Hispanic Executive #67

FOR THIRTY YEARS, SENATOR BOB MENENDEZ (D-NJ) HAS FOUGHT TO AMPLIFY THE VOICES OF THOSE HE SERVES P62

Hispanic

“Let us mobilize our collective resources to rid ourselves of racism using lessons learned from battling the pandemic.”

Four”

“We may be overwhelmed by the convergence of multiple crises, or unsure of exactly what to do, and that’s OK. What it means, though, is that you have to ask a lot of hard questions and not pretend to have the answers.”

—Javier Saade, Publisher’s Circle Contributor, “The Time Is Now. The Year Is 2020.”

Legal Changemakers

These leaders are driving big-picture change at their companies, across their communities, and within the industry as a whole

P82 Andrea Clavijo, GE (General Electric)

P88 Hasan Ibrahim, Prudential

P94 Benny Agosto, Abraham, Watkins, Nichols, Agosto, Aziz & Stogner

P99 Evelyn Pérez-Albino, JetBlue Airways

P102 Nikki Adame-Winningham, Pfizer Inc.

P107 Marta Miyar Palacios, Oportun Inc.

62

Steady in the Senate

EMBRACE YOUR FLAVOR

VP Elias Reyna on how his life experiences and background have motivated him to foster an inclusive environment at Papa John's International Inc.

INSPIRED TO LEAD

Valet Living's Chief People Officer Henry Enrique Toledo works to ensure that both the business and employees can grow and thrive

BETTER PEOPLE, BETTER COMPANIES

As the first CFO at Beecan Health, Karla Valle has worked to build a robust, mission-driven finance program that's more about people and less about numbers

REMOVING RISK FROM SUCCESS

Luis Guzman fosters a data-driven, collaborative culture to ensure immigration law giant Fragomen can grow without obstacles

A DIVERSITY OF DATA

Supply chain expert Julio Covarrubias pulls from his cross-border experience to help direct the decision-making process for Delek Holdings Inc.

CULTURAL TRENDS BECOME PROFITS

CIEN+ Cofounder Lili Gil Valletta proves that leaning into cultural intelligence allows businesses to tap into the full potential of high-growth markets

FINDING HER PLACE

Dawn Valdivia wasn't always sure where she fit in growing up, but she's found purpose in her law career and a place she belongs in her role at Honeywell

A Letter from the Publisher

Pedro A. Guerrero CEO of Guerrero Media Publisher of Hispanic Executive

WHEN THE LAST VOTE WAS TALLIED for the 2020 election, and the media began analyzing the results, they were surprised. Report after report was released on “the Latino vote,” and pundits across the nation concluded with astonishment that many Latinos, in many different parts of the country, vote . . . well, differently.

No one should have been surprised. It should not have been news to anyone that the Latino community is as complex as America itself, full of geographical as well as religious, cultural, socioeconomic, and generational divides. And the media—as well as all the polling agencies entrusted to determine voter sentiment—would have known that if they had had Latinos employed throughout their organizations and in key positions to provide thoughtful input on this important demographic.

But this letter isn’t about politics. It’s about an incredible and unbelievable gap in knowledge that exists in the halls of power and boardrooms alike—a lack of awareness about and insight into the second-largest population in this country, which (per the 2020 census) is sixty-two million people strong and still growing.

The facts are undeniable. If you don’t have an intentional approach to reaching the Latino market at all levels and in all facets of your organization, you will not succeed, and your market dominance will prove itself to be unsustainable. Or, as my friend Dr. Robert Rodriguez more starkly puts it, “If a company does not have a Latino strategy, it does not have a growth strategy.”

We see this every day in the business world. As our cover star Senator

Bob Menendez (D-NJ) (p.62) has seen firsthand, small newspapers have shuttered their doors because they chose not to embrace the fact that their once-all-white communities now have substantial Latino populations. International conglomerates have forgone millions of dollars because they don’t have an intentional strategy for targeting a community with close to $1.5 trillion in purchasing power.

As Lili Gil Valletta (p.142), CEO of marketing agency CIEN+ points out, “Inclusion is not an altruistic mission; it’s a superpower to future-proof your business. It’s not about reacting to social pressures or simply chasing representation, but anticipating market shifts and expectations with data, committed action, and dollars.”

Inclusion is not difficult to achieve. It is not difficult for organizations that have been publicly advocating for diversity in leadership to put those good words into action. They should ensure that the members of their C-suite and boardrooms are fully informed about the complex markets and communities of our nation.

It comes down to two things: being intentional and taking action.

Of course, getting off the metaphorical couch isn’t always easy. External forces like state and federal legislation can require organizations to be purpose driven. We have already seen that with California’s AB 979 legislation and could see yet further impact through the legislation proposed by Senator Menendez in the Improving Governance Through Corporate Diversity Act of 2021.

But there is no need to wait for such legislation to be passed. HR leaders can seek out and help retain diverse professionals for every open position at their

organization. Executives managing the supply chain for their company can ensure that every vendor they are working with puts diversity and inclusion at the forefront of their strategy.

And legal professionals—including every single attorney featured in this issue—have a unique opportunity, given their role, to leverage their power to advance Latinos, whether that’s by demanding diversity from their partners or demanding it from themselves and their internal teams.

More than that, legal leaders who position themselves as partners to the business have an opportunity to help set a vision and craft a strategy for their business that will ensure its ability to compete both in the present moment and beyond. They can make the case for diversity and help their business grasp the fact that a truly growth-centered, sustainable strategy—one that leads to wins in the marketplace—is a strategy that puts Latinos at the center.

“It is not difficult for organizations that have been publicly advocating for diversity in leadership to put those good words into action.”

Masthead

Featured Contributor

Edra Soto is an interdisciplinary artist and codirector of the outdoor project space the Franklin. Her work has been presented at the Smart Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Chicago Cultural Center, Albright-Knox Northland, and more.

Creative

VP, Creative Production

Kevin Warwick

Editorial Manager

Frannie Sprouls

Managing Editor

Sara Deeter

Editors

Melaina K. de la Cruz

KC Esper

Julia Thiel

Corporate

CEO & Publisher

Pedro A. Guerrero

Chief of Staff

Jaclyn Gaughan

President, Group Publisher

Kyle Evangelista

VP, Hispanic Division

Head of Audience & Engagement

Vianni Lubus

Hispanic Executive® is a registered trademark of Guerrero, LLC

©2022 Guerrero, LLC. guerreromedia.com

1500 W. Carroll Ave., Second Floor Chicago, IL 60607

Facebook: @hispanicexecutive

LinkedIn: @hispanic-executive

Twitter: @HispanicExecMag

Instagram: @hispanicexecmag

YouTube: bit.ly/youtubehemag

Reprints

Reprinting of articles is prohibited without permission of Guerrero, LLC. Printed in China. For reprint information, contact Reprints & Circulation Director Stacy Kraft at stacy@guerreromedia.com.

