Michelle Obama is our second representative from the public sector. And I'm going to tell you a little bit about her story. There's so much available information about her. We're just going to look at a couple of slices of her life to help us illustrate three of the many skills that she has developed, practiced, and exemplifies over the course of her remarkable life and career. Before we move on to the field of sports and entertainment where we'll be looking at the lives of Julie Foudy and Bruce Springsteen. Michelle Obama illustrates the skills of aligning your actions with your values, managing boundaries intelligently, and embracing change courageously. Let me take you to a time a few years back when she was appearing on the Late Show with David Letterman. And she was there to talk about Joining Forces, one of the major initiatives that she supported and led while she was First Lady. And Joining Forces is about honoring service members and their families, and helping them. So, six foot tall, she gets on the stage, sits down. And Letterman asks her, so, how are things going in the White House? Trying to stay out of trouble. Can't really go anywhere without people all around, but you know. Trying to get through it. Her very easy, somewhat self effacing, a little bit snarky response. And their repertoire is funny, engaging, before they got down to the business of talking about Joining Forces. And then later, Let's Move, which was another one of her signature initiatives as First Lady. And Let's Move, of course, was all about raising awareness of the problem of obesity in America, particularly with kids. And helping to create knowledge and tools for people to be healthier, with Joining Forces and Let's Move, the topics of that conversation. With Joining Forces, over 125,000 veterans hired in new programs. She worked with governors of many of the states to support this initiative to help veterans and their families. A cause that was near and dear to her heart. And then more recently, before leaving the White House, over the last few years of her role as First Lady, worked on higher education in a program that was called Reach Higher. Which was all about helping kids to see the value of higher education. But if we roll back to her early life, Michelle Obama was not someone who really sought the limelight. In her professional career, the roles that she played, well, she was filled with ambition. The roles that she played had to do largely with building relationships among different communities. I'll tell you a little bit more about that in just a minute. The world, of course, everybody knows who Michelle Obama is and they know her now to be outspoken and a plain speaker. She, initially, when the campaign for President that her husband ran in 2007, [COUGH] 2008. She was going to do it her way and to be herself. And that, sometimes caused a little heartburn for the staff because she wasn't readily contained in a certain mold. She was going to be true to herself. But is clearly someone who was a great asset to that campaign and became even more so over the years as her role as First Lady. Which she initially called herself Mom-in-Chief, which was somewhat controversial, like many of the things that Michelle Obama did. She was a very different kind of First Lady in some important ways and other ways, carried on some of the traditions of people who were in that role before her. Many, many books have been written now about her since her arrival to the White House. And many more will be written in the future, no doubt, because she was a pioneer. Her story is one if you dig in just a little bit, you can see the importance of the values that she learned as a child on the south side of Chicago. The importance of taking responsibility for helping other people. And as she said repeatedly, in what she was trying to do as Mom-in-Chief, trying to convey a certain set of values in a way of thinking about one's role in the world. While the stuff was different, having all the trappings and the experiences of being taken care of as one does as a First Lady in the First Family. Obviously, very different than her roots on the south side of Chicago, the values and sense of responsibility were the same. Michelle LaVaughn Robinson. She grew up in a one bedroom, one bath apartment with her parents and her older brother Craig. Her father was a station laborer for the Chicago Water Department. And his main goal in life, according to her, was to provide for a stable home. And the two of them, her parents, as she said, poured themselves into our lives. They moved in 1970 to the South Shores, her bungalow. And she was admitted to the Whitney Young High School, where she was a member of the Honor Society. But she had to travel a long way and it was a new world for her. But she did it because she knew it was important to advance herself in her education. And, of course, she had the support of her parents but not easy at that age. And then, extremely gifted student. She went to Princeton where she found that she didn't really belong there. Or at least she felt, what am I doing here? I'm not supposed to be here. It doesn't feel right to me. She was in a minority. African Americans and African American women were in a minority on the Princeton campus. But she found her niche after awhile. Got involved in the 3rd World Center and really focused on the role of race in society. Which, of course, was very personal, as well as a political issue for her. And she wrote her senior thesis about what it was like to be an African American on this campus. And the larger issues that her story represented. She was an excellent student. Went to Harvard Law School and discovered there, according to mentors and advisors that worked with her there, that she could be both, to quote one of them, both brilliant and black. She could be both of those things, that emerged especially at Harvard Law. And following that, she wasn't really sure what to pursue and took a job at Sidley Austin, one of the