Kindness with James Rhee
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For 25 years, Brightview Senior Living has been dedicated to creating an award-winning company culture so residents and families receive best-in-class services. Across our 50 communities, Brightview associates help deliver peace of mind, safety, security, transportation, daily programs, delicious food, and high-quality care if needed.

Welcome to Cheaters and Backstabbers. I'm Shadi Diaz. And I'm Kate Robards. And we are New York City stand-up comedians and best friends. And we love a good cheating and backstabbing story. Welcome to Cheaters and Backstabbers.

So this is a series where our guests reveal their most shocking cheating stories. Join us as we learn how to avoid getting our hearts broken or our backs slashed. Listen to Cheaters and Backstabbers on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Meet the real woman behind the tabloid headlines in a personal podcast that delves into the life of the notorious Tori Spelling as she takes us through the ups and downs of her sometimes glamorous, sometimes chaotic life in marriage. I just filed for divorce. Whoa. I said the words that I've said like in my head for like 16 years.

Wild. Listen to Misspelling on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. James Rhee has quite the resume. He graduated from Harvard undergrad and Harvard Law before becoming a teacher. Then he settled into a comfortable and profitable career as a private equity investor.

But that's not why I wanted to talk to James. I wanted to talk to him because he left all that behind and did something that all his peers thought was crazy. He became CEO of a distressed company called Ashley Stewart, a fashion brand that serves and employs predominantly black women. He was only supposed to be there for six months just to help the company go through liquidation.

But instead, he discovered an opportunity to reinvent the company and serve a new community. And he stayed there for over seven years. And he did so by discovering something remarkable. The importance of intangibles. Things that are hard to count or put down on a balance sheet, but they make such a remarkable difference that they can actually rescue people and rescue companies.

It's all about goodwill and kindness, two things that are grossly undervalued in our society today. James is currently a professor of entrepreneurship at Howard University and a strategic advisor at the MIT Leadership Center, where he gets to teach other people about the importance of kindness. This is a bit of optimism. James, you and I have something in common.

Which is, we both believe it's nice to be nice. Are we a dying breed, Simon? You know, I think theoretically everybody likes to be nice. Then you see the way that they talk to the server or the barista. I was standing in line to buy ice cream a few days ago, and the woman in front of me just went, give me a chocolate, give me two scoops. And maybe it's my English upbringing. I sort of muttered to myself, please, thank you, you know?

That was a big deal in our household growing up. You know, my parents were Korean immigrants. So it was like, it was how you did it. It wasn't what you said. It was how you said it. Yeah. My parents are English. I'm originally from England. So like we got in trouble if our elbows were on the table. Manners were always important and pleases and thank yous were important. But like now we have Alexa.

where we just sort of, Alexa, do this. Like, wouldn't it be nice if Alexa wouldn't work unless you said please at the end of the request? That would be nice. There are a lot of little formalities that are part of a social contact, right? I think a lot of those things are falling apart. Yeah, it's true. Someone on our team found the TED Talk that you did where you talk about goodwill, and that's how you got on our radar.

And what interested me is you came from finance and finance people are not traditionally associated, especially in the private equity world, with goodwill. Private equity is usually we bought a company, we stripped it, we laid off a bunch of people, we put some lipstick on the pig and we sold it for a profit.

And so I'm very curious your journey through finance that you discovered the power of prioritizing people even in distressed companies. I am a PE guy, but most PE guys also didn't teach high school and go to law school to be a public defender. Capitalism was different 40 years ago, 50 years ago.

There was a lot less financial engineering. There was more responsibilities to your neighborhood, to your community, to your employees. There was much more stress on that. It was in the annual reports. It was part of being a good leader. I think some of the bad reputation that PE has now is deserved. It certainly changed during my time when I first started with big dimples and no gray hair. It was still a lot about creating new enterprise growth opportunities.

I think we should lean into your story. I mean, your company had bought a distressed company, and why don't you pick it up from there? I was 42, and as a private equity person, you have a lot of investments in your portfolio.

