LEADERSHIP PROFILES
Mary Beth West, executive vice president and chief category and
marketing officer at Kraft Foods, No. 35 on The DiversityInc Top
50 Companies for Diversity® list, discovered early in life that “being
different is an incredible asset.”
Adopted by a white upstate New York couple, West was the youngest of five kids
and the only one who was Black. Three of her brothers and sisters were also adopted,
“I quickly learned in a large family that represented different kinds of people with different kinds of backgrounds
and different kinds of capabilities that there was a lot to be gained by sitting down and having a family meeting and
discussing things from lots of different points of view,” she says.
West has tried to integrate this same approach in her leadership style. “The funny thing is, if you ask each of my
brothers and sisters who felt the most special in the family, each of us would say ourselves,” says West, who is mar-
ried and has three children, ages 2, 5 and 7. “My mom, who never went to college and never spent a day in corporate
America, knew how to get the best out of a team.”
West joined General Foods in 1986 (which merged with Kraft in 1989) and has held a number of marketing posi-
tions of increasing responsibility. She received a bachelor’s degree in management from Nazareth College and an
MBA from Columbia University.
She serves on the board of directors of JCPenney, No. 46 on the DiversityInc Top 50 list. She is also involved with a
nonprofit organization, Off The Street Club, which she calls “a haven of hope and security for some
of Chicago’s high-risk youths.” BY SAM ALI
Mary Beth West Kraft Foods
No. 35 in The DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for Diversity®
Judy Jourdain-Earl Jourdain-Earl Associates
Judy Jourdain-Earl learned early in her nursing
career that successful patient treatment and cultural
competency are inextricably linked. Making that
connection led her from one career “making a difference” to another.
Jourdain-Earl started her professional life as an undergraduate nursing student at Boston University’s School
of Nursing, where she became involved in the civil-rights
movement. She organized a small group of Black students
and one Black faculty member and requested a meeting
with the nursing school’s dean to discuss diversifying the
curriculum. “They were educating us to work with white
patients and doctors, and we were all going back to communities that weren’t white,” she recalls.
After obtaining a master’s degree in community
health nursing from New York University, she spent
more than 20 years working in nursing positions around
the country, including a stint in the Kaiser Permanente
health system (Kaiser Permanente is No. 4 in The 2010
DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for Diversity®). The need
for cultural-competence training in healthcare became
increasingly evident to her, so she started her own diver-
sity-management/training
company in 1994, Jourdain-
Earl Associates.
“I focus on employee and
coworker interactions, especially
skill sets for the people who are doing
direct care—and their supervisors,” she says.
Jourdain-Earl, who is now based in Silver Spring,
Md., sees diversity training as a facet of “what should be
a systemwide strategic diversity initiative. Training is a
valuable component, but without leadership buy-in and
human-resources strategies, you don’t get the shift that is
measurable.”
Her emphasis is on diversity and cultural-competency
education, and she’s worked with a variety of organizations in and out of healthcare, including Sodexo, Monsanto
and Ford Motor Co., Nos. 1, 28 and 44, respectively, in the
DiversityInc Top 50, as well as NASA and the Children’s
National Medical Center, among others.
“I’ve been around the block and seen things along the
way. I consider myself a student of human behavior for
various perspectives,” she says. BY BARBARA FRANKEL
© 2010 DIVERSIT YINC
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