prestigious law firms in Chicago. And as one of the senior partners there remarked, she was as ambitious as anyone he'd ever seen in the junior ranks. But she was very private and reserved. She stayed living on the south side of Chicago and didn't move downtown where everybody else was living. And then a year or two in, they had a summer intern who took a particular interest in her and he pursued her. And, of course, she thought this was tacky, was the word she used. And inappropriate that there would be a romantic relationship with a coworker. But he persisted. And he's obviously a very creative and intelligent person who found a way. And that, of course, was Barack Obama. And they married a few years later, she did yield [LAUGH] to the flexibility of okay, we are coworkers but we can make this work. But in 1990, just before then, one of her best friends died and then the year after, her father died. And those events were transformational for her in thinking, what am I doing with my life? What's the point if I'm not passionate about what I'm doing? It's gotta be more than just having economic security. There's gotta be something more. And she started to question that. And that idea infused the relationship with Obama, who many people had said would not be President without Michelle Obama. Now, they had a family together, but it was very much a partnership of equals. Maybe not all the time and at the same time, certainly not, but over time. She went to work for the city, for Mayor Daley in Economic Development. She then went to work with a group that was a nonprofit, helping youth in the city. So she was getting more involved in community activities through her work. But she was wary of politics, although her husband was clearly not. And in 1996, he ran and won a seat in the state Senate. And then in 98, they had their first child, Malia. Michelle Obama was then working for the University of Chicago Hospital. Where her role, again, was community relations, external relations, which was her strength and her interest. But was a hard time for her and for their marriage. A low point in their marriage, where she was beginning to feel some resentment at not having enough time for herself. So, she negotiated a change in the domestic organization and insisted that her husband take more time for taking care of their child in the morning. To give her, Michelle, more time to take care of herself, to exercise and to care for herself. Also, they found a way to get a housekeeper to help relieve some of the strain on her so that she could have more time for herself and that helped. It helped as they had a more equal share of responsibility. And it also changed his consciousness about what it was like to be a parent and to be a member of a dual career relationship and how to make that work. Which informed his thinking as President and the two of them as role models for so many Americans and people around the world. Well, in 2004, he ran successfully for the Senate. She stayed in Chicago and he was in Washington for a good amount of the time. By this time, they'd had two children and she was not about to uproot them. And then, as we all know, a few years later, he ran successfully for the presidency. But she was who she was, even though there were people who were trying to package her and handle her, she was going to be saying what she thought. When they got to the White House, she insisted on some very important dimensions of what life was going to be like there. She brought her mother to live with them and as the former President has said, they lived above the shop. So it was like a small family operation. But it was a kind of coy way of putting the idea that he really lived up there with his family. And one of her requirements was that they dine together most nights, which they did. It was essential for her as Mom-in-Chief to have her husband home for dinner and they did that. When she was first arriving at the White House, she didn't just dive right in to take up the professional responsibilities of being First Lady and engage in the kinds of initiatives that I referred to earlier. She wanted to adjust and make sure that her daughters were okay. She thought first about, well where was going to be the best way for her to, in what domain of action was she going to invest, and took her time in doing that. Some years later, she's on television speaking to an interviewer, it was Gayle King. Who said, well, what about your career, and your accomplishments and your career? The then First Lady said, my career is not what defines me, what I do in my life defines me. What I find to be meaningful. And so, she was very thoughtful about the projects that she was going to bring her leadership to. So, in the Joining Forces campaign, a big part of that, once she discovered through listening and research and just being out there and talking to veterans and their families. One of the major problems was for many of the spouses, they had licenses to be nurses and other professions that required licenses. But state to state, they couldn't practice as their partners were being moved around and deployed. They'd move with them but then they couldn't practice their profession. So the idea of spouse license portability became something that she made real change in, in partnership with the Vice President's spouse, Jill Biden. The Let's Move campaign and the Hunger-Free Kids Act were major initiatives that she was directly involved in. Having a garden that she was visibly involved in was another symbolic way of conveying the value of healthy eating. But she's also very playful in how she brought her awareness of this campaign to the world through all kinds of cultural events like the super viral video of her doing Move Your Body with Beyonce. As David Axelrod, who was the Chief Advisor to the President said, a lot of what we do in politics is frankly bullshit. But what Michelle Obama does is real. And it might be over the long term that she might have even more impact than her husband.
