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THE POWER TO DO
THE IMPOSSIBLE:
THE OPRAH WINFREY STORY
What can people achieve with impossible thinking? We’ve seen
how shifting mental models led to running the miracle mile, creating new businesses and transforming lives. Oprah Winfrey’s life
serves as a case study of “impossible thinking,” illustrating the
power of new mental models.
OPRAH WINFREY
Oprah Winfrey began her broadcasting career as an unlikely talk
show host. She grew up in Kosciusko, Mississippi, in a house
without electricity or indoor plumbing. Her unmarried parents
separated soon after her birth, leaving her to be raised by a
maternal grandmother. At age six, she moved to Milwaukee to live
with her mother. As a child she was sexually abused by male relatives and friends. She ran away and was sent to a juvenile detention home at age 13. This difficult childhood later affected the
way she approached her show and the topics she chose for her
talk show and her books.
At the age of 14, she went to live with her father, whose guidance
and discipline (for example, she went without dinner until she
learned five new vocabulary words a day) helped put her on a
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CHALLENGING YOUR OWN THINKING
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path to success. She won a college scholarship for her oration
and in 1971 was named Miss Black Tennessee. She graduated
with a degree in communications and theater from Tennessee
State University.
Oprah started broadcasting in college, becoming co-anchor of the
evening news of the Nashville CBS affiliate. After graduating, she
became reporter and co-anchor for Baltimore’s ABC affiliate. She
looked so little like what they envisioned as a successful anchor
that the station sent her to New York for a beauty makeover. She
was told that her hair was too thick, her nose too wide and her
chin too big. But she was successful, not by fitting into the mold
but by breaking it.
Rethinking the Talk Show
In 1977, Oprah became co-host of the Baltimore is Talking show.
Under her leadership it boasted better ratings than Donahue, who
had been the reigning king of the format. After seven years in Baltimore, she was hired by ABC’s Chicago affiliate, where she
became anchor of the failing A.M. Chicago show in 1984. Because
the show was doing poorly, she was given free reign to experiment.
After she overhauled its contents, A.M. Chicago went from last
place in the ratings to rank even with Donahue in just one month
and then surged ahead. In September 1985, it was renamed The
Oprah Winfrey Show. In less than a year it became the number
one national talk show. She was on her way to a nearly twodecade reign as the Queen of Talk. The Oprah Winfrey Show is
seen by about 23 million viewers in more than 100 countries.
Oprah had a very different model for the talk show. While
Donahue worked his audience with microphone in hand like a
reporter, interviewing for information, Winfrey met the audience
as friends. She engaged in a dialog with them that was self-revealing. She told about her own challenges and experiences. Her style
appealed to women viewers. She recognized the need for connection with viewers sitting in living rooms in the afternoon. She
talked about personal issues, her childhood abuse, her relationship with her partner Stedman (who, like Oprah, is known to
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THE POWER OF IMPOSSIBLE THINKING
viewers by first name). She made a public medium into a private,
intimate one—as intimate as several million viewers can become.
In the process, Oprah changed the nature of the talk show,
democratizing it, and making it more personal. She adopted a
goal to “transform people’s lives.” She changed the way people
thought about talk shows and about their own lives—in effect,
challenging their mental models. In her shows and choice of topics for her book club, Winfrey also dealt with difficult issues that
were personally important to her. At the same time, she worked
to transform the mindsets of viewers and readers, encouraging
them to challenge themselves.
Adaptive Experimentation:
Books, Magazines and Other Media
Once Oprah had developed this new, personal view of the talk
show and established a loyal group of followers, she could take
her audience in new directions. She applied her new view to
other areas, challenging the thinking in other industries in ways
that sent shockwaves through them. In 1996, she created an onair book club that encouraged millions of viewers to read serious
fiction. These were not the kind of books that traditionally
became popular successes, so she created a whole new segment
of readers.
