Good evening, everyone and welcome to the latest installment of our series. Tonight were pleased to have with us orly lobel, author of you dont own me. She attended Harvard Law School and a fellow at Harvard Centers for ethics in the profession, Kennedy School for government and Weatherhead Center for international affairs. She has taught and lectured worldwide including law schools that yale, tel aviv and beijing. She is the professor of law at university of san diego and the author of awardwinning business book talent wants to be free. Her most recent book you dont own me was recently described in the new yorker as as a hairraising account of an epic tale in the Financial Times described as a real page turner of the decadelong court battle between Toy Companies mattel and mga over the ownership of the immensely popular brats dolls. Please join me now and welcoming our guest for the evening, orly lobel. [applause] thank you. So this is really special for me to be here at the Harvard Book Store because i spent many years as a graduate student here at Harvard Square come here Harvard University just roaming the shelves and loving it and really being inspired by all the different disciplines in a way that still continues to impact my Research Come , my writing, y thinking about ethics and Market Competition and justice, and all the interesting stuff that we see around us, how do we create culture, how are social icons made, equality and fairness. This is really also how i got to this book. So i will tell you a little bit about how why started thinking about writing this book and how it open so many windows into a lot of different issues really of the moment and we really care about in so many ways. So you dont own me start in our current times. It starts when barbie, blueeyed, blonde, tiny waist, very large breasts, very cold and never changing has dominated our markets, our images of womanhood, our childhood and our parenting for basically 60 years, since her introduction in the American Market by mattel in 1959. 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, you know, right now in current times in the beginning of the 21st century suddenly the Holiday Season brings a new doll, a different kind of doll, bratty doll, a fuller, more multiethnic, more sassy, United States, something that more reflects what the taste of children, girls have right now. Suddenly it comes out on the market without mattel expecting competition and as the judge in one of the many moments of the trial says, knox barbie offer pedestal. And so the story begins with a very unlikely hero. Think about a shy out and john, a very creative young designer, Carter Bryant, who always dreams about being a fashion designer, has been sketching some childhood, all sorts of angels and fairies and he describes himself as being sort of that awkward boy when he was growing up in los angeles who, what of the boys were maybe playing with trucks and cars and with balls outside, soccer, he was actually playing with barbie and reading fashion magazines, and his mother was very supportive. He actually testified in court about all of this. He wants to be in high fashion but the secondbest when you are working in los angeles is of this conglomerate mattel the control such a big market share and that 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 when 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 playrooms and in what we call the pink shelves of the toy stores. So he goes away for some time, takes time off mattel. He goes back to missouri picky sketches some sketches, and theres a lot, part of the roller coaster decadelong litigation is how do you actually show a moment of eureka and what is innovation and creativity come from, but he has inspiration when he is way from mattel, also weekends and nights, that 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 they said knox barbie off her pedestal. So i want to read to you actually to 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 lungs slender legs, tiny waist and the chest so large that finished researchers claimed any similarly endowed woman which surely tip over. Four years Carter Bryant dutifully served her. He styled her hair, trester in skirts, dresses and luxurious gowns, adorned her in jewelry and even apply for makeup. She always looked fabulous. Day after day, week after week she was unblemished, shiny and new. Any in a 3 billion industry shd dominated over 90 market share for five decades. Perhaps that was what carter despised, or perfection. The absence of a single flaw. She never changed. While people gain weight, their skin wrinkled and sagged, their hair got great here barbie stayed perfect and frozen against the changing world. While treatment ageless and pristine, the world that shed been born into ceased to exist. Everything was raunchier and more perverse. Barbie remain maddeningly clean. A real artist, congress of judy in the broken, the peculiar, the clear, perhaps even the grotesque. Like many creative people, trapped in deadend jobs experienced the angst of a servant whose goal had become the master big imagine a new icon that that reflected the modern world come using the beauty of real people. Carter had not intended to assault barbies persona come her public image for those invested in maintaining it. He had not even plan to confront his master. He could not have consciously dare to dream of the millions he would make from his rebellion, the millions in losses and the decadelong legal battle that were not only change barbie and the mattel corporation, will forever alter both entire toy industry and the very laws governing creativity and competition. He certainly could not have foreseen the incredibly ferocious feud between his over priority x employer and rosa gambled and missed it all to take a chance on him. Nor could he predict that lawyers would drag both his life partner, richard, and his mother, jane, to testify on his behalf asking them to reveal deepseated intimate details of his life and passions. Most certainly his dreams would not have included suffering depression and a stroke at the age of 41. 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 was that in order for barbie to be knocked off her pedestal and in order for a new doll line to thrive really like a greek tragedy, that parent had to be written off. Carter bryant the individual becomes sort of a pawn and then just disappears really from the scene. This is still a david versus goliath story, but the david here is not Carter Bryant. Its actually a much more powerful david. It is isaac larrikin, a jewish iranian immigrant who starts, violence his own toy company and is really that bold, used the owner owner now because of brats, of the largest most lucrative privately held toy company in the United States because he really has that ability to go over, after a resist the 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 are going after artist the represent barbie in a different way, musicians, film producers. Theres just sort of a roller coaster story of 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 start uncovering the history of the cells and his cultural icons, it turns out that barbie from a very inception was also not really created by whoever thought she was created, or just like mattel said that they own bratz because an exemployee have thought about the idea for bratz. Barbies in section also be traced to litigation between the new world, mattel, the american company, and the old world where she was pulled. Theres a secret, dark history there of her german origins that mattel didnt really want us to know about. It also allowed me to open these windows and to how was it that in the 50s suddenly a fashion doll came into the scene . Because before that the girls would play with baby dolls, kind of imagining themselves as mothers may be. But for the first time they are playing with a real, not very