Hana Yoo

Staff Writer

Billy Yost

Contributors

Zach Baliva

Dan Caffrey

Lucy Cavanagh

Charles S. Donnavan

Peter Fabris

Will Grant

Taylor Karg

Natalie Kochanov

Donald Liebenson

Keith Loria

Lindsey Lubowitz

Abigail Sutter

Andrew Tamarkin

Zayvelle Williamson

Designer

Elena Bragg

Photo Editors & Staff Photographers

Cass Davis

Gillian Fry

VP, Finance

David Martinez

VP, Sales

Ben Julia

Senior Director, Client Operations

Cheyenne Eiswald

Senior Client Services Manager

Rebekah Pappas

Client Services Manager

Brooke Rigert

Director, Client Services–Corporate Partnerships

Taylor Frank

Director, Talent Acquisition & Engagement

Haylee Himel

Director, Talent Acquisition

Heather Steger

Senior Director, Corporate Partnerships & DEI Solutions

Krista Horbenko

Events Director

Jill Ortiz

Digital Events & Marketing Coordinator

Ashley Parish

Communications Manager

Cristina Merrill

Director, Sales

Kelly Stapleton

Director, Sales Training & Development

Alexa Johnson

Director, Sales Onboarding

Justin Davidson

Content & Advertising Managers

James Ainscough

Allyssa Bujdoso

Roman Magallanes

Maureen O'Brien

Alejandro Vences

Industry Partners

Brownness,” Belonging, and Beauty

WORDS AND INTERVIEW BY EDRA SOTO

THROUGH HER INTERDISCIPLINARY PRACTICE, ARTIST MARIA GASPAR ADDRESSES issues of spatial justice and questions our relationship to power. Her source of inspiration is none other than one of the largest lockups in the United States—Cook County Jail, which happens to be located in the Chicago neighborhood of her upbringing. Gaspar responds to the complexities that this location proposes to its community and invites us to envision a more just world.

I had the pleasure of having a conversation with Maria about her expansive practice and her position on visibility and representation for Latinx communities.

Please tell us about the beginnings of your career and what experiences led you to become the artist you are today. My artistic practice was formed at an early age. Between performing with my mother, who did a stint as a clown for some time, painting murals, and collaborating with friends on community-based art projects since childhood, art was an everyday part of

my life. As a young artist, I sought opportunities that affirmed what an artistic life or a lived practice could be—something deeply embodied. I was also fortunate enough to have a support system made up of local artists who mentored me as well as teachers who helped me imagine my future.

Growing up on Chicago’s West Side had its challenges. In my immediate neighbor-

hood, there were too few options for cultural engagement, so I mostly left my community to attend programs or connect with other artists. I learned firsthand how social inequities permeated the city, and that would go on to play a major role in my arts practice.

Your ongoing site-specific series, titled “Disappearance Suits,” is currently at El Museo del Barrio in NYC as part of the Estamos Bien Triennal. Tell us about this body of work and why its inclusion in this contemporary Latino national survey is so important.

“Disappearance Suit” began in 2012, when a few ideas I was researching and experimenting with inside and outside the studio began

to merge. I was making work about visibility and being a first-generation Latinx person whilst making public art and doing performance art. During this time, I was deeply invested in materiality and the color brown as a signal for my immigrant identity. A series called “Brownouts” became a space to play with color, opacity, and legibility—perceptually and politically. At the time, my sitespecific projects were entirely constructed in urban, dense landscapes. Therefore, I decided to travel to Iceland during the season of the “midnight sun” to study the color brown in an entirely different environment.

My first suit was made of brown latex paint and spray paint. I staged a series of performances in this suit during different times of the day as I traveled across Iceland. Needless to say, Iceland is a very homogenous country, so this certainly played a part in the development of the performance. Since then, I have continued the series in various

locations, including Switzerland and the West and East Coasts of the US. Each suit is a response to the politics of location and is usually constructed from local materials. The suits and stills of the performances are being exhibited together for the first time at El Museo de Barrio. It was exciting to work with the curators to contextualize the work within the larger conversation about Latinx identity and all its fluidity, and among so many friends and folks I admire in the field. Institutionally, I think we need to reassess places like museums as well as art schools, civic organizations, and foundations. Who has been historically left out?

You have built an impressive career, with stellar national recognition for your work as well as for your research regarding social justice and the politics of location. Can you tell us about your motivations behind this

project, and why it continues to be a topic so close to you? How does this passion for social justice manifest itself in your practice?

I am so grateful for the support I have received. It has been a labor of love because the work is not always recognized, and that’s OK. My mentors taught me how to keep going even when times are tough because of my belief in the work and because the work brings joy, tenderness, and vitality. It’s even more special when others you are working with experience all that beauty and transformation too, and when something inside you feels lifted, affirmed, seen, or full. That is perhaps how I view my commitment to social justice. It’s not about the grand but about the intimate: how I care for others and how I hope others care for me, for my son, my family, or my community. To me, justice is one of the greatest acts of love, and my community continues to teach me those lessons . . . I am still learning.

Disappearance Suit (series), 2012–present, cloth, thread, dry grass, Tyvek, adhesive, latex, spray paint.

When the color brown was not a topic of conversation in the mainstream, you were already addressing it visually through installations and performative work. Books like The Sense of Brown by José Esteban Muñoz have now reached mainstream America, making this topic a bit more familiar to general audiences. Can you talk about this journey and what motivated you to elevate the importance of the color brown in your work?

I think we would be better people if we all read José Esteban Muñoz’s writing, and I do envision a time where it is in the mainstream. Wouldn’t that be amazing?! I feel rage and sadness about our current political moment in the US, where states are attacking critical race theory, transgender rights, voter rights, and caging children and families in immigrant detention centers.

Muñoz beautifully articulates “brownness” in the realm of both trauma and potentiality. I think about his work in relation to art making and life making, in relation to poetics and politics. “Brownness” resonates with me in so many ways because of my own interest in making work about being in and with dislocated communities, dealing with extraction, and seeing and feeling absence and erasure. Nevertheless, in my experience

Led by artist Maria Gaspar, Radioactive: Stories from Beyond the Wall is a series of community-engaged radio/visual broadcasts located between the largest architecture of Chicago’s West Side, Cook County Jail, and the working-class residential area of the Lawndale communities. Radioactive centers the voices of those currently incarcerated by broadcasting and projecting intimate and creative stories from inside Cook County Jail to outside its border.

Not Just Another Day, 2015, site intervention using a power-washer and stencils.

Radioactive: Stories from Beyond the Wall, 2016–2018, still from video documentation from Radioactive workshops inside Cook County Jail.

Radioactive: Stories from Beyond the Wall, 2016–2018, still from video documentation from site intervention at the north-end wall of Cook County Jail.

