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While in Texas last week I visited my friend Catherine Rohr at the prison where she runs Prison entrepreneurship Program.

Catherine and I met years ago but connected again recently in Austin and she told me a bit more about what she does. Her program works with mostly violent criminals who are in the last years of their sentencing, and who have passed strenuous testing to be accepted into PEP. These are prisoners who were running gangs or small businesses behind bars, whose skill-set can be converted into healthy entrepreneurial outlets. Once accepted, the state of Texas transfers the prisoners to the Cleveland (TX) unit where they enter into a five-month, intensive experience that changes their lives.

After going through security, Catherine and I made our way back to the classroom at the prison, a large, divided room that, on one side contains a computer lab and staff cubicles, and on the other an open room that will comfortably seat 100 or so prisoners. As the prisoners streamed in, I was surprised to be greeted by so many of them with hugs. These men did not seem like hardened criminals. They were soft and courteous and even dignified. Not only were they more kind and friendly than the stereotypical prisoner, they were more kind and friendly than the stereotypical CEO or COO. At one point, I looked around and realized Catherine and I were alone in the room with 100 prisoners. Literally, there were no guards in the room. And on a typical day, she would be in there without a single guest or staff member. The State of Texas certainly believes in the program, and in the prisoners who are enrolled.

As prisoners enter the program, Catherine and her interns (previous graduates, still serving time working for the organization from behind bars) wash the prison off their new students with such tactics as giving them sweet names, names like fruity juice or teddy bear. Prisoners are encouraged to hug, to say I love you, to acknowledge their own weaknesses (a strenuous character assessment is undergone in which many of the students fail. The character assessment assures prisoners they have no blind spots as to flaws in their personalities.) As a visiting teacher, I was asked to dance in front of the class (imagine me dancing in front of 100 men behind bars!) but the truth is I had a great time. Loud music played and I had to go up against some of the best dancers in the room. Somebody would show me a move, and I had to repeat it, all to the cheering of the PEP students. It’s their way of saying nobody in this room gets to act tough. Anybody who takes themselves too seriously would not last in PEP. Literally, the are asked to leave the program. It definitely broke the ice and made everything that happened after that light and easy.

I thoroughly enjoyed my time in prison. The men I met behind bars were some of the most encouraging, engaging businessmen I’ve encountered. Any company would do well to hire a man who has been through Catherine’s program. The only unfortunate reality of her program is that it is not accessible to teams of CEO’s on the outside. Any corporation would benefit greatly from the grueling experience of P.E.P.

I wrote a chapter in A Million Miles in a Thousand Years about Catherine’s program, but unfortunately am not going to be able to include it in the new book (it didn’t fit the memoir tone of the overall manuscript). It may move to a coming reprint of To Own a Dragon or a follow-up book I’m working on to come after Million Miles. That said, though, I wanted to post it for you:

(lots of type-o’s. Sorry about that.)

Chapter 14

Story Application in Leadership

While we were still working on the screenplay, I wrote an article about story—about how, in story, the point is usually the arc of the character. I wrote about the forces within story that change people, make them better. And so I was asked to speak about story at a conference in Atlanta.

The conference was in an old theater, and each presenter was given eighteen minutes to impart his idea. I was slotted between futurists who predicted an eventual climax in global population and a fellow who started a shoe company in which he gave a pair of shoes away in a Third-World country for every pair of his shoes purchased by an American. In the audience were leaders hoping to glean any sort of knowledge or inspiration they could apply in their given field.

I gave my speech about story, but before I was finished the zeros started flashing, so I had to wrap it up quickly and sit down. I got a spattering of applause but nothing to call Mom about. I was feeling a little insecure and wondered if I would have done better if I’d have used multimedia. The guy who spoke before me had slides.

I went back out into the audience and sat at a table, and an attractive, young girl leaned over and said, “I’ve seen it work. I’ve seen story change people’s lives.”

Before I could ask her what she was referring to, she was introduced and took the stage. For her presentation, she simply told her story. I found it compelling. I’ll summarize as well as I can.

Catherine earned a bachelor’s degree in business from Berkley and spent six years working in private equity and venture capital in Palo Alto and New York before the company she worked for, in an effort to expose their employees to varying cultures, took a few staff on a tour of a prison. Catherine had never been inside a prison and confessed she went in judgmental about what she would find inside. She assumed prisoners were bad, lazy people and they couldn’t be rehabilitated. Statistics indicate this is true, after all. But once inside, Catherine faced the reality that men in prison were human beings, and not only human beings, but human beings who were locked into cages and given no opportunity to play any other role than that of prisoner.

She went back to New York and tried to get the prisoners out of her mind, but she couldn’t. After being haunted for sometime by another storyline, she quit her job and moved to Texas where she started an organization called the Prison Entrepreneurship Program (PEP). Without any money or experience, she asked a local prison if she could come in and teach a business class. The prison agreed, allotting her a few students. The success of that class led Catherine to create a curriculum that would teach entrepreneurial leadership skills, and the prison found the students in Catherine’s class were less likely to get into trouble. Perhaps because Catherine would dismiss them from the class if they did.

Her results were so successful that after a year the prison decided to transfer some of the worst inmates in the state to the prison where she taught her class. Catherine requested the inmates who were running gangs or selling drugs, because those were the inmates who already knew how to manage people and financial structures. The success of her program is due, in part, to Catherine’s insistence that students begin to see themselves differently. Prisoners in Catherine’s class are not referred to by prison-issued inmate numbers, but as Chief Financial Officer of company B, or company A, according to the fictional business models they create. Over the first couple of years, Catherine’s program grew so successful that students began to compete with each other and were then judged by a panel who put students through a rigorous process of analysis. For judges, Catherine was able to recruit CEOs and COOs of some of America’s leading companies including AIG, J.P. Morgan Chase, Greyrock Capital Group, and many others.

To ensure students maintain their newfound identity as entrepreneurs, upon their release graduates are provided reentry assistance including job placement, executive mentoring, further education in business and access to financing. Nationally, more than two-thirds of the six hundred thousand prisoners who are released into the greater population return to prison within two to three years. PEP graduates, however, have a recidivism rate of less than 3 percent and 93 percent of their graduates are successfully employed within one month of leaving prison. Catherine’s program now operates in multiple prisons and has graduated more than four hundred students.

Most prisons provide food and water, a small cell, and exercise. The role most prisoners are given once behind bar is the role of an animal. And so many of them learn to live as animals. Their ambition is animal ambition, to survive, their conflict is animal conflict, to flee or to fight, and their resolution is animal resolution, to act as an animal upon release. Catherine is providing a different story, and a different role to play within that story. Catherine argued that while many prisoners deserve the sentences they have been given, the system itself is affirming a criminal identity through this lack of rehabilitation, and it’s costing taxpayers more than sixty billion dollars each year. Some might say we are spending sixty billion to educate criminals to become more criminal.

While Catherine’s program may not be feasible on a national scale, it does indicate the provision of an ambition, the guidance through conflict, and the promise of a resolution results in a change of character. Catherine had just created a new model for rehabilitation, and essentially, it was to guide a protagonists through a story.

I wondered whether story was more than just a way to live a better life. I wondered if it might provide an entire new model for leadership. I wondered how the average teacher, CEO, Coach, and even Parent would plan and execute strategy differently if they saw themselves as story directors rather than traditional leaders. It seemed like the elements of story were undiscovered treasures for more disciplines than writing and screenwriting.

Students clapping for a prisoner who is graduating the program and leaving prison.

Me showing my moves!

No combat boots for this leader!