A Challenge to Minority Business Owners: Expect More

Lee Walker's Introduction to Richard Parsons:

Booker T. Washington has been my hero and role model for more than 50 years, ever since I took a 9th grade field trip to Tuskegee University. Booker's example inspired me to become a role model both for my family and my race.

My first goal towards this end was to graduate from high school and earn a college scholarship, as my parents had no money to send me. I achieved this goal and headed to New York City to gain further education. My second goal was to finish college at my own expense; I kept in mind Booker's admonition to be self-reliant and avoid indebtedness. I succeeded in graduating from Fordham University without borrowing a dollar. My third goal was to rise to the executive level at one of the top five U.S. companies. Again, I accomplished my goal by following Booker's example.

As a member of that first small group of black executives 30 years ago, I imagined the day when a black would become president of a major white corporation. At that point I considered it highly unlikely that a black would ever be the chairman of the board of such a company. Today, however, Richard D. Parsons is chairman of Time Warner, one of the largest and most successful companies in the country. Parsons believes "the focus of all of us today is economic empowerment," a sentiment I heartily share.

My next community neighbor, Don Thompson, the recently appointed president of McDonalds USA, is yet further proof that the doors to prosperity are increasingly open to black men and women. One hundred years ago, Booker T. Washington urged his black brethren to seek economic empowerment through education, entrepreneurship, and self-reliance. That message remains important today and I congratulate Mr. Parsons on taking up that theme.

-- Lee H. Walker

Richard D. Parsons is chairman and chief executive officer of Time Warner Inc. He delivered this speech to the Alliance of Business Leaders and Entrepreneurs dinner in Chicago, Illinois on November 2, 2006.

Thank you, President [Hermene] Hartman. I also want to thank Eugene Morris and Wendell O'Neal for the invitation to join you today.

For the past 14 years, ABLE has been helping the African-American business community take its rightful place in Chicago's economic mainstream. And you have done it the old-fashioned way--by joining forces and coming together for the greater good.

One of my favorite Aesop fables tells the story of an old man demonstrating to his sons how sticks laid out one by one may be easily broken--not so when they are bound together in a bundle. The lesson there and the lesson of the Alliance of Business Leaders and Entrepreneurs is that in unity there is strength.

I also want to say how pleased I am to be in the Windy City. Not only is Chicago a major market for our company, it is also an important venue for one of our newest and most exciting ventures--the new CW Television Network, a join venture with CBS and Warner Brothers Entertainment, that depends heavily on the Tribune Broadcasting Company. Sixteen Tribune stations are affiliated with the CW Network, led by the WGN Superstation headquartered here in Chicago.

This city also has a rich African-American heritage, beginning with Jean Baptiste Point du Sable--a Black man from Haiti--who built Chicago's first permanent settlement in 1779. And your president, Hermene Hartman, publisher of Savoy and N'Digo, is the latest in a long line of African-American publishers from Chicago who have been role models for many of us who walk in their footsteps today--from Robert Abbot who founded the Chicago Defender in 1905 to the late John H. Johnson who founded the Johnson Publishing Company, home of Ebony and Jet, in 1942.

One of my great friends, David Dinkins, the former mayor of New York, used to say that we all stand on someone else's shoulders. When I look at my own career, I know that I stand on the shoulders of men like Robert Abbot and John Johnson. I owe a lot to the them and to the city of Chicago.

Freedom Symphony

Over time, because of the vision and sacrifices of people of goodwill here in Chicago and across this nation, the playing field of opportunity is being leveled. But there is still a lot of work to do. That is what I want to talk about today: What we need to do to accelerate the pace of change and bring more of us into the mainstream of the American Dream.

Another great Chicagoan, my friend Jesse Jackson, once gave a speech in which he compared the struggle for African-American equality to a four-part symphony. The first movement in that symphony was 250 years of slavery and the awful toll that took on black families, as well as the psyche and soul of this nation.

The second movement in our freedom symphony was emancipation, beginning in 1863. But, as we all know, emancipation did not turn out to be a synonym for freedom. It simply ushered in the Jim Crow era--nearly another century of sanctioned segregation and discrimination, largely in the South.

The third movement of the symphony, almost 100 years after emancipation, was enfranchisement--the period during which separate but equal was exposed as a lie in public education and the legal barriers to the Black vote were largely demolished. That movement began with Brown v. Board of Education and culminated with the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and '65.

Many of us in this room owe our success to the enfranchisement battles that were fought and won in the '50s and '60s--especially the leveling of the playing field in education.

Importance of Education

Without a doubt, education is the sine qua non of our struggle--it is the thing without which nothing good happens. On-the-job training is largely a thing of the past. You now need to show up with the basic skills package, which includes both basic literacy and computer literacy. That means doing all we can to strengthen the public schools where most of our children get their start in education. We must also do more to close the so-called "achievement gap" so that more of our children are prepared to go on to college.

