Oprah Winfrey, businesswoman and philanthropist.

by bestpossible (student)

International Baccalaureate Business Studies

Running Heading: Oprah

Oprah Winfrey, the Tycoon

John Balck

Florida International University

Oprah

Oprah Gail Winfrey, originally named "Orpah" after the biblical character in the Book of Ruth was born on January 29, 1954 in rural Mississippi. She is among many things a talk show host, actress, producer and philanthropist and best known for her self-titled, multi-award-winning talk show. Oprah was born into poverty in rural Mississippi to a teenage single mother and later raised in an inner-city neighborhood. She experienced significant hardship during her childhood and claims to have been raped at age nine and becoming pregnant at 14; her son died in infancy. She was sent to live with her father Vernon, a barber in ; he was strict but encouraging and made her education a priority. Winfrey became an honors student and won an oratory contest which gave her a full scholarship to Tennessee State University, where she majored in Speech Communications and Performing Arts (Wikipedia, 2012).

According to Wikipedia, her first job in the communication industry was during high school and her first two years of college doing the news part time for WVOL, a local black radio station; she also began co-anchoring the local evening news at WLAC at the age of 19, making her the youngest news anchor and the first black female news anchor at that station. In 1976 she moved to Baltimore's WJZ-TV to co-anchor the six o'clock news and was then recruited to co-host WJZ's local talk show People Are Talking, which premiered on August 14, 1978, around the same time hosted the local version of Dialing for Dollars.

Kelley states that Oprah’s “big break” came when she relocated to Chicago in 1983 to host WLS-TV's low-rated morning talk show, AM Chicago. Within months after Winfrey took over, the show went from last place in the ratings to overtaking Donahue as the highest rated talk show in Chicago. Movie critic persuaded her to sign a syndication deal with , she took his advice and the show was renamed The Oprah Winfrey Show and was expanded to a full hour and broadcast nationally beginning September 8, 1986. Her show brought in double Donahue's national audience and removed Donahue as the number-one daytime talk show in America (Kelley, 2011). In the early years of the show it was classified as a tabloid talk show but in the mid 1990s Winfrey adopted a less tabloid-oriented format and hosted shows on broader topics relating to health, geopolitics, spirituality, interviewing celebrities on social issues they were involved with, such as cancer, charity work, or substance abuse. The show was the highest-rated program of its kind in history and was nationally syndicated from 1986 to 2011; at times she was heavily criticized for unleashing confession culture and promoting controversial ideas. The series finale of The Oprah Winfrey Show aired on May 25, 2011.

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As well as hosting her television show Winfrey was very interested in evolving as a business woman. She co-founded the women's cable television network Oxygen and is also the Chairwoman and CEO of Harpo Productions (Oprah spelled backwards). On January 2008, Winfrey and Discovery Communications announced plans to change Discovery Health Channel into a new channel called OWN: Oprah Winfrey Network of which she is also the Chairwoman, CEO and CCO. Winfrey also has her own magazine: O, The Oprah Magazine was first published on April 2000. In 2002 Fortune called O, the Oprah Magazine the most successful start-up ever in the industry. On February 2006 it was announced that Winfrey signed a three-year, $55 million contract with XM Satellite Radio to establish a new radio channel, Oprah Radio; the channel is still on the air. Winfrey's company also created Oprah.com to provide resources and interactive content related to her shows, magazines, book club and charity. The site averages more than 70 million page views and more than six million users per month, and receives approximately 20,000 e-mails each week. Winfrey initiated "Oprah's Child Predator Watch List", through her show and website, to help track down accused child molesters, within the first 48 hours, two of the featured men were captured.

Oprah has also appeared in several movies but her most successful and powerful movie was in 1985 where she co-starred in Steven Spielberg's The Color Purple as Sofia, a distraught housewife and was nominated for an Academy Award ("Oprah winfrey biography," 2011). The Color Purple went on to become a Broadway musical where Winfrey was a producer. Oprah has also voiced for several animated movies, including Charlotte's Web (2006), Bee Movie (2007), Disney's The Princess and the Frog (2009) and in 2010 narrated the US version of the BBC nature program Life for Discovery. Winfrey has also co-authored five books, at the announcement of a weight loss book in 2005, co-authored with Bob Greene, it was said that her undisclosed advance fee had broken the record for the world's highest book advance fee.

