THE WORLD ECONOMIC Forum brings hundreds of corporate bigwigs and heads of state to the tiny alpine village of Davos, Switzerland, each January. Over the course of a week, luminaries like Alan Greenspan, Oprah Winfrey, and the world’s most notorious Bills — Gates and Clinton — fight limousine traffic jams to hash out global economic issues. But at last year’s conference, participants were treated to an unusual event: the world premiere of the rap video “Evolve.”

The heady locale of the debut wasn’t the only thing atypical about “Evolve”: the song itself was a collaboration between a Boston-based rap musician and one of the business world’s most renowned intellectuals, Rosabeth Moss Kanter. Kanter, a Harvard Business School professor and the author of numerous best-selling books on organizational management, had been working on her latest, Evolve!: Succeeding in the Digital Culture of Tomorrow (Harvard Business School Press), when she was inspired to put the book’s message to music. The book tracks the strategies and innovations that big-name companies use in developing their ecommerce presence. In it, Kanter shares the results of her exhaustive research (almost a year’s worth of surveys and interviews) into how the rise of the Internet has affected corporate culture. Her overarching idea — that companies must find a way to abandon their rigid plans and instead improvise and “evolve” in order to compete — struck Kanter as something that could apply to circumstances outside the business world. So she summarized the theme, interpreted it in terms of, as she says, “a message for the street,” and turned it into lyrics.

Through the youth-service corps City Year, on whose national board she sits, Kanter hooked up with local musician Mike Boston, a rising rap artist who works in City Year’s national development office. Together, Kanter and Boston polished the lyrics of the song and, with music from Eric Preusser, cut a track and a video. IBM sent out copies of the CD with invitations to the Davos book party the company sponsored for Kanter, and at the party the video premiered.

Since then, the video has aired on CNN and CNBC Europe; it was also played in South Africa when Mike Boston traveled there with City Year. Kanter and Boston plan to continue distributing the song in their respective communities. Both Kanter and Boston spoke with the Phoenix recently.

{Interview with Rosabeth Moss Kanter}

Q: My guess is that when you were finished writing Evolve!, the furthest thing from your mind was a song, let alone a rap song.

A: Actually, I was thinking about the song the entire time I was writing. While researching the book, I was out there in all these youthful start-ups that had music on all the time, and I started thinking music. Because I do all this work with City Year and I’m always with young people, I thought, “Why not put the book’s message into the rap genre of music? I have a book about innovation and change and about being more creative, so I can’t exactly present it in the same old way!”

Also, the name of the book — Evolve! — was so bouncy. I pasted the title up over my computer just to keep myself inspired, and as I would finish a section or idea I would start rhyming some of the ideas.

And now, as people who I don’t know ... are starting to get the book, which has just been published, they’ve emailed me saying, “Is there music to go with it? I’d like to use it to kick off a presentation.” It seems to have captured the imaginations of people of all ages. I found that people in corporations are quite captivated by it — it’s like it liberates them to get in touch with another side of what they do. And that young people think it’s just the coolest thing going makes me feel good. I don’t have to feel so old anymore!

Q: Tell me about the video’s premiere at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland.

A: IBM, with whom I’m involved in a business relationship, was hosting a book signing for Evolve! and decided to send out CDs of the song as part of the invitation to the reception, so that was wonderful.

Q: Why did you pick rap as the style of music for the song?

A: It’s great for me because I can’t really sing, but I can chant, so I thought, “Let’s take this idea of the rhythm and a genre that comes out of a community and let’s reclaim it in the interest of serving communities, not destroying them.”

It has also been great to take a message that is very positive and upbeat and put it in a genre that, unfortunately, has been associated with things that are very negative and misogynistic, and to say, “Look, this is a wonderful form of expression.”

Q: How did select your collaborator, Mike Boston?

A: Finding Mike was just fabulous because I’ve enjoyed him greatly and he’s taught me a lot, and that’s another message of Evolve!, which is that those of us who are a little older do have to sit at the feet of younger people and learn what they’re thinking and learn from their new knowledge.

I’m on the national board of City Year, which started in Boston and now is in 13 cities. I had the lyrics and I needed music and I needed to learn more about the genre, so I went ... to Charlie Rose at City Year and I said, “Is there anybody associated with City Year who knows something about rap music and can help me?” So Charlie made the introduction to Mike. We are so different, but we share so many values and we share this great organization which brings together diverse people for community service.

