Analyst for cnn, and former presidential adviser), carter ro

analyst for CNN, and former presidential
adviser), Carter Roberts (President and CEO of
World Wildlife Fund), Joe Kennedy (CEO and
President of Pandora), and Rich Lyons (Dean of
Haas Business School, University of California–
Berkeley).
Passion & Purpose offers profound insight
into the values and vision of today’s emerging
leaders, with inspiration and ideas for anyone
who aspires to catalyze enduring change in the
world.
John Coleman earned an MBA from Harvard
Business School, where he was a Dean’s
Award winner, and an MPA from the Harvard
Kennedy School, where he was a Zuckerman
Fellow and a George Fellow. Daniel Gulati
holds an MBA from Harvard Business
School, where he was a Baker Fellow and an
Arthur Rock Entrepreneurial Fellow, and was
awarded the Robert F. Jasse Distinguished
Award in Entrepreneurship & Leadership.
W. oliver SeGovia was born and raised in
the Philippines and received an MBA with
Distinction from Harvard Business School,
where he was a LeBaron-McArthur-Ellis
Fellow.
(Continued on back flap)
(Continued from front flap)

jac k e t d e s i g n: ja m e s d e v r i e s
au t h o r p h oto s: w e s l e y c h a n n e l, t r acy p ow e l l,
pat r i c k a n d pat r i c i a s e g ov i a
Get inspired. Stay informed. Join the discussion.
Visit www.hbr.org/books www.hbr.org/books
manaGement US$25.95
“ many baby boomers like to characterize the Facebook
generation as entitled slackers.
In reading the amazing stories of the leaders in Passion &
Purpose, you quickly realize that
nothing could be further from the truth. the reality is that this
new generation of leaders is
committed to making a difference and is ready to lead—not
tomorrow, but now.”
— Bill GeorGe, Professor of management Practice, Harvard
Business School;
author, True North
“ It doesn’t matter where you begin your career. What matters
most is developing the ability
to connect the dots . . . the rarest and most valuable commodity
in our work is those
individuals who can bridge government, business, civil society,
and academia in solving
the biggest problems facing our society.”
—Carter roBerts, President and CeO, World Wildlife Fund
“ With america—and the world—at a major inflection point,
strong and principled leader-

ship is as crucial as it’s ever been. as this book shows, the
younger generation is stepping
up more and more each day to provide that leadership—in ways
all of us should be paying
attention to.”
— DaviD GerGen, Director, Center for Public Leadership at the
Harvard Kennedy School;
senior political analyst, Cnn; and former presidential adviser
“ the younger generation has an integrated identity that is
consistent between workplace,
home, and society . . . they not only want to make a difference
themselves, they want to
know that the company they work for is also making a positive
contribution.”
—DeB Henretta, Group President, Procter & Gamble asia
“ the great challenge and the great opportunity we face today is
the ability to work almost
any time and any way. the new generation of leaders seems to
embrace the opportunity
side of this, approaching work more flexibly in terms of when
and where it takes place.”
—Joe KenneDy, CeO and President, Pandora
“ Leadership is not being the CeO; leadership is influencing
outcomes. Leadership is often
without formal authority. I think that for a lot of these younger
folks, they demonstrate
the skills of leadership, but they also embody a new mind-set.”
—riCH lyons, Dean of Haas Business School, University of
California–Berkeley

“ the next generation of leaders will have the opportunity to
shape the world. they will deal
with exciting and quite different challenges than their
predecessors—all in the context of a
globally connected and rapidly changing world.”
—DominiC Barton, Global managing Director, mcKinsey &
Company
ISBN 978-1-4221-6266-8
9 781 422 1 62668
9 0 0 0 0
john coleman
daniel gulati
w. oliver segovia
foreword by bill george
Stories from the
Best and Brightest
Young Business Leaders
H a r Va r D B U S I n e S S r e V I e W P r e S S
PASSION
PURPOSE
PA
SSIO
N
PU

R
PO
SE
coleman
gulati
segovia
How will the next generation
of leaders shape business?
From questions about globalization and sustainability to issues
surrounding diversity, learning, and the convergence
of the public and private sectors, tomorrow’s
leaders have a lot to think about. But these big
issues aren’t the only ones facing young leaders
starting out in business today. What else are
they focused on? And how do they prioritize
the challenges and opportunities before them—
while also making the world a better place?
In Passion & Purpose, recent Harvard
Business School MBAs share personal stories
about assuming the mantle of leadership in
ways unlike any previous generation. In candid,
often moving accounts of their successes and
setbacks—from launching start-ups or taking
on the family business to helping kids in the
Arabian Gulf or harnessing new technology to
develop clean energy—they reveal how their
generation’s ideas, aspirations, and practices are
radically reshaping business and transforming
leadership.