And one of these investments happened to be a business that really I thought was historically important for a certain segment of people in this country. They were for black women, moderate income and size 12 and up. I think it's fair to say that the systems are not geared to reward that person easily. There's a lot of things that she has to overcome just on a daily basis. And

Yeah, my dad was dying and I was having a lot of thoughts just about what's my life about? Is it to shuffle money around and to leverage them and to not be accountable for jobs and say, oh, it's a bad investment. I'm going to walk away. This one just came at a time in my life. There's very little advocacy for this demographic.

in the inner sanctums of boardrooms of private equity. And so I made a choice. I wasn't crazy. I sort of said, I'll do it for six months. I volunteered to be the interim head to avoid liquidation. And after six months, a lot of things changed in my life. I got very close to a lot of the women in the front lines in the neighborhoods across America. And then sadly, not a lot of people came to help. And some of the reactions were less than

polite, right? Or some of the words were, well, hurtful. So after six months, I was going to come home because my contract was up. But I had another decision to make at that point. And we canvassed the entire world. Not one person would give money to the company. And I felt like I was right about the women, about my relationship with them,

I had some opinions about where the world was going. I think some of them have panned out over the last 10 years. Like what? That people would really value realness. They would see through perfection. That they would be really looking for people, leaders, brands, friends, people.

that were not perfect. As an investor, I was really long women. I thought that women were more natural systems changers. Just ability to handle paradox and oxymoron. They always have to live in multiple systems all the time, right? And I think that this demographic too, that particularly black women, they have to handle even more change, constant change.

And I thought that was a real asset to be real, but also to be agile, to be able to handle change. And so that's what I saw. And more importantly, I knew my friendship with the women was real. And so I stayed. I ended up staying for seven years. Six months turned into seven years. How did goodwill function? I mean, that was the topic of your TED Talk, and you've talked about that in other places as well. Like, where did goodwill factor in?

Goodwill is just a lot of the intangible things that you can't see that you create generally through generosity through kindness through Decency it's your relationship with other people in a lot of ways goodwill is a measurement in our real life of humanity of Your impact that you've had on people It's a it's things that you create with other people when you haven't asked for reciprocity. You're not asking for anything and

And so I saw that in this company. I saw it with the women. I saw it with the women as related to me. And I thought it was a real asset and that there are very few companies in our economy that have created natural goodwill, that it's been organic goodwill. A lot of the goodwill in our society has been manufactured with cheap money and digital marketing.

But this goodwill was real. You could feel it. And it was not something that you could see on a spreadsheet. You made these friendships. It turned the business around.

It became a profitable business, self-sustaining business. It's a wonderful story. I'm curious, did it change you? Yeah, it was a huge change. I resisted some of it for a while. So the first town hall, I showed some vulnerability in the beginning when I said, my name is James and I've never done this before. I'm obviously not the customer. And I just said, listen, over time, you may get to see that I have some applied experience here. But yeah, like on paper, no.

least qualified person to do this yeah the armor was off i was really focused on them like to really solve for this problem it would bother me that this company had failed them for so many years and when i was doing that they were very generous with me right they uh they saw parts of me that maybe i had forgotten i think to this day they'll say to you if you ask them they said ah

We could feel your heart, James. And we knew. The thing that I'm loving about this conversation is we're talking about business here. And all of the traditional things that I think people would say when you take over a business, you did the opposite. As you said, you didn't come up with this big rah-rah. Here's what I'm going to do. Here's my plan. Everything's going to be great. You were insanely honest in a time where there was probably more fear than anything else because they knew the writing was on the wall.