Rankings

Born in rural poverty, Winfrey became a millionaire at age 32 when her talk show went national. At age 41, she had a net worth of $340 million and replaced Bill Cosby as the only African American on the Forbes 400. Winfrey has also been the only African American to rank among America's 400 richest people practically every year since 1995. She has been ranked the richest African American of the 20th century and was for a time the world's only . Her multiple achievements have earned her many worldwide, national and historic rankings. She has been called numerous times “the world’s most powerful woman”, “the most influential woman in the world” by organizations such as CNN, Time, American Spectator, Life, USA Today, among others. She also appeared on TIME’s “Most Influential People" from 2004 to 2011 and is the only person in the world to have done so on all eight occasions. In 2005 she became the first black person listed by Business Week as one of America's 50 most generous philanthropists, having given an estimated $303 million as of 2007. In 2010 Life magazine named Winfrey one of the 100 people who changed the world, alongside such luminaries as Jesus Christ, Buddha, The Beatles, Cleopatra and Madame Marie Curie, she was also the only living woman to make the list.

Power & Influence

It is undeniable that Oprah has great leadership power and influence, she possess both personal and position power. Her influence and popularity has also inspired special terms for the effects that she has. For example, “Oprahfication” a term coined by The Wall Street Journal, means “public confession as a form of therapy”. Oprah herself confessed intimate details on her show about her weight, love life and sexual abuse, this approach at the time with the audience was revolutionary and helped her create a new form of media known as “rapport talk”. Once she evolved into this type of talk show she became an interactive leader, developing relationships with her audience. There’s also “The Oprah Effect”, which refers to the power that her opinions and endorsements have on the public. The effect has been known to affect areas such as book sales and election voting (Wikipedia, 2012). In 1996, Winfrey introduced the Oprah's Book Club segment to her television show. The book club became such a powerful force that whenever she introduced a new book it instantly became a best-seller.

In 2008, for the first time Winfrey endorsed a presidential candidate, Barack Obama ("Oprah winfrey biography," 2011). An analysis by two economists at the University of Maryland, estimated that her endorsement was accountable for about 500,000 to 1.6 million votes in the primary alone, this suggests that her endorsement was responsible for the difference in the popular vote between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton (Wikipedia, 2012). Oprah was also heavily involved in getting child protection legislation enacted; motivated in part by her own memories of childhood abuse she initiated a campaign to establish a national database of convicted child abusers. She testified before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee in support of the National Child Protection Act, which President Clinton signed into law in 1993, the bill is also known as “The Oprah Bill” ("Oprah winfrey biography," 2011).

Spiritual Leadership & Philanthropy

In 2002, Christianity Today published an article called "The Church of O" in which they concluded that Winfrey had emerged as an influential spiritual leader (Kelley, 2011). Twelve days after the September 11 attacks, New York mayor Rudy Guliani asked Winfrey to serve as host of a Prayer for America service at New York City’s Yankee stadium. In 2007, Winfrey also began to endorse the self-help program, The Secret. The Secret claims that people can change their lives through positive thoughts or 'vibrations'. In 2008 Winfrey supported author and spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle and his book, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose, which sold several million extra copies after being selected for her book club.

In 1998, Winfrey created the Oprah's Angel Network, a charity that supported charitable projects and provided grants to nonprofit organizations around the world; it raised more than $80,000,000 (Wikipedia, 2012). Oprah personally covered all administrative costs associated with the charity, which means 100% of all funds raised went to charity programs, unfortunately for some reason the charity stopped accepting donations in May 2010. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Oprah created the Oprah Angel Network Katrina registry which raised more than $11 million for relief efforts; Winfrey personally gave $10 million to the cause. Winfrey has also helped 250 African-American men continue or complete their education at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia. Winfrey was the recipient of the first Bob Hope Humanitarian Award at the 2002 Emmy Awards for services to television and film (Wikipedia, 2012). Winfrey has also invested $40 million in establishing the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls in Henley on Klip south of Johannesburg, South Africa, which opened its doors on January 2007 (Kelley, 2011). The school features state-of-the-art classrooms, laboratories, a library, theatre and beauty salon. Oprah, who has no surviving biological children, has described maternal feelings towards the girls at the Academy and also ensures that she is involved regularly by teaching a class at the school via satellite (Wikipedia, 2012).

Oprah’s story is one of true leadership; her fame is not about her secrets, drama, or dirty laundry, it is about how she managed to create and enormous influence and how she uses that influence everyday in every decision to make a positive impact. Her power goes beyond her TV show; she is a true businesswoman and philanthropist and was able to transform herself into a motivator and teacher who channeled her gifts, energy, discipline and experience to help herself and others find the path to a life of decency and respect. She leads from the heart and uses her own experience, including setbacks and mistakes to strengthen and motivate others. Leaders from all walks of life have a great deal to learn from her. While honesty and emotional openness are risky, they are far less so than deceit, especially in an era of growing transparency.

References

Kelley, K. (2010). Oprah: A Biography. Washington: Crown Publishers.

Oprah Winfrey. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved April 23, 2012, from

Oprah winfrey biography. (2011, November 28). Retrieved from