Drawing on insights from a survey of five
hundred students from top U.S. business
schools, Passion & Purpose provides an
overview of today’s big hot-button issues,
followed by firsthand accounts from the young
leaders who are tackling these issues head-
on. Their personal stories are rounded out
with broader perspectives from established
luminaries in business, academia, and the
public sector, including Dominic Barton
(Global Managing Director of McKinsey &
Company), Deb Henretta (Group President of
Procter & Gamble Asia), Nitin Nohria (Dean
of Harvard Business School), David Gergen
(Director of the Center for Public Leadership at
the Harvard Kennedy School, senior political
to learn more, visit: www.hbr.org/passion-purpose
Coleman10343_Mechanical.indd 1 9/26/11 5:03 PM
This document is authorized for use only by Tylecia Westbrook
in WMBA-6000-3/MMSL-6000-3/MGMT-6000-3/WMBA-
6000B-3-Dynamic Leadership2021 Spring Sem 01/11-05/02-PT2
at Laureate Education - Walden University, 2021.
PASSION
PURPOSE
107124 00 i-xiv r2 vs 9/19/11 8:11 PM Page i
6000B-3-Dynamic Leadership2021 Spring Sem

01/11-05/02-PT2 at Laureate Education - Walden University,
2021.
107124 00 i-xiv r2 vs 9/19/11 8:11 PM Page ii
2021.
PASSION
PURPOSE
JOHN COLEMAN
DANIEL GULATI
W. OLIVER SEGOVIA
HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW PRESS
Boston, Massachusetts
Stories from the
Best and Brightest
Young Business Leaders
107124 00 i-xiv r2 vs 9/19/11 8:11 PM Page iii

2021.
Copyright 2012 Harvard Business School Publishing
Corporation
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or
introduced into a re-
trieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means
(electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior
permission of the pub-
lisher. Requests for permission should be directed to
[email protected],
or mailed to Permissions, Harvard Business School Publishing,
60 Harvard Way,
Boston, Massachusetts 02163.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Coleman, John, 1981-
Passion & purpose : stories from the best and brightest young
business leaders /
John Coleman, Daniel Gulati, W. Oliver Segovia.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-4221-6266-8 (alk. paper)
1. Leadership. 2. Executives. 3. Success in business. 4.
Organizational
effectiveness. I. Gulati, Daniel. II. Segovia, W. Oliver. III.
Title. IV. Title:

Passion and purpose.
HD57.7.C644 2012
658'.049--dc23
2011025148
107124 00 i-xiv r2 vs 9/19/11 8:11 PM Page iv
Find more digital content or join the discussion on
www.hbr.org.
The web addresses referenced and linked in this book were live
and
correct at the time of the book’s publication but may be subject
to change.
2021.
www.hbr.org
mailto:[email protected]
Contents
Foreword, Bill George ix
Introduction 1
1. Convergence 11
Creating Opportunities Across Sectors

Floating Above the Boxes 17
Business, Nonprofit, and the Age of Falling Boundaries
UMAIMAH MENDHRO
Learning from Kibera 23
Nonprofit Lessons for Business from East Africa’s
Largest Slum
RYE BARCOTT
Commerce and Culture 28
Combining Business and the Arts
CHRISTINA WALLACE
Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Business of Peace 34
JAKE CUSACK
Business in the World 41
How Corporations Can Be Change Agents
KELLI WOLF MOLES
Interview with David Gergen, adviser to four presidents, 47
Director of Harvard’s Center for Public Leadership,
and senior political analyst for CNN
2. Globalization 55
Embracing the Global Generation
Bridging Two Worlds 61
An India Story
SANYOGITA AGGARWAL