Hispanic Executive

working with incarcerated communities and other system-impacted people, vitality and life persist, and the complexity of this reality requires humanity and subtlety.

How do you feel about the lack of representation of Latino artists in museum collections and the art market? Why should museums provide Latino representation in their collections? We might need a whole issue, or many issues, dedicated to these important questions. For

brevity, Latinx artists are here. We have been making work. We have been making our own spaces because majority-white spaces have excluded Latinx and other marginalized communities. And we have been driving culture and cultural movements. Museums and other institutions should support the critical work being made by Latinx artists if they want to be relevant now and in the future. Institutions need to do the internal labor and acknowledge the systemic impact of white supremacy and colonialism and take

Puerto Rican born, Edra Soto is an interdisciplinary artist and codirector of the outdoor project space the Franklin.

Recent venues presenting Soto’s work include Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art’s satellite, the Momentary (Arkansas); Albright-Knox Northland (New York); Chicago Cultural Center (Illinois); Smart Museum (Illinois); and the Museum of Contemporary Photography (Illinois).

Recently, Soto completed the public art commission titled Screenhouse, which is currently at Millennium Park in Chicago. Soto has attended residency programs at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Beta-

concrete steps in creating truly inclusive, critical, caring, and relevant institutions. I want my kid to be able to go to a major museum in the US and see himself in the collection.

You have had an incredible artistic career, secured a professorship at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and been a terrific mother on top of that. Is there anything you would still like to explore?

Thank you. I feel like I just got started! There are a million things on my list, and this COVID time has only affirmed my tenacity. Managing an art practice, a full-time teaching load, and other projects while also raising a toddler has not been easy. I hope more institutions also recognize artist parents, especially mothers whose jobs have been gravely affected throughout this pandemic. Besides some major projects, I am exploring how I can support other artist mothers in my teaching and projects and how to advocate for one another in the field.

Local, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Residency, the Headlands Center for the Arts, Project Row Houses, and Art Omi, among others. Soto was awarded the Efroymson Contemporary Arts Fellowship, the Illinois Arts Council Agency Fellowship, the inaugural Foundwork Artist Prize, and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant, among others. Between 2019 and 2020, Soto exhibited and traveled to Brazil, Puerto Rico, and Cuba as part of the MacArthur Foundation’s International Connections Fund.

Soto holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a bachelor’s degree from Escuela de Artes Plásticas y Diseño de Puerto Rico.

Soy Paz, Soy Más, 2020, sky-written message above Coastal Bend Detention Center (Robstown, Texas).

Soy Paz, Soy Más was one of eighty skywritten messages produced in water vapor that artists released into the air as part of In Plain Sight, a nationwide artist-led intervention by Cassils and Rafa Esparza dedicated to abolishing immigrant detention and dismantling the United States' culture of incarceration.

MISSION

When one’s work makes an impact in the community, it transcends employment and becomes a calling. These executives have answered their call.

14. Elias Reyna, Papa John’s International Inc. 19. Victor Santillan, Grifols Inc. 22. Berta Alicia Bejarano, Kaiser Permanente 24. Deanna Salazar, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Arizona 27. Henry Enrique Toledo, Valet Living 31. Andrés Acebo, New Jersey City University 34. Elida Moran, T-Mobile

Embrace Your Flavor

BY DAN CAFFREY

VP Elias Reyna on how his life experiences and background have motivated him to foster an inclusive environment at Papa John’s International Inc.

Elias Reyna VP of HR & People Services

Papa John’s International Inc.

“What’s your flavor?” asks Elias Reyna, vice president of human resources and people services at Papa John’s International Inc.

Reyna laughs and assures me that cheese is a great choice. It’s ubiquitous. It’s timetested. You can’t go wrong with cheese.

On one hand, Reyna and I are just bantering—the question being something of an icebreaker as we get to know each other over Zoom. On the other hand, the flavor question sits at the foundation of his philosophy as an HR professional. Since his arrival at Papa John’s in April 2020, he’s asked it of all of the company’s employees—the idea of one’s flavor being a metaphor for inclusivity.

“We’re all about fostering a sense that everyone belongs,” Reyna says. “We incorporate that into our culture on a daily basis. We’re unlocking the voices of our team members and want them to bring their authentic selves to work. Yes, we’re dedicated to delivering better pizza, but only by putting people first.”

The “flavor” metaphor becomes literal on a daily basis at Papa John’s offices, which are each outfitted with a pizza kitchen: there, team members regularly get to test out new products and flavors. Of course, the company works in a number of other ways to promote an inclusive environment in the workplace.

And those efforts are gaining recognition: Papa John’s recently received a score of one hundred on the Human Rights Campaign Foundation’s Corporate Equality Index, the country’s foremost benchmarking survey measuring corporate policies and practices related to LGBTQ workplace equality. It was

the only pizza company and one of only fortytwo companies in the Food, Beverage, and Grocery category to earn a perfect score.

Currently, Reyna’s work is heavily focused on bringing this kind of supportive environment to the new Papa John’s headquarters in Atlanta. That headquarters’ unveiling came on the heels of the company’s reopening of all its other HQ buildings as the COVID19 pandemic began to wind down. Reyna is handling everything from safety and health guidelines to training and building out a diverse talent base with new hires.

“It feels like a return to school, a return to the office, and a grand opening all happening in parallel,” he says.

The new headquarters and numerous reopenings mark a milestone in Reyna’s time at Papa John’s, given that he was hired during a time when he and his colleagues weren’t able to meet in person. He’s managed to persevere in a most difficult year and push his team members to do the same, which he says comes down to the importance of staying rooted, of remembering where your inner strength comes from and of what makes you you. In Reyna’s case, he finds a great deal of inspiration in his background and family.

“I’m proud to be a second-generation Mexican American,” he says. “My grandfather migrated here and was a migrant farmworker on the West Coast, then brought his family to East Texas during the 1950s. He made a big impact on me when I was

“Cheese,” I tell him somewhat sheepishly. I wish I had a better answer, but I can’t lie. I grew up eating the pizza chain’s simplest flavor at school, home, and Little League practice. To me, a slice of Papa John’s cheese pizza—dipped in a small plastic tub of their trademark garlic sauce—tastes like childhood.

“[My grandfather] made a big impact on me when I was growing up, just seeing the sacrifices he made so that his loved ones could have a better life.”

ALICIA ELATASSI/JAMAAL JONES

growing up, just seeing the sacrifices he made so that his loved ones could have a better life. I consider him to be one of my true role models.”

As Reyna was growing up in the Galveston, Texas, area, he got to spend a lot of time with his grandfather, standing by his side as he built storm blinds and window screens. Even when the family patriarch was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, he continued to work.

“That was one of those informative moments for me,” Reyna says. “It taught me a lot about how to deal with adversity.”

