I am a big fan of Ella Fitzgerald, I love her voice, it’s just so beautiful; rich, smooth and full of feeling, she brings the best out of every song.
She was incredibly talented. Yet even she needed help in order to break through and hit the big time.
I saw a story yesterday about how it was Marilyn Monroe who had helped her make that breakthrough, by helping her to play in the bigger clubs.
If you don’t know the story you can find more details here,
Basically what happened was that Ella Fitzgerald was stuck playing the smaller clubs.
So Marilyn called the Mocambo club in hollywood, which was a popular venue which was regularly visited by the biggest stars of that period. She told them that they should book Ella Fitzgerald immediately, for a full week, and if they did she would take a front table for each show, and that the press would go wild.
The manager could see how this would be great for his club and agreed.
After this Ella Fitzgerald never had to play small clubs again, she went on to become a superstar, and the rest as they say is history.
To me this is a great example of leadership and there are three lessons we can learn from Marilyn that will help to make us better leaders.
If we practise these three skills they will help us to be coming more inspiring leaders.
Want to achieve improbable results contact me at gordon@leadership-principles.com now!