What Real Change Demands From Leaders

Jon Clifton:
[0:08] Understanding one's strengths is a critical part of personal and professional growth. But how does this understanding shape leadership and address social issues? To explore this, we sat down with Dr. Andre Perry, a senior fellow at Brookings and a distinguished scholar on race, structural inequality, and education. Dr. Perry leverages his expertise to drive meaningful change and is a key advisor to policymakers and civil rights groups. Join us as we delve into his insights on leadership and the importance of knowing your strengths.

Andre, when you first saw your top five strengths, what were your thoughts?

Andre Perry:
[0:43] I said, that's me. Because I could hear other people say those things about me. And I have had enough colleagues who know their top five. And I immediately asked them, does this ring true to you? And they were like, oh, absolutely. I'm so glad you took the test. So for me, it was less a surprise, more of a sort of validation or recognition of who I was. So I was like, wow, that's me. That's me. No question.

Jon Clifton:
[1:29] Now, we've talked about your top five strengths. And there are two that I think kind of come to number one for you, which is either Futuristic or Ideation, which is the one that when you're doing research, when you're sharing research with other organizations, which one is top of mind the most?

Andre Perry:
[1:47] Well, what motivates me, what keeps me going, is Futuristic. As a researcher, I have to be immersed in ideas. That's what I do. But ideas can be very stagnant. It can be a state of. But Futuristic is how do you take that state of and build a better future? What can be as a result of this information that you have? And so I'm constantly thinking about ideas, throwing away ideas, refuting them, uplifting new ones. That's the nature of my work. When you work at a think tank, you are progressing ideas. But I aim those ideas at the future. I want to see a better world. I want to see the possibilities of this new world. And at my job, I can actually create the policy frameworks to make that happen. At Brookings, we are policy think tank. We create policy. And that's the bridge for me from taking the ideas and making them into action or taking something that's an idea and building it into policy. So for me, it's both. No question, if you asked an outsider who I am, they would probably say Ideation just because I'm constantly talking about ideas, critiquing ideas. But what gets my blood flowing is the future. I want to see a better place.

Jon Clifton:
[3:31] Now, just on, or excuse me, on Ideation, I think one of the ideas that you talk about the most, or kind of one of the most thoughtful ideas, was the name of your book.

Andre Perry:
[3:42] Yeah, Know Your Price.

Jon Clifton:
[3:44] That's right. Can you tell the story about how that idea came to you and sort of how it drove the soul of the entire book?

Andre Perry:
[3:51] Yeah, so I write a lot about housing devaluation, the price of homes, along with my colleague, Gallup colleague, Jonathan Rothwell. We calculated the devaluation, the underpricing of homes. We found that homes in black neighborhoods are underpriced by 23 percent, about $48,000 per home. Cumulatively, there's about $156 billion in lost equity in black communities. I name my book, Know Your Price, after my favorite play in the whole wide world, Two Trains Running. In the play, Two Trains Running by August Wilson, there's the main character, Memphis, who's about to have his property seized through eminent domain by the city of Pittsburgh. They offer him $15,000 to which Memphis says, I know my price. I got my price. I'm not selling my property for $15,000. And it's a refrain throughout the play. I'm paraphrasing, but it's a refrain. I got my, I know my price. I got my price. There's another character, Hambone, in the play who agrees to paint a fence for a proprietor in exchange for a ham. So he says, I'll paint your fence. Give me a ham. He paints the fence. The store owner never gives him the ham. And throughout the play, he says, give me my ham. Give me my ham. And it's another refrain. And we don't know if Hambone, that's his name, had mental illness before he made this deal. But he actually goes mad and dies demanding his ham. But there's a happy ending. Memphis, the main character, eventually gets $35,000. And the moral of the story is you got to know you have worth. What I try to do is give people the price to stand on, know your price. But there's another part of that story, and I always bring up Hambone, because when you're doing hard work, and work on racial justice is very hard, you have to work as a team. You got to work collectively, or you will go crazy and die alone. And so for me, I take know your price. I give people the price to stand on. But it's also a call to work together because I don't want people demanding, demanding on an island because you won't win and you'll lose your sanity in the process.

Jon Clifton:
[6:33] But that idea came from you watching a play. I mean, so what do you do to drive your inspiration, your Ideation? What inspires your Ideation?

Andre Perry:
[6:46] Oh, I do read a lot of poetry, look at movies, listen to music, go to museums. I'm a small art collector, love visual arts. You've got to find outlets that aren't in your field. In many ways, I write about housing, but I'm an outsider to housing. I came through policy circles through education. I really do believe you have to cross-pollinate between subject matter, between genres, in order to get new ideas. You're not going to get new ideas by listening to the same people or reading the same books. You got to step outside of your field. So for me, reading books outside my field, going to plays, traveling, talking to new voices and new people. So for me, it's about cross-pollination all the way.

Jon Clifton:
[7:56] I mean, you can feel that in your work too. I mean, you cite music even in your work, but how do you know when you have a bad idea?