Reyna ended up having to go through a similar struggle in his own life. Right before starting college at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, he was diagnosed with a severely aggressive bone tumor. Dropping out or delaying his education would have been completely understandable. But remembering the work ethic and strength of his grandfather, he decided to stay enrolled as he underwent medical treatment. Not only did he manage to finish on time—he immediately started working toward his MBA after graduation.

Today, Reyna draws from his experiences to inspire others both at Papa John’s and at the Boy Scouts of America, where he’s been a scout leader for fifteen years. He and his wife of twenty-three years have three boys, who are ranked First Class, Second Class, and Eagle Scout.

“It’s been amazing to see my own children grow through that experience,” Reyna says. “And as a leader, it’s so fulfilling to see how much of an impact you can have on a young person’s life.”

Like everyone else at Papa John’s, Reyna is his own distinct flavor, made up of life experiences that are unique to him and him alone. And there’s plenty of room for everyone’s story.

“That’s what I want to foster in others,” Reyna says. “Everyone has a seat at the table.”

“We’re unlocking the voices of our team members and want them to bring their authentic selves to work.”

Your personal flavor is welcomed & your voice is always heard at Papa John’s.

TALENTED PEOPLE WITH BOLD IDEAS, INCLUSIVE ATTITUDES, AND A SENSE OF FUN. SOUND FAMILIAR?

Papa John’s es una empresa que ofrece oportunidades equitativas de empleo. © 2021 Papa John's International, Inc. Derechos reservados.

How Do You Want to be Remembered?

Victor Santillan works to ensure that his legacy as an HR leader is one of positivity, inspiration, and growth

BY ABIGAIL SUTTER

VICTOR SANTILLAN HAS ALWAYS HAD a talent for adapting to the situation. Whether he’s discovering his professional purpose, changing industries, or overcoming personal challenges, his ability to pivot while staying true to himself and his goals has brought him a lifetime of success.

Despite his lifelong passion for helping others, Santillan admits that he fell into HR accidentally. When he was looking for marketing internships in college, only HR options were left. Wanting experience, Santillan took one of those opportunities, and was offered a position as a full-time recruiter at the end of the summer.

A sophomore in college at the time, Santillan was interviewing and hiring candidates with considerably more experience and higher qualifications than he had. “It was a window to the world,” he reflects. “And I happened to be very good at it.”

Now that he had found his niche, Santillan dedicated himself to framing the company in the right way when speaking with potential hires. Hiring, he explains, is a two-way street. He is personally a lifelong learner and seeks out businesses he can truly be a part of, businesses where he can expose himself to who and what is driving the company from a strategic standpoint.

This willingness to learn is a large part of what has led Santillan to success throughout his career. His HR career has spanned banking, retail, hospitality, and most recently, at Grifols Inc., healthcare and pharmaceuticals. Many of those positions had different priorities and responsibilities, Santillan says, so he had to learn different ways to make an impact: even if a position required his relationships with other employees to be more transactional in nature, he sought to make that transaction transformational.

“I’m a servant leader,” Santillan emphasizes. “The best success is when others succeed, when our company succeeds through our efforts in HR.”

But his relationships with his colleagues are not the only ones Santillan focuses on at Grifols, a global healthcare company known for its leading-edge bioscience, diagnostic, and hospital products. As head of human resources and senior director of Grifols’ plasma operations, he works with global partners such as Cielo to help advance the company’s mission.

Grifols has been in a period of growth ever since he joined the company, Santillan explains, and has overseen a number of key mergers and acquisitions over the years. Cielo created a unique recruitment process and has worked with Grifols to fill critical staff openings in the United States—despite last-minute curveballs that have been thrown their way. “One of the things I think is so critical to Cielo specifically is that they really wanted to understand our business,” he says. “They have been a great partner since day one.”

For his part, Santillan has worked to ensure that employees from acquired companies feel a part of the company culture at Grifols. He has also helped the company adapt to other changes, including Grifols’ adoption of a service model.

As Santillan explains, the pharmaceutical/healthcare industry doesn’t always prioritize service. Under the leadership of Peter Allen, president and CEO of Grifols Plasma Operations, the company decided to change its mindset. “Peter brought forth this idea of a change of culture to a true

Victor Santillan Head of HR and Senior Director of Grifols Plasma Operations Grifols Inc.

service model that flips the pyramid upside down: employees become the person you support, and those of us in the office in supportive roles are at the bottom of that pyramid supporting upwards,” the senior director explains.

Santillan’s commitment to his work stems in part from his passion for the company’s purpose. “Grifols’ mission is to improve the health and well-being of people around the world. How cool is that? You’re in an industry that saves lives,” he says.

But the Grifols mission is only part of what inspires Santillan every day in his work as head of HR. He was the first person in his family to attend college, where he learned he had a genetic learning disability. He knows firsthand how hard it can be to not only break into an industry but to thrive within it.

That insight is why Santillan often asks managers he works with, “How do you want to be remembered? What is going to be in your eulogy as a manager?” Asking these questions has allowed Santillan to focus on what kind of leader he wants to be: someone who helps others grow and flourish, someone who hopes to “inspire even one individual to enter into HR or just continue to grow in their own career.”

More than anything, Santillan says, he hopes to help others believe in themselves and work determinedly toward their goals. “I think the drive is what’s key,” he explains. “You can’t really waver from what you want to do or what you want to be in life. And sometimes you need to make a right or left turn, and that’s fine—as long as that drive still carries you forward to the person that you want to be.”

“The drive is what’s key. You can’t really waver from what you want to do or what you want to be in life.”

Expert interpreter Berta Alicia Bejarano advocates for patients of all different backgrounds and experiences at Kaiser Permanente

The Language of Compassion

BY BILLY YOST

THE ESSENTIAL FUNCTION OF THOSE with multiple language skill sets wasn’t always as highly valued as it is today. Berta Alicia Bejarano, director of orthopedics, podiatry, physical medicine, diversity, equity, inclusion, language equity/access, and ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act), services at Kaiser Permanente, doesn’t have to think hard about the first time she found herself in trouble for being bilingual. In high school, Bejarano and her friend were suspended from school for the high crime of conversing in a language that wasn’t English.

Berta Alicia Bejarano Orthopedics, Podiatry & Physical Medicine Director of Equity, Inclusion & Diversity, Language Equity/Access & ADA Services Kaiser Permanente

But the punishment couldn’t do more damage than the inspiration her high school Spanish teacher had provided the young student, and Bejarano would go on to achieve outstanding success as a court interpreter, somehow completely bypassing the usual protocol of state-employed interpreters getting called up to federal positions. She passed her federal exam on the first attempt, and also became the only interpreter to ever be hired at the California Judicial Council Interpreter Program for the State of California.

“I am grateful for where I am,” Bejarano says, speaking from her office at Kaiser Permanente. “Look at all of the doors that have been opened for me because I speak Spanish.”

