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  Then we made the biggest personal decisions of our lives: I asked Gloria to marry me and she said “yes.” I was a senior at Morehouse when we formally got engaged and Gloria was a junior at Morris Brown. After her graduation a year later, we were married. It was June 23, 1968.

  Our daughter, Melanie, was born in 1971 and Vincent followed six years later. Later on, when we relocated to Omaha because of my work, they didn’t have problems adjusting. They got used to being in the predominantly white school and living in the predominantly white environment, because they really hadn’t known anything else.

  But Gloria and I used to talk with Melanie and Vincent about what it was like in the segregated South when we were growing up. They couldn’t really identify with it. They had more of an historical awareness.

  We always insisted on having quality family time at home. We had a rule about turning off the TV and the radio when we had dinner—no boob tube, no boom box—because that’s when we talked. That’s the way we did it in our family, even when they didn’t have anything to say: If it was quiet long enough, they’d start talking.

  One day when Vincent was about six or seven—I don’t remember exactly how old he was—he asked, “Dad, did they have TV when you were growing up?”

  I thought: This kid is really out of touch. I said, “Yes, Vincent, they had TV when I was growing up.” Then I gave him its history and evolution. I told him that our first TV was very small; that we had only one set and it was black and white, not color; and that the Ed Sullivan Show, broadcast every Sunday evening, was the one that everybody watched then.

  Just as Sundays were family time when Gloria and I were growing up, they remain so to this day. In fact, in 2011, because I had to leave Atlanta on Sunday, June 12, in order to prepare for the New Hampshire debate the next day, Gloria decided to cook me Sunday dinner on Saturday. The kids came over with the grandkids and Gloria prepared a forktender roast, collard greens, green beans, candied yams, hand-shucked corn, and homemade cornbread. That’s the meal I want on my deathbed—that is, if I can still eat.

  Now, as I continue to travel the country seeking my party’s presidential nomination, Gloria continues to be a steady source of devotion and inspiration, never more so than now.

  Some people have certain expectations concerning the traditional politician’s wife, though, and I’m often asked: “Where is your wife? Why isn’t she campaigning with you?”

  “She is at home,” I answer.

  And Gloria will tell them that she’s not running but she supports me 100 percent. That’s all I need.

  What it all comes down to is that while Gloria and I are both CEOs of ourselves, we are also vice chairman and vice chairwoman, respectively, of each other’s boards of directors. We have shared mutual advice and support on key decisions and destination points for more than forty-three years now and the love we share is priceless.

  4

  Mathematics to Pepperoni

  Seek ye the LORD, while he may be found, call ye upon him while he is near.

  —Isaiah 55:6

  When I married Gloria, I was already working as a mathematician with the Department of the Navy, in Dahlgren, Virginia. My mom wasn’t happy when I told her that I had accepted that job. She kept saying, “Why do you have to go all the way up there for a good job. Aren’t there good jobs in Atlanta?”

  “You don’t pick a job for that reason,” I explained to her. She and Dad, like many other folks back then, viewed a job as your career. To them, you worked for thirty-five years; got a gold watch; and you retired. I’ve had five careers, but Mom didn’t understand the multiple-career concept.

  I didn’t know then how many jobs I was going to have, but I knew I wasn’t going to get a job just to get one and be stuck there if I didn’t enjoy it. That wasn’t me. Mom finally got used to it.

  It wasn’t long before I realized that my coworker, a white man, was always promoted about a month before I was, despite the fact that I consistently received the same outstanding performance ratings that he did.

  One day, I decided to find out why. I asked my boss about it and he said, “It’s because you don’t have a master’s degree.” Right then and there, I decided to remove that barrier to my advancement; I would go for a degree in computer science, one of the fastest-growing professions in government and in business during the 1960s and 1970s.

  While I applied for admission to several graduate computer science programs, the one I really wanted to attend was Purdue University’s. My reasons were twofold: First, I had read that Purdue had one of the top five computer science programs in the country. The second, and more telling reason, given my competitive spirit, was that my boss in the Department of the Navy didn’t think I would be accepted there. According to him, even if I did manage to be accepted, I would never be able to finish the program because one had to maintain a B average there—3.0 out of a possible 4.0 for all courses. But I was accepted, and with the transfer of two classes and credits from another university, I completed my graduate studies in one intense, demanding year, earning a degree in computer science.

  Did I consider for one moment that my boss was right about me? Could he have stopped me in my tracks? No, absolutely not! Remembering that I was CEO of Self, I was able to reject his opinion and advice because I remembered what Mr. Johnson, my high school math teacher, had told me about having to work a little harder, and a little longer.

  That is exactly what I did, compiling a 3.4 grade point average and earning my master’s degree. My determination to attend Purdue helped me to get my job at Coca-Cola, because Bob Copper, a native Hoosier, knew firsthand of the university’s outstanding reputation.