Andre Perry:
[8:05] Um when well bad ideas also show themselves in bad results. They give you the results that you don't want and every idea every action has a reaction. And so many of my ideas, it got a negative reaction or a result I did not want. I'm trying to think of one in research. I'm constantly testing. And so...

Jon Clifton:
[8:39] How do you do that? Do you test it on social media? Do you post something somewhere to see the feedback? Or how do you test something?

Andre Perry:
[8:45] One, you create models assuming that you might find that you might get a result and you end up something different than you initially thought. So you have that. You get a negative reaction. There's a lot of what would be perceived as negative results that you still have to publish, largely because you went through this process, you agreed to release a report. But sometimes the timing is not right for the report. And you always have to have a sense of, hey, is this the right time? Is this the right moment? Who will you hurt by releasing?

Jon Clifton:
[9:31] What's an example of that specifically? Did you ever have one that you launched at the wrong time?

Andre Perry:
[9:35] Well, the report that I always felt uneasy about was a report on business devaluation, again, Jonathan Rothwell and I put out. And we found that businesses located in black neighborhoods, blacker neighborhoods, get less revenue and fewer stars as the neighborhoods get blacker. And how people can read that is that, why would I put my business in a black neighborhood? You know, and we released the report. So, but whenever I talk about that report, I do highlight the strengths. What it did show, the report did show, that black, brown, and Asian-owned firms actually score higher on Yelp than their white counterparts.

But the scores go down in all cases in blacker neighborhoods. But what the elders used to say holds up empirically, our ice is just as cold. Our businesses are just as good. It's the perception of the neighborhood that's driving down the perception of the business, not the quality of the business. So for me, it's about sharing that. You can't just say, hey, these businesses in black neighborhoods are getting less revenue. No, they are of the same quality. It's only the perception of the neighborhood that's driving down the revenue and the rating. So those kind of reports, you just have to know when to release them and how to release them. I never talk about the report without giving the context of it because you never want to demoralize anyone. You never want to remove hope, to destroy someone's dream.

And in that case, I also feel responsibility to say, hey, we need to create incentives for people to site their business in a black neighborhood. If these businesses are going to be devalued, we need government interventions to incentivize people to put their businesses there. Because not everyone is going to have a business in the quote-unquote good part of town. They need to be wherever customers are, wherever people are. So we just, until we remove perceptions, we also have to provide incentives to those businesses.

Jon Clifton:
[12:15] When you look back at ideas that you have, are there others that you say, those were particularly great ideas that I have that rank among all the others?

Andre Perry:
[12:25] I think the issue of devaluation was one that I thought about deeply because I wanted a policy win. I wanted to win in policy. President Biden created an entire task force around my research, around our research. The Federal Housing Finance Agency released all the appraisal data because of our work, numerous documentaries. We've really had culture change. There's a reckoning in the housing community because of our research. But as important as all those things are, it was the metaphor that's more important, that just like properties are much more valuable than they are priced, so are people. It's not that the housing is devalued. It's people who are devalued. And they are much more valuable than they are quote-unquote priced. And that is a theme that resonates throughout my work, going back to being Futuristic. I see the potential. I see the strengths in people. If there was another strength, maximizing or maximization, I'm forgetting the correct term. Maximizer. Is another, I think it's in my top 10. It is. Yeah. And because I see the strength in people. I'm constantly looking for strength.

Too often, and I'm guilty of this, researchers are guilty of this, when we're talking about the black community, we talk in terms of deficits. We compare black people to white people constantly, and we know that there's a history there that predicts for certain outcomes. The problem is when you only look at deficits you never create an environment where you're going to invest in in people because no one invests in problems no one invests in deficits and it but it also creates this illusion that people aren't growing people aren't achieving people aren't overcoming. A lot of my research, I look for where things are working, where places where black people are doing well, where black people are thriving, because we can learn from those places. We can see the civic action that took place in order to get those outcomes. We should assume that people can do and are doing. And so for me, I look for places where people are thriving. It's a different paradigm.

I really do feel that many of the attacks on DEI, on diversity in general, come from this belief that black people are less than. And I don't want to contribute to that by putting out a bunch of disparity research. Although the intent is always to highlight, hey, there are differences in wealth distribution. There's differences in the distribution in resources, federal resources, corporate resources that we need to address. We want an equitable society because America is founded on this belief that anyone can achieve if given the proper chance. And so in order for us to really believe that, we have got to get rid of these negative perceptions of people that are unfounded. Except for, no, they're founded in hate. They're founded in bigotry. And so my goal is to uncover the bigotry, but always spotlight the potential of homes, the potential of people.

And so for me, I don't spend a lot of time talking about what's wrong with black people. Well, one tagline that I have, you'll hear me say it over and over again, like it keeps my teeth white, is that there's nothing wrong with black people that ending racism can't solve. That we should solve for racism, but not spend a lot of time talking about how bad black people are. Let's just look for the drags of racism. Let's remove them, and people will grow. People will thrive. They are thriving all across the country, and we need to pay attention to that.

