Blacks and Steve Jobs

What we could learn from Jobs

Steve Jobs, the former Apple CEO who was responsible for the company’s renaissance died after a quiet and long struggle with cancer. As a disclaimer I must admit I have been in a long standing monogamous relationship with Apple for about 7 years now and I am absolutely obsessed. Whenever I am having a bad day I will go to the stores, stand there, and look at all the products with amazement. After a few minutes with a sparkling new IPad I feel better, it is so bad that I go play with products that I already own but always in amazement. So it was no surprise that I ran out to get a copy of the new Walter Isaacson biography “Steve Jobs.” After finishing it I am still digesting it, but throughout the book I could not stray to far from the question would America have given Steve Jobs the opportunity if he was black and as a black man is Jobs’s success relevant to me?

I don’t in any way suggest that Steve Jobs was less brilliant because he was white, but the question that bothers me is can a Black man be as obstinate and callous and still be given the same opportunities in corporate America.

I was surprised after reading the biography at the genius of Jobs, but equally startling was his complete insanity. He was allowed to double cross friends, steal ideas, blatantly lie or as his friends call it fall into his “reality distortion zone.” Jobs would rarely give credit yet he always asked for more from his employees and yet that was considered apart of his brilliance.

I try to imagine an African American crying to other executives when things are not going their way, or stealing the credit away from their chief designer. Would a group of white men and women allow me, an African American, no matter how brilliant to fire them and replace them with my own friends who would give me carte blanche? I don’t think so. Would they even let me be a CEO after finding out that I denied my first child and then later tried to name a computer after the child before I claimed her as my own?

As an African American I wonder what leadership advice I should take from the book, since in all likely hood I couldn’t lead the same way. My answer is vision. If you have a business, be it a product or service you should learn to perfect it. Be obstinate. Never let the imperfections slide, your customers deserve the very best product at the very best price. If you find perfection unpleasant and you don’t want to do the hard work then you are in the wrong business.

With Jobs perfection was the standard, if you are a small Black business owner like myself perfection should also be our standard. It is unlikely even in the Obama era that African Americans will be allowed to be completely unruly to board members given our race, but we can control what reaches our consumers and create products and provide services that can be amazing.

After you were gone the only thing I have left is everything.

A friend of mine, who shall remain nameless, is currently going through a painful relationship. We spoke for some hours and I could not help but think of my last really painful relationship. So this is about my ex and this piece is dedicated to all people who have been in relationships with persons who take, take, take, and take and at the end of the day after you thought you would loose everything when they were gone, you found relief.

I found you somewhere I would rather not discuss, under circumstances that were less than ideal for the both us. I remember remarking that you were attractive though not in the traditional sense, but in a way that made sense to me. It was your style; I thought what a diamond a hidden gem you were, nothing like a beauty only visible to the beholder.

We would spend all night on the phone and in between working hours: lunch breaks, fifteen-minute breaks, on the way home; we spoke about everything. I remembered your stories about past pain and traumatic experiences that shaped who you were to become (past is always prologue). I thought looking at who you had become meant that you had changed, that you had overcame the things that tried to destroy you. I was wrong; I didn't yet know who you were.

You sucked the life out of everyone, and used what you had been through as an excuse for who you are. I was flexible, I caved, I loved, I gave and gave, and you took and took. So I finally left; out of town, out of state, I met someone who made me happy, but I felt with you there was something unfinished. You stayed on my mind, maybe I was masochistic, maybe it was true love or I was possibly confused. So I came back.

Then one day I got the phone call from you for the last time. You blamed me, you couldn’t do it anymore, you were too flaky, too fleeting, and you didn’t have the energy. I was devastated. I got home and looked around my apartment and realized that there was nothing in my apartment attributed to you: nothing in my home, nothing in my car, nothing at my workstation and finally nothing in my heart. Then suddenly there was relief. I smiled and realized that after you were gone the only thing I had left was everything. In fact I can go on because I had never lost anything.

OJ Simpson Revisited

In this brief article I am going to try and present some evidence that OJ is innocent email me bostonnian@gmail.com and let me know what you think.

Dream Team – What Dream Team?

