Leadership Oakland

By Ron Shamma, LOXII
LO Volunteer in Residence

The culture at Mercedes-Benz is cutting edge, offering staffers many open-area meeting locations, work areas and common areas. This includes coffee bars and cafeteria areas on almost all four floors of their building. It also includes lots of art work, in all forms, and much of it is meant to be handled. Their commitment and  corporate devotion to art and culture made it a perfect spot for the morning session.  Jennifer Korman, Mercedes-Benz Community Relations Manager, arranged tours of the entire building so the class got to see the entire Mercedes-Benz collection. It was truly inspiring to see a corporation interweave art into their culture.

One session titled: "100 Arts & Entertainment Venues in Southeastern Michigan" was particularly interesting. It included an exercise to identify as many as 100 venues in the metropolitan area that you may not think of as arts and cultural venues. Although the group only managed to identify about 55, it did bring out the point that there are lots of opportunities to increase your leadership understanding through the arts and culture of the area. Another session: "What can the Business Community learn from the Art Community" showed how a group of individuals with diverse backgrounds, including arts, can help find best solutions to issues that need answering; arts and art education is also a business.

Leadership Oakland's second part of the day moved to the Birmingham Bloomfield Arts Center(BBAC). There amongst classrooms of adults taking "art" classes, our session continued A video of Detroit's Heidelberg Project showed how the Heidelberg street community has come together to infuse art into their neighborhood and that has helped to clean-up the area and bring in new residents thereby increasing the value of the area. Tours of BBAC were taken by class participants and several pieces of local art were purchased. (This includes a great wool purse this author bought for my wife's birthday.)

The day included several other sessions that appeared to inspire the class. A talk by Christopher Baum, Senior VP, Film Detroit about the current state of Michigan's film incentives, sparked lots of questions and enthusiasm from the class.

Tyree Guyton's quote from the Heidelberg Project video was particularly inspiring, he said: "Life is no fun, unless you can go out and shake things up!"

The 2011 Leadership Oakland class year is almost over (graduation is in June) and it appears to me that yet another LO class will soon be going out into the work world with newly inspired leadership skills and follow Tyree's lead to begin to "shake things up."

If you are looking for this same type inspiration, sign up for the next LO class.

One final point: below website is a short picture quiz. Don't worry--there are no wrong answers. There are three photos. One is captioned "Do You See it?"another, "Do You Like it?" and a third, "Do You Get It?". They reference three pieces of art in Mercedes-Benz collection. Write me at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it and let me know your thoughts on them.  We will discuss it next month!!

Do You See It?

Do You Like It?

Do You Get It?