INTRODUCTION

Have you ever heard comments like these?

•   “You’re a woman—why do you want this global job?”

•   “You don’t have enough gray hair to be a senior vice president!”

•   “You are so aggressive; you should try to be more likable.”

Have you ever met all the required qualifications for a project or a promotion, but you still do not feel qualified enough to take on a new role?

Have you ever been in a meeting when a male colleague repeated what you just said—and he then received great feedback on the idea that everyone ignored when you said the same thing?

I have. Often. Throughout my career.

I was born in Phoenix, Illinois, a town so poor and small we didn’t even have our own post office, bank, or grocery store. My parents had emigrated from Jamaica and wanted me and my three siblings to have all the opportunities America could afford us. I wanted those opportunities, too, but I had no idea what they were. Many folks in our town commuted to larger towns to work blue-collar jobs. Nonetheless, I prepared for something better than that. White kids were bused into our neighborhood to attend Coolidge Elementary School, and then for high school the tables were turned. I was bused to an all-white high school and was quite proud of my 4.0 grade point average. When I asked my guidance counselor about applying to college, he said, “Oh, Daphne, girls like you don’t go to college. They become secretaries. You will not get in, and if you do get in, you won’t graduate.” I got the message: I should know my place. College and good careers were only for white girls and boys.

So I followed my guidance counselor’s advice and enrolled in a two-week secretarial course. I had already learned, in high school, how to type well and take dictation, so I was a top candidate for a great secretarial job. The college placed me at Women’s Day magazine in downtown Chicago. I had a desk job in a big city. The people back in Phoenix thought I had made it. I was one of only two women of color working for an entirely white male staff. Yes, an all-male staff running a woman’s magazine! But I soon realized, “I shouldn’t be a secretary; I should have a secretary. I know I can do more; I just need some education!” I said that to myself, even though I had no women of color in my life, anywhere, to show or tell me this was possible.

“I don’t care what that guidance counselor said I can’t do; I’m going to go to college anyway,” I told myself. And the rest, as they say, is “herstory.”

Through many examples in my life, in the lives of my family members, and in my friends’ lives, I was continually reminded—through people’s words and actions—that I wasn’t good enough, or “right” enough, to win.

Millions of people suffer social injustice because of their gender, race, and other visible “differences,” and that injustice leads them to feel they cannot win. The conditioning to not believe in ourselves begins early. When we are first called the “N” word by little kids that may have first heard that term by an adult, we are conditioned to believe we should be grateful for whatever job we are given, whatever salary is awarded. That conditioning follows us all the way to adulthood, when it transforms itself into imposter syndrome. I experienced the subtle and not so subtle messages and actions directed at me that told me that I couldn’t and wouldn’t win.

In spite of those messages and behaviors I’ve lived through, I’ve achieved a lot, and I am grateful for my victories. Not only did I go to college, but I received my bachelor’s degree in three years instead of the usual four years. I went on to get my MBA, receiving it in one year instead of the usual two years. So I was able to take the negative energy of my counselor’s predictions and biases and use it as an agitant to spur me on to achieve. I’ve worked for some of the world’s most recognizable companies—IBM, Johnson & Johnson, Hospira (now part of Pfizer), and General Electric. Although I started my career in an entry-level position of systems engineer at IBM, I rose to director, executive director, and vice president. From there, my titles included corporate officer, chief information officer, senior vice president, and senior executive. I have traveled to every continent in the world except Antarctica, and I have run global teams in those same continents, delivering countless millions of dollars of value for those corporations.

Starting out as a young Black woman in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) wasn’t easy. I was often not just the only Black—but the only female. A unicorn. But I got invited into those rooms because I decided and designed my career to spend my professional life using and implementing digital technologies to help companies differentiate and transform their business models, distribution channels, and products—enabling the companies to win in their respective markets. I found that when I could help companies win and simultaneously design a winning career for myself, I was unstoppable. Even though others would try to stop me. It is the strategies that helped me win and be unstoppable that I share in this book. I want you to win when people say you won’t. And if a little Black J’American girl from Phoenix, Illinois, can win, so will you!

I was inspired to write this book and share my experiences and those of others because being a winner wasn’t always clear for me, and I want this book to create a movement of winning, a movement of continuous improvement. We don’t want to only hope to win; we want to know how to win. Every woman has the capability to be able to win, and I want to show you how.

I knew how to win as a little girl because my mom set goals in my mind and told me what to do—whether it was learning math or reading a set number of Nancy Drew mystery books each month. When I achieved those things, she told me I did a good job, although it wasn’t with much fanfare: she expected me to do what she said, so there was not much to celebrate. My first objectives were education-oriented.

