Meaningful Meetings: Lessons Shared: Chris Noth: What Leaders Can Learn From a Celebrity Life

This 30-minute Meaningful Meetings show features Chris Noth, an actor best known for his roles in Sex and the City and Law and Order, who also owns businesses and is helping to raise his family. 

A Long Road to Success 

Reflections on the Journey

• Finding your path isn’t necessarily pre-ordained—it’s a journey that often doesn’t happen instantly.
• The people around you really do make a difference...After spending the first half of his teenage years generally getting into trouble, Noth might never have discovered acting unless he attended a boarding school where the kids were genuinely engaged in the arts.
• Yes, getting the world’s best training can make a difference.  The Yale drama school helped set Noth on his way, he states.  
• One spontaneous decision in life, in his case the decision as a lark to try out for a play in college, can turn out in reflection to be a lifetime game-changer. It is no different in any professional career.
• In acting, a common method to avoid mental distractions on stage is to focus 100% on the character in front of you. This level of listening is equally useful in life and business. People appreciate being genuinely heard.
• As a celebrity, getting interrupted at meals or on the streets can be annoying or worse, but in fact it is a privilege to have so many people interested in you and should be humbly appreciated as an organizational leader as well.
• A highly unpleasant byproduct of being in the public eye is the percentage of people in the media business who have no regard for privacy or the truth, and that there is nothing to do but accept that good and the bad as a fact of life. The business press can be tough too.
• Being in the limelight proportionately increases the need to resist the headiness and temptations of success. Business leaders are in effect celebrities in their organizations and need to show similar caution in their dealings with stakeholders and the community. 
• The ability to apologize goes beyond simple words: owning mistakes can be a painful self-assessment process that only over time can help people and those affected get to a better place. Apologies are due as much in business as in one's personal life. 
• To perform consistently over many months on stage, having a system is critical. Yet, ironically, the system is only a means to the end—it should not be your focus but rather free you to concentrate on going to the next level of creativity or inspiration. In fact, there are many different systems in acting, all of them with their merits.  The same applies to business.
• In business, total trust in one’s partners and a common vision are essential for getting through the inevitable tough times.
• In acting, performers are told that their own worst traits are a source of powerful energy on stage. This is probably sometimes the case as well in business leadership during critical moments of decision-making and decisive leadership. The key for people in leadership is to leave that at the office.

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