Photos by Jennifer Silverberg
Leadership doesn’t always look like a corner office. Sometimes it looks like building a hospitality empire, leading a team on the ice, or knowing when to embrace change or make a difficult decision.
That’s the idea behind the new Business Author Series from St. Louis County Library (SLCL) and Greater St. Louis, Inc., which aims to explore the many faces of leadership through conversations with authors whose experiences shape a myriad of industries.
The series launches Sept. 26 with Danny Meyer, the renowned restaurateur and hospitality leader whose work offers lessons in building businesses, cultivating teams, and creating a culture centered on what he’s coined as “unreasonable hospitality.”
The second author in the series, former St. Louis Blues captain Chris Pronger, brings a different perspective on leadership, drawing on his experiences in professional sports and the challenges of motivating himself and his team. The author series event with Pronger happens Oct. 4.
For SLCL Director and CEO Kristen Sorth, that variety and varied perspective is intentional. “We didn’t want it to be really traditional business books,” Sorth says. “We wanted it to reach a wider audience.”
The result is a series that looks at leadership through sometimes unexpected lenses, exploring everything from hospitality and teamwork to collaboration, executive decision-making, and world-class leadership. The lessons, Sorth says, aren’t limited to people who run businesses.
“These are real-life lessons that are coming from people who have had success in business, sports, and other fields,” she says.
At its heart, the Business Author Series asks a simple question with a wide range of answers: What can we learn about leading people, organizations, and ourselves from those who have found success across different arenas.
Why was it important to you and SLCL to launch a Business Author Series?
We have been talking about a Business Author Series for many years. But a lot of times, publishers don’t send business authors on book tours. They’ll send them to special events and things like that.
We have a small business area here, and we have resources for entrepreneurs and small businesses. We have startup competitions, pitch competitions, and we really wanted to extend that into our author series. So, we’re so excited to partner with Greater St. Louis, Inc. on this.
What can people expect from the series?
We will be bringing in authors who have written books about business, about teams, about leadership, about smart decision-making, about collaborative strategies for organizations, and not just businesses. Those are conversations and processes that I think all organizations can take in.
Greater St. Louis, Inc.’s Managing Partner Ron Kitchens and I were actually just on a panel together where we talked about how nonprofits can work with government and business. Our message was that everybody should be running their organization with business strategies in mind. So, I think this is really going to have something for everybody.
Danny Meyer is an interesting choice to kick off a business series because many people know him primarily as a restaurateur. What does he bring to this conversation?
We did not want it to be really some of those traditional business books that you see. We wanted it to reach a wider audience. And Danny is such a good example.
Hospitality is really all about what we’re doing here. We need to make sure that people feel comfortable coming in here and want to stay, just like you do at a restaurant.
We also want it to be unexpected. And I think a lot of the authors’ approaches to being successful in business might be unexpected to people.
What kinds of lessons do you hope people take away from these conversations?
It’s not just about business. It’s about employees, teams, collaboration, and embracing change.
Our second author is going to be Chris Pronger, the former captain of the St. Louis Blues, who has written a book about leadership. I have read that book, and there is so much in there about the struggle of being a leader and hard decisions that you have to make for yourself personally and for the team in general, and how sometimes that means stepping away from things.
So again, these are real-life lessons that are coming from people who have had success in business, sports, or other fields.
Who do you hope comes to these events?
I really think this is going to have something for everybody. The conversations are about leadership, teams, collaboration, decision-making and how organizations work. Those aren’t lessons that are limited to people who run businesses.
The library has become known for its author events. What should people know about other upcoming events?
If people are interested in hearing about our programs, our services, and especially our author events, the best way to do so is to follow us on social media or to get a library card. Then you’ll get all kinds of information because many of our author events sell out quickly.
And what do you hope this new Business Author Series adds to the library’s broader role in the community?
We want people to understand that the library is a place where you can have conversations about all kinds of things. We have resources for entrepreneurs and small businesses, but we also want to bring people together around ideas and experiences that can help them think differently.
I think that’s really what we’re trying to do with the series: Bring in people with interesting experiences and unexpected perspectives and give people an opportunity to learn from them.