’t. It opens a really complex can of worms around The Nutcracker doll and the questions of representation. And also, there’s now a really complex way to think about all the different possible racial expressions that you need to accommodate within this kind of modification. But at least we’ve started that conversation, and that’s, in some ways, a method of innovating, right?
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah, I love that.
MING MIN HUI: It’s within the classics. Yeah.
BRIAN KENNY: And back to what we were saying earlier, you can’t make everybody happy, but you’re going to have to make some people unhappy sometimes in order to make progress. This has been a great conversation. I was really looking forward to this one. I’ve got one question left for each of you, so I’ll start with you, Ming. By the way, our mission at Harvard Business School is to educate leaders who make a difference in the world. That’s a very simple statement that has a lot that backs it up, and you’re a great example of that. I’m wondering what advice you would give to other young people from underrepresented backgrounds like yourself who are aspiring to be in leadership roles in legacy or traditional institutions that maybe haven’t been as open to that in the past.
MING MIN HUI: I’ve come back to campus quite a lot, because I am quite passionate about making sure that people see that there are alternate examples of what this leadership can even just look like. And for anyone who then looks more like me, they might feel a little more inspired to believe that this path is possible. And in those conversations, I’m open to admitting that feeling a certain degree of imposter syndrome, I think that that’s maybe an overplayed concept, but it’s not that unusual. And on some level, I think that the feelings like that sometimes tell you something about what challenges you’ve accepted, and what work you’re doing that maybe goes even beyond yourself, and that it’s okay to lean into some of the discomfort that that might yield, and to appreciate that that work is really important. The advice that was given to me that I found helpful is, are you really smart enough that you’ve managed to dupe everybody else into thinking that you are not deserving? And isn’t that quite presumptuous of you to think that you have outsmarted everybody else? I just find it such a fun kind of inversion of the self-doubt that might come from not seeing yourselves in kind of the hero role or the leader role. And so, that’s something that I share in case it’s helpful to anybody else.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah, and another piece of advice that I got along the same lines a long time ago was that if you’re not a little nervous and you don’t have a little bit of that feeling, you probably haven’t challenged yourself enough.
MING MIN HUI: Yeah, exactly.
BRIAN KENNY: So, that’s not a bad feeling to have. Edward, last question goes to you. We always ask our case authors, if there’s one thing you’d like people to remember about the “MING MIN HUI” case, what would it be?
EDWARD CHANG: And I hope that one of the things that’s emerged both from this conversation, hearing Ming talk about how the Ballet is thinking about staying relevant and also addressing issues around equity is actually understanding that these issues are much more interrelated than they might seem at first blush. And that for all sorts of organizations, not just for the Boston Ballet, that I think organizations that are going to remain relevant for another 50, 100 years, are those where questions around how do you address things like diversity, equity, and inclusion are not this kind of on the side thing that’s nice to do when we have a little bit of extra spare time.
But when you think about something like, so for the Boston Ballet, they need to think about, how do they stay relevant for an audience that’s changing? It’s changing both in terms of its taste, it’s also changing demographically. And if an organization like the Boston Ballet thinks that, “Oh, the way we’re going to do this is by hiring the exact same sort of people who all look alike, who are going to have all the same background, and that’s going to help us produce products that are going to be innovative or relevant,” I think that’s probably not a winning strategy. And in many ways when you think about something like, How do you stay relevant to audiences? How do you stay relevant in terms of creating new products? Oh, actually thinking about maybe having, in this case, having dancers, having choreographers, having staff who better reflect the future audience, that that might be a better strategy for a business in terms of staying relevant.
Or even if you think about, how do you actually recruit an employee base that’s going to help accomplish that? If you are an organization that is not invested in diversity, you are essentially, perhaps, cutting off a large portion of the talent pool, because it’s much harder to recruit people from unrepresented backgrounds if your organization is very homogenous in the first place. And that having failed not to invest in that early on is something that’s going to make it much harder to diversify later on in an organization’s life.
By investing in talent, by creating an environment where people feel like they belong, where people feel like they can bring their whole selves, for people from all sorts of backgrounds feel like they can be accepted, can hopefully help you build a diverse organization that’s going to help you generate the ideas, make the right decisions, create the products that are going to help the organization stay relevant.
BRIAN KENNY: Ming, Edward, thank you so much for joining me on Cold Call.
EDWARD CHANG: Great.
MING MIN HUI: Thank you so much.
BRIAN KENNY: If you enjoy Cold Call, you might like our other podcasts, Climate Rising, Coaching Real Leaders, IdeaCast, Managing the Future of Work, Skydeck, Think Big, Buy Small, and Women at Work. Find them wherever you get your podcasts. If you have any suggestions or just want to say hello, we want to hear from you, email us at coldcall@hbs.edu. Thanks again for joining us, I’m your host Brian Kenny, and you’ve been listening to Cold Call, an official podcast of Harvard Business School and part of the HBR Podcast Network.