Today, Bejarano enjoys a plethora of duties—part of her continuing evolution at Kaiser Permanente. The director currently leads six different departments, and all of these opportunities, she says, came from her first passion: the desire to advocate for patients with the best language services possible. Today, Bejarano helps Kaiser Permanente continue to help and support an increasingly diverse patient population.

“I always tell our interpreters that I want our team to lead with quality,” she says. “There is always slang that can be used, but I ask my team to always act as if they’re interpreting for a dignitary. We want to provide care for our patients using the language that they understand the best. They’re in an intimate setting, and they’re coming to us to talk about their health.”

Bejarano explains that people put in a stressful environment will naturally revert to the language in which they are most comfortable. An emergency room patient or one being confronted with difficult and important news doesn’t just deserve to understand what is happening; they deserve to be served with the same compassion and humanity that any English speaker would receive.

For some time, Kaiser Permanente was offering both in-person interpreters and a telephone interpreting service to assist patients. But Bejarano recognized that in some instances an interpreter wasn’t always available in time.

That is why Bejarano and her team implemented tablet technology that provides a live interpreter, capable of speaking everything from Cantonese to Farsi, with the touch of a button. “Our doctors are sometimes visiting twenty patients a day,” the director explains. “They don’t have minutes to spare. That is

why I charged myself with providing a service that connects in thirty seconds or less.”

The interpreter platform has also provided extended benefits to another patient community that often has to fight for equity: deaf patients are now able to access American Sign Language interpreters in a matter of seconds. For the organization’s blind patients, Kaiser Permanente provides a script reader that talks patients through their medication from the comfort of their own homes.

As the leader of Kaiser Permanente’s equity, inclusion, and diversity council, Bejarano says that working on behalf of patients is second nature. “When you’re interpreting for the court, you are not the advocate for the litigant,” the director explains. “When you’re interpreting for healthcare, it is your utmost responsibility to advocate for the patient.” But it’s not always easy.

“There is always inequity and disparity,” Bejarano says frankly. “We know this across

the board, and COVID-19 just amplified this for so many of our minority populations. People may be fortunate enough to have healthcare, and they may have access to that healthcare, but do they have bilingual physicians or services available to them that ensure they will have positive outcomes for years to come?”

Language services is just one of the six departments that Bejarano leads, but it’s one that is both vitally important and often underrecognized: everyone deserves empathy and compassion, regardless of what language comes most naturally to them. It’s good to know there are people like Bejarano making sure those patients receive treatment that, in all things, leads with quality.

Editor’s note: At the time of press, Berta Alicia Bejarano had accepted a new role at Kaiser Permanente as the TPMG practice leader for language services, access, and equity for Northern California.

“I ask my team to lead as if they’re interpreting for a dignitary.”

The Benefits of Giving

General Counsel Deanna

EVEN AS A CHILD, DEANNA SALAZAR knew what she wanted out of a career— opportunities to help improve others’ lives. Today, she fulfills that passion in her role as chief administration officer and general counsel at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Arizona (BCBSAZ), as well as through her various positions as a board member for organizations such as Teach For America and Expect More (now known as College Success Arizona). These opportunities have enabled her to drive change at both the individual and community level.

ing the Peace Corps after obtaining her JD. She soon realized, however, that the Peace Corps was more in need of medical professionals, teachers, and engineers than they were of attorneys. Pivoting to private practice, Salazar joined Phoenix-based law firm, Lewis and Roca (now known as Lewis Roca Rothgerber Christie), where she eventually became partner.

“It was the first place where I was exposed to people who were not only going to teach me how to practice law but also teach me how to get involved in the community,” Salazar says.

BY CHARLES S. DONNAVAN

A graduate of the Arizona State University College of Law, Salazar considered join-

Salazar continued to build out her experience as senior counsel at both Wells Fargo

Salazar looks beyond the traditional scope of a legal role to fulfill her lifelong dream of helping others

Deanna Salazar Chief Administration Officer and General Counsel Blue Cross Blue Shield of Arizona

Bank and professional employer organization Employee Solutions before joining BCBSAZ in 1999 as associate general counsel. Before her promotion to her current role, she served the insurance company as senior vice president, general counsel, and vice president of human resources.

“Most of my work at BCBSAZ is contracts, regulatory work, and implementation,” she explains. “There has been some pretty significant federal legislation that has either come out through executive orders or legislation in the past three or four months, and the scope of those policies is actually bigger than the Affordable Care Act. We play a big role in analyzing all of that and making sure not just that we implement it but that we’re optimizing business strategies and opportunities that the legislation may bring to us.”

Salazar is also responsible for managing BCBSAZ’s office of the Corporate Ombudsman, the company’s state and federal legislative activities, and, importantly, its Community Health Advancement efforts. In the first three months of 2021, BCBSAZ provided support to two state-run vaccination sites at Chandler–Gilbert Community College in Chandler, Arizona, and at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona. According to Salazar, the state of Arizona sent out a call for assistance, asking for volunteers to help run the 24/7 drive-through at the Glendale site— and BCBSAZ employees readily volunteered their time.

From January 11 through early March of 2021, Salazar says, hundreds of BCBSAZ volunteers traveled every day to Glendale, where they were met by BCBSAZ employees

who had taken temporary assignments as site leads and site managers. On March 3, when the Chandler–Gilbert site opened, BCBSAZ volunteers transitioned their efforts to that site and continued to support both patients and clinical staff. Salazar and her team had provided legal support to help get the site up and running, and when it opened, she volunteered yet more of her time, helping to direct traffic flow and check in patients.

Volunteering was a remarkably emotional experience for many reasons, Salazar says, including the fact that she had lost someone very close to her to shortly before vaccines became available.

“We witnessed tears of joy and were thanked by so many of the 496,000 patients that came through the vaccine sites,” Salazar says. “We knew it would be a big ask and require the utmost bravery to take on the tremendous lift, but working together as a team allowed us to accomplish something truly amazing for our state.”

Despite the impact she has already made, Salazar is determined to continue giving back. As a board member, mentor, an advocate for diversity, equity and inclusion, and community leader, she and her team at BCBSAZ are proud to inspire health and continue to serve their community.

“We knew it would be a big ask and require the utmost bravery to take on the tremendous lift, but working together as a team allowed us to accomplish something truly amazing for our state.”

Inspired to Lead

Henry Enrique Toledo entered the HR industry because of the example his mother set. Today, as chief people officer at Valet Living, he works to ensure that both the business and employees can grow and thrive.

BY KEITH LORIA

Henry Enrique Toledo Chief People Officer Valet Living

Hispanic Executive

Growing up in New York City, Henry Enrique

His father decided to move back to Peru when he was just four years old, so his mom had to figure out how to support them both. Toledo still remembers the day his mom went to his father’s former boss and told him in broken English that she needed to work. He gave her a job driving a delivery truck.

“She’s barely five feet tall and she would sit on the yellow pages to be able to see, and she did that for a number of years,” Toledo recalls. “Once I was at the point where I needed to make a decision on a major, it sunk in me: what would be better than a job where you can give people opportunities to take care of their families?”