Jon Clifton:
[17:37] You know, you often talk about the inspiration behind this. Ultimately, it came from when the Moynihan Report came out. And when you looked at it, you said, wait a minute, this is just another study at what's wrong with the community. We ought to be doing more studies on what's right with a community. Is that something that you felt was kind of a change within you at that particular moment? Or have you always seen the world that way?

Andre Perry:
[18:02] Well, you know, it does come from a belief in family. I also strongly believe in family and in going to sort of my sort of Ideation sort of trait that my, the way I was raised, I was informally adopted by an older woman in the hood who took in kids of various races, black kids, white kids, biracial children. We were brothers and sisters. The woman who raised me was mom. I had aunties who weren't my relatives. So family means something very different for me. It means a commitment to something higher. And a household means something more than sort of brick and mortar. It means a commitment to growing together. And so this older black woman, she was 63 when I was born, she took me in. My father at the time was addicted. He was murdered in prison. And so this woman did what a lot of matriarchs did. She just took in kids. But when I read the Moynihan Report, which it had a lot of good stuff in it, to be honest, But it's still blamed largely black women for the state of black America. If they could only get married and stop exalting a culture of poverty, sort of, then everything will be okay. And I'm reading this report in undergrad, and I'm thinking, oh, he's talking about the woman who raised me. That doesn't make any sense. This woman was an asset. She was a strength in our community. She literally took in kids, built them up. They're going to college. They're doing a lot. This can't possibly define my mother.

And so for me, so much of my belief systems came from a woman who broke ideas. She was a rule breaker in so many different ways. She, I don't know, I wish she could take a CliftonStrengths test just to see where she would be. I don't know. I have my guesses, but... She created an environment where I could learn, I could read, I could write, I could think, I could break ideas. It was okay for me to question God, to question teachers. And she was an incredible woman. And so when I hear commentary or policies with the assumption that black women, black people, black men are their own worst enemy, it drives me nuts.

Jon Clifton:
[21:32] You know, so you dominate with thinking themes in your top five. I mean, even your six or ten has even more thinking themes. Do you feel like those were a product of that environment that she created, or do you think that she knew that's who you were, and so she created an environment to help those strengths of yours flourish?

Andre Perry:
[21:53] Both. I think when you grow up poor in somewhat what some would say dire circumstances, you have to imagine. You have to see the future. With that said, I was in one of the most loving households you could possibly be in. When I hear people say, oh, you came from nothing you know, every Olympics or every Super Bowl, you'll hear an athlete I came from the bottom, I came from nothing. No, that's impossible You're here because you had assets all around you. Mom, Elsie Boyd, she saw a lot of strength in me. She nurtured it. She cultivated it. She bought the Encyclopedia Britannica. She pushed me intellectually. There was a time I actually dropped out of school in fourth grade. She homeschooled me.

Jon Clifton:
[23:02] Why did you drop out of school?

Andre Perry:
[23:04] Like a lot of kids, I was getting bullied, teased. People, a kid by the name of Donald would call me Lumphead. Hey, Lumpy. You know, and it was, you know, drove me nuts. And I just stopped going to school. And because I grew up in a household with a lot of kids, there were any, I mean, there were probably 12, 15 kids that she raised. From the time I was born until I graduated. So any period, there were several kids. So we would all walk to school together, and I would just walk away, go to the library, you know, and hang out. I missed a certain amount of days. At some point, the truancy officer, there were truancy officers back in the day, came to the house and said, where's Andre? And she looked, she said, he's going to school. And they said, hey, he's going to have to repeat the fourth grade, which I did. But she read the Pittsburgh Courier to me. And Pittsburgh Courier is a black newspaper. And at the time, it was the newspaper of record in the 60s, 50s, 60s. It was a major publication. And so I would read about Du Bois and Booker T. Washington and all the great thinkers, and they would debate in columns. And so certainly that experience transformed me. It made me who I am today. I debate with some of the great thinkers in the Washington Post today.

So it was a little bit of both. She saw talent and strength in me, but I also needed to see a better future. I think when you're a kid in certain circumstances, you know when things are not right. I mean, you hear kindergartners say, oh, that's not fair. You can see things that aren't fair all around you. When you go to the mall, when you go to the movies, when you go to the park, you see inequity. And you may not have the words for it, but you understand it. And so I think at some point I was able to articulate the world I wanted to see. And I could add numbers to it. I could add language to it. I could build teams around solving it. And that's where I am. That's where I am. But a lot came from how I was raised. And mom was a strength. She was a strength. I want to say she is a strength because she still is present in what I do.

Jon Clifton:
[26:02] If there was someone here that said, I have a child in my presence, whether it's a parent, whether it's an aunt or an uncle, and says, I know I have a child here that dominates with thinking themes, what would you say to them? What would you say really worked?

