As he moved up the ladder, Liles started realizing he had a knack for motivating people, and he began checking out self-help titles like Jim Collins' Good to Great.
Before long he was combining those lessons with ones picked up at his own particular school of hard knocks, rap records. And he began mentioning them whenever he gave a talk to people at the company or in the industry.
His book, however, puts him dead center in a contentious debate among African-Americans -- sparked in part by Bill Cosby's sharp criticism last year of "people putting their clothes on backwards" -- about the influence of hip-hop values on kids and whether the fashions and attitudes conveyed in the music are holding people back.
"The group that is probably most upset by hip-hop is the group that sees itself most affected," said Greg Carr, an assistant professor of African-American studies at Howard University. "Folks who work hard for a living, can't miss a paycheck, and whose children can be seduced in part because they see the struggle of their parents." Those children, he said, have always been impressed by the "zero-to-60" narratives of success celebrated by hip-hop.
Liles says that people who fear hip-hop's influence are simply not taking away the right lessons. The music, he writes, is about "making success happen for ourselves by being ourselves, only better." It does not matter how you wear your clothes or what work you do. The idea of teenagers shelling out US$24 for a hardback book inspired in part by the wisdom of a bunch of highly paid corporate consultants may seem far-fetched, but Sara Nelson, the editor in chief of Publishers Weekly, said the market for such books is there.
"Why shouldn't a self-help book come out of the hip-hop world?" she asked. "As a boldface name in hip-hop," she said, Liles has "a built-in platform, which is what you need these days."
In the meantime, however, Liles will stay hard at work spreading the message, as he has for years, even to his own family. "My brother said, `I can't work for US$5 an hour,'" he said, recalling a family conversation a few years ago. "I said, `You don't have a job.' I don't even understand it. I would work for US$5 an hour, learn that skill, learn that trade and eventually, I would own that company."
"I'm going to get that job by working hard, by not allowing people to tell me what I can't accomplish," he added. "When the boss says to me you're not educated enough, you don't have the right degrees, I'm going to work an extra four years in that same position to learn everything about that company, so the people will have no reason not to give me that job. That's hip-hop."
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