That realization drove Toledo to earn a degree in human resource management from Georgia State University and his MBA from Temple University. He also completed an intensive HR management program at Duke University, and for almost three decades has focused on cultivating his expertise in the field.

JUST A MATTER OF TIME

Today, Toledo serves as chief people officer for Valet Living, a nationally recognized organization that provides amenities such as doorstep recycling and trash pickup, pet visits, package delivery, cleaning and laundry services, and fitness classes to the multifamily housing industry. In that role, he’s responsible for guiding the development and implementation of the company’s people strategies, including recruiting, organizational development, learning and development, total rewards, performance management, and culture for an organization of more than eight thousand associates nationwide.

“I would say 90 percent of what I do every day has nothing to do with human resources, yet all of it has

“One of Valet Living’s leadership standards is to ‘Be better tomorrow than we are today.’”

Toledo saw firsthand the role that businesses can play in supporting families.

to do with people,” Toledo says. “I’m fortunate that I don’t have barriers in the scope of my work and get to be a true business leader and advisor to our CEO and executive team.”

Before joining the company in 2017, Toledo’s career journey included stints at Fortune 200 companies such as ADP, WellCare Health Plans, and Citigroup Inc., where he led a global learning, talent, and performance operation.

“I have worked for a lot of large companies—but I’ve also worked for some very small companies and have been fortunate to run every function in HR,” Toledo says. “Ten years into my career, I knew I wanted to be a chief officer, and it was just a matter of time.”

When he was offered the position at Valet Living, Toledo knew this was the opportunity he had been waiting for—to drive culture and help the organization grow while transforming the role of HR.

COMMUNICATION, CULTURE, COMMUNITY

Toledo calls his leadership style “a work in progress” and sometimes chuckles when he hears others describe their style. Any description, he elaborates, means that one’s leadership style is static, finite. “One of Valet Living’s leadership standards is to ‘Be better tomorrow than we are today,’” he says.

As chief people officer, Toledo is committed to improving himself as a leader as well as empowering others to continue in their own professional development. He follows a 70-20-10 development philosophy: as he sees it, 70 percent of an employee’s growth should come from the job experience in a very intentional way, 20 percent should come from exposure (e.g., to

mentors, reading materials, and Ted Talks), and 10 percent should come from classroom learning.

“It’s also called the three Es: experience, exposure, education,” Toledo says. “I didn’t come up with it, but I believe very strongly in it.”

But despite his passion for this work, Toledo hopes that, eventually, the HR function will be matured into extinction.

“I’ll be doing this forty-five years by the time I retire, and I absolutely want to strive to mature HR in such a way that it simply bends into the fabric of an organization. The reason is that much of human resources—including talent planning, coaching and development, and performance—should be part of the business,” he explains. “Every leader should be a human resources professional and take on those responsibilities.”

As chief people officer, Toledo works hard to integrate the HR department into the broader business. “Our Valet Living HR leaders know this business from all angles,” he explains. “Communication and culture have improved. I host an internal podcast with the CEO, and we share it with all eight thousand associates: they are basically listening in on our one-on-ones. We are pushing that information in an effective manner, and that helps to drive culture in a simple way.”

He also has been instrumental in the company’s diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, empowering the Valet Living DEI council to help in strategic planning and developing initiatives centered around everyday bias, internal hiring and promotion efforts, and the data underlying the company’s efforts.

Today, Toledo knows that he is exactly where he is supposed to be. And for that he thanks his mom, who from the very beginning helped him understand the power of community, family, and hard work.

“In the work I do every day, I see many talented people like my mom,” he says. “That’s why I work as hard as I do and am excited about what I do.”

First Advantage congratulates Henry Enrique Toledo and Valet Living on this welldeserved honor! We are proud to deliver comprehensive background check and drug testing solutions to help Valet Living make confident employment choices. For more detailed information on First Advantage products and services, call 844.317.5232 or visit fadv.com.

“In the work I do every day, I see many talented people like my mom. That’s why I work as hard as I do and am excited about what I do.”

Andrés Acebo was compelled to succeed on behalf of his immigrant parents, but now he’s found his true calling: helping those who need him most

Righting the Ship

BY BILLY YOST

THERE IS A NAUTICAL COMPASS ON display in the office of Andrés Acebo, interim chief of staff and secretary to the board of trustees as well as assistant university counsel at New Jersey City University (NJCU). The compass was used by his father, a native of Pinar del Río, Cuba, during the harrowing journey Acebo’s father took on a small craft in pursuit of freedom nearly sixty years ago.

Following his rescue by the American Coast Guard, Acebo’s father was assisted by Catholic Charities as well as the US government. Eventually, he met Acebo’s mother, born in Manzanillo, Cuba, who had also fled Cuba with her family to avoid political persecution. The two would likely never have met in Cuba, as they were from completely separate parts of the island, but they were brought together in the United States.

Andrés Acebo Interim Chief of Staff and Secretary to the Board of Trustees Assistant University Counsel New Jersey City University

The compass that Acebo’s father carried with him throughout his journey and during his years in the US has motivated Acebo his whole life. On a relentless mission to prove just how far the son of immigrants could make it, Acebo—the son of a waiter and a secretary—went on to attend both Brown University and Rutgers Law School and made partner incredibly early in his career.

Acebo seemed to have the world at his fingertips. There was no ceiling to the money he could make or reputation he could build.

But now, as a “recovered overachiever,” Acebo can tell that that wasn’t the path for him. The compass hadn’t steered him in the wrong direction; he just hadn’t been reading it right.

“Everything in my career had become about what could come next,” the lawyer explains. “It was all about trying to see how much distance I could create from where my family and I started. I found professional success, but it wasn’t giving me true joy. I hadn’t found personal fulfillment.”

Acebo knows his story is a familiar one: that of child who grew up with a self-imposed burden of “ultimate success” and a burning desire to make his parents proud after all the traumatic circumstances they went through to make a better life for themselves and their family.

A CALLING AND A MISSION

Today, Acebo has found joy in reconnecting with his old stomping grounds of Union City and West New York, New Jersey, and the surrounding area. The lawyer is now leveraging his extensive experience representing municipalities, county governments, public school districts, county colleges, and independent public authorities on behalf of NJCU, an institution that has acted as a launchpad for first-generation minority and Hispanic students for decades.

“I’m now working in service of a public anchor institution—a federally recognized, minority-serving, and Hispanic-serving university in the county that raised me and shaped me,” Acebo explains. “The part that I love so much about being a lawyer is being an advocate, a problem-solver, and a strategic partner. I love preparing and navigating legal arguments to protect and defend individual interests and positions.

“But the professional experiences that I most rejoiced in were the quiet, privileged ones,” he continues, “the ones where I found myself in rooms with people that had to make very difficult and important decisions and who would turn to me to help guide them through the strategy and legal ramifications of their options.”