The LA County District Attorney’s office had never deployed as many prosecutors as they did for the OJ Simpson trial. At any given time there were more than forty, yes forty, deputy district attorneys and more than a dozen clerks working full time to prosecute OJ. The LA DA’s office had the technical services of the FBI’s crime laboratory, the worlds finest, as well as the services of the entire state of the California, Interpol, and the private facilities of Cell Mark, a DNA testing firm. By the time the trial was through, the prosecutor had spent 8 million dollars, a sum OJ never could match. This overwhelming advantage allowed them to prepare 58 witnesses during their prosecution and put on 488 individual exhibits. In whole, the prosecution of OJ Simpson took 6 months an obscene amount of time for a case that was not a civil one.

Another caveat to the dream team myth is that the FBI sends its agents to a special class to teach them how to appear in court. They teach the agents in this school how to look directly at the jury when answering a question, how to sit properly in the witness’s chair, and how to appear affable. All the federal agents who testified against OJ had gone to this school as well as the LAPD officers who had testified against OJ.

The Evidence

Mark Fuhrman, the infamous detective was the first person on the crime scene and one of the principle witnesses to the prosecution, but he was in fact a racist, who collected Nazi paraphernalia, particularly medals and badges.

Why was Fuhrman the first on the scene, when he was off duty? Fuhrman bragged to two officers that he had a sexual relationship with Nicole Brown Simpson; they apparently met after one of the domestic disputes between OJ and Nicole. According the two officers Fuhrman made a point of describing what he called Nicole’s “boob job.”

DNA – The LA DA’s office DNA evidence divided into two parts: The samples taken from the socks found in OJ’s bedroom at Rockingham and off the back gate. The socks were likely a product of tampering. The socks appeared to have been placed at the foot of the habitually neat Simpson’s bed to create the impression that he had left in a hurry. However the chief investigator Dennis Fung, who collected the socks, saw no blood on them neither did the three criminologists who examined them in the LAPD lab. In fact no blood was found on them until weeks later.

There was also the blood in the Bronco, it has went to the LAPD lab, none was found, then to the FBI lab, were the FBI found no blood, then suddenly a cop in the impound finds a spec of blood.

So where did the blood come from? After the initial interrogation of OJ Simpson Blood samples were taken from him and a large quantity of them ended up disappearing from the laboratory.

The list goes on

OJ made statements to the police during his initial interrogation those statements had disappeared.

The coroners could not determine how the victims where really killed and in what order; this suggesting there were probably multiple culprits.

There were no bruises on OJ’s body.

Almost all the DNA evidence showed up weeks after the murder.

Mark Fuhrman and other detectives lied multiple times and in fact Fuhrman plead the Fifth Amendment the second time he was called to the stand to avoid a charge of perjury.

Fuhrman had access to OJ’s blood and was at the crime scene alone for 18 minutes in the first few days of the investigation.

There were shoe prints at the crime scene that were unaccounted for, at least two that did not belong to OJ.

I could go on for days listing all the reasons OJ did not commit the crimes he was charged with despite what he says.

Time Out

I wonder why I don’t have more time. I read an article this week by a lawyer who stated that lawyers should not work more than 40 hours a week because after that it’s simply a case of diminishing returns. Hmmm, well if that’s my true entire life has become a case of diminishing returns.

I am of course not alone in this dilemma; I would imagine that most young professionals share a similar story. We have sacrificed much in order to fulfil a destiny that many of us may not actually want. We have become content to confirm to the standards set for us by society, but have therefore perhaps lost contentment in general. According to wisegeek.com, the average age that a man marries (26.8) has increased by one year in the past 100 years and has increased for woman by three years (25.1). However, anecdotally it appears that the rate of marriage for professional people, especially women, is much higher than the average. Of all of the female lawyers within my age range that I know none were married before age 25 and only 2 were married before age 30. The story is not very much different for my male colleagues. This is not very surprising when you consider that at 25 many of us were still in college and at 30 many of us are still struggling to get out of the debt of student loans. Even more inhibiting is the fact that a 65 hour work week leaves little time for romance and socialising. For me, the free time that I do have I find is best spent resting in bed recovering from a long day and getting ready to face another day of work.