Andre Perry:
[26:19] Oh, man. If there is a theme that you can see, one, learn what it means and learn how you can nurture it. You know, if Self-assurance, if assurance is a strength, which is one of my number six, don't try to keep this kid humble, like force this kid in some false humility, on the football field, basketball court, track and field. I mean, you see coaches that try to beat assurance out of people. Know that when you have someone with assurance, allow that peacock to spread those wings. I mean, because I see too often kids who are, have a sense of assurance that we try to beat it out of them. Literally, in some cases, beat it out of them because they're expressing confidence.

Jon Clifton:
[27:29] What's an example of what that would look like?

Andre Perry:
[27:33] Oh, if you, I mean, it could be in the grocery store and they want to say, I see that. I want that. Why can't I have that? And someone might take that as disrespect. But no, that's who the kid is. You can explain, hey, I'm not going to get it. And if they question why, you explain why. I don't have the funds right this moment. And you made some decisions around these other things and we're going to move forward. But you don't squelch a strength. You know, it's okay to have kids in their head. You know, I used to hear that, why are you in your head all the time? Why do you debate all the time? Put that kid in the debate. That kid likes to argue with mother, father, cousins, friends. Put that kid in a debate club. You know, don't squelch their desire to explore ideas, to challenge ideas. That's what the manifestation of ideating is. It's questioning. It's challenging. It's creating new concepts. It's breaking the mold. So for me, you got to uplift it. Like with my child, I am constantly exploring his strengths because he is very confident in some respects and not confident in others. And I'm always like, well, where did the confidence go? Where did your smile go? And you see it exposed a lot of times in sports where they're in a situation where it's new, that's challenging, they get nervous. And with my son, hey, let's try some deep breathing. I say, hey, you've been here before. Imagine we're in the backyard just playing. We're just playing.

Jon Clifton:
[29:48] Now, I'm going to ask you something a little selfishly because as we've talked about, we both have high Self-assurance. And people with Self-assurance, sometimes we, whatever the masses do, we want to go the opposite direction. We're the ones in the conversation, the contrarians, somebody that you go, why are you always taking the other side? Where's it gotten you in trouble? And again, I'm asking for my own therapy.

Andre Perry:
[30:13] I mean, in my world around racial justice, if you don't go with the flow, you can ...

Jon Clifton:
[30:22] Define the flow right then.

Andre Perry:
[30:23] The flow is if you're not going with the dominant narrative of how racial justice should play out. And for me, again, me talking about strengths and not deficits oftentimes gets me in trouble. There was a report. That came out in Pittsburgh that said that Black women, Pittsburgh is the worst place in the world for Black women. I said, that can't possibly be true. Again, my writing partner, Jonathan Rothwell, and I did the Black Progress Index where we looked at life expectancy in different places, looking at how the social determinants, all the things that predict for life expectancy. And we can see where people are living the longest. There are places where, like the area we're in, the DMV, the District of Columbia, Maryland, Virginia, this is, if there's a Wakanda in the United States, it's this area where people are living in many places into their 80s. Very different from the average of 74, but there are places where people are living in their mid-60s. But I say all that to say in Pittsburgh, black women are living a lot longer than many places in the South and other places in the Midwest. It's not the worst place in the world. I get what people are trying to do. They're trying to spotlight inequity. You don't have to show or convey how bad black people are doing or how bad places are. You can uplift the strength and still show that it could be higher than what it is if you remove these drags of racism and sexism, of homophobia. These are the things that are throttling growth. And so for me, to lead with disparity is to do everyone a disservice. I mean, it literally brings people down. When I talk about potential, people light up. The people who need the help, they light up. So for me, I lead with strengths. Nobody wants to hear how bad they are. Nobody. Nobody. So I think in my world, talking about racial justice, you have to have a level of Self-assurance.

Jon Clifton:
[33:06] Who in the world of racial justice, though, is pushing back on that particular narrative?

Andre Perry:
[33:10] I won't name names, but there is a literary theme called Afro-pessimism in which basically says that in order for the country to thrive, black people must suffer. And it comes out of the history of slavery in which the U.S. production was at some of its highest when black people were the most oppressed. And the belief is that in order for GDP and productivity to occur, you have to have essentially laborers and exploitation in order to get that productivity. And so in many ways, there's a lot of truth to those concepts. We see all the time the exaltation of billionaires who exploit tax policy, who exploit labor. We see this in real time. So I would never say that these things don't exist. What I do say, let's spotlight the doers who are changing tax policy, who are changing the conditions on the ground, and inspire them. Those are the folks who need inspiration. You're not going to, by giving the attention to the bad guys, so to speak, you're fueling them. You know, I need the folks who are changing conditions to get fuel. I need them to get their flowers. I need them to be recognized and more most importantly, I need their ideas to get sunlight. If we're not giving good ideas attention, if we're constantly giving attention to disparity and or exploitation, we're doing ourselves a disservice. You're robbing us of solutions.

Jon Clifton:
[35:24] So one of the interesting things is how your Self-assurance works with Analytical. Because one of my favorite quotes from you is, I have a love-hate relationship with research. Can you say more about that? Because you are a prominent researcher. It's what you do. What do you mean by that?

