Take a Lesson. Caroline V. Clarke

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       Dedicated to you, dear striver, student, dreamer, leader, builder, seeker, explorer, reader. And to your success!

Introduction

      For while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it must always be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness.

       —James Baldwin

      At the tail end of 2020—the year that wasn't what anyone in the world thought it would be—I did something I wasn't sure I'd ever do: I left my role as chief brand officer at Black Enterprise (BE), the Black‐owned media company where I'd worked for 28 years, to accept a senior executive role in corporate America.

      I hadn't sought the new position; it sought me. Having always been a big heed‐the‐Universe type, while it wasn't easy to leave the company and colleagues I'd known and loved, it felt right.

      BE had turned 50 in 2020, a milestone that I felt proud to reach with it. Women of Power, the brand I cofounded and ran, celebrated its 15th year at a conference 1,300‐strong in Las Vegas in the earliest days of March. Little did we know it would be the last live gathering any of us would attend for a very long time.

We honored the inimitable sextuple threat (actor‐director‐dancer‐choreographer‐executive producer‐author) Debbie Allen at that event along with pioneering biopharma CEO Myrtle Potter, retired BET CEO Debra Lee, and Nationwide's Chief Administrative Officer Gale King, who, soon after, announced her retirement from the company where she'd spent her entire career.

      These women—and the countless people, women and men, I had interviewed during my years at BE—broke molds, shattered ceilings, and obliterated expectations, transforming the places they worked and changing lives with the examples they set. My life was one of those. By sharing their stories with me—on and sometimes off the record—they enabled and empowered me to not only leave BE, but to unexpectedly pivot again months later, when I left my new corporate job to write this book.

      It was an unconventional choice, for sure. And a risky one. But the opportunity was unique; I was passionate about the need for this book; and again, the timing—odd as it was in many ways—felt right.

      I had reached out to the publisher, John Wiley & Sons, to inquire about my first book, Take a Lesson: Today's Black Achievers on How They Made It & What They Learned Along the Way. It was out of print and a Black publisher was interested in acquiring the rights and rebooting it.

      I produced that book, a rare oral history project featuring a cadre of super‐success stories, while heading Black Enterprise's book division. This was back when BE was primarily a magazine, not a full‐blown media company. It was in a time before streaming or smart phones or Twitter, in a land where the idea of there being a Black US president or Black woman vice president or even a Black woman Fortune 500 CEO seemed like a distant dream, at best.

The Black Lives Matter movement was not yet born, and many of the hard‐earned civil rights gains of the mid‐twentieth century were falling away. Yet Black people were still moving, in larger numbers and at a quickening pace, into positions of power and influence in all corners of American life. Black women, in particular, were making critical strides, and I felt blessed and excited to work at a publication where we reveled in chronicling every single one.

      Released in early 2001, Take a Lesson sought to illuminate some of those trailblazers in a more prominent and lasting way. It also aimed to fill a gaping need for community among those who were still largely isolated in their organizations and industries, where it was easy to feel that not only they, but their ambitions and hopes, might never actually find a comfortable place to belong.

      A series of intimate first‐person interviews with many of the most impressive names from entertainment and finance to education and politics, the book featured the intrepid California Congresswoman Maxine Waters (before she was dubbed “Auntie Maxine” on social media or appointed chair of the powerful House Financial Services Committee); filmmaker Spike Lee (when he was still more Hollywood outcast than insider); and the late lawyer Johnnie Cochran, who successfully defended fallen NFL star O.J. Simpson in the most famous trial of its day.

      The original book also included interviews with Kenneth Chenault, who had only just been named CEO of American Express, and his peers Dick Parsons, who was promoted from president of Time Warner to chairman and CEO a few months after publication, and Tom Jones, then chairman and CEO of Citigroup's Global Investment Management and Private Banking Group, who seemed poised to soon join what they all believed was going to be a fast‐growing fraternity of Black corporate chiefs.

They were wrong.

      We will, at some point, encounter hurdles to gaining access and entry, moving up and conquering self‐doubt; but on the other side is the capacity to own opportunity and tell our own story.

       —Stacey Abrams

      Re‐interviewed for this new book 20 years later, all three men, along with retired corporate leader Debra Lee, who not only sits on several major corporate boards but has cofounded The Monarchs Collective, a consultancy dedicated to cultivating board readiness among women and people of color, expressed their deep disappointment and frustration over the lack of progress made in building a truly diverse corporate pipeline or in advancing Black executives who are otherwise succeeding to the top rungs