realistic, but a grownup one with unrealistic proportions, and you start seeing these colorful characters from the past, and begin seeing how history repeats in that sense. So i will read to you a little bit about, if you watched madmen, you know about some of the history of advertising and marketing in the 50s and 60s in the whole culture there. This is the real kind of madmen, and so they hire this guru, another immigrant, austrian immigrant who really transformed the way that marketing is done and mattel to truly innovative in using, using consumer psychology, freudian psychology in marketing and advertising. This is the marketing coup they had picked in the 1950s, he transformed products beyond their mundane function. Soap was about sensuality. Not personal hygiene. Tobacco really stress, symbolized a really Advisory Board or a good day at the office. In smoking and health concerns, everest to reduce the amount of smoking, a willingness to sacrifice pleasure order to massage their feeling of guilt. Guilt feeling may cause harmful, physical effects, not at all cost by the cigarettes used which may be extremely mild. Such a guilt feelings alone may be the real cause of the injurious consequences, rather than of people have, tobacco smoking, he said, was comparable to sucking at the nipples of a gigantic world press. I apologize for the audience that brought kids. One campaign displayed a man smoking next to his date captioned, smoking rounds of the forms of enjoyment, illicit sex then along with tobacco was another reward for a good day at the office. Lipstick also was a phallic play on that desire, and subconsciously hinted to women and men buying makeup for women in invitation to flash her. He marketed cars to trigger mens fantasies of a mistress. He writes all of this like he actually is very, very clear about what hes trying to do in his marketing. Suddenly hes asked, well, how about marketing to children . How do we convince mothers to buy a sexualized doll for the little girl, and theres a lot of thought that i sort of uncover in the book. The other thing that a want to say about what drew me to tell this story, which again is sort of this legal thriller that opens so many questions about our contemporary types of how we compete, is that this case really i started looking at it when i was writing my previous above, talent wants to be free, and then i was showing sort of more in my 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 that not a hazard will cost cost of the lives of workers and our careers but actually on regions and what kind of products we have and what consumers can experience, and how innovation happens and how collaboration happens. And i was very honored and fortunate in the summer of 2016, i actually got a call from the white house. I like saying that so i will say they can. I got a call from widest to talk about talent wants to be free before people from president obamas policy team and a representative from the treasury department, the department of justice and the Labor Department as well as representatives from the state, the various states. They were really concerned about noncompete policy that i was researching and a lot of scholarly articles i published and in talent wants to be free. I became part of the working group that in october 2016 was kind of culminated in the president s called action to the states to try to curtail this rise and trying to since the mobility of employees. The more and more i look at this case in you dont own me of mattel, it became pragmatic to me its not just about the kind of pure noncompete clauses, but theres a lot of different areas of law and ways of contractual ways, like in this case of asking employees, and weve 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 de facto creating these fences, even if you dont use the blunt language of you can move to a competitor. I started delving into this case, but when i did, of course the cinematic quality and the roller coaster, wild facts and the color for personalities of this case just became very, very clear. It became clear that its not just about that. That we have here a case that opens questions about the american dream, the rise of feminism, the making of icons, about marketing and consumer psychology, the trial, racism, one of the reviewer said its a civil action set in toy stores and another reviewer said elwood referring to legally blonde, with eat this story alive. What happens is in the trial, really when you read it you get a sense of how much the kind of battle or a dispute that starts as though its a contractual dispute between an employer, a 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 there is oftentimes this use of the courtroom as a sledgehammer to kind of work things out but to be worked out in the market context. 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 a roller coaster event. The same fax and the same plaintiff and defendants, 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, it becomes a completely different environment, completely different trial and sort of study in the courtroom, and claims about sort of the corporate ethics of the corporation that initiated the trial come about, in this kind of next rounds of the trial. One of the things that starts happening, 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 what mattel has been doing to them and other competitors. So i will read to you a couple paragraphs on that. Mga couldnt figure out how mattel was anticipating its every move until the mattel insider jump ship and reveal shocking information about mattel practices. Jennifer keller who is determined that comes on board later and really shifts the whole jury emotions 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 that was called how to steal manual. That was integrally used. She described to the jury motels conduct as unlawful, averages, despicable, and argued it costs mga tens of millions philosophy mga presented evidence that while mattel was preparing for its final attack on mj in the courtroom is also engaged in the illegal espionage, nj transit its motels scorched earth strategy as the worst type of market battle. Together, these two frontiers, litigation and spine, he came motels greatest weapons in innovation war stick litigation brought to drive competition out of the market and spine to gain an unfair advantage over the hearts and dollars of consumers. As mga told the jury, barbie was flailing, and barbie was failing and mattel executives were in a state of panic. Mattel desperation grew as bratz popularity exploded. Mattel operated like a well oiled undercover rifle in internal memos mattel employees were instructed to use the codename nahb, instead of mga. Can you crack the code . In hb is one letter off mga, brings to mind another shift in letters in space odyssey, the computer how is often thought to be based on a one letter shift from the name ibm. This has been denied by the director. Mattel denied that nhb was a code. But when it comes to the next hot plastic toy, loose lips can sink a plastic toy ship. So all of these questions that came, and the facts that were discovered in the courtroom really bring a lot of pause not just to the tour and Entertainment Industry, but how we battle and how we create markets and how we create culture. 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 moment of a lot of uncovering of Corporate Culture within me too movement, and what i want to suggest to you is that a lot of these contracts, its really two sides of the same coin, that we see a lot of attempts by concentrated markets to both 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 us, or they do own me in the sense that everything that is created can be owned, all ideas, so of this idea of intellectual property expanded and expanded to infinity. As i said, the cinematic quality of the case really drew me to tell this story, which is just come had to b