Then I realized that having an objective and achieving it means you have won! Getting As in school, being promoted to the next grade, and graduating from college two years early were all signs of forward progress and success. However, when I looked at those achievements from a higher level, I realized that to continue being a winner meant I had to achieve and improve continuously. It meant never resting on my laurels. Winning is a continual journey, one that I never quite complete, but I do get placed in the “winner’s circle” for my profession or my business! I felt I understood that. Life is fair: just set a goal, and life will be there to help you achieve it. Right? Not necessarily . . .

On my journey to the C-suite, I discovered a new reality: that too often, my color, my gender, or both caused me to be disrespected, underpaid, underpromoted, undervalued, and overlooked. But I also found out that didn’t happen only to me. One of my friends was an SVP of HR at a Fortune 100 company who recalled a compensation meeting with the top leaders of the company where she heard justifications on why a man should receive more compensation than a woman. “Jack has a family of three kids at home to support, so he needs to get a bigger bonus than Jen.” The fact that Jen’s husband was laid off and that Jen was supporting her sick mom (or whatever Jen’s story was) didn’t matter. Enabling Jack to have a better home situation was prioritized over meeting Jen’s needs. What about performance, potential, and leadership as the real differentiators?

As a director, or executive director, or VP, I was often cut off in mid-sentence or treated as an “other”—as though I weren’t as experienced, as wise, or as capable as others younger and whiter than me. I was told and treated as though I couldn’t and wouldn’t win. And like many of my protégés and friends did, I began to listen to that crap; and from time to time, I told myself that I wouldn’t win. That I was not good enough. Not global enough, not expert enough, etc. I learned through my own career, and from the thousands of people over the years who reported to me, that we need to teach women and people of color from the bottom up to systematically deconstruct for themselves the momentum that has been set against them.

These challenges are not new, but the Covid-19 pandemic has had an outsized negative impact on women in what many are calling not a recession, but a “she-cession.” According to a 2021 McKinsey Report, this she-cession is resulting in more obstacles for women who are already struggling for representation in the workplace. Women, as a whole, have lost 5.4 million jobs since February 2020, which comprises over half of all net US job losses in that time period. While some women have found work, more than 2 million women have vanished from the paid workforce altogether.

A large portion of job losses for women stemmed from working mothers who have succumbed to simultaneously being mom, teacher, daycare and eldercare provider, housekeeper, cook, therapist, and so many other roles, all while working full-time. They are burned out and stressed out. The stats are even worse for Black working moms who are leaving the workforce at twice the rate of their white counterparts.

All told, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, “The pandemic has set working women back by more than three decades . . . to levels of labor force participation last seen in 1988”—and it’s had a disproportionate impact on women of color.

The reckoning of the Black Lives Matter movement has been painful for us as a nation, and I am fortunate to have achieved another level in corporate America—to sit on the board of directors for three separate multibillion-dollar public corporations. I’ve seen inside the upper echelons of corporate America and am witnessing the time and energy that is being put into finding solutions to the enormous disparities between opportunities given to white employees and those given to nonwhite employees, and also between opportunities offered to men and those offered to women. In my work as a board member, I see the efforts being made at the top to overhaul the Five Ps—policies, pay equity, pipeline, procurement, and philanthropy—the areas that have disproportionately negatively affected women and people of color in the workforce. But that is not enough.

Initially, I wrote this book for women, women of color, and people of color, because data has shown that those groups tend to have micro-inequities and blatant discrimination thrust upon them. Society doesn’t seem to value or expect as much from us as it does from the majority. And doesn’t consistently seem to give the benefit of the doubt, or assistance, that the majority may receive. Therefore, my goal was to share how I, a J’American woman, succeeded when society didn’t expect much from me—and showed me as much—so I could help other women win. But in reality, anyone can want to win, and anyone can learn to win. As a technologist, I believe in systematizing processes, as much as possible, to help drive speed and efficiency. So I decided that as I won continually, there had to be a way to capture the process so it could be replicated not only by me, but by others—any demographic. So I took a “wash, rinse, repeat” approach. Although we are all different, and we have to allow for the context that is different among us, I believed my basic approach could be applied to nearly anyone. And I wanted to share it.

This book can be used by leaders as a personal/professional development life cycle approach to coach women or others in their organization on how to systematically win. It can be used by men who may want to read examples of the challenges a woman has and may inspire a change in their mindset or behavior. It can be used by those who want to transform their mindset and subsequent behaviors to have a winning one. My four-step approach can be applied by anyone who wants to win and is motivated to invest the energy to walk through four steps to winning when “they” say you won’t.

