Shannon Schuyler
Fostering a Culture of Service
BY GAIL ZOPPO
While pursuing a liberal-arts degree at the University of Michigan, Shannon Schuyler opted to teach English to
inmates at a maximum-security prison for credit instead of
spending her time in the classroom. Her one-year assignment
turned into a three-year volunteer effort. The reason: Helping
others “has always resonated with me,” says Schuyler, now
corporate responsibility leader for the Americas at
PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).
That’s what attracted Schuyler to PwC 13 years ago. Leading the
firm’s alumni-relations efforts and later overseeing the award-win-
ning Great Places to Work initiative, she discovered that the key to
attracting, retaining and engaging talent was in creating a culture of
service. Among the several thousand campus recruits PwC speaks to
each year, for instance, “it’s now about [which companies do] the
most for their communities and the environment,” says Schuyler. “It
used to be ‘who will pay me the most.’”
Today, she implements internal volunteer efforts involving the
firm’s 3 0,000 U.S. employees, facili-
tates discussions with clients on their sustainability and sits on the PwC
Foundation board. Schuyler also started a program that allows 10 extra hours of
paid time off each year for discretionary employee-volunteer work.
Shannon Schuyler
PricewaterhouseCoopers
No. 5 in The DiversityInc
Top 50 Companies
for Diversity®
Frank K. Ross
Recruiting Blacks to Accounting
BY GAIL ZOPPO
© 2010 DiversityInc
“Minorities continue to face subtle and invisible barriers,” says Frank K. Ross, director of the Howard University School of
Business’s Center for Accounting Education.
The key for the accounting profession, he says, is for companies to remain
committed to diversity long enough “so that minorities can plainly see a career
path with an upward trajectory.” Ross knows firsthand what it takes to succeed,
being one of only a handful of Blacks to hold a senior leadership position at a
major accounting firm. The West Indian immigrant joined Peat Marwick in 1966, which later became KPMG (No. 21
in the DiversityInc Top 50). Prior to retiring in 2003, Ross became mid-Atlantic managing partner for audit and
risk-advisory services and managing partner of the firm’s Washington, D.C., office. In addition, Ross was elected
three times to the KPMG U.S. board, including serving as chairman of the KPMG Foundation, where he helped
establish The PhD Project (a DiversityInc partnership organization, designed to increase the pipeline of underrepresented B-school students; DiversityInc CEO Luke Visconti is a board member).
Ross was also one of nine cofounders and the first national president of the National Association of Black
Accountants in 1969, which today provides more than $400,000 in scholarships each year to finance and accounting
students. Plus, he served as visiting professor of accounting at Howard, teaching pro bono.
Inspired by the hundreds of students he has mentored, Ross wrote “Quiet Guys Can Do Great Things, Too: A
Black Accountant’s Success Story” two years ago. All proceeds of his advice-filled book are earmarked for scholar-
ships for accounting students and, with a goal of $1 million, Ross proudly reports that “we’re about halfway there.”
Frank K. Ross
Howard University School
of Business, Center for
Accounting Education
February 2010 107