I think if there is a positive, if I was to get married I would certainly be too busy to have an affair. That is small consolation, and in any event moot because I’d never have the time to get married in the first place.

What I want is more time; I want to have time to catch up with my friends, to spend with my family, to go on trips during the weekend, even to go to the movies occasionally! I want more time to write my columns! I wanted to write about the dilemma of being a conservative but not having the ability to support conservative parties (because they are absolutely mad), but of course I had to work on Saturday and it’s now Sunday night and I have to get to bed to get to work. So I don’t have the time to write the column that I actually wanted to write. You see it is quite a pervasive thing this modern urgency, this marriage to work. It takes everything from you and offers little in return. Instead of a 2,500 word column about a serious topic, I only had enough time to write a 500 word column which admittedly is far lighter. However, although this column is not particularly long I wonder if you’ll have enough time to read it all.

Audley Hanna Jr., Esq

Montana Fishburne “A Review”

I love to keep up with the most extreme forms of pop culture, generally I don’t like peeking into the personal lives of celebrities, but I will try to catch a popular movie, or viral YouTube clip that may come my way. So when I got wind that Lawrence Fishburne’s daughter was making her entryway into porn my interests naturally peaked. I wanted to know why the 19-year-old daughter of a millionaire would venture into pornography. So I viewed the clip.

Chippy D is the name porn name of Montana; the scene is with a popular male porn star by the name of Brian Pumper (both viewed in the picture below). From the opening scene you could see there were scars all over the backs of her legs and on her behind. She looked as if she had either been burned or severely bruised. It immediately made the scene uncomfortable. I sped through what seemed to be a classic porn clip, with oral sex, regular sex, and the facial and thought to myself if I were a father of a young woman what could I do to stop my daughter from destroying her life. The answer is tragic, absolutely nothing.

What I learned after viewing the clip is that Montana was arrest for prostitution and that she had been beaten and pimped out by her boyfriend on many occasions. The scars all over her body were evidence of this.

I was deeply saddened by the clip, not only for her, but also for her parents and her family. I thought how sad was it that a teenager should be in control of her life at 19 and essentially destroy it without all her mental faculties in place and her parents are powerless to stop her.

Laurence should not be ashamed, but angry, and we should all hope and pray that our children don’t fall victim to the same fate.

On Wyclef and His Bid For The Presidency.

Recently with my son we watched “Schindler’s List” as we watched this amazing piece of cinema I was amazed at the sacrifice that Oscar Schindler made in order to save the lives of people who were not his own. At the very end of the movie we saw one of the greatest scenes in movie history, where Oscar Schindler, played by Liam Neeson, says, “this car, why did I keep the car, ten people right there, ten people, ten more people. This pin, two people, they would have given me two more at least one.” Oscar Schindler breaks down and cries, he says, “I could have gotten one more person and I didn’t.”

I am half Haitian, although I claim no connection to the country as I was not raised a cultural Haitian. I was raised primarily by a single mom from Alabama. But as ignorant of the culture as I am, like most Americans I could not escape the stories of horrific poverty. One of the stories that broke my heart was hearing that Haitians were actually eating dirt. A business has thrived in Haiti where people are creating and selling mud cakes. If you look at the picture just imagine.

Brittle and gritty - and as revolting as they sound - these are mud cakes. For a long time these mud cakes had been eaten by impoverished pregnant women seeking calcium, a dangerous and medically unproven supplement, but now the cakes have become a staple for entire Haitian families. It is not for the taste and nutrition, it contains tiny bits of salt and margarine, but the salt and margarine do not disguise what journalist who have tried these cakes describe as eating dirt. This picture was taken in 2008 long before the earthquake that wreaked havoc on the poverty stricken nation.

Lets move a couple years forward; the recovery efforts in Haiti are proving nearly impossible, with poor leadership and mounds of rubble still uncleared, according to a report by the RAND Corporation. Unqualified and poorly trained government workers, general lawlessness, poor policing and bad prisons are among the concerns. A former United States special envoy to Haiti says while the humanitarian response was quick, very little rubble has been removed and few basic decisions have been made.