While book reviews had once been the domain of print publications such as The New York Times, her show represented a new
format for discussing books with a very broad audience of viewers. This made Winfrey an arbiter of taste in the publishing industry, where her endorsement could mean an additional halfmillion or more copies in sales. Within two years she had helped
two dozen books onto the best seller lists. Time writer Richard
Lacayo remarked:
It's not true that Oprah Winfrey's Book Club was the most
important development in the history of literacy. For
instance, there was the invention of the written word.
Then there was movable type. So Oprah comes in third.
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But no lower, at least not in the opinion of publishers and
booksellers, who binge every month on the demand for
whatever title she features on her show.1
She then shook up magazine publishing in April 2000 with the
creation of O, The Oprah Magazine, which became the most successful magazine startup in history, rapidly growing to more than
two million readers monthly. As periodicals such as Mademoiselle folded in a tough advertising environment, hers continued to
grow. While other magazines featured models on the cover, O featured Oprah Winfrey. She extended her personal connection and
perspectives to this new channel. She broke the rules of some
leading magazine publishers by placing her table of contents on
page 2, instead of 22, so readers would not have to wade through
countless ads. She also co-founded a cable and Internet company
for women, Oxygen Media, in 1998 and created a movie production division that has turned out award-winning films such as
Tuesdays With Morrie.
Her personal involvement doesn’t end with her business activities.
She has worked actively on behalf of many charities around the
world. Her “Oprah’s Angel Network” has raised millions of dollars
from viewers to help build schools and aid children throughout
the world. She also has been active in promoting legislation
related to child abuse and other topics of importance to her.
Bridging Adaptive Disconnects
In developing her book club, Oprah used the popularity of her talk
show to bridge the “adaptive disconnects” between her audience
and the intimidating world of modern literature. She showed the
connections between the themes of these books and the themes
that she addressed in her shows. She transformed this rarefied
world into something personal, engaging and transformational for
her audience. In the process, she was able to serve as a guide or
interlocutor to lead millions of viewers into this new territory.
This approach had tremendous power in creating a new segment
of readers. It changed the way her viewers saw literature and
changed the way many writers and publishers looked at their
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THE POWER OF IMPOSSIBLE THINKING
audiences. No longer were they publishing just for reviewers. They
were publishing for Winfrey and the readers she represented.
Once her audience began to follow her lead, she could take them
in many directions because she was a trusted source of advice.
Build a World Order: The Harpo Infrastructure
to Support the Oprah Brand
Winfrey created an infrastructure to support her new model of a
personal talk show. While others such as Martha Stewart went
public or added their names to diverse products, Winfrey jealously guarded both her name and her growing empire, protecting
the brand and her model for her entertainment company—a private company, Harpo, Inc. (Oprah spelled backward). This tight
control not only helped to build her personal fortune, but also
ensured control over the editorial content of her show, magazine
and other projects. She made sure that these projects expressed
her own thinking and personality.
The Oprah Winfrey Show won several Emmys for Best Talk
Show, and Winfrey was honored as Best Talk Show Host. In
1993, she won the Horatio Alger Award, given to people who
overcome adversity to become leaders in their fields. She was
named by Time in 1996 as one of America’s 25 most influential
people. She has also appeared on the Forbes list of the highestpaid entertainers.
Along the way, she has consistently reinvented herself, her industry, and the thinking of her viewers. She brought her mental models to the talk show and transformed it. Her message to her
viewers is to challenge themselves as well. She made her viewers
aware of the limits of their own mental models and the possibilities in their own lives. As she said during one of her live “Live
Your Best” road shows, “If you're open to the possibilities, your
life gets grander, bigger, bolder!”2
What are the distinctive experiences of your own childhood and
background, and how have they shaped the way you look at the
world? What possibilities do your unique mental models allow
CHALLENGING YOUR OWN THINKING
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you to see in the way that Oprah Winfrey saw the opportunity to
re-envision the talk show? What new perspectives have you
applied in one area that might be carried out to other areas, in
the way that Winfrey transferred her personal approach to communication from broadcasting to the book club to magazines?
ENDNOTES
1. Lacayo, Richard. “Oprah Turns the Page,” Time, 15 April 2002, p.
63.
2. Sellers, Patricia. “The Business of Being Oprah,” Fortune, 1 April
2002.