Many of those decision-makers, Acebo says, were leading communities like his hometown. Those individuals needed “more than just an understanding of arcane legal procedures or difficult-to-understand judicial precedents,” the lawyer says. “They needed perspective and independent judgment. Those experiences led me to seize the opportunity to serve in my current role. I get to use my education and my experiences every day to help drive NJCU’s mission of not just changing the course of individual lives but building communities that are empowered to break through systemic and structural barriers to prosperity.”

The lawyer’s off-the-clock activities include service for nonprofits working to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion. He currently serves the Hispanic National Bar Association (HNBA) as a regional deputy president and as the chair on the HNBA’s special committee on Cuba.

The HNBA has played a pivotal role in Acebo’s career, and he credits much of his professional accomplishments to the organization and its leadership—individuals that look at the statistics that reveal less than 4 percent of all lawyers in the US to be of Hispanic or Latino descent and are committed to moving the needle.

He personally credits individuals like HNBA’s immediate past president Irene Oria, who (to his mind) personifies the very best of the organization’s commitment to championing its community. “She has generously mentored me and given me the great gift of believing in me from a thousand miles away,” Acebo notes. “She has given me a platform to

“I found professional success, but it wasn’t giving me true joy. I hadn’t found personal fulfillment.”

use the power of our shared background and personal narrative to advocate for and shine a light on the sacrifices our families endured so that their promise could be realized through their children.”

He also serves as a board member for the Cuban American Alliance for Leadership and Education (CAALE), which recently won the Nonprofit of the Year Award from the Statewide Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of New Jersey. CAALE is renowned for its incredible efforts to financially support college students, promote the leadership development of first-generation students, and facilitate cultural educational experiences designed to enable students to become strong, valuable leaders in society.

Even further, Acebo recently joined the board of the North Hudson Community Action Foundation, which he served as legal counsel while in private practice and helped support during the organization’s heroic response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

These are all byproducts of Acebo’s passion for making the community that raised him a better place for minorities and Latinx people.

CRISIS AND COMMITMENT

Looking back, Acebo points to the COVID-19 pandemic as a turning point and a motivator for his transition to NJCU. The idea of standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the constituencies he both felt a part of and could support throughout that crisis, of leaning wholeheartedly into the organization’s mission—Acebo realized that what he was doing and what he wanted to do were two different things, and he needed to commit firmly to the latter.

The decision to forge a new path for himself would be made all the more clear when Acebo lost his cousin to COVID-19. His youngest son was also hospitalized for nearly three weeks right at the beginning of the national shutdown. New Jersey City University— which had been a signpost of success for his wife, his motherin-law, and his grandmother-in-law—was the opportunity the lawyer had been looking for to bring his entire self and all his passions to his work.

As of June 2021, Acebo is only five months into the job, but you can hear his happiness in his voice. His day job is now completely aligned with the countless hours he’s dedicated to his community in his spare time. Recently, he got to shake the hand of an NJCU graduate, a childhood classmate whose own journey had taken several twists and turns but who had finally found success.

Today, Acebo knows that the success he craved on behalf of his parents was leading him down a path he was not charting for himself. His ship is now righted, and he knows where he belongs.

US News & World Report ranked us the best public school in New Jersey for ethnic diversity.

Ten years after graduation, our alumni earn 22% more than the national average income.

As home of the Debt-Free Promise, we are committed to making college accessible.

njcu.edu/gamechange

After joining T-Mobile as a paralegal, Elida Moran worked her way up to director of legal affairs—a journey she credits to her work ethic, professional network, and family support

Don’t Wait for an Invitation

BY LINDSEY LUBOWITZ

ELIDA MORAN IS CURRENTLY THE director of legal affairs for telecommunications giant T-Mobile—but her professional success has not come easily. Moran comes from a family of “first-generationers”: her great-grandmother emigrated from Norway, her maternal grandfather from Mexico, and her father from Peru. Her father met her mother while living in Seattle—he was only fifteen credits shy of a degree when Moran’s parents found out they were pregnant with her, so her father decided to instead become a welder.

Because he was not able to officially receive his degree, Moran’s parents and grandmother made it their mission to prioritize her

education, and she took that seriously. She attended the University of Washington for her undergraduate studies, and while there, decided that she wanted to pursue a JD.

In between her studies, Moran secured a position in the banking industry to try to save up money to pay for law school. However, she quickly realized that she would not be able to do it without taking out a loan—a realization that made her all the more appreciative of the value of her graduate education.

“Funding law school on my own gave me a sense of, ‘I really need to get this and do well,’” Moran recalls. “I loved to read, and I loved the analysis, and I loved to learn . . . I really treated it like a job.”

Elida Moran Director of Legal Affairs

T-Mobile

None of her family members were lawyers, Moran notes, so she learned key skills like networking all on her own. Soon after law school, she landed a job as a contract paralegal at T-Mobile. Initially, she was tasked with simple data entry—but Moran was determined to take on more responsibility. “The way that I was brought up is that you just jump in and help,” she explains. “You just roll up your sleeves; you’re not waiting for an invitation to do something.”

Moran’s willingness to help did not go unnoticed, and she quickly caught the attention of one of T-Mobile’s in-house attorneys.

“Based just on her observations of me willing to do just about anything to help the team, she said, ‘I really need help managing the commercial leasing portfolio. I’d like to offer you a job. It won’t be an attorney job because we don’t hire right out of law school, but I will commit to training you so that you will learn the business and learn what’s needed in order to advance to an attorney position,’” Moran recalls. She took the position because she loved the business aspect of corporate law.

Ever since that day, Moran has dedicated herself to mentoring others. As director of legal affairs, she makes a point of leading by example and aspires to be seen by others the way that she saw her own mentors. If law students want to meet to talk about a corporate position, she makes the time.

She also learned a lot about taking ownership to manage her career by being selected as a T-Mobile LCLD (Leadership Council on Legal Diversity) 2018 Fellow and a HNBA LELP (Latina Executive Leadership Program) participant. These experiences helped her become a better manager. “As a manager, it’s also incumbent upon me to know my team’s career goals in order to help them advance,” she emphasizes.

The strong relationships Moran has cultivated at T-Mobile, including relationships with T-Mobile’s partners, have set both her and the company up for further success. As

Ramina Dehkhoda-Steele, partner in charge at Wong Fleming, remarks, “Wong Fleming is a strong supporter of NAMWOLF (The National Association of Minority & Women Owned Law Firms) and its purpose. It is through Ms. Moran’s tireless advocacy, combined with NAMWOLF’s role as facilitator, that Wong Fleming is now counsel to T-Mobile.”