Out of a country that has been for many reasons a disaster, natural and otherwise a young savior has emerged, Wyclef Jean. Wyclef has been an incredible musician, but what are we to make of him as a potential leader of Haiti. I want to preface this by saying that I do not know Wyclef’s soul. I do know that he owns 37 cars. The auto collection Wyclef includes an ultra-rare, 543-horsepower Pagani Zonda C12-S, an exclusive Italian-built sports car that sells for $350,000 according to Motor Trend Magazine.

I read about other cars that Wyclef owns some of them so rare that less than 50 exist in the whole world. The prices of many of the cars were upwards of a half a million dollars.

Wyclef now cries in his public interviews, but he claimed in his open letter on why he is running for president, "I'm not crying for myself; I'm crying for the people of Haiti." In the midst of his tears I would ask him the question Schindler presented to the rabbi, how many could you have saved? How many could you have fed? I would ask him your $350,000 car, how many Haitians would not have eaten dirt, how many lives, and how much medication?

I am not critical of a man who makes a lot of money and indulges himself, but if you are to run for president of a country that is the poorest in the world, what does it say that you accumulated 37 cars while your people ate dirt.

You can view the last scene by clicking on Schindler's List in the first paragraph.

Get Your Ticket

Professional athletes are lucky. Perhaps that goes without saying. In an era in which athletes are celebrities entirely removed from the day to day reality of their fans, we pay large sums of money for the opportunity to watch them shoot a basketball, pitch a baseball or catch a football and cheer them to victory. We grow attached to these complete strangers: they become a part of our family and our circle of friends. We discuss them as if the connection is real. We fantasize about meeting them. They who we want to be and who our children wish we were. In short, they are our heroes and we shower them from afar with our reverence and admiration. Odd, because if you think about it, the vast majority of athletes are merely the beneficiaries of circumstance. They are the ones which the Fates smile down upon. In a society that tends to favor meritocracy, it is curious that we have grown to idolize those who attain their success, in large measure, as a result of pure chance.

What would tell your child if he wanted to become a doctor? You would probably tell him to be disciplined and diligent in his studies, pay attention in class and work harder than he’s ever worked before. In addition, you’d devote your available resources to improving his chance to achieve his dream by paying for test prep, tutors, special summer programs and enriching extra curricular activities. Now, while everyone does not possess the intelligence to realistically become a doctor, with the right work ethic, even those with normal intelligence can achieve this goal. Now what would you tell your child if he told you that he wanted to become a professional basketball player? Well, you would have to tell him that he needs to be about 6 feet 6 inches tall, be able to run extremely fast, have a vertical leap of at least 36 inches and be able to shoot a ball with a diameter of 9.5 inches into a hoop with a diameter of 18 inches from a distance of 15 feet about 50% of the time. Other than perhaps the latter of these requirements, mere hard work and discipline play no role in attaining this goal. Basketball is essentially something that you are born to do. Of course training and refinement play a significant role but only to the extent that it sharpens innate skills.

In reality, being a professional basketball player is dependent upon a series of factors over which we have no control. The requirements for being a basketball player are entirely counter intuitive to those that we would consider necessary for success in day to day life. Often genetics contribute to success, but rarely is success almost entirely dependent upon genetics. Every field in life has its prodigies and savants. Some children may be born to play the violin or to excel at quantum mechanics. The difference however, is that many people can learn how to play a violin functionally or to become competent in mathematical physics though it may take more time for some than for others and while you may never become as good as the prodigy, at some point the difference becomes virtually indistinguishable to all but the aficionado. On the other hand, there is no amount of practice or training that would enable the average person to dunk a basketball or to throw a baseball 100 miles per hour and the difference between a professional athlete’s ability and that of an average person is clearly noticeable.

The professional sports we have come to love today were, by and large, all invented within the past 150 years. They did not become at all profitable until the construction of stadiums and arenas. These sports had no potential to make a person rich until the invention of television specifically the ability to broadcast games “live via satellite”. Therefore, when one considers the amount of luck involved with being able to earn 10 million dollars a year by playing a game, it defies logic. Ultimately, being a successful professional athlete is akin to winning the lottery: extreme profits obtained largely by chance.

Now, I do not think that there is anything wrong with making huge sums of money simply for being tall or fast, I just think it’s…interesting.

Audley Hanna Jr.