Andre Perry:
[35:45] Well, one, researchers are steeped in the same ills that we all are. There are racist researchers. There are sexist researchers. There are paradigms that are steeped in racism and sexism. And so for me, I use the tools. I use the master's tools using Audre Lorde's phrasing. With that said, I know there are limitations. I need to see beyond these tools. I need to see that they are not the be-all, end-all of conditions, that we need to imagine a world beyond what these tools are telling us exists. So for me, I love research because it helps me refine and prove ideas. But you have to go beyond them because people are not stuffed in some Excel spreadsheet. We are bigger than many of the methods that we use. We are more speculative, more imaginative. We contradict many of the things that we predict. And so you got to leave room for that. And so I do. But we will always use most rigorous methods, whatever that means, to explore phenomena. But at the same time, you can't get satisfied and say, oh, that's the way it is. Because if everyone lived with that's the way it is, we would never improve.

Jon Clifton:
[37:38] But the way, one of the ways I think that your Analytical is so fascinating is you have like a macro Analytical and a micro Analytical when you approach research. And your macro Analytical says sometimes when we're looking at research, we're comparing black populations to white populations, which was wrong in the first place. Can you talk more about how you initially kind of made those observations and then how you reframe some of your research to help alleviate some of those kind of macro analytic challenges?

Andre Perry:
[38:09] Yeah, you know, it goes back to this deficit thinking. If we're talking about full employment, for instance, and that's a state where unemployment is under 3%, that when people talk about full employment, they're largely talking about white employment. They're not talking about black because black employment can be, in normal circumstances, double that of white employment. But we know why because discrimination exists. What I try to do is say, hey, where's black unemployment doing well in different categories? Because we can learn from those places. Are they breaking down many of the sort of tribal mechanisms that are in place in cities? And we know that through the research, through the name research, where people identify a black-sounding name, those folks are less likely to get a call back. But there are some places where we're defying that. And I want to learn about all these places. And so for me, on the full employment side, it's like, hey, if we base our economy on white people's economic health, you're missing an entire community in the process. So let's come up with new measures that we can use to expand and grow the economy. We can't rest on what someone determined literally 150 years, 200 years ago, sometimes more. We cannot rest. But in research, we do that. In art, I see it progressing. I see art progressing. I mean, there's obviously some of the classics that we still uphold. But for me, I want to expand. I want to grow. I want to try new things. And that might be the nature of who I am, sort of my strategic thinking sort of theme. But I also think, well, no, I know if we want a better world, we're going to have to imagine it. It can't come from the current paradigms and methods that we currently hold.

Jon Clifton:
[40:45] Speaking of Analytical, one of the things that you open with so boldly in your book is talking about bias. I think bias for researchers is something that you are way ahead of the curve on. And now it's something that's being widely talked about. But can you talk more about what's an analytical framework that future researchers or today's researchers can be thinking about? How do they protect against their own biases or even acknowledge them in the research that they're doing?

Andre Perry:
[41:11] You know, I'm very biased. I think we all are. I'm very biased. My bias comes from my upbringing where an older woman took me in, older black woman took me in, along with other children. So when I think about family, it is very different from researchers who say that the nuclear family is the only family that matters. I think all researchers have put their biases up front because we all have them. The more we put them up front, the more we can see where our research is headed. So much of the paradigms we use actually predict for our outcomes. And so the more we can put our biases up front, challenge them at times, have others refute them. You know, the great thing about being at a think tank, you can find people who don't think like you, who have a different background, backgrounds, and you can get in the same room and you can talk it out. I think we all need to do that. We need to inspect our biases, but that's why diversity matters. And it's not just racial diversity, it's strengths. You need different strengths. You need different backgrounds of all kinds because you can get better ideas at the end of the day. And so for me, I really challenge biases because we're going to have them. It's a matter of what are you going to put up front to people.

Jon Clifton:
[43:04] Is there a bias that you would have challenged at one point that would have just shocked everyone you knew?

Andre Perry:
[43:10] Oh, man. I think if we're really honest, we all hold some sexism. We all hold some racism. We all hold some classism. How that manifests itself differs, you know, based upon power, based upon your position. And so I think we all need to work on those big isms that we are all infected with. But more importantly, we need to get in the habit of questioning our assumptions. What assumptions do we bring to this problem? We bring assumptions to everything because we're wired to. But we should question those assumptions. We should have a platform to question the assumptions. And so you can get at the sexism, racism, homophobia, those big things, but as you work on those, You develop the habit of questioning assumptions in other much smaller areas.

Jon Clifton:
[44:30] Now, you just mentioned bringing in others' diverse perspectives, diverse strengths. One of your remarkable strengths is Arranger. And it's very clear how you bring in so many different partnerships. I mean, you work with Gallup. You even had John Legend here at one point. I mean, the number of organizations that you bring in in order to do, can you talk more about how you do that successfully?

