That is the primary query I tried to reply after I established the race beat at Fortune precisely 5 years in the past this month. On the time, there had been fifteen Black CEOs within the historical past of the Fortune 500, with 5 nonetheless on the job.
At the moment, as we wade into the grim truth-telling that’s Black Historical past Month, we face the identical query.
“Within the historical past of the Fortune 500 listing, first printed in 1955, there have been solely 19 Black CEOs out of 1,800 chiefs,” says my colleague Phil Wahba in this must-read-and-share piece. And, as anybody who has been paying consideration has repeatedly famous, no person is coming. “Extra worrisome, observers and executives agree, is that there isn’t any fast repair, given the years it takes to groom somebody for the C-suite,” Phil writes. “A serious supply of the issue is that too few Black businesspeople are placed on a administration monitor early of their profession, wherein a promising government is given oversight of a enterprise with its personal revenue and loss (P&L) benchmarks, the measures by which superiors and the board assess whether or not somebody is CEO materials.”
With the thrilling information that Roz Brewer, at present Starbucks Chief Working Officer, has been tapped to turn into Walgreen’s subsequent CEO, she is now considered one of 40 ladies working a Fortune 500 firm—and at present, the one Black one. With TIAA CEO Roger Ferguson Jr. stepping down on the finish of March, that brings the entire variety of Black Fortune 500 CEOs to 4: Brewer, Ken Frazier at Merck, Marvin Ellison at Lowe’s and René Jones at M&T Financial institution.
Oh, cling on… breaking information… Merck CEO Ken Frazier simply introduced that he will probably be stepping down on the finish of June.
Sorry, people. We’re again to 3.
A short while after she left her position as Xerox CEO, I interviewed Ursula Burns for The Black Ceiling, an inside take a look at the various causes Black government ladies don’t make it to the C-Suite. It was a equally dispiriting second. She had been the primary Black lady ever to run a Fortune 500 firm. When she left in 2017, there have been none. (Mary Winston turned the second, after she briefly led Mattress Tub & Past as interim CEO in 2019.)
She was unflinching in her evaluation of the issue.
Black ladies are inclined to get shunted away from positions of actual influence and find yourself in profession cul-de-sacs that remove them from consideration. “HR isn’t going to get you there,” she says. “Communications and the humanities aren’t going to get you there. So, now take a look at the numbers of ladies we now have now. Until you’re bringing individuals in from Mars, it’s going to be some time.”
Sensing a sample?
Burns, in an episode final fall of our Management Subsequent podcast (Apple/Spotify), instructed Fortune CEO Alan Murray and me about her quest to advocate for prime down change through her Board Variety Motion Alliance, a no-nonsense plan to diversify company boards to higher handle the utter lack of progress in company variety.
Seems, the sample is a big a part of the issue: Everybody’s ideally suited brief listing for Black board expertise is ridiculously out of contact. Board chairs routinely ask her for a listing of Black people who’ve already run a Fortune 500 firm or related. “That’s like a listing of 25 individuals,” Burns says, which totally ignores the outstanding expertise that exists in all kinds of positions and industries. “I promise you, white persons are not held to that very same commonplace.”
Lowe’s CEO Marvin Ellison, previously of J.C. Penney, seems on that brief listing twice. He’s the one Black individual to be CEO of two Fortune 500 firms, and he practically didn’t make it the primary time. “[A]t House Depot, the place he spent a few years, he jumped to retailer administration, giving him a P&L by which to measure him as he rose up,” says Wahba. “He was handed over in 2014 when House Depot modified CEOs, and he went to Penney.”
The manager pipeline then, is skinny by blind spot and design. To resolve it, we now have to suppose past central casting as we develop Black government potential early and sometimes.
However to actually change issues, we must always revisit the premise of my first-ever company variety story, and all those that got here after: The trail to the C-Suite begins from start.
It takes 22 years to develop an entry degree worker, and lots goes unsuitable for individuals alongside the best way. Proper now, a future CEO—or physician, engineer, filmmaker, Nobel Prize winner, journalist, provide chain genius, or fill-in-the-blank—is about to be misplaced in a human pipeline that has been invisibly leaking for generations. The explanations are many and associated. Insufficient housing and schooling. An unsafe neighborhood and lack of contemporary meals. Below-resourced dad and mom with no entry to credit score markets in dead-end, soon-to-be-replaced-by-automation jobs. An unresponsive well being care system. The legal justice “system.” To not point out the fixed low-level exhaustion of residing in a rustic that wishes to wave away white supremacist norms like so many gnats from an errant puddle.
Black CEOs are throughout us, if we’d allow them to develop.
Ellen McGirt
@ellmcgirt
Ellen.McGirt@fortune.com