107124 00 i-xiv r2 vs 9/19/11 8:11 PM Page v
2021.
vi Contents
QatarDebate 67
Education, Civic Engagement, and Leadership
in the Arabian Gulf
ANDREW GOODMAN
Emerging Social Enterprise 74
Learning the Business of Agriculture in Tanzania
KATIE LAIDLAW
Global Citizen Year 79
Learning from the World
ABIGAIL FALIK
The Business of Reconciliation 85
How Cows and Co-Ops Are Paving the Way for Genuine
Reconciliation in Rwanda
CHRIS MALONEY
Interview with Dominic Barton, Global Managing Director 91
of McKinsey & Company

3. People 99
Leading in a Diverse World
Nonconforming Culture 104
How to Feel Comfortable in Who You Are No
Matter Where You Are
KIMBERLY CARTER
Diversity Day 110
Whole People, Whole Organizations, and a
Whole New Approach to Diversity
JOSH BRONSTEIN
Women and the Workplace 118
TASNEEM DOHADWALA
Joyful on the Job 124
A Generation Pursuing Happiness at Work
BENJAMIN SCHUMACHER
People Leadership from Baghdad to Boston 130
SETH MOULTON
Interview with Deb Henretta, CEO, P&G Asia 134
107124 00 i-xiv r2 vs 9/19/11 8:11 PM Page vi
2021.

4. Sustainability 139
Integrating Preservation and Profits
A Sustainable Career 145
ANNIE FISHMAN
From Safety Nets to Trampolines 151
VALERIE BOCKSTETTE
The Value of Community Partnerships in 158
Addressing Climate Change
CHARLEY CUMMINGS
Interview with Carter Roberts, CEO, World Wildlife Fund 164
5. Technology 171
Competing by Connecting
Building an Online Marketplace 175
JAMES REINHART
Technology and Social Good 181
Loans, Relays and the Power of Community
SHELBY CLARK
Mobile Millennials 185
JASON GURWIN
Interview with Joe Kennedy, 191
CEO and President of Pandora

6. Learning 197
Educating Tomorrow’s Leaders
The Leadership Boot Camp 203
Training the Next Generation of Corporate Leaders
KISHAN MADAMALA
The MBA of Hard Knocks 210
Why Fast Failure Is the Best Thing for Business Education
PATRICK CHUN
The New Corporate Classrooms 216
Training’s Tectonic Technological Shift
MICHAEL B. HORN
Contents vii
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2021.
Tackling Financial Illiteracy 223
ALEXA LEIGH MARIE VON TOBEL
The Education of a Millennial Leader 228
JONATHAN DOOCHIN

Interview with Rich Lyons, Dean, Haas Business School, 235
University of California–Berkeley
Moving Forward 243
Capstone Interview with HBS Dean, Nitin Nohria 246
Appendix: About the Passion and Purpose MBA Student Survey
255
Notes 263
Acknowledgments 273
Index 275
About the Contributors 289
About the Authors 295
viii Contents
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2021.
Foreword
Many baby boomers like to characterize the Facebook
generation as enti-

tled slackers. In reading the amazing stories of the leaders in
Passion and
Purpose, you quickly realize that nothing could be further from
the truth.
The reality is that this new generation of leaders is committed
to making a
difference and is ready to lead—not tomorrow, but now.
The authors of this remarkable collection of twenty-six stories,
all writ-
ten by exceptional young leaders, were deeply impacted by the
leadership
failures of 2008 that led to the Great Recession. The three
authors con-
clude, “We have faith in the young generations of leaders who
have wit-
nessed the lessons of the crisis and are now seeking to learn
from the
mistakes that were made and offer a new vision for the future.”
Georgian John Coleman believes that “business offers solutions
to
some of the most pressing problems we face.” Filipino Oliver
Segovia
quotes the local saying, “He who doesn’t appreciate his roots

shall never
succeed.” Australian Daniel Gulati saw firsthand examples of
how organi-
zations can meet their financial goals and simultaneously make
positive
contributions to society.
Unwilling to wait their turn in line, these leaders are already
having
enormous impact. Look at the global citizens being developed
by Abby
Falik, the transformation of leadership that Jon Doochin is
leading at
Harvard College, Marine Captain Rye Barcott’s initiative to
help the
slums of Kenya’s Kibera become a safe community that works
for
107124 00 i-xiv r2 vs 9/19/11 8:11 PM Page ix
2021.
everyone, and Katie Laidlaw’s efforts to make agriculture in