They knew this was a last ditch effort. They knew the odds were frightfully against all of you. And for you to say, look, here's the reality. I don't know what I'm going to do. And I'm not the most qualified person here. I didn't grow up like you. I don't look like you. I'm not like you, but I care and I'm going to try. And I think there's something deeply human about that, that when somebody says, I'm going to do this for you, I'm going to do this for us.

that people rally around and say, let's do this. Where if you'd come in with a big rah-rah speech, I would imagine that though some people might have bought into it, some people would have flat out just rejected it because they could see the writing on the wall, they could see reality. And others would have leaned back, folded their arms and said, all right,

Show us what you got. And I think one of the things that humanity does from a leader is it sort of validates the humanity of everybody else in the room. It makes us want to be on the team. Yeah, I think it's really well said. I mean, it's kind of, you were saying I almost did the exact opposite of what you would read in a classic leadership books at the various business schools across the country. The leader comes in on a horse, no shirt,

I got all the answers. You're all incompetent. I'm going to fire this people now and I don't need to listen. I'm bringing my own people in and just do what you're told. I did the opposite. So I gave space. I waited. I hovered. I didn't move. I just sat still. Just not to sound overly Buddhist, but it was like really just to –

It took a lot of action for me to not do things. These things are not events, they're processes. You know, no plan ever survives contact with reality anyway. What you did was so fascinating, which is you took time to listen and learn before making any big decisions, which in a company that's distressed, you know, you would think you don't have the time to do it, but you did. Yeah. And it's, I think a lesson in life sometimes too, like I tell my kids, it's the most important thing for you to do is what you don't do. Yeah. Give other people space, watch.

Let them author it with you, which they did. It was more like a creative process. Comment on some of the things that are going on in business today, the ones that seem to confound us. Elon, Twitter. Yeah, I think that goes back to your opening about the manner in which we engage. I don't love what Elon's doing. I think that he's obviously a brilliant man, but there's collateral negative externalities for this sort of breach in decency, like the manner in which we speak to one another.

I am concerned that we look at Jerome Powell and this Fed funds rate, and we look at it like it's some sort of seer, that this is the one thing that if we toggle correctly, it'll fix all of society's ills. We're so focused on an interest rate, a Fed funds rate, that that's going to drive all of human behavior. It's partly because of the way that we've gamified and turned finance into a circus on CNBC, and

And we're watching it like it's a show. And what's less sexy than that, right? It's all the long-term investments in public school education and our children. No one cares because you can't gamify them into a show. I've talked about this before, but we over-indexed on rugged individualism and heroized people in business. Elizabeth Gilbert talks about this in her TED Talk, and I've talked about this as well before, which I absolutely love. The concept of genius pre-Renaissance is

was a daemon that lived in your walls, this spirit that lived in your walls. And if somebody did something remarkable, they would say, ah, they had their genius with them. And you could never take full credit. And somewhere in the Renaissance period, we became, they had their genius, so they are a genius. And I think what you did in your experience as a CEO, which is you never thought you were the genius. You thought you had your genius. And if you got anything right, it's because you had your genius with you. You had the people with you. Mm-hmm.

I love the way you say that. I used to say to them, this is chapter three of your story. In chapter three, a sort of unlikely different looking friend came. And isn't that beautiful? It's like life. You never know who shows up for you. Sometimes you're the friends that you expect to show up for you. They don't, but you leave yourself open. So I came, but make no mistake, this is your book.

It's your story. What you're offering is a service mentality, which you're saying is, I may be the leader, but we go together. And I may make mistakes, but we go together. And I may ask for help, but we go together. And I may lean on you, but we go together. And you may lean on me, but we go together. And I think that's so lost in modern business because we've made business about me and we forgot that it is actually a story of we. But you did saying, look, I don't have all the answers.

I don't know exactly what to do. And here's the newsflash. Nobody really does. Even somebody who's got more experience in this than me, they don't know either because everything is different. The times are different. The peoples are different. The companies are different. The markets are different. And nobody actually knows. And I think it goes back to the conversation about mathematizing everything, which is mathematics is about certainty and business is anything other than certainty.