Andre Perry:
[44:56] Yeah. One, if you understand the nature of problems, these are public problems that require a lot of people to solve them. That it is arrogant to believe that any one person or even a small group of people can solve these problems. Again, this goes back to my belief in family. Part of what I believe in terms of growing, in terms of intellectually, in terms of growing power, is to develop more family members. I don't think of my collaborations as sort of transactional. I'm getting this information. I'm getting this data. I'm getting this. No, I see them as family members. I need them to be a part of my house. I need them to have say in my house because I need these problems to be solved. And there was a time where I did everything. I, you know, crunched the numbers. I wrote the report all by myself.

Jon Clifton:
[46:11] How long ago would that have been?

Andre Perry:
[46:12] I mean, even when I got to Brookings in 2017, you come in pretty empty-handed in terms of funding, so you don't have funding. So you're doing everything on a shoestring. But then you get an idea. You work with a colleague. You get a drop of funding. You get an intern. You get an RA. You establish a friend in Jonathan Rothwell. You work with organizations like the NAACP, Gallup, Living Cities, John Legend's organization, Human Level. I'm blanking on it. But literally, I partner with probably dozens of organizations because there's no way to solve these problems. I see myself as part of a movement for change. Me playing a role. I have an important role, and I'm very cognizant of it, that I have a privilege of working at Brookings. I'm privileged to have my own center at Brookings, Center for Community Uplift. It's a privilege.

And so I need to extend that stage, so to speak, to others so they can grow, so they can reap the benefits of my privilege. And so I, you know, but it's family. This is a family business. You know, this is about growing family, growing friends, hanging out. And I hang out with my colleagues, so to speak. Like, you know, I often find I can't separate business and personal things because I'm constantly thinking. I'm also thinking about ways to build stronger relationships and sustaining things. And you're not going to just pound, pound, pound, pound all the way. But you have to have moments where you recognize people, where you're nurturing relationships, where you're having fun. And so that's all a part of it. So, yeah, so that's how I move in the world.

Jon Clifton:
[48:53] You know, people with Arranger, one of the things that they do is they can change things kind of on a dime, especially if something has come up. It's like a general in the field that an unforeseen sort of circumstances or, you know, like in football, there'll be a two minute you're down by six and something horrifying has happened thinking you're going down the field. How do you do that where you manage something that comes up with all those different partnerships? That was kind of an unforeseen circumstance to make sure that everything's the trains are kept on track.

Andre Perry:
[49:30] So there's, and I don't know this, but I think there are kind of two levels of Arranger. There's folks who see the connections and the overall landscape at a macro level. I also work with Arrangers at a very micro level, my operations people, who also make that work. So I actually work well with folks who their strength is Arranger, a little bit even higher. They might lead with Arranger. And they're more operations people. And that's where I, you know, my Arranger really is enhanced when I have another Arranger at a different level. Who also helps me connect the dots, so to speak.

Jon Clifton:
[50:24] Why do you think that is?

Andre Perry:
[50:27] One, again, this goes back to having a great team. You need these components. You need to recognize the strength in people. One of the – what immediately transforms you when you take this strength test is you start to realize, oh, you don't have to have the same kind of person on your team. In fact, that hurts you. You need different people around you. And this, again, this is where assurance comes in. And I love a diverse team of folks who understand who they are. And that's not saying, hey, you know your role. But you do know how we all move on this team. And it just makes for a very productive team. I mean I again I am very privileged blessed lucky whatever orientation you have in that. That I've accomplished a lot, particularly over the last decade, transformed institutions. Even before that, I started working on immigrant educational rights with the DREAM Act. I did a lot with charter schools and ed reform, challenging the movement at times. I did a lot with housing, I did a lot with student debt. I'm doing a lot. And I say I'm lucky and blessed. And it's not by accident, though. It's because I've made connections to people, understanding their strengths, understanding how they can enhance whatever I'm trying to do. Um, and, but the more you understand that, the more you are wanting to, to get people to realize their strength, to enhance their strengths, to have them bathe in their strengths, you know.

Jon Clifton:
[52:58] Do you think that that's your Strategic, your Arranger, your Connectedness or all three?

Andre Perry:
[53:03] All of it. All of it. You know, it is hard to untangle a lot of this because some of it is just being straight strategic. You need to understand the pieces on the chessboard, what they can do. At the same time, it's also about wanting a better future. You know, it's about seeing a better future, you know, inspiring people for that future. It's about having the assurance to work on diverse teams. And to cut across the grain, to say, hey, you know, we're going to go in a different direction. Are you with me? This is why. You know, and that's always a challenge. When you are moving in a different direction, you have to explain why. And oftentimes, because the Strategic thinking theme, and I have so many of these strengths in that bucket, that I am in my head. And so you have to verbalize what's going on in your head because people might miss a step. Why did we go here, not there?

Jon Clifton:
[54:28] And speaking of Strategic, you know, oftentimes people with Strategic, they have plans for plans. Or they think their plans or it's almost like the metaverse where they have so many different things, like a hundred or a thousand ways to get from point A to point B. How do you pick which one? Do you lean on somebody?

