An uncomfortable story
Often when I meet a client for the first time, they ask me what Mulberry St is named after. Recently that has been a more controversial answer than it once was.
When I settled on the name for my business, Mulberry St, over two years ago now, I posted about this milestone and were the inspiration for the name came from. I have loved Dr Seuss since I was a child. His work is weird and funny, he experiments and puts concepts and words together that shouldn’t really go together but they do. All the things I think we are often too scared to be in our organisations but would be the difference between having a point of difference or just following our competitor’s lead. Dr Seuss’s first book was a story called “And to think I saw it on Mulberry St”. For those of you that haven’t read it, it is the story of a boy whose father tells him to ‘keep his eyelids up and see what you can see” on his walk home on Mulberry St. However, as Marco walks home from school, he’s disappointed that the only thing he sees is a “horse and wagon.” Thinking this is not good enough, Marco begins to elaborate on what he sees (“that can’t be my story, that’s only a start, I’ll say that a zebra was pulling the cart!”) until, by the end of the story, he has a whole parade with bands, animals the police and the mayor. But when his father asks what he saw he backs out, “nothing I said, growing red as a beet, but a plain horse and carriage on Mulberry Street.”
For me, there is a lesson in here about company culture and innovation. We tell people we want them to bring new ideas, that no idea is a silly idea, to bring their whole selves to work, to be vulnerable. But unless they feel this, they feel safe to explore, to fail, they feel connected and supported by their team, then we lose all the creativity and innovation that goes on inside people’s heads.
The story about how this book came to exist has even more lessons for all of us in business. As far as we know Geisel (Dr Seuss) was walking home from the book’s 27th rejection when he bumped into an old university friend, who had, that very morning been made the editor of children’s book at one of the US’s top publishers. He invited Geisel up to his office and the book was signed that day. Dr Seuss himself says “if I’d been going down the other side of Madison Avenue, I’d be in the dry-cleaning business today.” While some may see a story of being in the right place at the right time, it is more about perseverance than luck. I’m not sure I know many people that could believe in something so much to get back up after 27 separate rejections.
So my business Mulberry St was inspired by both the meaning in the story and how it came to exist but less than a year later – that same book was removed from the shelves for “portraying people in ways that a hurtful and wrong.” “Research in recent years has revealed strong racial undertones in many books written/illustrated by Dr. Seuss” was the statement for one of the school districts in the USA asking schools to distance themselves from Dr Seuss.
When this first came out, some people suggested I change my company name to ensure I wasn’t associated with this in any way, something I definitely considered. Someone else suggested I make up a new backstory as to why Mulberry St was meaningful to me, perhaps a street I lived on when I was young or the location I met my husband. For someone that helps organisations figure out how to be more authentic, this option was never going to fly with me. The final option was to embrace it, not the book, but the lesson in having the hard, uncomfortable conversations and changing our views as we learn more. As Dr Maya Angelou says “when you know better, you do better” and I think this has to be the lesson here. We have to learn how our behaviours, words, drawings and stories impact others. We have to learn to have uncomfortable conversations about race and diversity both in and outside of our organisations. And we have to learn to change and grow as we learn more. So Mulberry St stays and becomes an even more important part of the story and the work I do to help organisations take a more human-centered approach to change. Now to learn how to tell that story in a much more succinct way for when the next person asks me!