Stories From The World/Stories From The Heartland

Photo: Nisha Sondhe

One of the most gratifying experiences of traveling the world for the past three years, and most recently, driving through America, has been the deep understanding I have had, and the connections I have made with human beings from all walks of life in the many countries and states I have visited. I have been fortunate to be able to spend time with hundreds of people, interview and photograph them, empathize with their lives, listen to their stories, and emote with them instead of reading about them as demographic profiles, which I did for twenty years as an executive at MTV. This has radically altered my view of people as "consumers" of products and services; as “targets” or "segments"; or "eyeballs" in the morbid language of TV programming. Before my wanderings, I'd read copious reports on the millions of millennials and Gen Zs, and Gen Xs, but never held a traumatized refugee child in my arms or met a Stanford sophomore on her year off from college serving those same refugees, or met the misunderstood muslims of Little Rock, the oppressed transgender community of Utah, the Native Americans of Browning, or the impoverished young blacks in the townships of Cape Town.

In my keynote at the Storytelling Summit at the Microsoft HQ in Redmond next Monday, I will share recent stories about some of the most interesting folks I've met in my journeys, as well as thoughts on how big companies can compassionately align their values to correcting some of the vast and troubling inequities of our times rather than creating more.