I wrote this book to show you that wherever we do find systemic and top-down racism or sexism, it can be combated and defeated when we set our minds and use the tools that are at our disposal to treat these issues as a business problem, and not get caught in the trap of responding only emotionally or without a strategy. I am committed to showing you that we can set our sights on our objectives and win when others say we won’t. You don’t have to rely on what women, especially women of color, have needed to do for many, many years—that is, to work twice as hard to get half as far. We can work twice as smart, just like businesses do, and go further than you ever imagined. You don’t have to wait for change to come from above; you can use my strategies to advance right now, even in seemingly impossible situations.

How? By using a process I think of as a personal/professional development life cycle, which I call EDIT. Its steps consist of Envision, Design, Iterate, and Transform. Figure I.1 provides an overview to this process. This process comes from a similar technical process that app developers use to develop apps we know and use everyday.

FIGURE I.1  The EDIT process

EDIT means change. People can change their minds, change their lives, change their expectations, and change their outcomes. In this book, I help you learn how to apply the EDIT process to your goal of improvement and advancement. Just as you have seen continuous improvement and new versions of products and services you use—whether that be your iPhone iOS software (at Version 15+ now), your car, advances in healthcare, and more, you, too, can see yourself as a product and can change or create a new version of yourself. EDIT helps you change and grow through advancing yourself to a new level of capability. You don’t have to stay at the current version you are now. What do you think a new version of you could look like? Even in environments where you may be the only person of color (POC), or the only woman, or where people of color or women haven’t yet broken through to the level of their organization that they want to attain, you can be that one to create a new version of yourself and transform those around you.

When businesses run into issues like declining market share or a product portfolio of many unprofitable products, for example, they do at least four things: use tools to assess the situation, decide outcomes they want to achieve, design and execute their strategy by running a proof of concept or pilot test, and then measure the outcomes and determine if they need to refine their strategy to hit or exceed their target. When finished, they will have transformed their business from losing market share to neutralizing the loss and then on to gaining share. Or they’ve gone from having too many unprofitable products to a more rationalized portfolio of products with gross margins that beat the competition. That doesn’t happen overnight, but it gets done. When winning businesses discover a challenge or a new direction they want to go in, they don’t get emotional about it, and they don’t quit. The business leaders dispassionately but intently and earnestly use the information and tools available to them to move the company to a better place. That is the same thing you will do.

Win When They Say You Won’t presents the EDIT methodology broken down into chapters where each one is a step with a clear goal. Whether you want a promotion, a pay raise, more responsibility, or a better seat at the table, by achieving so many wins along the way, you will be able to build on that feeling of accomplishment all the way to your big win. A journey is not done in one giant leap, but in a series of steps that go forward. And for me, each step forward, no matter how big or small, was a win. In each chapter, I provide guidance on how you can start concretizing your ambitions; I also illustrate with my own stories of succeeding in impossible situations, as well as stories from people I have mentored or worked side by side with. To show how EDIT is applied at each juncture of an upward journey, I’ve included various stories of how I, my protégés, my family, and my peers faced challenges in our lives, and how the EDIT principles and business tools were used for the win. (These stories appear in italics, to make them easier to read and learn from.)

Step I addresses the critical and challenging work of envisioning where we want to go. As underrepresented people in the corridors of power and influence, we may not have any template from our families or friends for how to achieve what it is we want. Which is why a technology framework like EDIT is going to be so helpful—it is a proven and concrete iterative process for making small and big leaps.

As you dream, you will apply critical thinking to what is and isn’t working in your career, so that you can be strategic and specific about your goal. And then use the metric of what I call the Five Fs—faith, family, fitness, finances, and furthering career—to ensure that you have thought through the impact of your goal on every key area of life. This way, you won’t make the mistake of attaining a goal that fulfills one area but capsizes all the others. It’s not worth getting a higher-paying job (furthering career) if you are then blindsided that your fitness and family are suffering. You will work solutions and interventions into your process. You then leave Step I by making a commitment to yourself to meet this newly identified goal, even if and when it gets challenging.

In Step II, Design, I illustrate how to prioritize your objectives, because you may have several, and you will apply a bit of agile and design thinking to your objective. When I ran large tech divisions, we accomplished our big goals by breaking them up into small sprints and mapping out exactly what would be required in terms of resources to attain them. Here you will do the same. By performing your due diligence, you will be prepared to leverage tailwinds and withstand headwinds that come your way.