  I would never have known the real story about my not having been promoted had I not invoked my right as CEO of Self to ask: Why am I being passed over for advancement? By dealing with that instance of discrimination, as well as with so many other negative things in my life, I chose as CEO of Self to remove the barriers rather than to allow the barriers to remove me.

  I would have to deal with another form of discrimination during my time at Dahlgren: even after major civil rights legislation had been passed, I couldn’t get a haircut in the barber shop of my choosing. Thinking that I wouldn’t have a problem in Fredericksburg because I knew of a place there that employed black barbers, I drove over there and went in.

  There were people in all the chairs—white people—so I sat down to await my turn. Other patrons, all of them white, came, had their haircuts, and left, but half an hour later, I was still awaiting my turn. Every other customer had been told “next”—except for me. I asked one of the barbers why I had not been called, and he told me that they were not allowed to cut black people’s hair there.

  When I left that barbershop, I bought a set of clippers and cut my own hair. I continue to cut my own hair to this day, exercising my right as CEO of Self to do so.

  I was happy at my job as a Navy mathematician. I was twenty-seven years old and managing a group of professionals and I even achieved my ambition of earning $20,000 a year. My five-and-a-half years with the department were, by most standards, a genuine success, so I reasoned that moving up from my current status as a GS-13 to a GS-14 would be more of a function of time than opportunity.

  My long-term goal was to become a corporate executive, so much so that one day, I said aloud, “I want to be vice president of something, for somebody, somewhere, someday.”

  And, of course, the logical place to begin to realize my goal was at Coca-Cola, Dad’s place of employment. I was interviewed there by Bob Copper, the head of a corporate analysis group in Atlanta, but he told me that no jobs were available.

  Two weeks later, however, he called and invited me to meet with his boss and some other people. Bob said that as a result of my exceeding his expectations in our first meeting, he was trying to convince his boss to create a position for me. He succeeded, and I came aboard.

  Some of my friends thought that leaving government employment was a ri
sky move. They pointed out that I was giving up a comfortable and secure position. While I welcomed their advice, only I, as CEO of Self, could decide what to do. As it turned out, my decision to change direction turned out to be the right one. Although I had the title of manager of management science, my position at Coca-Cola was really being a project manager, which was a great starting point for my entrance into the corporate world, as I was involved in some very interesting projects and I learned the basic concepts and language of business.

  After four years at Coca-Cola, however, I was becoming stuck in neutral. What I really wanted to do was to become a vice president. But I was not on the right track to achieve that goal. I realized that to have any chance of becoming a vice president, I would have to stay there for a long time, paying my dues by working in the trenches and earning my stripes by consistently delivering bottom-line positive profit and loss results.

  And there was another obstacle to my advancement at Coca-Cola: As I suspected, my being known as the “chauffeur’s son” would always limit my future opportunities there.

  As luck would have it, Bob Copper, who had joined the Pillsbury Company in Minneapolis three years after my arrival at Coca-Cola, invited me to come on board there. When I asked why he had chosen me over many other competent people in his Coca-Cola group, he said that I was more of a risk-taker than they were, and that there was some risk in what he was trying to accomplish at Pillsbury.

  “What will happen to us if we don’t succeed?” I asked.

  “The two of us will be looking for new jobs,” he replied.

  I have always been more motivated by the possibility of success than by the fear of failure, so what Bob said didn’t scare me off and I accepted his offer. My dad was fine with that. While he knew that Coca-Cola had given me a good start in the private sector, he realized that the company probably wasn’t going to allow me to move up in the organization the way I wanted to—that as long as I remained there, I was always going to be viewed in that predominantly white corporate culture as his son, not as the mathematician and computer scientist I actually was.

  I was thirty-two years old when I came on board at Pillsbury, and I set my next “decade goal” to reach vice presidential status by the time I turned forty. I realized that by setting and achieving a series of decade goals, those “biological clock blues” on reaching forty or fifty would not be such a big deal.

  I reported to Bob Copper at first, and when Bob became vice president for strategic planning, I reported to Dr. John Haaland, Pillsbury’s corporate vice president of systems. John Haaland and Bob Copper were true CEOs of Self.

  I advanced quickly. In a matter of years, I moved from manager to director; from director to group director; and from group director to senior director of Management Information Systems for the Consumer Products Division.

  My biggest leadership challenge in that post came when Pillsbury acquired the Green Giant Company. I was responsible for integrating its MIS department into our Consumer Products Division’s MIS department. There were obvious redundancies in systems and positions that had to be eliminated without disrupting services. My task was particularly challenging: If we did not execute the integration smoothly, we could shut down the day-to-day operations of the largest and most profitable division of the company.

  Fortunately, that integration went as smoothly as silk. One year later, when Dr. Haaland called me to let me know that he was leaving the company to pursue his dream, he told me that I had been selected to replace him as corporate vice president of systems.

  I now had two major challenges. The first one involved a three-part effort: getting approval from the company’s board of directors to build a new, multi-million-dollar, state-of-the-art data processing facility; getting the new mainframe computer installed; and then making sure that all the systems were running smoothly.