Tanzania
profitable for all. Theirs are just a few of the initiatives that
vividly illus-
trate how this generation of leaders really is different from
mine.
Anthropologist Margaret Mead once said, “Never doubt the
power of a
small group of people to change the world. Indeed, it is the only
thing that
ever has.” Through their initiatives, young leaders are
confirming Mead’s
wisdom.
My generation started out just as idealistically as these young
leaders.
We were kids of the Kennedy era who flocked to Washington,
D.C.,
Selma, and Watts to try to change the world. Somewhere along
the way
we lost sight of that idealism. Was it the futility of the Vietnam
war and
the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther
King, Jr.,
or were we seduced by flawed economic theories into believing
that self-

interest should take precedence over the common good?
Whatever the
answers, the leadership failures of the last decade—from the
fall of
Enron through the economic meltdown of 2008—have vividly
demon-
strated the flaws in twentieth-century leadership and the need
for a new
generation of leaders to take charge.
The response of this new generation, as these stories vividly
illustrate,
is to use their talents now to make a positive impact in helping
others. As
a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School
the past
eight years, I have had the privilege of working closely with
several of
these leaders and many more like them.
After completing my tenure as CEO of Medtronic in 2001 and
board
chair in 2002, I took a working sabbatical in Switzerland to
teach at two
leading Swiss institutions. It was there that I decided to devote

myself for
the next decade to helping develop the next generation of
leaders, from
MBA students to the new generation of corporate CEOs. In
early 2004 I
returned to my alma mater, Harvard Business School, to help
launch a
new course, Leadership and Corporate Accountability, and later
created
Authentic Leadership Development, a course based on leading
from
within and built around six-person Leadership Development
Groups.
During these years I have spent hundreds of hours in the
classroom
and many more in private discussions with students in my
office.
x PASSION AND PURPOSE
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2021.

Through these open, thoughtful, often poignant talks, I have
learned just
how committed these young leaders are about using their talents
to have
an impact. They are willing to work countless hours to realize
their
dreams, yet they also want to lead integrated lives. I have seen
them fol-
low their hearts to unite people around common causes, and the
impact
has often been stunning.
Their approach to leadership differs sharply from that of the
baby
boomer generation. Command-and-control is out. So is exerting
power
over others. They eschew bureaucracy, hierarchical
organizations, and in-
ternal politics. That’s why many are opting to start their own
organizations
rather than joining established institutions.
The focus of their leadership is to build on their roots and align
people

around a common purpose and shared values. They recognize
that they
cannot accomplish their goals by using power to control others,
as so
many in my generation did. Instead, they amplify their limited
power by
empowering others to take on shared challenges.
Their leadership style is collaborative, not autocratic. Nor are
they
competitive with their peers. They seek to surround themselves
with the
most talented people representing a wide range of skills that can
be help-
ful in achieving their aims. They care little who gets the credit,
so long as
their mutual goals are achieved. Most of all, these young
leaders seek to
serve, using their gifts and their leadership abilities.
One of the characteristics of this new generation of leaders is
their
ability to move easily between the for-profit, nonprofit, and
government
sectors. In fact, that’s because many of them have worked in all
three sec-

tors. They have firsthand knowledge of how people in each of
these sec-
tors think, how they measure success, and how they get things
done. A
number of the contributors to this book have joint master’s
degrees in
government and business, with a substantial dose of social
enterprise
courses and projects.
This broad perspective is increasingly important because
developing
workable solutions to the world’s intractable problems—global
health,
energy and the environment, education, poverty and jobs, and
global
peace—requires multisector approaches. For example, take the
challenges
Foreword xi
107124 00 i-xiv r2 vs 9/19/11 8:11 PM Page xi
2021.

of AIDS in Africa. It isn’t sufficient for pharmaceutical makers
like Glaxo-
SmithKline to give their AIDS drugs away. It takes support
from local gov-
ernments to get the drugs to the people who need them most,
NGOs like
Doctors Without Borders to administer the drugs to HIV
patients, and
funds from global organizations like the World Health
Organization and
the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. These emerging leaders,
with the
diversity of experiences they have accumulated before the age
of thirty,
understand how to bring people together from these
organizations and get
them to collaborate to solve major problems.
That’s what former Marine Captain Rye Barcott is doing to
address the
problem of poverty in Kibera, Nairobi’s largest slum. While
still a student
at the University of North Carolina, Barcott formed Carolina for

Kibera,
investing $26 and combining it with the sweat equity of nurse
Tabitha
Festo and a local youth named Salim Mohamed. Incredibly, he
was able
to build this new organization while serving for five years as a
counterin-
telligence officer in Bosnia, Iraq, and the Horn of Africa.
Barcott sees similarities between the tactics he used in building
the
Kibera community and the Marines’ task in community building
in war-
torn towns like Fallujah, Iraq. He writes, “I feel fortunate to
have been
able to work across the public, private, and nonprofit sectors at
a young
age, and I aspire to continue to incorporate such a balance
throughout my
life. The solutions to our world’s toughest problems, such as the
growth of
megaslums, require full engagement and collaboration from
each sector,
and we have no time to waste.”

