Marriott Customer Diversity Leadership Forum

Okay, so, so you were at Bank of America?$$I was at Bank of America. I had started--when I was at univer- when I was at City College [of San Francisco, San Francisco, California], Bank of America was one of the three jobs that I had, and I quit the other two jobs and kept Bank of America. Then, when I went back to school to the University of San Francisco [San Francisco, California] I continued to work at Bank of America. By then I had gotten a promotion. I had moved forward and now I was working in the collections department collecting on credit cards as opposed to processing the payments. So, I worked there in the evenings. Again, one of the strongest, strongest and best individuals in the, in the department and while I was at University of San Francisco my supervisor had, he and I'd had a conversation and he, he was pretty good. He was always looking out for--as opportunities came up he always made sure that he would talk to employees about putting them forward. And an opportunity had come up to be a student loan officer, and he sat down and talked with me and put me forward for that position. I said yes that's something I wanna pursue, and so I became a student loan officer which was a different kind of position then. Bank of America had created a position in this, in two branches in the city where there would be students who were trained to be loan officers and their portfolio would be student loans. They would also carry the title of student relations representatives, very much a community relations representative, and we would represent the bank at college campuses and high schools, and so I would go to high schools and talk to high school students about savings accounts and credit and banking, about student loans and how to pay for your education, how to pay for cars and what you might want for yourself in life, but primarily about savings and investments and loans and then I would also manage the student loan portfolio and, and extend loans to students. And so I was a student loan officer. And so I worked and went to school.$Your involvement with the National Black MBA Association begins to grow in the early '90s [1990s] and--$$Yeah, after the late '80s [1980s] I joined, I joined in '86 [1986], late '86 [1986]. I became the chapter president in '87 [1987] of New York. I went on the board, I think it was in '89 [1989] and, and then came to a crossroads, and I had when I came to the board I was asked because of my background in strategic planning I was asked to take the organization through a strategic planning process. And up to that point, they hadn't had--they hadn't had anybody or too many people that I was aware of who, who was involved in strategic planning, who had discipline in strategic planning or experience in strategic planning, and you typically that's one of those parts of corporate America you typically didn't find African Americans in. You might have your little ghettos, but you, you typically didn't find them there. So, I took the, created a committee and, a strategic planning committee and my committee and I took the organization through a strategic planning process, and we took them through a process from start to finish, so we extended the process into--after we finished with the strategic plan got them into business planning and action planning so that we could really make sure that the, the plan was not just a piece of paper, it was not just something that we could hold up and say okay we got a plan, but we wanted to keep driving the discipline into the organization so that we could really focus and--on what it was we wanted to do and we could understand what it was going to take to do what we wanted to do, so we weren't as much of an organization that was full of talk, but one that could move to action. And when we got to the end of that process, we did some visioning with the executive committee, worked with a gentleman by the name of Horace Smith [ph.] who was an advisor to the group and he, he worked with me to do some visioning and with the executive committee and get them to a place of decision-making around what we were going to do with this plan and how we were going to take this plan forward. And so the decision was made that the organization would change, that it would build its own management capability. At that point, we had a lot of outsourcing managed by an association management firms and had just begun to bring some things in house and so they made a decision to hire an executive director, and they asked me and another person if we would do that and the other person decided--we were supposed to go in together--the person decided that he couldn't do it. He had a family, I didn't. The organization could not meet his expectation and his needs in terms of what he needed for his family. You know, I was either young and dumb or I had the angel sitting on my shoulder and I made the decision to go forth and, and it took us, but it took us about a year and a half to get through that dialogue and that discussion and get to that decision that I would leave corporate America and come head the National Black MBA Association.$$Okay.$$But by the time that I had made that decision, George Carmany had left the bank [American Express Bank, New York, New York]. He was still with American Express; he had gone to another division of American Express in Boston [Massachusetts]. He had asked if I wanted to go, I said no. I was not interested in moving to Boston, and I wanted something different and this opportunity came, so I was at a crossroads and this was the opportunity that was put before for me at the time that, you know, things were moving. You know, they were moving at parallel paths and then they went like that and so.