Leadership
The Importance of People: Cox’s Mae Douglas
BY JENNIFER MILLMAN / © 2007 DiversityInc
Cox Communications’ Mae
Douglas thought she’d “eternally be
a salesperson.” Yet after only one
year as ad-sales regional vice president for CableRep, Cox’s advertis-ing-sales division, then-Cox CEO
James Robbins recruited her back to
human resources, where she had
spent the first two decades of her
corporate career.
“[He] made a convincing enough
case for the importance of people to
him as a leader and to the success of
our business, and wanted to signal
the importance to the organization
around people and the changes that
needed to be made [by having me
report to him],” says Douglas, chief
people officer, senior vice president
for Cox Communications.
Robbins had three major goals as
CEO, recalls Douglas: “Satisfy our
shareholders, because we
are a public company,
provide products and
services that our customers need and want,
and make sure I have a
line of successors to
come after me when I
leave this room.”
Douglas’ title of
“chief people officer” is Mae Douglas
deliberate. She is respon-
Company: Cox Communications
sible for cultivating a Headquarters: Atlanta, Ga.
pipeline of future lead- Top
50 Rank: 25
ers—recruiting diverse
talent, communicating expectations,
giving feedback and creating a cul-
ture that enables and empowers
them to succeed.
Douglas is also vice chair of the
National Association of Multi-ethnicity in Communications’
board of directors,
which is committed to
advancing diversity
within the telecommunications industry.
“To me, that’s what
leadership is—I’m pas-
sionate about making
sure other people devel-
op to their fullest
potential,” says
Douglas, who as a 10-
year-old marched with
her family in protest
against the rampant dis-
crimination in 1960s Greensboro,
N.C., beginning a career-long com-
mitment to advance equality and
access for all people.
“Justice, for me, isn’t just around
issues of race/ethnicity but justice
for every person,” says Douglas.
Leading the Charge: HACR’s Carlos Orta
BY JENNIFER MILLMAN / © 2007 DiversityInc
Statistics prove the
increasing impact of
Latinos in all aspects of
U.S. society. Yet of 11,000
Fortune 1000 board seats,
Latinos—who now comprise nearly 14 percent of
the U.S. work force—
hold less than 2 percent
and only account for 1
percent of these compa- Carlos Orta
nies’ senior leaders.
Organization: HACR
As president and CEO Headquarters: Washington, D.C.
of the Hispanic
Association of Corporate
Responsibility (HACR), one of the
nation’s most influential advocacy
organizations, representing 14 leading Latino organizations in the
United States and Puerto Rico, it is
Carlos Orta’s mission to change that.
“The numbers
don’t lie,” says Orta.
“If you want to get to
that market, you have
to understand that
market.”
More than half of
HACR’s corporate
members are in The
2007 DiversityInc Top
50 Companies for
Diversity®. They
understand that such
partnerships build
brands. “All of our corporate partners
‘get it,’” says Orta. “Some companies
come to us because they think they
get it, but they don’t understand, and
so our job is to educate them.”
Orta began working with HACR
in 1997, when he joined the
corporate-affairs division of Ford
Motor Co., No. 5 in the Top 50.
Orta continued to leverage this partnership to the benefit of Ford and
later Anheuser-Busch before taking
the helm at HACR in March 2006.
“As a Hispanic in corporate America,
I always valued this organization
from the other side,” says Orta, a
career lobbyist and community
activist with a passion for giving back
to his community. “I love doing that,
so this is a great organization because
that is what we do—we advocate.”
“You can change people’s lives
through legislation and public policy,” says the Cuban-born Orta, who
immigrated to Miami in 1971, where
he later graduated from Barry
University. “At the end of the day,
you’re giving back.” DI