Andre Perry:
[54:50] I, you know, deadlines, I actually think this is where grants and deadlines matter. I do have to deliver. When in the think tank world, you do have to deliver. And I also learned this. I have a background in journalism. I wrote a column for years. At the end of the day, you got to turn something in. And I lean on deadlines a lot because I can spend inordinate amounts of time thinking through processes and trying to decide the options. When you're strategic, you're constantly thinking about path forward. But I do think it's about moving forward. Once I get some momentum on something, I'm going with it. I'm all in. And when I see, oh, there's an impasse here, we're not going to be able to move, let's change directions. So you can't commit to something that's not going to work. You have to pivot. And that's where I think I see a lot of folks go wrong who don't understand their strengths is that or they're too committed to a particular dimension of their strength. That oftentimes you hit a roadblock, you have to move in a different direction. Or you're going to spend enormous amounts of energy, time, resources in the wrong direction. So for me, it's I try my best to have deadlines. And when you do that, you are realistic about what you can and cannot do.

Jon Clifton:
[56:44] Now back to your favorite theme, Futuristic. How far do you think in the future? How far do you live in the future?

Andre Perry:
[56:52] Probably, I spent a lot of times in my 80s. I think about when my child is 40, or I said when my youngest is 40. So I have a 31-year-old, 28-year-old, and a 13-year-old. I think about the 13-year-old when he's 40. Because that means I'm going to be 80.

Jon Clifton:
[57:25] So about 30 years.

Andre Perry:
[57:27] Yeah, yeah. I spend time thinking about what house am I going to live in, what part of the country, what kind of world we're going to live in. Like, are we going to ...

Jon Clifton:
[57:43] What does your Futuristic say about that?

Andre Perry:
[57:45] Oh, it's positive, very positive. Right now we're in America, around the world, there's a lot of chaos, a lot of pessimism in the world. But if you look at history, one, after these moments of extreme pessimism, skepticism, and just downright, just depression, there's goodness that comes on the other side of it. You know, my life, I mean, if I've spent time thinking about what went wrong with my father, what went wrong with my mother, what went wrong with this community, I would not be where I am today. I've come out better after every tragedy or every traumatic experience. So right now we're in a state of trauma in this country. There will be a rising of the sun. No question. I want to be a part of that. I think I have ideas that will be at that horizon. And I'm very confident in that. So I think we're going to be in a much better place 30 years from now because there are people who will not allow us to fall. You know, and I also don't want to get too pessimistic given that. Over the last 50 years, we've seen tremendous progress. I challenge anyone. I mean, even in civilization, we're talking 3,000 years of civilization, we've seen tremendous progress. In the last 100, tremendous progress. Yes, there's still racism, oppression, sexism, oppression. No question about it.

Jon Clifton:
[59:55] Is there disagreement on that?

Andre Perry:
[59:58] Oh, absolutely. There's people who will argue that they are not optimistic about the world or we're no different than we were 100 years ago. And that's just for me. I have data that says otherwise. But it's more of the attitude that we hold. For me, I always have hope because I see doers every single day getting it done. The teacher, the plumber, the electrician, the economist, the theoretician, the think tanker who are making changes. Now, we need more of it. We need it scaled. But that's my job. You know, that's what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to identify the strengths. I'm trying to codify them and resource them so that more people can benefit. But I understand that over the last 50 years, we've seen tremendous progress. Tremendous.

Jon Clifton:
[1:01:06] How can others do something similar to inspire others who may have come from a background with as many challenges and to come out as inspired as you and turn it into a positive? How can others do that?

Andre Perry:
[1:01:21] I do believe on a macro level, we need new narratives. I, you know, why I think this conversation is, well, I know this conversation is important to me, is that I take this strengths-based approach in everything I do, like everything I do, that there are assets, there's strength, there's capabilities in us all that we need to unleash. And when we do that then the world is much brighter it is when you can see all that you have to offer, but we spend so much time talking about what's wrong with us and why we don't measure up and why we can't contribute and why we're less than and social media doesn't help people to spend their time comparing themselves to others not realizing that they have their own unique strength. And so for me, I do this through my research. I identify the assets that are worthy of investment. But I do it in my personal life. I look for strength. I talk about strength. I talk about the good news. And I'm not some Pollyannish person that says, oh, there's nothing bad going on in the world. Well, no, there's lots of bad. But if you never identify the growth, you are shortchanging the truth. There is growth in our communities, growth, real growth that is measurable, that is tangible, that is substantive, that is real. And if you mask the growth with pessimism, you dishonor the people who are doing good work. And I mean that.

Jon Clifton:
[1:03:22] On the point of your Futuristic, Camille said that I had to ask you about Afrofuturism. Can you talk more about that and your passion, curiosity, and interest around it?