  My second, more complex challenge concerned responsibility for the completion of Pillsbury’s World Headquarters, then being built by a major real estate developer in downtown Minneapolis, a twin-towered, forty-floor office complex where Pillsbury would be the lead tenant, occupying most of the space.

  At that time, Pillsbury’s headquarters staff was spread out over nine locations throughout the greater Minneapolis area. In addition to requirements for the executive officers and for various corporate functions, space was also needed for the agricultural, consumer products, international, and restaurant divisions, as well as for several smaller business units.

  It wasn’t long before I realized what a decision-making, coordination, and communications nightmare my assignment was turning out to be! This project was over budget, behind schedule, and headed for a “crash” with our future landlord. Language ambiguities in the lease contract caused conflicts over who would be responsible for paying for changes to the project—and we’re not talking peanuts, but millions of dollars in real money.

  I asked the previous executive in charge, who was retiring, to call a meeting so that I could meet everyone responsible for various pieces of the project. Walking into a conference room where more than twenty people were sitting around a large table, I wondered: Who are all these people?

  I soon found out. There sat a chief accountant, a chief architect, a chief attorney, a chief construction consultant, a chief contractor, a chief engineer, a chief moving manager, a chief planner, as well as all of their cochiefs! Said “chiefs” looked at me as if to say: So how are you, a young whipper-snapper, going to straighten out this mess?

  Frankly, I had no idea! This was supposed to be just a get-acquainted session, so I hadn’t had the opportunity to speak with each chief separately in order to identify the right problems to deal with. The only thing that Dr. Haaland and I knew at that moment was that the World Headquarters Project was an all-consuming mess!

  I began my job of straightening things out by discussing with Bill Spoor and Win Wallin, Pillsbury’s president and CEO and COO, respectively, not only what they wanted to see, but what they did not want to see in the new World Headquarters.

  Given their input, I was not afraid to take charge, make decisions, and focus on the critical things I needed to do in order to get the project moving. Again, seeing myself as CEO of Self, I was determined not to fall into a comfort zone of letting other people, no matter how competent and well-meaning, make the decisions for me.

  As a result—treating the individual chiefs as a kind of board of directors—the World Headquarters Project was completed ahead of schedule and under budget. Five years later, Bill Spoor presented me with the Pillsbury Company’s Symbol of Excellence in Leadership Award.

  After the headquarters project turned out successfully, I was once again bored. Life was good—Gloria and I were healthy; we now had a daughter and a son; we lived in a nice home; we had even started taking vacations, which we had never done much earlier in my career. I was even singing in the church choir and recording with a Minneapolis gospel singing group. But my motivation had collapsed.

  I was sitting in my new office on the thirty-first floor of the World Headquarters one day when I looked out the window and saw that the inflatable dome of the new Minneapolis stadium had collapsed. I realized, as I sat there, staring out the window, that what had kept me happy and motivated was the excitement, challenge, and risk of the past few years.

  I also thought about Dad, who had always been one of my heroes and was then dealing with the complications of diabetes. I thought about how much he had been able to accomplish in his life with a lot less than I had started with, and what a difference he had made to so many people, especially to me.

  I was thirty-six years old and although I had been blessed to achieve so much, so fast, I knew at that moment that I had to reach for more. So I began to imagine how exciting it would be if I were actually the decision-maker running a business!

  So as CEO of Self, after several successful years as vice president of Pillsbury’s corporate systems and services, I knew that I had to dream higher: I had to dream of
being president of something, for somebody, somewhere. And I decided to put that dream into action.

  Achieving that dream meant that I had to change careers. Although I had run a very important staff function for Pillsbury, I did not have experience with profit and loss, or P&L responsibility for a business unit.

  I consulted Win Wallin and he advised me that my path to becoming president of a business unit lay within one of Pillsbury’s rapidly growing restaurant companies, and he suggested that I explore the possibility of going to work for Burger King.

  It was easy for Win to say that, but my going to Burger King would mean the loss of my hard-earned, and much coveted, vice presidential title; a significant initial drop in salary; loss of stock options; the need to learn a new business from the ground up; and, if I succeeded, a potentially disruptive relocation to another part of the country.

  Fortunately, Gloria, always my greatest supporter, understood my need to undertake this new challenge and she was with me every step of the way.

  But Mom thought I had lost my mind: “You’re a vice president and now you’re going to make hamburgers?” she demanded.

  “I’m not going to make hamburgers forever,” I explained. “I just have to learn so I can move up the corporate ladder.”

  As I had predicted, I had to work my way up the corporate ladder again. I’ve always been inspired by a new challenge; I was never happy being in cruise control. One of the things that always challenged me the most was doing something that people say you shouldn’t do.

  After meeting with Burger King’s president and some key executives, I was offered the opportunity of entering the company’s “fast track” program. If I completed the eighteen-month program successfully, I could then be made vice president and regional general manager—a crucial step in my aim for a company presidency, as I would be given full P&L responsibility for my assigned region.