These leaders of the future are global in their outlook and
comfortable
working across diverse cultures. By the time they reach
graduate school,
they have lived and worked all over the world. In sharp
contrast, I never
traveled outside North America until my honeymoon at twenty-
six, and
first moved overseas at age thirty-seven.
Abigail Falik is typical of this new generation. Completing her
MBA in
2008, Falik didn’t follow her classmates into financial services
or consult-
ing. Instead, she took a big risk and founded Global Citizen
Year. Its pur-
pose is to enable talented high school graduates to do a gap year
of service
before entering college by immersing themselves in a
developing country.
xii PASSION AND PURPOSE
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2021.
In a sense, Falik is trying to replicate for others the experience
she had
as a sixteen-year-old in a rural village in Nicaragua. She
believes these
formative experiences will enable young people to learn the
empathy and
gain the insights they need to address twenty-first-century
challenges.
Falik concludes, “Not until we walk in another’s shoes can we
truly feel
others’ hopes and fears, and have the wisdom to know what it
would
mean to work together toward a common cause.”
Katie Laidlaw had a similar experience in Tanzania during a
summer
internship with TechnoServe, studying how to make fruit and
vegetable
markets run profitably. She concludes, “This experience
confirmed my
own hypothesis that future leaders will be better equipped to
tackle the

problems of tomorrow by being successful in operating across
geogra-
phies and sectors today.”
The Facebook generation may be the first that is genuinely
color-blind,
gender-blind, and sexual preference–blind. Writes former HBS
LGBT
president Josh Bronstein, “My call to action for our generation
is simple:
be authentic. That means bringing your whole self to work, not
just those
characteristics that you think your employer wants to see . . . A
defining
characteristic of our generation is that we want to be recognized
as indi-
viduals—not anonymous cogs forced to think, act, and dress in
the same
way.”
These new leaders are changing the way leaders are educated as
well.
Jonathan Doochin, who struggled with dyslexia throughout his
school
years, couldn’t wait to graduate from Harvard College to

transform the
school’s education of future leaders. During his senior year
Doochin
founded the Leadership Institute on the premise that developing
leaders
requires practical experiences that cause individuals to
reexamine their
perspective of the world, learn to empathize with others, and
develop
their unique leadership style.
Doochin organizes students into Leadership Development
Groups that
enable them to understand their authentic selves by sharing their
life sto-
ries, how they have coped with their failures, and what brings
them gen-
uine happiness. Doochin writes, “Each of us has the capacity to
lead . . . all
of the mysterious qualities that once defined ‘leadership’ are
not inherent,
Foreword xiii
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2021.
but eminently teachable . . . The model for leadership is not
one-size-fits-
all, but should be individualized as we play to our own
strengths and per-
sonalities.”
In 1966 Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., said prophetically, “Few will
have the
greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to
change a small
portion of events. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage
and belief
that human history is shaped.” The acts of these young leaders
will write
the history of this generation as they focus their talents on
making the
world a better place for everyone.
If these emerging leaders stay on course through the inevitable
pitfalls,
setbacks, and disappointments, I have confidence their

accomplishments
will exceed their greatest expectations. The time is ripe for the
baby
boomers to provide emerging leaders the opportunities to take
charge.
Their passion and dedication to their purpose gives all of us
hope that our
future is very bright indeed.
—Bill George
Bill George is professor of management practice at Harvard
Business
School and former chair and CEO of Medtronic, Inc. He is the
author
of four national best-sellers: Authentic Leadership (2003), True
North (2007), Finding Your True North: A Personal Guide
(2008),
and 7 Lessons for Leading in Crisis (2009). His newest book,
True
North Groups (2011), was released in September 2011.
xiv PASSION AND PURPOSE
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2021.
Introduction
It’s been an interesting time to come of age in
business.Arguably, the past decade has been one of the most
intriguing and terri-
fying in history. Technological innovation has led us from the
infancy of
the Internet to the nearly ubiquitous online connectedness,
social net-
working, and location-based technology we enjoy today. The
world order
has shifted dramatically—billions of people in developing
economies have
joined the ranks of the middle class, and business has become
ever more
global, with goods and services moving more freely over
national bound-
aries and corporations seeking greater growth in transnational
commerce.
And, of course, the global economy crashed, falling from a
period of un-

