Three black corporate executives graced the cover of Newsweek earlier this year along with the headline “The New Black Power.” Stanley O’Neal of Merrill Lynch, Richard Parsons of AOL Time Warner and Kenneth Chenault of American Express were hailed as “three of the most important CEOs in America.”
The black business community is still alight over the news. The elevation of three African-Americans to chief executive of three major U.S. firms is a cultural achievement and a watershed in corporate America.
Chenault was named chief executive officer of AmEx in July. Parsons will take the reins of AOL in May, and O’Neal is poised to succeed David Komansky as CEO of Merrill Lynch when he retires in 2004.
However, “the new black power” may not be the best way to describe them. It is a gimmicky phrase that sells magazines, but it distorts their actual achievements.
Indeed, they are powerful in that they control billions of dollars in market capital. But they are not powerful in the way black power has been defined in the past, as an outgrowth of the civil rights movement. They are not black leaders. In terms of influence, their power doesn’t extend far beyond the corporations they run.
“I don’t think that shareholders are thinking about black power. They’re thinking `I’m just glad they got the right person to run the organization,’ ” said Price Cobbs, a psychiatrist, executive coach and co-author of “Cracking the Corporate Code: From Survival to Mastery.” “The new black power is civil rights imagery; not business imagery. The imagery [should be] that black people can wield power, also.”
`They were excellent’
Understanding how these men came to wield such power is an important lesson for anyone who wants to succeed in business. Invariably, because the men are black, some people will assume they were propped up by affirmative-action guidelines or corporate diversity initiatives. They’re wrong. They made it in spite of their skin color, not because of it. They attended Ivy League schools, worked within the system, fit into the corporate culture, cultivated relationships with powerful white men and, most important, turned enormous profits.
“Those white people who put those men in those jobs didn’t give them those jobs just because they’re colored. They earned those jobs because they were excellent,” Vernon Jordan, a former civil rights activist who now sits on 20 corporate boards, said last month at the Breakfast for Champions, a forum for black business leaders in the Chicago area.
Perhaps Jordan is right–corporations recognize excellence without regard to color. But excellence isn’t always enough. That goes for anyone trying to succeed in business, but especially for persons of color.
“Excellence is becoming colorblind; it isn’t colorblind yet,” said Carl Brooks, president of the Executive Leadership Council, a Washington-based group of about 250 high-profile black executives. “There’s some progress being made but too little progress. Race and skin color still play a part in decision-making.”
Fitting in
Certainly, Chenault, O’Neal and Parsons have expanded the model of who can run a major corporation. A black CEO of a major U.S. corporation was unthinkable even 10 years ago. Their corporations deserve some of the credit for creating an environment where these men could thrive.
“When you get a Dick Parsons, that isn’t a decision that was made recently. That has been coming in terms of the corporate culture for a while,” said Carolyn Nordstrom, president of Chicago United, an organization committed to workplace diversity. “If you want your leadership to be diverse, then you’ve got to be making decisions today if you want that to happen tomorrow.”
But their experiences are not the experiences of the preponderance of black men and women in the business world, said Mark Williams, founder and CEO of the Diversity Channel and author of “The 10 Lenses: Your Guide to Living and Working in a Multicultural World.”
Achieving “fit” with a corporation’s culture is a monumental and mystical task for many African-Americans because corporate cultures typically weren’t established with black folks in mind.
“There may be people in the organization who may be good but may be perceived as being too black,” Williams said. “Does it matter whether you have your hair in braids? Does it matter where you were educated?”
Williams said the challenge in the diversity world is to get companies to broaden the model of who can lead so that people who hold styles that are slightly off-center are not denied opportunities.
“All of those are silent issues around fit that have nothing to do with competence,” he said.
Draining the talent pool
African-Americans as well as other racial and ethnic minorities and women are regarded as outsiders in the white-male-dominated corporate world. But African-Americans encounter some of the most egregious stereotypes of all–most having to do with their intelligence and whether they’ve earned the right to be there. For some, it is too much to bear.
“They get frustrated and leave. I have to get organizations to recognize that is draining the talent pool,” Williams said.
Subtle racism
There has been tremendous progress. Today, racism in the workplace is the exception. If it is present, it is usually very subtle. Racist attitudes were more blatant and prevalent in corporate America when Chenault, Parsons and O’Neal, all middle-aged, first began making their way up the corporate ladder.
“I’m sure they’ve all had racist experiences. But at the end of the day, they know how to handle themselves. They know how to succeed as black men,” said Hermene Hartman, editor of the N’Digo newspaper, a Chicago weekly aimed at blacks.
Besides being good at their jobs, they learned the norms and nuances of their organizations’ cultures. They had mentors who vouched for them, and they established relationships with powerful people who grew to care about their success.
In the end, all three were handpicked by their white male predecessors.
Many African-Americans in business have wondered: “Can I be black and successful?” Racism, stereotypic assumptions and biases can and do create barriers. Sometimes, the only recourse is to leave the company.
But blacks who are successful don’t excel by ignoring the challenges or pretending that racial bias doesn’t exist, Cobbs said. They shake the victim mindset and find ways around the roadblocks.
“It’s a major challenge. If I am excessively race and gender conscious, I’m going to find so many things that go on that they’re going to hinder my ability to be successful,” Cobbs said. “You must recognize the issues that come up in subtle ways, figure out ways–generally subtle–to cope with them and keep on stepping.”
