Of you dont own me. She attended law school here at harvard and was a fellow at harvards center for ethics, Kennedy School for government. She has taught and lectured worldwide including law school that gail, tel aviv and beijing and is the dawn wakes teen professor of law at university of san diego and the author of Award Winning business book talent wants to be free. Her most recent book, you dont own me was recently described in the new yorker as a hairraising account of an epic tale in the Financial Times described it as a real page turner of a decadelong court battle between Toy Company Mattel and mga the ownership of the immensely popular bratz dolls. Please toy me in welcoming our guests for the evening, orly lobel. [applause]. Thank you. This is really special for me to be at the Harvard Bookstore because i spent many years as a graduate students here at Harvard Square and Harvard University just roaming the shelves and loving it and being inspired by all of the different disciplines in a way that still continues to impact my research, my writing, my thinking about ethics and Market Competition and justice and all of the interesting stuff that we see around us, how do we create culture, how our social icons made, equality and fairness and this is really also how i got to this book. So, i will tell you a little bit about how i started thinking about writing this book and how it opened so many windows into a lot of different issues and we capture that so anyways, so you dont own me starts in our current time. It starts when barbie, blueeyed, blonde, tiny waist, very large breasts, very cold, never changing has dominated our market, our images of womanhood, our childhood, parenting for basically 60 years, since her introduction in the American Market by mattel in 1959 and the story starts when finally after really dominating 90 of the market around the world for the First Time Ever without mattel ever expecting it suddenly through almost right now in current times in the beginning of the 21st century only the Holiday Season brings a new doll , a different kind of doll, bratty doll, fuller, more multi ethnic, more sassy, trendy, something that sort of more reflects what the taste of children, girls have right now and suddenly they sort of comes out on the market without mattel expecting, titian and as the judge in one of the many moments of the trial says, knox and barbie offer pedestal and so the story begins with a very unlikely hero. Think about a shy elton john, very creative young designer, Carter Bryant who always dreams about being a fashion designer, has been sketching from childhood all sorts of angels and fairies and he describes himself as being a sort of that are cord away when he was growing up in los angeles who while other boys were maybe playing with trucks and cars and with the balls outside and soccer he was actually playing with barbie and reading fashion magazines and his mother was very supportive. She actually testified in court about all of this and he wants to be in high fashion, but the second best when you are working in los angeles is this conglomerate mattel the control such a big market share and has such huge purchasing power of talent and he takes a job designing barbie clothes. He becomes really frustrated with the culture of mattel. He feels like its been very stagnant. Theres not acceptance of new ideas. Barbie is never changing and actually what i did a lot of the research and interviews and kind of intense discovery of the Corporate Culture of mattel i actually uncovered this term that mattel executives use about not introducing competition to barbie and they say we dont want to cannibalize barbie. They dont want to eat up what is so dominant in girls, you know, playrooms and in what we call the pink shelves of toy stores. So, he goes away for some time on the takes time off of mattel. He goes back to missouri. He sketches some sketches and theres a lot, i mean, part of the roller coaster decade long litigation is how do you actually show a moment of eureka and where does innovation innovation innovation and creatures of an come from but weekends and nights becomes a big defense that is part of the trial that he was not working at mattel when he thinks about this idea of a bratty doll and he sells it to a competitor and they develop without mattel knowing. He leaves mattel and they develop a huge empire that knocks barbie offer pedestal, so i went to read to you to actually set the stage the very first paragraph from not even the first chapter, the introduction of you dont own me to give you some sense of how the story begins. She was blonde and beautiful, statuesque with a long slender legs, a tiny waist and a chest so large that researchers claimed any similarly endowed woman would surely tip over. Four years Carter Bryant to beautifully served her. He styled her hair am addressed her skirts, dresses and luxurious grout cows, adored her injury and even applied her bake makeup and shows looked fabulous. Today, we week she was unblemished, shiny and new and in a 3 billiondollar industry she dominated over 90 market share for five decades and perhaps i was what carter decides for perfection at absence of a single flock and never change while people gain weight, their skin wrinkled and sag their hair grade, barbie stood perfect and closing of the changing world and while she remained ageless and pristine the world she had been born into ceased to exist. Everything was raunchier and more perverse. Barbie remains clean. A real artist, carter saw beauty in the broken, the queer, the broken and perhaps even a grotesque and like many creative people trapped in dead end jobs he experienced the inks of a servant whose goal had become the master. He imagined a new icon a better reflected the modern world using the beauty of real people took carter had not intended to assault barbies persona, public in the those invested in maintaining it your key had not even plan to confront his master he could not have consciously dared to dream of the millions he would make from his rebellion , the millions in the ensuing