matched prosperity into one of frightening destruction and
uncertainty.
It’s an era that cries out for new leadership and new thinking.
And it’s
an era that has left a generation of young leaders wondering
how they can
contribute even as they seek a life of meaning, passion, and
purpose in
the private sector. Whether in the world’s biggest corporations,
local
small and medium business, or nimble start-ups, they aren’t
entering
business solely for financial gain, but as a way to find
meaningful work
and make a positive difference in the world.
Yet few forums have provided these young leaders an outlet to
voice their
visions for the future, to highlight the trends they’ve seen
emerge from the
chaos of the last decade, or to offer both practical advice and
hopeful inspi-
ration to their friends and colleagues as they embark on their
careers.
We hope this book helps fill that void. Our purpose? To share

the sto-
ries of young business leaders and thereby give a glimpse into
the future
107124 00 001-010 INT r2 vs copy 9/19/11 8:09 PM Page 1
2021.
2 PASSION AND PURPOSE
of business and leadership—offering both practical learning and
inspi-
ration. To do this, we “crowd-sourced” much of the content—
asking
more than twenty young business leaders to tell their stories,
conduct-
ing an …
Reading selection: “Learning to Read” excerpt from The
Autobiography of Malcolm X
MALCOLM X
Born Malcolm Little on May 19, 1925, Malcolm X was one of
the most articulate and powerful leaders of black America
during the 1960s. A street hustler convicted of robbery

in 1946, he spent seven years in prison, where he educated
himself and became a disciple of Elijah Muhammad, founder of
the Nation of Islam. In the days of the civil rights movement,
Malcolm X emerged as the leading spokesman for black
separatism, a philosophy that urged black Americans to cut
political, social, and economic ties with the white community.
After a pilgrimage to Mecca, the capital of the Muslim world,
in 1964, he became an orthodox Muslim, adopted the Muslim
name El Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, and distanced himself from the
teachings of the black Muslims. He was assassinated in 1965. In
the following excerpt from his
autobiography (1965), coauthored with Alex Haley and
published the year of his death, Malcolm X describes his self-
education.
It was because of my letters that I happened to stumble
upon starting to acquire some kind of a homemade education.
I became increasingly frustrated at not being able to
express what I wanted to convey in letters that I wrote,
especially those to Mr. Elijah Muhammad. In the street, I had
been the most articulate hustler out there. I had commanded
attention when I said something. But now, trying to write
simple English, I not only wasn’t articulate, I wasn’t even
functional. How would I sound writing in slang, the way 1
would say it, something such as, “Look, daddy, let me pull your
coat about a cat, Elijah Muhammad—”
Many who today hear me somewhere in person, or on
television, or those who read something I’ve said, will think I
went to school far beyond the eighth grade. This impression is
due entirely to my prison studies.
It had really begun back in the Charlestown Prison,
when Bimbi first made me feel envy of his stock of knowledge.
Bimbi had always taken charge of any conversations he was in,
and I had tried to emulate him. But every book I picked up had

few sentences which didn’t contain anywhere from one to nearly
all of the words that might as well have been in Chinese. When
I just skipped those words, of course, I really ended up with
little idea of what the book said. So I had come to the Norfolk
Prison Colony still going through only book-reading motions.
Pretty soon, I would have quit even these motions, unless I had
received the motivation that I did.
I saw that the best thing I could do was get hold of a
dictionary—to study, to learn some words. I was lucky enough
to reason also that I should try to improve my penmanship. It
was sad. I couldn’t even write in a straight line. It was both
ideas together that moved me to request a dictionary along with
some tablets and pencils from the Norfolk Prison
Colony school.
I spent two days just riffling uncertainly through the
dictionary’s pages. I’d never realized so many words existed! I
didn’t know which words I needed to learn. Finally, just to start
some kind of action, I began copying.
In my slow, painstaking, ragged handwriting, I copied
into my tablet everything printed on that first page, down to the
punctuation marks.
I believe it took me a day. Then, aloud, I read back, to
myself, everything I’d written on the tablet. Over and over,
aloud, to myself, I read my own handwriting.
I woke up the next morning, thinking about those
words—immensely proud to realize that not only had I written
so much at one time, but I’d written words that I never knew
were in the world. Moreover, with a little effort, I also could
remember what many of these words meant. I reviewed the
words whose meanings I didn’t remember. Funny thing, from
the dictionary first page right now, that “aardvark” springs to
my mind. The dictionary had a picture of it, a long-tailed, long-
eared, burrowing African mammal, which lives off termites
caught by sticking out its tongue as an anteater does for ants.
I was so fascinated that I went on—I copied the
dictionary’s next page. And the same experience came when I

