Leaders Should Wait On People, Not Make Them Wait

When I was a kid, I spent hours parked in front of my grandparents’ television, waiting. We didn’t have cable in the communal parts of our house growing up, so grandma and grandpa’s house was the place where I got my cable television fix, especially MTV. I would sit through video after video—Def Leppard, Rod Stewart, Peter Gabriel, and Whitesnake on a loop—waiting for the moment when Michael Jackson or Prince might appear on the screen, or for the lone weekend hour-block of hip-hop to come on. I was waiting on my music, and my artists. While I certainly enjoyed the sounds that would eventually broaden my musical palate, it was the artists who looked and sounded like home that connected with me most. It was only in those rare sightings and slivers of time that I saw myself reflected back. I’m not picking on MTV; this waiting game was prevalent across broad media writ large for Black America. That’s exactly why Black Entertainment Television (BET) is so important.

For almost fifty years, BET has been the home of Black cultural production, casting the Black community as the main character where it was otherwise tokenized or exploited for its creations. BET was the original FUBU, for us by us. And now, under new leadership, BET is entering a new era. So, we invited its newly minted president, Louis Carr, onto the FROM THE CULTURE podcast to discuss BET’s legacy and where it’s going next.

Carr has spent 40 years at the network, generating more than $9 billion in advertising revenue and earning a spot in the Advertising Hall of Fame before stepping into the presidency late last year. When asked what kept him at BET for so long, his answer boiled down to one single word: service. That immediately clicked for me as I reflected on my media consumption experience as a youth. While I was waiting to see myself on TV, standing by for the moment Black culture would grace the screen before the world returned to its regular programming, Carr and BET were waiting on me. Like a server waits on tables, BET was attending to us, anticipating what we needed, and serving us the full meal—not merely scraps.

According to Carr, the future of BET will hinge on its ability to serve. In his own words, "Black people want to be seen. Black people want to be heard. Black people want to be understood. Black people want to be served." This is the mantra driving the network's next chapter under Carr's leadership, and, within the few months he's taken the reins, it seems to be paying off.

Look no further than the 2026 BET Awards, the network's tentpole event that celebrates Black culture across music, film, and sports. This year's show posted the network's highest ratings since 2019 among adults 18 to 49 years old. While most award shows were down this year, BET reported a 50% year-over-year growth. Carr attributes this feat to the network's ability to see the Black community, hear them, understand, and serve. In doing so, he made decisions that might look reckless to someone without proximity to the community but were a no-brainer to someone with intimacy.

He handed the hosting duties of the event to Druski, an influencer who had never hosted an awards show—the youngest host in the show's history—as opposed to a battle-tested vet, who was sure to bring laughs and an audience. He moved the BET Experience, the weekend-long pre-show festivities, out of the L.A. Convention Center and into the Crenshaw community, over warnings from Black and white colleagues alike. Parking. Security. Footprint. On the surface, the whole thing seemed like a gamble, but not to Carr, who spends time in the community he serves and reads its discourse across the social media comments everyone tells him to ignore.

For years he'd seen the same question in the social comments: why do we always have to go to somebody else's community—why can't people come to ours? So, he brought the event home, and the community met him there, block-long lines of grandmothers and strollers and teenagers who could finally walk to their own celebration. On Druski, the calculation was the same. Carr realized that Druski represented the Black cultural zeitgeist, and—crucially—that he was willing to do the work: the rehearsals, the studying, the promos. As Carr put it, "Most of us just need a shot." BET saw Druski and served him with an opportunity to be the best version of himself on stage.

What made this year’s programming of the BET Awards so different, and ultimately more successful than years past, was the network’s ability to serve, which is a tall order for a collective as diverse as the Black community. Blackness is not a monolith; it’s a community with a wide spectrum of cultural expressions—HBCU culture, Black Greek culture, Hip Hop, hoops, roller skaters, you name it. There are many representations of Black culture, which makes it challenging to serve such a wide population with both great heterogeneity and shared expectations. For instance, some people grew up in the traditions of the “Black church” but are not well-versed in the conventions of hip hop. How do you serve them both?

That’s been the challenge for BET over the years, and it has caused the network to sometimes misstep in its programming, sparking controversy and backlash along the way. The convergence of young and old and one cultural cohort versus another makes the Black community a large and complex tent to serve. But this is where Carr’s marketing mind and leadership philosophy meet. Great service, just like great brands, he insists, requires great proximity. You must be able to discern what belongs together and what doesn’t, what’s provocative and what’s offensive, what’s insightful and what’s just lazy if you want to serve. But how can you serve what you don’t understand? How can you understand what you don’t see or hear? And we people aren’t seen, they are inevitably forced to wait.

Check out our full conversation with Louis Carr on the latest episode of FROM THE CULTURE here.