losses and the decadelong legal battle that would not only change barbie in the mattel corporation, but forever alter both the entire toy industry in the very law governing creativity petition. He certainly could not have foreseen the incredibly ferocious feud between his over prioritizing xm lawyer ex employer and those who gamble to risk a chance on him, nor could he predictable years would drag his life partner, richard erman, and his mother, jane, to testify on his behalf asking them to reveal deep seated intimate details of his life and passions of most certainly his dreams would not have been it including suffering depression and a stroke at the age of 41 took Carter Bryant only wanted to build his own dream house away from barbie. So, the story begins with Carter Bryant, but what is fascinating and what drew me to tell the story that i thought had to be told without in order for barbie to be knocked offer pedestal and in order for a new doll line to thrive really like a greek tragedy the parents had to be written off and Carter Bryant individual become sort of a pond and then disappears really from the scene and this is still a david versus goliath story, but the david here is not Carter Bryants. Its actually a much more powerful david. It is isaac larry and, a jewish iranian immigrant who starts, found his own toy company and its really kind of that bold hes the owner now because of bratz, because of the largest most lucrative privately held toy company in the United States because he really has that ability to go over go after or resist about goliath, mattel, that as the story unfolds you see how it really uses everything it can to fight off competition, different expressions, images of barbie that they dont control so going after not just toy makers, but going after artists that represent barbie in a different way, musicians, film producers just sort of a roller coaster story who mattel views in the scene of presenting challenges. Another thing that was fascinating is how much history repeats in this sense because when you actually go to when i started uncovering the history of these dolls in these Cultural Icons it turns out that barbie from her very inception was also not really created by whoever thought that she was created or just like mattel said that they own bratz because the next employee had thought about the ideas for bratz, barbies inception also can be traced to litigation tween the new world, mattel, the American Company in the old world where she was pulled in sort of a secret dark history there of her german photography origins that mattel did not want us to know about, but it also allowed me to open these windows into how was it that in the 50s suddenly a fashion doll given to the scene because before that, you know, girls would play with 80 dolls kind of imagining themselves as mothers, maybe, but for the first time they are playing with a real not very realistic, but a grownup woman with unrealistic proportions and you start seeing these colorful characters from the past and again seen how history repeats in that sense, so i will read it to you a little bit about if you watched madmen and you know about some of the history of advertising and marketing in the 50s and 60s and the whole culture there. This is the real look of madmen and so they hired this guru, another immigrant austrian immigrant who really transforms the way that marketing is done and mattel is really innovative in using consumer psychology, really freudian psychology and marketing and advertising, so this is the marketing guru they hired. In the 1950s, he transformed products beyond their monday function. Soap was about sensuality, not personal hygiene. Tobacco really stressed symbolized for reality and was a reward for a good day at the office. Smoking and health concerns, he wrote efforts to reduce the amount of smoking signify a willing iced to sacrifice pleasure in order to massage the feeling of guilt. Guilt feeling may cause harmful, physical effects, not at all caused by the cigarettes used, which may be extremely mild. Such guilt feeling alone may be the real cause of the injurious consequences. Rather than a lethal habit, tobacco smoking, he said, was comparable to sucking at the nipples of a gigantic i apologize for the audience that brought kids. One campaign displayed a man smoking next to his date captioned smoking rounds out other forms of enjoyment, illicit sex along with tobacco was another reward for a good day at the office. Lipstick was a phallic play on that desire and since consciously hinted to women and men buying makeup for women an invitation. Marketed cars to trigger mans family fantasies of a mistress and write this like hes actually very clear about what hes trying to do in his marketing. Suddenly hes asked how about marketing to children, had we do that next had we convince mothers to buy a clearly sexualized doll for their little girl and theres a lot of thought that i sort of uncovering the book. The other thing that i want to say about what drew me to tell the story, which again is sort of a legal thriller that opens; about how contemporary times and how we compete is that this case really, i started looking at it when i was writing my previous book, talent wants to be free, and there i was showing sort of more in the Research Field how employers have this mindset of not letting employees use their own ideas and not letting them move from competitor to competitor and how it that has not only real cost on the lives of workers and our careers, but on regions and what kind of products we have and what consumers can experience and how innovation happens and how collaboration happens. I was very honored and fortunate that in the summer of 2016, i actually got a call from the white house. I like saying that, so i will say it again. I got a call from the white house to talk about talent wants to be free before president obamas policy team and from the treasury department, department of justice and the Labor Department as well as presented in front of the various states and they were concerned about noncompete policy