studied that. With every succeeding page, I also learned of
people and places and events from history. Actually the
dictionary is like a miniature encyclopedia. Finally the
dictionary’s A section had filled a whole tablet—and I went on
into the B’s. That was the way I started copying what eventually
became the entire dictionary. It went a lot faster after so much
practice helped me to pick up handwriting speed. Between what
I wrote in my tablet, and writing letters, during the rest of my
time in prison I would guess I wrote a million words.
I suppose it was inevitable that as my word-base
broadened, I could for the first time pick up a book and read
and now begin to understand what the book was saying. Anyone
who has read a great deal can imagine the new world that
opened. Let me tell you something: from then until I left that
prison, in every free moment I had, if I was not reading in the
library, I was reading on my bunk. You couldn’t have gotten me
out of books with a wedge. Between Mr. Muhammad’s
teachings, my correspondence, my visitors—usually Ella and
Reginald—and my reading of books, months passed without my
even thinking about being imprisoned. In fact, up to then, I
never had been so truly free in my life.
The Norfolk Prison Colony’s library was in the school
building. A variety of classes was taught there by instructors
who came from such places as Harvard and Boston universities.
The weekly debates between inmate teams were also held in the
school building. You would be astonished to know how worked
up convict debaters and audiences would get over subjects like
“Should Babies Be Fed Milk?”
Available on the prison library’s shelves were books on
just about every general subject. Much of the big private
collection that Parkhurst had willed to the prison was still in
crates and boxes in the back of the library—thousands of old
books. Some of them looked ancient: covers faded; old-time
parchment-looking binding. Parkhurst, I’ve mentioned, seemed
to have been principally interested in history and religion. He
had the money and the special interest to have a lot of books

that you wouldn’t have in general circulation. Any college
library would have been lucky to get that collection.
As you can imagine, especially in a prison where there
was heavy emphasis on rehabilitation, an inmate was smiled
upon if he demonstrated an unusually intense interest in books.
There was a sizable number of well-read inmates, especially the
popular debaters, Some were said by many to be practically
walking encyclopedias.
They were almost celebrities. No university would ask
any student to devour literature as I did when this new world
opened to me, of being able to read and understand.
I read more in my room than in the library itself. An
inmate who was known to read a lot could check out more than
the permitted maximum number of books. I preferred reading in
the total isolation of my own room.
When I had progressed to really serious reading, every
night at about ten P.M. I would be outraged with the “lights
out.” It always seemed to catch me right in the middle of
something engrossing.
Fortunately, right outside my door was a corridor light
that cast a glow into my room. The glow was enough to read by,
once my eyes adjusted to it. So when “lights out” came, I would
sit on the floor where I could continue reading in that glow.
At one-hour intervals the night guards paced past every
room. Each time I heard the approaching footsteps, I jumped
into bed and feigned sleep. And as soon as the guard passed, I
got back out of bed onto the floor area of that light-glow, where
I would read for another fifty-eight minutes—until the guard
approached again. That went on until three or four every
morning. Three or four hours of sleep a night was enough for
me. Often in the years in the streets I had slept less than that.

