Stop using Martin Luther King Jr. as a prop for “business lessons”
Today is the federal holiday honoring Martin Luther King Jr. It's also another day in which some of the saddest, laziest click-bait gets published. It's my sincere hope that this short post is not an addition to that pile.
The Internet is a collection of would-be writers looking to SEO and listicle their way to traffic by finding the right combination of numbers in headlines, bulletpoints and topical references. That's just how it is, and we all traffic in this to an extent. However, today is a particularly toxic day because some geniuses decide that King's real lessons were about business and about how we solve our own narrow problems, not about the real, complex and continuing issues that King actually took on.
We saw the same thing when Nelson Mandela died -- trivial pap on how to run a small business, how Mandela's struggles relate to the art of marketing and business difficulties, easy fun Mandela quotes for business situations, easy fun Mandela quotes for PR professionals, and how Mandela's apartheid struggle was apparently just a master class in innovation.
Today, we have folks who think that we should be focusing on MLK's importance to entrepreneurs, which is not even an original idea; or, perhaps instead of reading MLK's writings, we should describe them in the context of the latest clinical buzzwords that support the thesis of the author's new book. These articles also dare to think you are less interested in reading MLK's work itself and more eager to learn about what he did for community managers, job-hunting, or, again, PR tips.
Despite all that's been written about King and Mandela, not to mention President Abraham Lincoln and countless others, there remains plenty to discuss, debate and ponder. But if you cannot truly add to the conversation -- if you merely want to appropriate the reputation of these thinkers for your plug-and-play listicle of the week -- you'd be better off not writing anything.
Knowing when to shut up because it's not about you -- there's your leadership lesson for today.