By the time we reach Step III, Iterate, you are ready to launch. Here you run the play that you designed in Step II, and you will tweak your action steps, or your overall plan, based on feedback from your marketplace, be that your boss, your colleagues, or your family. Maybe you didn’t demonstrate enough leadership potential with your first big project. You will learn to ask for another opportunity, to iterate, and get closer to your win by understanding what you may have overlooked, so you can try again. If you keep iterating, which includes working the plan, soliciting feedback, altering strategy, and trying again, you inevitably will get closer and closer to your objective.

Step IV, Transform, is where you sit with the change. You’ve achieved an objective or some major key results. Because you are not quite the same person who started your journey and if you don’t take time to adjust to your new status or role, you may backslide. So here you reflect on your accomplishment and decide what you learned and would do differently next time. Because . . . there will be a next time. Right now, in fact. While you want to arrive in the feeling of triumph, you never want to feel like you are done growing and learning. You have a growth mindset.

So you will end where you began, by deciding where you will set your sights next, from your new vantage point of success.

It’s complex to be Black or a POC. To be female. To be a Black female or female of color today—female and color do not exist independently of each other, but often inform each other, creating a complex convergence of oppression. But I found that while I may be looked at as an “other,” by society or corporate America, my EDIT approach to driving my career and achievement is very much “mainstream,” proven, and effective. To further help the Black women, or women of color, more specifically, I have written a chapter dedicated to the women of color to help deal with the nuances of our corporate experiences. That is Chapter 13.

To win means to be victorious or successful in a contest, conflict, or endeavor.

It will be important that you define what winning means to you. Early in this book, you will be tasked with envisioning a winning future for yourself—one that you have always wanted, or one that you feel is perfect for you in your current stage of life.

When you achieve that future, you will have the confidence to try again, and win again, even as roadblocks try to get in your way. I wrote this book to show you the right mindset and toolsets that you will use to always find a way to win. However you define winning and success for yourself, remember that you will truly be successful when you become a contributor in helping other people win.

WHO ARE “THEY”?

My book title says there’s a “they” out there who doesn’t want you to win. There is an often quoted saying about the opposition that goes this way: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” Who are “they”?

•   They are people in your family who laugh at your dream and say you can’t do it.

•   They are people who are in your circle, but when you need them, they may not be in your corner because they don’t really believe in you.

•   They are the white supremacists dressed as company senior leaders or your non-POC neighbors who are agitated that you can afford to live next to them.

•   They are the other women or other men you may work with who view you as the enemy, and not the external competition or the other threats in your business.

•   They are the boss who just inherited you, who believes you are a falling star, even though the boss who originally hired you knew you were a shooting star.

•   They are your college professors who grade your paper more harshly than they grade the paper of someone in the majority for no obvious reason, except because you are a minority.

•   They are the people who focused more on unclear or racist criteria—and less on true capability—in confirming the first African American female Supreme Court justice.

•   They are we who believe the negative and hurtful things that are said about women of color, or single mothers, or grandmothers raising their grandchildren, and all of us who wonder if we really are impostors.

They are everywhere and can be anybody. We need to be aware that they exist around us, but rather than us listening to them, their skepticism and lack of support should catalyze us to win. We will hear what they say and do, but we will not listen to them, unless it is meaningful, helpful, and inspiring.

We are at a moment in history when the disparities in hiring and compensation for people of color have been laid bare. According to one Citigroup study, the US economy has lost $16 trillion over the past 20 years due to race-based inequality. And according to a recent study by McKinsey, Black women are less likely than men or women of any other race to feel supported by their manager. You may have found yourself stymied and stuck below your potential, and you want a blueprint for rising if you don’t have anyone to lift you up. You need that now.

You will learn how to believe in yourself. You will be able to say, “I’ve been in a tough situation before, and look how I got out of it. I have won before, and I can do it again.” You will have a blueprint that will give you outcomes you never thought were possible. This book will coach you and show you how to tackle problems and teach you how to persevere. You will read stories about very accomplished women who have dealt with setbacks through their life or career. You will read about how they thought and won in their lives.

As a woman who climbed all the way to the C-suite and worked at several global conglomerates, I have a view to share that will exponentially benefit readers who want to know how to rise in white- and male-dominated fields. This book will give you a strategy you can use to tackle any obstacle in your lives.

As my own journey demonstrates, this approach can create an ever-rising spiral of success—even for a poor Black girl from a tiny Midwest town. Even for someone who has been told—by teachers, by leaders, and by example—that she can never win.

I’m here to tell women of all races, you absolutely can—and if you have enough courage to grab your journal and flip to the next page, I will show you how.