James Rhee says the first thing he did as the new chief executive of a failing retailer was point at his own face.

“I am the least qualified person to run this company,” Rhee told business students at Virginia Commonwealth University Sept. 9, recalling his first speech to the employees of Ashley Stewart. The rest of the truth, he said, was hardly more flattering: The company was nearly out of money, and he had hired security because unpaid vendors were threatening violence.

Rhee brought that same candor to a daylong visit to the VCU School of Business, where the author of the 2024 best-seller "red helicopter―a parable for our times: lead change with kindness (plus a little math)" delivered guest lectures in two classes before headlining the inaugural Free Enterprise Forum, an evening that drew more than 500 people to the Altria Theater and launched the school’s Institute for Free Enterprise.

But the real subject, in all three appearances, was human agency, which he defined for students as the belief that you can shape the future you want and are “an actor, not a puppet.”

Ashley Stewart, a plus-size fashion retailer that serves predominantly Black women, had been through bankruptcy once and was headed for another when Rhee, then a private equity investor, took over as interim CEO in 2013, intending to stay six months. He ended up staying seven years, through a reinvention that included a 2016 sale, with Rhee remaining as CEO.

Helicopters and ladders

In the day’s first class, BUSN 212 Business Problem Solving, instructed by Maurice Brown, Ph.D., an instructor of practice, Rhee asked students to think of their careers as helicopters rather than airplanes because helicopters, he said, can fly in many directions, land almost anywhere and hover, whereas airplanes go one way and need a long runway. The helicopter, he explained, is a symbol of agency. Exercising it is “often really painful,” he said, but “the opposite of agency is hopelessness.”

James Rhee, author of "red helicopter―a parable for our times: lead change with kindness (plus a little math)," walks through his framework for personal agency during a guest lecture. Rhee, a former private equity investor, uses the helicopter as a symbol for a career that can move in any direction, in contrast to an airplane’s fixed path.

The symbol traces to a kindergarten classroom where, Rhee said, he shared half his lunch nearly every day with a classmate whose mother had died, and where the boy’s father thanked him with a $2 toy red helicopter. Decades later, alone in Secaucus, New Jersey, he faced what he called “the ultimate moment of agency,” weighing whether to keep running a company no one wanted to buy, and asked himself why that 5-year-old had shown more courage than a 42-year-old with all his credentials.

“The opposite of having a sense of agency is hopelessness.” — James Rhee

Accounting, he told students, is a convention that captures only what can be measured, which is why Ashley Stewart’s financials missed assets such as customer loyalty. By his account, about 70% of employee injury claims came from workers climbing ladders to change light bulbs, so he invested in expensive LED bulbs and told workers to throw the ladders out. Injuries fell, insurance costs dropped, the brighter stores made clothes look better and evening sales rose. “That’s called a feedback loop,” he told the class.

Rhee addresses students in BUSN 212, Business Problem Solving. He guided the class through his idea that accounting captures only what can be measured, leaving out assets such as trust and loyalty.

The stakes are higher for this generation, he said, in a world where artificial intelligence will keep supplying knowledge. “I’m asking you to be wise,” he told the class, and he questioned the tech industry’s talk of “agentic” AI. “Only humans have true agency,” he said.

Kennedy Blunt (B.S. ’29), a marketing student, recognized the Korean folk song “Arirang” from a trip to South Korea when it opened a video Rhee played for the class, pairing it with “Amazing Grace.”

“I understood why he chose these two songs to represent both cultures and his story with Ashley Stewart,” she said afterward. What stayed with her, though, was agency. 

“I think it was really nice to hear that you always have agency and that it’s really up to you,” Blunt said. “You don’t have to be hopeless sometimes. You don’t have to listen to what’s happening around you. You have the ability to do what you want.”

A first for the case

Students in MGMT 434 Strategic Management, instructed by Bob Kelley, Ed.D., assistant professor of practice in the Department of Management and Entrepreneurship, became the first to study “Reimagining Ashley Stewart?” The Harvard Business School case about Rhee written by Rebecca Henderson, a professor at the school, and researcher Jack Brooks.

Brian Brown, Ph.D., dean of the School of Business, introduced Rhee by telling students that success in business takes compassion, empathy, trust, agency and collaboration as much as rigor and numbers, if not more. “You don’t hear the word kindness in business school too often, but you’re going to hear it a lot today,” he said.

Rhee writes “Belonging” and “Emotional” on the whiteboard as he leads MGMT 434 students through what he called Ashley Stewart’s “capital P product.”

Rhee walked the class through the first part of the case, which ends as he decided whether to stay after no buyer emerges, and when students offered that Ashley Stewart was a plus-size apparel company, he guided them toward what he called its “capital P Product,” a sense of belonging and a safe place for women who often did not have one in their lives.

