WASHINGTON, Jan. 25, 2001 (PRIMEZONE) -- Cracking the Corporate Code: From Survival to Mastery highlights the everyday stories, professional strategies, lessons of self-mastery, and coping skills of 32 African- American corporate executives -- all members of the Executive Leadership Council -- who have risen to success in the predominantly white, male-dominated upper echelons of corporate America.
ELC is a national membership organization of senior-level African-American corporate executives committed to building the next generation of African-American executives and to bringing new insight to a variety of issues affecting American business.
The book, co-written by Dr. Price Cobbs, M.D., a psychiatrist and corporate management consultant, with associate Judith Turnock, Esq., provides management insight and gripping corporate workplace stories from a uniquely African-American perspective. Yet, the book speaks to the human experience making it beneficial for both young African-American managers seeking advancement as well as human resources directors grappling with the complexities of managing a diverse workforce.
When ELC was founded in 1986, it created a support network for 18 men and one woman -- Elynor A. Williams -- who comprised senior-level leadership in corporate America. Williams, the first African-American corporate officer for the Sara Lee Corporation, is profiled in the book along with other business luminaries such as Mannie Jackson, owner and chairman of the Harlem Globetrotters, and the first African American and former athlete to own a sports/entertainment organization; David L. Hinds, who joined BankersTrust (now Deutsche Bank) as a management trainee and built a 30-year career with the company; Ira Hall, treasurer of Texaco, who became the youngest trustee ever of his alma mater, Stanford University, and helped organize, as founding executive director, the Stanford Mid-Peninsula Urban Coalition with William Hewlett and David Packard; Jerri DeVard, one of the younger ELC members who has built a successful marketing career via such organizations as the Minnesota Vikings, Harrahs, and Revlon, and now oversees e-commerce and internet marketing as a Citigroup managing director.
Divided into 12 chapters, the book deftly examines a broad array of issues, interprets members responses to specific situations and provides analysis about various psycho-social factors. Among the areas addressed: learning to handle ambiguity; managing the demons of racism, sexism, and insecurity; fitting into the corporate culture; learning to crack the unwritten codes of the corporate workplace; managing relationships; and acquiring, understanding and utilizing power.
Told largely in their own words, the executives share numerous stories filled with passion, pathos, and the humor of ordinary people striving for self-mastery and success often under extraordinary human circumstances.
For example:
Bruce Gordon, a group president at Verizon, chronicles his lifelong, sometimes confrontational, relationship with a corporate executive whose leadership Gordon viewed as adversarial until he learned to crack the code of mentoring in the corporate workplace.
Charles "Chuck" Chaplin, vice president and treasurer, Prudential Insurance Company, relates how volunteering for an assignment - the Macys leveraged buyout -- brought him months of hard work and anxiety as well as career-making visibility.
And Paula Banks, vice president of global social investment, bp, recounts how she was cast in the role of "teacher" in a Sears management training program when the coordinator, a former military man, confessed difficulties with race and gender and asked for help.
The personal, conversational tone in which Cracking the Corporate Code is presented is an outgrowth of the learning dialogues that are part of the Mid-Level Managers Symposium that Dr. Cobbs has developed for the Council over the past six years. An internationally recognized expert on executive leadership, management development and corporate diversity, Dr. Cobbs has lectured and published extensively on the dynamics and effects of racism.
Judith Turnock, Esq., co-author of the book, has devoted her professional life to the struggle for racial, gender and economic justice and to closing the communications gap between blacks and whites. For more than a decade she has been an organizational coach for managers and executives in private, community, and government organizations.
Cracking the Corporate Code is available for $30 from the Executive Leadership Council and Foundation, 1010 Wisconsin Ave., NW, Suite 520, Washington, DC 20007. Orders must be prepaid. For more information, contact the Communications Department at: (202) 298-8226, Ext. 206 or jstevens@elcinfo.com
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CONTACT: Executive Leadership Council and Foundation, Washington
Joann Stevens
(202) 298-8226
Jstevens@elcinfo.com