that i was researching and a lot of scholarly articles i published and in talent wants to be free and i became part of a working group that was kind of culminated in the president s call to action to the states to try to curtail this rise and trying to fence the mobility of employees, but the more and more i looked at this case in you dont own me of mattel it became pragmatic to me that its not just about the kind of pure noncompete causes, but a lot of different areas of law and ways and contractual ways like in this case of asking employees and we have all signed these contracts with whatever industry you work at asking them to assign all of their ideas, all of their knowhow, all of their creation, creativity, innovation, inventions weekends and nights included to the employer and really but effective creating these fences even if you dont use the blunt language of you cannot move to a competitor. So, i started delving into this case, but when i did of course the cinematic quality and the roller coaster and wild the facts and the colorful personality of this case just became very very clear. It became clear that its not just about that, that we have here a case that opened questions about the american dream, the rise of feminism, the making of icons, about marketing , consumer psychology, the trail, racism. One of the reviewers said a civil action set in toy stores and another reviewer said, l woods remix referred to legally blonde would eat this story alive. I think what happens in the child really when you read it you get a chance sense of how much the kind of saddle or dispute that starts as though its a contractual dispute between an employer, powerful corporation and a previous employee. You see how it becomes really about the emotions, compassions and the rationality a lot of time of executives are operating in markets and how theres often times this use of the courtroom as a sledgehammer to work things out, but should be worked out in the marketplace. One of the things that is really fascinating is how much these personalities matter. You can see this because this trial happened twice and this is what i keep referring to as the roller coaster that. The same facts in the same plaintiff and defendant when they come before a different jury, two sets of juries, two sets of judges, two sets of attorneys because the teams of attorneys change. Its because a completely different environment, completely different trial and sort of setting in the courtroom and claims about actually for the corporate ethics of the corporation that initiated the trial come about, so in this kind of next round of the trial one of the things that starts happening and is very important is that mga, who was sued by mattel as having stolen this idea for a bratty doll because they hired a former employee, they find out a lot of details about whats mattel has been doing to them and other competitors. I will read to you some paragraphs. Mj couldnt figure out how mattel was anticipating its every move until a mattel insider jumped ship and revealed the shocking information about mattels practices. Jennifer keller who is the attorney that comes on board later and really shifts the whole kind of jury motion told the jury that mattel was the worst type of offender in the corporate espionage world. The kind that maintains its own corporate espionage department. They had a manual in the courtroom called how to steal manual. That was internally used to. Pick she described to the jury mattel conduct as unlawful, outrageous, despicable and argued it cost mga tens of millions in losses. Mj presented evidence that while mattel was preparing for its final attack on mg and the court it engaged in the illegal act espionage and mga termed mattels scorched earth a strategy as the worst type of market battle. Together these two frontiers, litigation and spine became a great weapon and innovation moores. Nation brought to drive competition out of the market is time to gain an unfair advantage over the hearts and dollars of consumers. As m ga told the jury barbie was flailing and barberie was failing and mattel executives when a state of panic. Mattel desperation grew as bratzs popularity exploded. Mattel operated like a well oiled undercover trial with internal memos employees are instructed to use the codename nhp instead of mga. Can crack the code . And hb is one letter off nga bring to mind another shift in letters in space odyssey, the computer is often sought to be based on a one letter shift from the name ibm. s have been denied by their mattel denied and hb was a code, but when it comes to the next hot plastic toy loose lips can sync its classic toy ship. So, all of these questions that came in that kind of facts discovered in the courtroom really brings a lot of pause to, not just to the toy and Entertainment Industry, but how we battle and how we create markets and how we create culture and im happy to talk about a lot of different aspects about the book, but one of the things that becomes very clear is that right now theres this moments of a lot of uncovering of Corporate Culture with that Metoo Movement and white went to suggest to you is that a lot of these contracts, theres really two sides of the same coin that we see a lot of attempts by concentrated markets to both the silence the speech of insiders when they see wrongdoing, when they see misconduct whether its Sexual Misconduct or other misconduct and they also have this mindset that they do own as they do own me in the sense that everything that is created can be owned, all ideas and sort of this idea of intellectual property expanded and expanded to infinity so, as i said the cinematic quality of the case really drew me to tell the story , which just had to be told and i have been very pleased that while i thought actually when i was doing some of the interviews i would ask the people that i interviewed, the insiders, the attorneys, jurors, the judges that i sat down with, my final question was so, if this was a movie who would play you and now i really am a feeling very pleased that a lot of the reviewers in th