Alease Randall-Freeman reads a copy of the Harvard Business School case on Rhee in MGMT 434. Randall-Freeman, a senior marketing major, sad the case’s account of Ashley Stewart hit close to home: Her mother shopped there when Randall-Freeman was growing up in Washington, D.C.

The idea hit close to home for Alease Randall-Freeman (B.S. ’26), a marketing major who grew up in Washington, D.C., where her mother, a single parent raising two girls, bought church and work outfits at Ashley Stewart. As a girl, she said, she sometimes wished she could shop at younger, hipper stores. “At least there was somewhere that I felt celebrated,” she said. “No one ever picked apart my body. No one made rude comments about how I looked.”

After five minutes with the second part of the case, students faced the central question of whether they, in his place, would have stayed, and Rhee put it to them directly.

“Would you have done it?”

Agency, he reminded them as the class wound down, is something people are born with, and “no one can take it from you unless you let go.”

“I honestly think he humbled himself, which is really rare,” Randall-Freeman said afterward of how Rhee won over the women of Ashley Stewart. He told them, as she put it, “I don’t know it all, but I want to learn from the people who do this every single day.” She has long called herself an ethical capitalist, she said, and her husband used to laugh and say there was no such thing. “But seeing this shows me that it actually does exist.”

“You don’t have to live the life of a person to care about them,” she said of Rhee. “You don’t have to be a plus size woman and Black to care about an Ashley Stewart. You just care because they’re people.”

The forum

Opening the forum, the dean said young Americans are losing faith in capitalism not because free enterprise is broken but because of a “very real failure to keep its promises to extend opportunities broadly enough.”

“We have a responsibility to ensure that anyone with the aptitude and determination to succeed should get the opportunity to experience the power of free enterprise,” he said of the institution’s mission. He then welcomed Rhee and Roben Farzad, host of NPR’s “Full Disclosure,” who moderated the conversation.

Roben Farzad, host of NPR’s “Full Disclosure,” interviews Rhee at the Free Enterprise Forum in the Altria Theater. A screen behind them displays a quote from Rhee’s TED Business Talk and a Boston Globe excerpt from his book, "red helicopter―a parable for our times: lead change with kindness (plus a little math)."

Farzad wanted to know why a private equity investor would take on a bankrupt retailer, and Rhee answered by pointing to his Korean immigrant mother. “The most important person in my life was my mom,” he said. The store managers at Ashley Stewart reminded him of her, just as his father, a pediatrician, was dying, and when his father died, Rhee said, those same managers carpooled to the funeral, hugged his mother and told her they liked her son.

Taking the job, Rhee said, was an act of agency, though he was careful to call it “the right decision for me” rather than a template for everyone. It is also, he suggested, what many young people feel they lack, echoing the dean’s opening remarks. They are effectively saying, “We don’t have a sense of agency.”

Farzad turned the conversation to capitalism itself, including the trillions being spent on artificial intelligence. “I’m a tried-and-true capitalist,” Rhee said, but he explained that the system depends on fair pricing, open flows of capital and limits on concentrated power. He pointed to social media companies that designed addictive products despite known harms. “Did anyone pay the price for those negative externalities?” he asked. “If we want to have a different system,” he said, “let’s just call it a different name.”

Rhee plays a song from his rock opera during the forum, drawing a laugh from Farzad. Rhee, who calls himself an amateur guitarist, uses music as another way to talk about kindness and capitalism.

Guitar in hand, Rhee played a song that he wrote for his rock opera about, as he put it, “just making money without regard for its impact on your community, because you want to make the money and then leave the country or build a bunker.” The lyrics went in part:

The refrain that followed turn on Ctrl-Alt-Delete, the keyboard command for a reboot. Rhee has offered a disclaimer at the outset: “I’m not a professional guitar player or singer. So, caveat.”

Rhee referred to Adam Smith, the “father of capitalism”, several times in his talk. He noted that Smith wrote that capitalism only works when intertwined with civic duty, morality and kindness. Rhee pointed out that a strong middle class and rule of law serve capitalists, too. “Civic unrest is really bad for investors,” he said. The country, he added, should do what Ashley Stewart’s leaders did, making hard changes while protecting what stood at the core. “This country is flawed but so beautiful,” he said. That work, he said, belongs at public universities such as VCU. “It has to be public institutions that do this.”

Students Steven Bonilla (B.S. ’26) and Reema Kasturi (B.S. ’27) take a selfie with Rhee after the MGMT 434 class discussion as Anna Nguyen (B.S. ’26), right, smiles nearby.

His confidence, he suggested, came from the students. “The whole day today, I kept looking around. I’m like, this is awesome. Like, this is how I grew up, actually. This is my life. It’s like all these different faces, all these different backgrounds, and it’s like, we got this.”

 

Watch "The Business of Kindness" VCU School of Business Dean Brian Brown, Ph.D., sits down with James Rhee to explore the future of capitalism, human agency, leadership and what kindness means in an increasingly AI-driven world.