Diversity in Boston business
THIS WEEK'S launch of The Commonwealth Compact initiative, which seeks to make Massachusetts a welcoming and diverse location, creates a framework for Boston to face squarely its lingering problem as a place of unease for people of color in general and African-Americans in particular. Professional achievement and entrepreneurial spirit remain difficult goals for people of color.
Even Boston's attractions - beautiful homes, the best prep schools, world-class universities and colleges, and social and cultural attractions - are not enough to lure African-Americans with high professional growth aspirations and a desire to grow or acquire entrepreneurial enterprises of significant scale.
The ability to understand this uneasiness on the business and entrepreneurial front could very well determine the success of the Commonwealth Compact. There are some natural allies who will support this effort.
In 2005, Bill Van Faasen, then CEO of Blue Cross and Blue Shield, and Ron Homer and Ed Dugger of the Mass Black Business Alliance encouraged a group of private corporations and The Boston Foundation to fund a study on the status of minority owned companies in Massachusetts. The study concluded, in part:
"The reality is that ethnic and racial minorities in Massachusetts are dramatically underrepresented when it comes to business ownership and growth. In the short term, the study urges some corporations to go beyond rhetoric and good intentions and make a serious and active commitment to doing business with minority-owned firms."
There are some hopeful signs on the horizon. Several weeks ago, the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City, which annually recognizes the fastest growing inner city businesses in the nation, honored Roxbury Technology, an $11.4 million company in Jamaica Plain that remanufactures and sells laser printer cartridges and imaging supplies. The company, led by Beth Williams, received recognition as the top "Minority and Women Owned Company."
Equally as important as the success of this company is the background of its founding by entrepreneur Archie Williams. Diddy Cullinane, an early believer that we need African-American business growth in the Boston market, started a group dubbed "Black and White on Green." The point: to get white corporate leadership to meet and play golf with minority entrepreneurs, establishing personal relationships that could lead to business relationships. Archie Williams met Tom Stemberg, then CEO of Staples, at one of these golf outings and the men began to share the vision and potential of Archie's budding new company. The rest is history.
Some of the active and committed entities that believe strongly in the need to grow and expand minority-owned businesses in Massachusetts include the Initiative for a Competetive Inner City, the Initiative for a New Economy, The Partnership, Inner City Entrepreneurs and the Mass Black Business Alliance. They work daily with the new firms and need help in finding the next Tom Stembergs.
The Commonwealth Compact can help Boston with a major attitudinal change at the board and CEO level. Except for Cleve Killingsworth at Blue Cross and Blue Shield, and Wendell Knox at ABT Associates, there are few African-American corporate CEOs in this market. Even with the passage of the Sarbanes Oxley Act, which mandates that corporate boards diversify their membership, African-American inclusion at these levels in Boston is not statistically measurable. This kind of embarrassing metric is an early signal to minority talent that perhaps they should take their professional and entrepreneurial aspirations to Atlanta, Chicago, or other cities where African-Americans enjoy enterprise leadership positions and sit on corporate boards.
The legacy heirs of Fredrick Douglass, Charles Sumner, William Lloyd Garrison, Harriet Tubman, and William Monroe Trotter are those Bostonians who understand that the 21st century barometer for making Massachusetts a location of choice for people of color, as stated in the preamble of the Commonwealth Compact, is inextricably tied to progress in growing and sustaining African-American businesses of scale, minority CEOs, and minority corporate board directors.
The Commonwealth Compact has the opportunity to join Bill Van Faasen and Diddy Cullinane in expanding and strengthening the resolve to achieve this new paradigm. Many are hopeful and excited about its prospects.
Richard L. Taylor is chairman of the board of the Urban League of Eastern Massachusetts and past chairman of the board of The Partnership.