Q: What are some of the gaps you see this project bridging?

A: It certainly carries a message from the boardroom to the community, from people who are thinking about business and how you make businesses succeed but they need collaboration and creativity. They need to get rid of the equivalent of “gangs” in the corporation — turf-minded executives who are clinging on to their old divisions. In order to take advantage of the tremendous opportunities the Internet offers, you have to think beyond your own territory and be much more collaborative. So that’s a message for the business world. But as I put that message in general terms I thought, that’s really a message for young people in the community, too: think bigger, think beyond the particular group you are part of today, stretch your aspirations, make partnerships beyond your community, but use all of that to serve the place that you come from, because that’s where we really live.

Q: Mike Boston really gets it, and it’s possible that you might have been introduced to someone that doesn’t get it.

A: It turned out that we did it together differently than I thought we would — that is, he didn’t supply the music. He helped me think through the beat and the rhythm. I didn’t have enough stanzas initially, and things like that I had to learn about rap. We ended up going to someone else to produce the music, but Mike and I performed together and we actually rehearsed while I was finishing the book, on Martha’s Vineyard, at a meeting that had some IBM people and a lot of our friends on the Vineyard. We stood up and rehearsed, and we were very awkward; we couldn’t do it in sync, he could get a rhythm that I couldn’t get. But we tried it, and the thing that I had to overcome was feeling foolish. After all, I’m a Harvard professor and nobody expects me to be perfect at it, but the rehearsal was really wonderful — we got to know each other, and that was a starting point. Then we found Eric Preusser and he helped us get the music and lay the track and produce the video, so it’s been a wonderful process of making a friend as well as making a CD.

Q: So we’re not going to run the risk of losing you to the entertainment world, are we?

A: Oh my goodness! I’ll tell you one of the things that has happened, though: many of my friends in the nonprofit world in Boston heard I had done this, and so I started to get requests about whether or not I could write a rap for them! I do have other lyrics, so you never know.

{Interview with Mike Boston}

Q: What was it about Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s book that really turned you on and made you want to do a song about it?

A: The first thing that struck me was the fact that she was doing this book on business and eculture and she wanted to put a kind of a twist on it. And she wanted to include me in the project, which I could bring around to my friends who know absolutely nothing about business or eculture or the Internet. I wanted to be able to introduce it into my community as well as raise the awareness of what’s going on at Harvard: in Roxbury, Mattapan, and Dorchester, no one’s really listening to what’s going on out there.

Q: Were you apprehensive at first?

A: I was absolutely sure of this. I did a couple of roundtables with Rosabeth at City Year and had heard tons about her. So I was really excited about working with her on this. And I knew it was going to break barriers. If you look at the video, you see this tall black guy from Roxbury then you see this Jewish, Caucasian lady, and we’re both rapping and we’re bringing this whole kind of a new thing to rap and hip-hop and music, and that’s all right.

Q: What other music projects are you working on?

A: I have an album that I just completed — a four-song EP. I got tons of stuff coming out.

Q: Was the approach to “Evolve” the same approach that you take to writing songs every day?

A: Actually, she wrote the lyrics and I had to learn them. And that was a new thing for me. I had never done a piece written by someone else.

But in other ways it was the same approach, because I try to start with a formula. With really good music there’s a formula, and with “Evolve” there’s absolutely a formula, and that’s what made me so eager to bring it around to my community and introduce it to people.

Q: Did you think that maybe you’d lose some of your cred, working with a Harvard intellectual?

A: No, because most people who know me in this neighborhood know that I am a community activist. I took the Rosabeth project on as a third job while I was working at City Year, so people knew that I was trying to build something and they respect that. No matter who you are in the ’hood, people respect the person who is trying to do positive things. And that’s the bottom line.

Q: What was it like getting Rosabeth into the studio?

A: That was just absolutely fun. When I met her and hung around her, she had so much energy, and that was exactly what we needed. And you’ll see it on the video.

Q: Where do you see the project going?

A: We see hip-hop going in all kinds of directions. I remember it used to get a lot of downplay, and it used to upset me because it kept me going all these years, all my life growing up. Now, I want people who aren’t stereotypically expected to listen to this kind of music to hear it.

Henry Santoro can be reached at hsantoro[a]phx.com.

Issue Date: May 31 - June 7, 2001