The teachings of Mr. Muhammad stressed how history
had been “whitened”—when white men had written history
books, the black man simply had been left out...I never will
forget how shocked I was when I began reading about slavery’s
total horror. It made such an impact upon me that it later
became one of my favorite subjects when I became a minister of
Mr. Muhammad’s. The world’s most monstrous crime, the sin
and the blood on the white man’s hands, are almost impossible
to believe...I read descriptions of atrocities, saw those
illustrations of black slave women tied up and flogged with
whips; of black mothers watching their babies being dragged
off, never to be seen by their mothers again; of dogs after
slaves, and of the fugitive slave catchers, evil white men with
whips and clubs and chains and guns...
Book after book showed me how the white man had
brought upon the world’s black, brown, red, and yellow peoples
every variety of the sufferings of exploitation. I saw how since
the sixteenth century, the so-called “Christian trader” white man
began to ply the seas in his lust for Asian and African empires,
and plunder, and power. I read, I saw, how the white man never
has gone among the non-white peoples bearing the Cross in the
true manner and spirit of Christ’s teachings —meek, humble, and
Christlike…
I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading
opened to me. I knew right there in prison that reading had
changed forever the course of my life. As I see it today, the
ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to
be mentally alive. I certainly wasn’t seeking any degree, the
way a college confers a status symbol upon its students. My
homemade education gave me, with every additional book that I
read, a little bit more sensitivity to the deafness, dumbness, and
blindness that was afflicting the black race in America. Not
long ago, an English writer telephoned me from London, asking
questions. One was, “What’s your alma mater?” I told him,
“Books.” You will never catch me with a free fifteen minutes in

which I’m not studying something I feel might be able to help
the black man.
VIA Little, Brown and Company
Eulogy, a Poem by Sherman Alexie
"When she died, we buried all of those words with her"
May 12, 2017 By Sherman Alexie
Share:
My mother was a dictionary.
She was one of the last ﬂuent speakers of our tribal language.
She knew dozens of words that nobody else knew.
When she died, we buried all of those words with her.
She knew words that had been spoken for thousands of years.
She knew words that will never be spoken again.
She knew songs that will never be sung again.
She knew stories that will never be told again.
My mother was a thesaurus,
My mother was an encyclopedia.
My mother never taught her children the tribal language.
Oh, she taught us how to count to ten.
Oh, she taught us how to say “I love you.”
Oh, she taught us how to say “Listen to me.”
And, of course, she taught us how to curse.
She was one of the last four speakers of the tribal language.
In a few years, the last surviving speakers, all elderly, will also
be gone.
There are younger Indians who speak a new version of the tribal
language.
But the last old-time speakers will be gone.

But she never taught me the tribal language.
And I never demanded to learn.
My mother always said to me, “English will be your best
weapon.”
She was right, she was right, she was right.
When she died, her children mourned her in English.
My mother knew words that had been spoken for thousands of
years.
Sometimes, late at night, she would sing one of the old songs.
She would lullaby us with ancient songs.
We were lullabied by our ancestors.
I own a cassette tape, recorded in 1974.
On that cassette, my mother speaks the tribal language.
She’s speaking the tribal language with her mother, Big Mom.
And then they sing an ancient song.
I haven’t listened to that cassette tape in two decades.
I don’t want to risk snapping the tape in some old cassette
player.
And I don’t want to risk letting anybody else transfer that tape
to
digital.
My mother and grandmother’s conversation doesn’t belong in
the
cloud.
That old song is too sacred for the Internet.
So, as that cassette tape deteriorates, I know that it will soon be
dead.
Maybe I will bury it near my mother’s grave.
Maybe I will bury it at the base of the tombstone she shares
with my
father.
Of course, I’m lying.
I would never bury it where somebody might ﬁnd it.

Stay away, archaeologists! Begone, begone!
She knew words that have been spoken for thousands of years.
She knew words that will never be spoken again.
I wish I could build tombstones for each of those words.
Maybe this poem is a tombstone.
She spoke the old language.
But she never taught me how to say those ancient words.
She always said to me, “English will be your best weapon.”
She was right, she was right, she was right.
__________________________________
From YOU DON’T HAVE TO SAY YOU LOVE ME by
Sherman Alexie. Copyright © 2017 by Sherman Alexie.
Reprinted with permission of Little, Brown and Company.
Indigenous languageslanguageLittle Brown and
CompanyMother's Daymothers and sonsNative
AmericanspartnersSherman AlexieYou Don't Have to Say You
Love Me
Sherman Alexie
A National Book Award-winning author, poet, and filmmaker,
Sherman has been named one of Granta's Best Young American
Novelists and has been lauded by The Boston Globe as "an
important voice in American literature." He is one of the most
well known and beloved literary writers of his generation, with
works such as The Long Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
and Reservoir Blues and has received numerous awards and
citations, including the PEN/Malamud Award for Fiction and
the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Award.

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