Companies Change their Views
The other requirement, getting employers to recognize the strength of black-college programs, also has been met. Two developments illustrate the point. The first is the change in at- titudes of hiring managers. The second is shown in the develop- ment of AMIE (Advancing Minorities’ Interest in Engineering). More about that later. On that first point, as Tuskegee’s Dean Burge puts it,
America’s “mainstream” institutions have long been assumed to be competent to produce new generations of first-rank science and technology professionals, but until the BEYA Conference brought a close involvement of top corporate officers with the HBCU deans and students each February, the HBCUs’ abilities to regularly produce top technology performers from among a student population drawn from the nation’s least well-served communities was lost in the hash of stereotypes about what blacks were not prepared to do. “We regularly bring large numbers of students to the BEYA
Career Fair,” Dr. Burge said, “and a lot of them get hired. And when Tuskegee holds its own Career Fairs later in the spring, 100 to 150 companies come to our campus, and almost every one is hiring engi- neers. And every one is a BEYA company.”
Ramping Up Corpo- rate Attention Bill Granville, a
young Mobil Oil executive during the mid-1980s, was
there at the beginning, and has firsthand knowledge of how the changes occurred.
As Granville, founder of the nonprofit Granville Academy business tutoring and motivation program and an ordained minister after he retired, said in an interview, he was a Delaware State University mathematics graduate, up from the streets of East Trenton, New Jersey, when he got hired by Mobil Research in Princeton. Granville had begun his career at Aberdeen Prov- ing Ground, and Mobil wanted his computer skills. At that time, Granville said, there were very few blacks holding management positions in the company’s operating arms, or in the operating divisions of other major corporations in the energy sector. The clamorous push for independence and self-reliance among energy-producing countries during the mid- 1970s opened up new opportunities, however. “These companies started to look around, and they saw black people overseas in high government positions,” Granville said, “and they knew they had to change. They had to get some black people out there.” “I was in research,” Granville said, “and when they want to move you over to operations, the first place they put you is plan- ning. So I worked in planning, and then the next thing I knew, I was going to corporate board meetings. Then I was in South America, representing Mobil.” “Then in 1973 Mobil, now ExxonMobil, sent me to Kenya,”
www.blackengineer.com
Granville said, “where I was in charge of technology transfer for 18 countries.”
Enter the Salesman
By the mid-1980s, Granville had risen to corporate execu- tive status. He was sitting in his office at Mobil when a young Tyrone Taborn walked in. “I don’t know how he knew who I was,” Granville recalled,
“but I saw that Tyrone was a good salesman. He presented logi- cally and I liked the way he handled people. He wanted to see if he could get some money for his plan, and I had some connec- tions with people on the Mobil Foundation. I saw that it was a good thing to invest in.” Granville attended that first BEYA Conference, and returned
“
...getting to the BEYA winner’s circle frequently does work as a kind of certification that that em- ployer has indeed identified a top performer.”
to New York with a positive report. Mobil bought in, and after a few years became BEYA’s first primary sponsor. The Mobil CEO wrote a letter to other Fortune 500 CEOs, telling them he’d discovered a wonderful program that he thought other compa- nies should support. “Then, when the top guy took an interest, other people wanted to have a part in it. That’s how the Mobil Team got started, when other blacks came together to develop the workshop programs,” Granville said. “The workshops were very well received. There were very few major corporations having top-level profes- sionals and executives conducting such work-
shops. Mobil wanted to put their best feet forward, given the EEO challenges at the time. Mobil saw that EEO was good for business internally and externally. At the time, Corporate Ameri- ca was just beginning to understand the urban environment from which I hailed. Mobil became one of the few pioneering major corporations publicly and honestly promoting EEO.”
Lockheed Steps Up Gradually, as other corporations signed onto the BEYA pro- gram, Granville said, Mobil reduced its role. Lockheed Martin replaced Mobil as the primary corporate sponsor in the 1990s, and has continued for more than a decade. Boeing, Chrysler, IBM, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon signed on as major sponsors as well, and Granville sees broad growth in the way companies now approach diversity. “Through BEYA interfacing with Mobil, now ExxonMobil, and other EEO-pioneering corporations, it became a catalyst for companies with similar Equal Opportunity interest, especially as they saw meaningful corporate inclusion efforts tying into the bottom line,” Granville said. “Up until BEYA, blacks for the most part were just in staff jobs (personnel, public relations, equal opportunity, etc.), and not in the mainstream of the business: manufacturing, supply and distribution, marketing, planning and financial analysis. This
USBE&IT I WINTER 2011 77
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