When Kwame Jackson, the runner-up from the first season of NBC’s The Apprentice, first met the show’s casting director, he walked in the door and said, “We know there’s a ‘one black guy’ rule in reality TV.”
The risky opener, he told students Friday, was his way of being himself and thinking outside of the box, something he said is key to getting ahead in the business world.
Jackson, a Harvard Business School graduate with Wall Street experience, used stories from his career and the show to teach students the most important lessons he learned about climbing the career ladder.
The talk, held at 11:30 a.m. at the Colony Ballroom in Stamp Student Union, was hosted by the Career Center as part of its Diversity Job Search Series.
Jackson used business smarts and sharp talking to beat out more than a dozen other “apprentices” in a competition to become billionaire real estate developer Donald Trump’s newest employee. Though he ultimately lost, the Career Center thought the Washington native would have valuable advice to share with college students about how to use their skills to make it to the top.
In his talk, Jackson stressed the importance of fearlessness and risk taking.
When he sat in the boardroom across the table from Trump, he said, he refused to be intimidated. This sort of confidence is the best way to impress future employers, he said.
Another good risk to take, he said, is simply to be yourself. Jackson said he always tried to act like he had “a little home training.”
He also stressed the importance of being accountable for your own actions. On the show when his team failed on a project and Trump tried to pick the group apart in the boardroom, Jackson said he found that admitting the project had gone poorly was the best way to be responsible and make a good impression on the people in charge of hiring and firing.
Throughout the show, viewers could see the bond that formed between Jackson and his close friend Troy McClain. Jackson talked about his bond with McClain and used this to emphasize the importance of never forgetting the team.
Jackson said he owed his success to the people who supported him throughout his life, including his mom. When Jackson asked his mother to give him $75 for a Super Nintendo, he said she told him, “People in hell want ice water.”
Instead of just giving him the money, Jackson said, his mom gave him something even more important: his work ethic.
Other advice included knowing when not to talk, as Jackson did when he refused to take Trump’s bait to talk badly about the other contestants and to work behind the scenes and stay positive.
“Leaders are people who do the work when no one else is looking,” he said.
Though many in the audience of about 150 seemed starstruck, others asked Jackson for specific advice and to find out more about his current career and plans to break ground on a 500-acre real estate complex in Prince George’s County.
Jackson summed up his advice in a response to one student who asked what black people in particular should do to succeed on Wall Street, a predominantly white establishment.
“You just need to be determined to know what those landmines are,” Jackson said, “and hustle to work hard and prove a lot of people wrong and to have the ability to build networks of people that are going to be advocates for you.”