Andre Perry:
[1:03:33] Yeah, Afrofuturism is a genre of literature that really, literally sees black people in the future, where so many of our stories and narratives really black people are absent from. And so my fascination with Afrofuturism is less from science fiction and more about urban planning. I want to see spaces and places that are built and designed for black people to thrive, for all people to thrive, no question about it. But when it comes to urban planning, black people could not claim space. We could not create space. And so we need to be a part of the planning process. And so for me, Afrofuturism, how I identify with it from its roots in science fiction. I see it in urban planning that we can create residential areas that are in tune with thriving. We can create commercial corridors where black entrepreneurs exist, where we can see black people having a cup of coffee, reciting poetry, selling their products to a global market where people are dressed differently. They think differently, that there's not this, almost to the point where you don't even see that you are black, you just belong, you know. And that's how I interpret Afrofuturism. It's just, we are there, present in the future. And so a lot of why we are insecure is because racism, white supremacy, has said we don't belong in the future. And so for me, it's about creating a world, oh, we're there. We are there.

Jon Clifton:
[1:06:05] And, you know, a lot of times people that have Strategic and Futuristic, they see the vision and they actually put a plan in order to get there. One of the things that you've done in partnership with Jonathan, with Camille, is actually start to measure thriving within the black community. Can you talk more about what that looks like?

Andre Perry:
[1:06:22] Yeah, we started breaking down where people are thriving, where the highest levels of wellbeing. And we started mapping that, those places all across the country, and not just for black people, white people, Asian Americans, our Native brothers and sisters, Latinos, in cases. So the goal is to identify why they are thriving. There is a correlation between wealth and wellbeing. We know that economic security is a significant part of wellbeing. It's not the only part. So we see when the places where people are thriving, it's no surprise. They have housing. They have a good job. They have safe neighborhoods. But those are things that can be created. Those are policy decisions that we need to make. And we can learn from the places where black, brown people are thriving and try to take those learnings to places where they are not. I mean, it's no question. We did some analysis. I started looking at some of the places where people are thriving and then comparing them to places where they are not. We still have places where people can't get good, clean drinking water, where their air quality is poor, that education is suffering, that housing options are less, and people aren't thriving the way they should be. So for me, I want to correct those policy choices that we make, because we can change those conditions, and we can change them faster than we think. But we need to learn what other places, what people in other places have done, their actions and inspire those actions and inculcate that attitude in other places and people in other places.

Jon Clifton:
[1:08:31] Was there anything from the research in thriving that completely surprised you?

Andre Perry:
[1:08:38] I, you know, it's, it's always surprising to see how many black and brown people are thriving. I mean, given their socioeconomic circumstance, people find a way to thrive. People find meaning in their life. I lived in New Orleans, for instance, and if you go there, you can leave a way going, how can anyone find happiness in a place where housing is unaffordable and you have all these climate disasters and policing is completely biased? But people find a way to find happiness, to find thriving. They find a way to call a place home. One of the first things I ask people when I'm doing an exploration of cities, I say, what keeps you here? Why do you stay? And inevitably, the answers point to the assets in the community. And it could be anything from the child caretaker. It could be the music. It could be the second line parade. It can be the church. It can be the employer. Can be colleagues. These are the things that people lean on in order to get a sense of thriving and happiness. And so for me, it's always fascinating to find that people will find a way. People will thrive. But there are some correlations to some very basic things, to thriving that we need to solve for so that everyone can thrive. You know, and this is one of the reasons why I'm fascinated by thriving as opposed to closing many of the gaps, wealth gaps, for instance, which we still work on to narrow wealth gaps. I still, if the wealth gap isn't closed, people still need to thrive. People still need to find happiness. People still need economic security, whatever that means. And so we need to have multiple measures of progress. Thriving should be one of those measures of progress.

Jon Clifton:
[1:11:02] You're an optimist. The world needs a lot more optimists for the future. But when thinking of the promised future, how do we get there? And what additional things can we be hopeful for about the next 30 years?

Andre Perry:
[1:11:19] You know, for me, the promised land and a promised community, this is where faith comes in. You have to have a belief in something higher than yourself, something greater than yourself and your community. Folks are so immersed in their own social relatives, so to speak, and their worldview. They never go beyond what their cousins believe, their social cousins, I should say. Never go beyond that, never exploring a place where people. We don't have these identities that sort of throttle our humanity. So for me, I'm constantly thinking about that place. I hear it in songs. I hear it in art. I hear it in the creators who are moving beyond. I hear from spiritual leaders who talk about a higher place. They talk about a heaven. They talk about a universe that is different. I think you need to have that in order to even, if you're a policymaker, you have to have that vision. Because if you don't have that vision of a promised land, then you're really not going to know where your policy recommendations are headed. You've got to have a destination. And you've got to know who you are so that you can navigate through this terrain. The sooner you know who you are, what your strengths are, the sooner you know where you're going, then you can find a way to that place. And so that's what I'm trying to do with my research. That's what I'm trying to do in life. That's why I want my children to develop. That's why I want my brothers and sisters, whatever genetics they may have, to do. So to get to that higher place, that promised land.

Jon Clifton:
[1:13:54] Andre, thanks for being a great partner. Thanks for caring about research as much as we do. And thanks for carrying a strengths-based philosophy everywhere you go. It means a lot to us. And thank you for being here today.

Andre Perry:
[1:14:06] Hey, you're welcome.

Transcript autogenerated using AI.