And if COVID didn't prove that to everybody, I don't know what will. Yeah, I've learned a long time ago to run away from anyone who thinks that they know anything with certainty. Yeah. I used to fall for that younger. And particularly now, we're just in so much uncertainty, so much inflection point. It's really the ability to embrace uncertainty. I know you're an optimistic guy. I just wanted to say this to your listeners. One of the most beautiful parts of what happened was that

After we sort of got our own act together and people really watched what we were doing, the entire business community really rallied around us. Because we had a mindset of, I think like in Buddhism you would call it, sort of like this real big self coming from small self. To just not compete against everybody. You're not here to win. You're here to be with everyone. So these large companies, they came and really wanted to be part of it.

People delivered these large companies and they said, we want to work with you. We feel better about ourselves working with you. And it's not companies that wanted to work with you. It's human beings who worked at that company who had decision-making ability who wanted to work with you. Let's be crystal clear. It didn't make the company feel better. It made the people who worked with you feel better. Can you tell me a specific story of one of your team members?

who they more than others impacted you personally? She still works there. She is a store manager. She really was very early to say, you know, I trust you and I'm going to teach you everything I know about what's not right, what's going on. She was always there to support me during the early months and years. She would send me emails and call me and say, we know what you're doing. We believe in it.

We know you're lonely and that you miss your family, but we just want to tell you we appreciate you. This is the woman who showed up at my dad's funeral unexpectedly and said to my mother and said, Mrs. Rhee, your son's a good person. You did a good job. This is the same woman who held my hand at that funeral and said, you didn't tell anyone your dad died? You didn't think we'd be here for you?

This is the same woman who came to my mom's funeral my last year being CEO. This person made a really big difference on my life and we talk still all the time. I admire her. She's a great wife, mother, creative leader. I always thought about her and her assistant manager every time I made decisions or was thinking about things. I said, would they approve of this?

Would they be proud of this decision? Is it good for them? God, if only more leaders would say, is this good for the person? This is good for my people, this generic thing. And I think when we make general statements like, this is good for our people, this is good for our customer, we don't actually know who these people are. And it becomes amorphous and quite frankly, intangible. And when we say, is this good for her? What would she think? Because I know her. She knows me.

it makes that decision much more difficult. It's like, is this good for children? Is this good for my children? Is this good for society? Is this good for my neighbor? And I think the more that we can personalize decisions, the more difficult they become because right now the default is, is this good for a generic customer or is this good for a generic investor? Unfortunately, employee is not on that list as much as it needs to be. To use your words, you took

what was a messy situation, and you made music. Yes. I let her sing her song cleanly. Yeah. You made music out of the whole situation. And notes on a page are decisions. Each one is a choice. And they'll either be a cacophony or they'll go together. And that's sort of what business is, right? We're trying to make music with each decision as a difficult decision. And we get to experiment. Yeah.

We get to play around a little bit, see what sounds good. And then if it works, we'll use that again. But this one is a chorus. Thanks so much for coming on. I really appreciate it. Thank you. If you enjoyed this podcast and would like to hear more, please subscribe wherever you like to listen to podcasts. And if you'd like even more optimism, check out my website, simonsenic.com for classes, videos, and more.

Until then, take care of yourself. Take care of each other. For 25 years, Brightview Senior Living has been dedicated to creating an award-winning company culture so residents and families receive best-in-class services. Across our 50 communities, Brightview associates help deliver peace of mind, safety, security, transportation, daily programs, delicious food, and high-quality care if needed.

Discover how our vibrant senior living communities can help you live your best life. Visit brightviewseniorliving.com to learn more. Equal housing opportunity. Welcome to Cheaters and Backstabbers. I'm Shadi Diaz. And I'm Kate Robards. And we are New York City stand-up comedians and best friends. And we love a good cheating and backstabbing story. Welcome.

So this is a series where our guests reveal their most shocking cheating stories. Join us as we learn how to avoid getting our hearts broken or our backs slashed. Listen to Cheaters and Backstabbers on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Meet the real woman behind the tabloid headlines in a personal podcast that delves into the life of the notorious Tori Spelling as she takes us through the ups and downs of her sometimes glamorous, sometimes chaotic life in marriage. I just filed for divorce. Whoa. I said the words that I've said like in my head for like 16 years.

wild. Listen to Misspelling on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.