The other day, I read John Heilemann’s article about
Joe Biden in New York Magazine. It was a fair article, balancing the gaffs with
his mettle and making the point that you have to give Joe a chance to prove
himself, because, as we all know, Joe Biden will sometimes say stupid things.
In the beginning of his term – remember? – he several
times made us cringe, especially when he said that, “it will not be six months
before the world tests Barack Obama” with a “generated crisis.” But, despite a difficult start with the
president, there was a thaw and the two gradually developed a bond.
Heileman writes, “Over time, a sense of personal
chemistry has flowered alongside professional esteem.” Biden is quoted as
saying, “I think the bottom line is, what they like about Barack is Barack
doesn’t pretend to be what he’s not, and I don’t pretend to be what I’m not.”
“We’re an unmatched matched pair,” he concludes. The president gave him a
chance; I suppose they gave each other a chance.
Likewise, take Kelly Ripa and Michael Strahan. They
gave each other a chance, too. Michael guest-hosted until he could get past the
blond bubbliness.
Look at the Ramones. Despite Johnny being the punk
version of Ted Nugent and Joey being an OCD Jewish liberal, they found a
rhythm, gave themselves the same last name and made beautiful music together. (Compare
that to the Osmonds, where Donny and Marie share chromo somatic vanilla for
DNA, yet we want to beat them with a baseball bat as soon as they smile.)
A few years ago, I had this creative department with
a Thai girl, a Korean, a Mexican, two African Americans, an Indian from India,
an inked up creative manager, 3 Jews, a bald German that looked like Mussolini,
2 Italians (moi included), 3 maybe 4 gay people and then, get this, I went and
hired a white guy who was born in Connecticut, of all places. It turns out
that he was, as one of the copywriters described, the “darkest white guy” we had
ever met. Sure, he occasionally turned up the collar of his polo shirt, but he
had enough good taste in his sick sense of humor to compensate.
You
see, to make diversity pay off, people need a chance. HR charges us with making
our agencies more diverse yet rarely are we told what it will take to work,
rarely told how to evaluate a young person’s site for potential, rarely told
how diversity could do more than make a holding company look good. We need
mentorship programs, we need managers who are fascinated by people who think
differently than themselves, heck, we need managers. We need to do something
other than find different looking kids and plop them into agencies as if from
an alien ship. Fine, there is no amount of tutelage that will sway me into
hiring a fan of Josh Groban for the creative department (my tolerance has
limits) but I do believe a little guidance will go a long way.
It
usually takes time to learn that we share a quality with someone who is quite
different, takes time to assimilate that strange quality with the qualities
we’ve been comfortable with. Yeah, maybe the tension is all within our selves.
Remember Jekyll and Hyde? People need a little help to get over themselves.
