Economically Empowering the African American Community

To advance on Wall Street, African American MBAs should find a mentor who has a vested interested in their success, said Richard Hanks, ’01, managing director of Renaissance Development and a former analyst for Goldman Sachs . “You need someone who is going to make it their purpose or goal to get you where they are,” Hanks said during a panel at the 23rd Annual DuSable Conference, presented by the student-led African American MBA Association at Palmer House Hilton November 9.

Wall Street executives will assume Chicago MBAs know their numbers, he said. “Don’t mess up that assumption,” Hanks said. “The next aspect is, don’t just be a numbers jockey. You don’t want to be the person where they say, ‘Let him crunch the numbers,’ and then somebody else takes the transaction to the client. You want to be the person who says, ‘Now that the numbers are done, here’s how I can present this.’”

Meanwhile, if African American MBAs want to be entrepreneurs, they first need to gain experience in business, said Ava Youngblood, ’85, president and CEO of Youngblood Executive Search. “You need to learn how to sell something,” Youngblood said. “Otherwise you’re going to be dead in the water. Whatever you do, sometime in your career, do something in business development and sales, where you’re actually interfacing with customers and you have to close deals.”

Some companies allow MBAs to better connect with their communities, said Daniel Paho, partner in Dubai Emira Investment and principal with Dubai Holding . “One of the things I like about my job is having the abili Y Yty to actually impact people’s lives around the world,” Paho said. “It’s more than just buying assets and companies. It’s more a human endeavor. When I look at the jobs we’ve done in Africa, the Middle East, or Central Asia, I think we did more in four years than the World Bank did in 20 or 25 years.”

To strengthen their family’s assets, African Americans need to start thinking differently about how they invest their money, said Elise Roby Yanders, vice president and wealth management advisor for Merrill Lynch . “I get people out of their comfort zone and to start looking at what for our community is considered less traditional assets,” Yanders said. “You complain about gas going to $3 a gallon. You know what? I don’t care. My Exxon stock has gone up, so drive on.”

To strengthen the assets of their community, African Americans need to start doing business with each other and think differently about their economic power, she said. “I was at a church conference with our bishop and I asked him, ‘Was your hotel room free?’” Yanders said. “He said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘Why not?’ I wrote down how much money our conference was generating. I said, ‘Not only should your room be free, but so should the rooms of everybody in the church leadership.’ We really have to understand our economic power and be willing to use it.”

The African American MBA Association assembled the panel to provide a cross-section of speakers with experience in transactions to articulate domestic and international perspectives of building communities, said second-year student Sean Singleton, who moderated the panel. “There was also an emerging markets component we were hoping to come across because, as a panelist said, community does not necessarily mean geography,” Singleton said. “It’s a much broader network.”

- Phil Rockrohr