That's why at Time Warner, our community service efforts are focused in two areas: arts and culture, which is at the heart of what we do, and support for public education--which is critical to ensuring we have both the workforce and the consumer base to be successful far into the future.

Empowerment

The fourth movement--the one that is the focus of all of us today--is economic empowerment.

No one can argue that we have not made progress over the past 50 years. But it is more important now than ever that we accelerate the pace of change. The landscape has dramatically shifted in recent years. The challenges and the competition we face today are rapidly increasing and moving from the domestic front to the global stage.

Thomas Friedman is right when he says in his new book that the world is flattening. What he means is that where once Americans were competing with Americans for jobs, for business opportunities, for economic leadership, we are now competing with the rest of the world, and especially the growing economic powers in Asia. So, if we don't want to be left behind, we must do all we can to accelerate the pace of change and close the remaining gaps. Economic empowerment is the key.

Economic empowerment means that along with the right to vote and equality in education, it is essential that we have an equal opportunity to create, earn, and acquire wealth in the world's most successful capitalist economy. It means not only standing on the shoulders of progress, but seizing the opportunity, the know-how, and the will to transform our lives and to build a better future for our families, our communities, and our nation. That is what ABLE is all about.

The key to economic empowerment is access to capital and small-business development. As we all know, a strong business community is the engine of both job creation and wealth creation.

Beyond Workforce Diversity

I am happy to report that more and more companies are realizing that they must go beyond workforce diversity, as important as that is, to take advantage of the extraordinary and largely untapped expertise represented by companies like yours. Things are getting better. We recently reported in Fortune magazine that, "In 2005 America's largest companies purchased more than $90 billion worth of goods and services from minority-owned businesses."

At Time Warner we have an active second-tier process for corporate procurement, whereby we encourage our prime suppliers to use minority businesses as subcontractors. After some notable success with this program at corporate headquarters, we are now preparing to launch a national second-tier program that will increase supplier diversity throughout every division of our company.

As more and more companies initiate active supplier diversity programs, we can expand access to capital, infuse billions of dollars into minority businesses, and take a major step towards accelerating the pace of empowerment and closing the economic equality gap.

Expectations

With all due respect to Jesse, I believe there is a fifth essential movement in our freedom symphony, one that is generally known, but not much talked about--expectations. Someone once said to me that the tyranny of segregation had been replaced by the tyranny of low expectations. They were talking about how the majority community could no longer hold us back through segregation, but that their expectations for us were so low that they did not see us as viable players.

Unfortunately, this same thinking exists within the African-American community. We have not set high enough expectations for ourselves in my opinion.

When I think about why I strove to be successful, the baseline reason is that it was expected of me. My parents sent me to school to learn something ... and if I didn't because I was messing around I would catch hell when I got home. For me, going to college was not optional--it was always expected of me.

This is about building and strengthening a culture of achievement. It is about impressing upon our young people that they are expected to achieve a level of self-sufficiency, productivity, and happiness going forward in life.

The media has a major role to play here. That's why I am proud of the multi-cultural scope of Time Warner's news and entertainment operations, including AOL Black Voices and Essence magazine. This year's Essence Music Festival kicked off a nationwide campaign called "Essence Cares." Essence is rallying support for our young people and encouraging more of our hip-hop generation to channel their considerable talents and energies into positive expressions of empowerment and away from expressions of violence, self-destruction, and disrespect for women.

To build this culture of achievement we need to do three things. First, people like us need to be more visible as positive role models. Whenever I talk with young people at least a few of them will come up to me after my talk and ask me what steps I took to get where I am. I can almost hear them saying to themselves, "If he can do it, so can I."

Second, we need to put the issue of high expectations on the agenda of organizations like ABLE. We cannot afford to be silent about this. If we want to empower the next generation, we must always emphasize the importance of high achievement among ourselves, with our children and in the larger community.

And lastly, we have to teach our young people the importance of personal responsibility. We have all learned that if we wait for somebody to do it for us, we are going to be waiting a long time. We must do for ourselves, or it won't get done.

I am reminded of something Morpheus told Neo in my favorite Warner Bros. Movie, The Matrix. At one point, Morpheus, played by Laurence Fishburne, says "I'm trying to free your mind, Neo. But I can only show you the door. You're the one that has to walk through it."

For 14 years, ABLE has been opening the door of opportunity for Chicago's African-American business community. And so my charge to the larger business community and to the young people who aspire to achieve what you have achieved is that now it is up to you to walk through that door.

Thank You.

Richard D. Parsons is chairman and chief executive officer of Time Warner Inc. He delivered this speech to the Alliance of Business Leaders and Entrepreneurs dinner in Chicago, Illinois on November 2, 2006.