Moran also makes a point of connecting with and supporting individuals and organizations beyond T-Mobile. “Growing up, there weren’t any Peruvians that we knew of in Seattle, but my mom, being born and raised here, makes it home,” she says. Because the number of Peruvian lawyers is even smaller than that of Peruvian Americans, Moran is always excited to meet any fellow Peruvian lawyer.

To further connect with both the Latino community and other diverse attorneys, she stays actively involved with the Hispanic National Bar Association (Corporate Counsel Section), the Latino Bar Association of Washington, and is a board member of both the Association of Corporate Counsel of Washington and LEAD-WA (Legal Employers Advancing Diversity in Washington).

In her LEAD-WA role, Moran can connect with diverse 1L law students at the three Washington law schools and support T-Mobile’s summer legal interns as they start their careers. She has also served on numerous Parent Teacher Student Association boards to ensure that equity is prioritized within her daughters’ schools.

According to Moran, these organizations have connected her with countless impressive people and attorneys. She tries to attend as many of their events as possible, even if she needs to pay for them out of pocket.

The HNBA holds a special place in her heart. “When I first walked into an HNBA event, I didn’t know anybody,” she says. “But once I stepped in the door, instantly people started introducing themselves to me, and there were a few people I did know since the

Latino legal community is relatively small. Being largely introverted, I just felt welcomed to the family and a sense of belonging.”

Despite all the strong connections she has made in the legal field, Moran remains most grateful for the support she has received and continues to see from her family. About a year ago, her youngest daughter interviewed Moran’s father for a school project. He said, “Your mom has done such incredible work. She’s worked really hard. She’s become really successful, and she did it all on her own.”

Moran remembers tearing up when she heard this. She would not be where she is today, she stresses, without her father’s sacrifices, her parents’ commitment to providing her with education opportunities, and most importantly, her family’s love. And not a single day goes by that she forgets that fact. Moran hopes to provide this same support to her daughters.

Wong Fleming is a national AV-Rated law firm. Recognized for combining exceptional client service with innovative and creative solutions, Wong Fleming seeks to ensure the success of each client in a cost e ective and e cient manner.

TRANSACTIONAL (TECHNOLOGY, PROCUREMENT, PRIVACY)

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

IMMIGRATION & EMPLOYMENT

REAL

CIVIL

Wong Fleming is one of the largest women and minority owned law firms in the United States. Wong Fleming is National Minority Supplier Development Council (NMSDC) and Women Business Enterprise National Council (WBENC) certified and a long-standing member of National Association of Minority & Women Owned Law Firms (NAMWOLF). wongfleming.com

“The way that I was brought up is that you just jump in and help. I mean, you just roll up your sleeves; you don’t wait for an invitation to do something.”

STRATEGY

What is your secret to successful leadership?

The impressive executives featured here share theirs, and they are strategies that engage both the mind and the heart.

40. Karla Valle, Beecan Health 48. Clara Jimenez, Johnson & Johnson 53. Alejandro Huerta, Tucker Powersports 56. Claudia Sanchez Wilson, Zynga 58. Susana Pichardo, Convey Health Solutions

Better People,

Better Companies

BY BILLY YOST PORTRAITS BY PHILIP CHEUNG

Karla Valle has a knack for delivering big. As the first-ever CFO at Beecan Health, she’s worked to build a robust, mission-driven finance program that’s more about people and less about numbers.

WHEN KARLA VALLE WAS OFFERED A POSITION as area chief financial officer at Kaiser Permanente in 2012, she felt she was at least a year away from being prepared for the role. Not only that, but her first task as CFO would be to find $50 million and resolve a financial gap within the organization.

Valle had applied for the role in large part because of her mentor, who had urged her to vie for the job. But that did not stop her from diving into challenges head-on once she actually secured the position: from the outset, she worked to collaborate with those around her in order to establish a clear plan of action. “I remember my first department meeting as CFO,” Valle says. “We had about a hundred people there, and I remember thinking that there was no way I could do this by myself. I needed every person in that room to feel ownership for those numbers.”

Valle organized the meeting attendees into cross-functional groups: people from nursing, engineering, and financial departments put their heads together to find answers. The goal was clear, Valle explains. “Whenever organizations are overbudget or trying to cut expenses, it’s always the same question: ‘Who do we get rid of?’ I did not want to cut anybody. It may be more difficult, but it keeps people whole.”

By the time Valle left six years later, successfully navigating a $50 million gap was the least of her accomplishments: in her tenure as CFO, she had

helped transform the medical center’s entire financial outlook, securing the medical center a number one spot in the program from both a financial and quality perspective.

SEEKING OPPORTUNITY

That success ultimately led Valle to her current role as the first-ever CFO for Beecan Health, a cuttingedge company dedicated to serving and supporting skilled nursing facilities in Southern California. In her video interview with Hispanic Executive, she sits behind a large desk with an incredible view of downtown Glendale, California. The view is perfect, idyllic—particularly when contrasted with the hardship of her arrival to America from Guatemala in 1982.

Valle’s mom was granted asylum in the United States after her life was threatened, but when Valle and her brother attempted to obtain visas to enter the country legally, they were denied. She entered the US without documentation under the cover of blankets in a back seat of a van, relying on her aunt and uncle to help her safely reunite with her mom.

“I believe there is an extraordinary resilience within every immigrant that comes to this country,” Valle reflects. “All politics and shortcomings aside, I still believe this is a land of opportunity. Success is defined differently for everyone, but whatever that is for you, I believe it can be achieved if you have the will.”

“My job is to hire unicorns. I can hire any expert, but I look beyond a person’s function or job title and give them the opportunity to offer the added value of truly being themselves and letting their talents show.”

HIDDEN TALENT

For Valle, those opportunities include helping build Beecan’s financial program from the ground up. As the organization’s first CFO, Valle had a blank slate when she came on board. “My first duty was to hire a controller, an analytics team, and then bring all of our functions—including accounting, finance, and budgeting—in-house,” Valle explains. “The good news was we got to create everything from scratch. The bad news was also that we had to create everything from scratch.”

BUILDING A LEGACY

Valle’s efforts to strengthen the finance team extend beyond hiring. She strives to remind her team members of their real mission, something she has done successfully in previous roles as well. One day, she decided to bring her Kaiser team members to an intensive care unit. “I wanted them to remember when someone comes to them for extra staff or a new piece of equipment and understand where those [requests] were coming from,” Valle explains. “I really felt the need to humanize what we are doing as nonclinicians, and [explain] why it matters to have discussions with our nursing staff.”

Valle has purposefully sought out unique specialists with diverse experience and backgrounds. Her controller is from the restaurant industry. Another leader is from manufacturing. “If we’re going to form the most trusted skilled nursing facilities for your loved ones, then we need to create an environment that generates great ideas,” the CFO says. “The only way to accomplish that is through finding different backgrounds and experiences, and hiring people who are smarter than me.”

The CFO sees her team building efforts as a chance to bring together the best from all fields in a nurturing environment where they can thrive. “My job is to hire unicorns. I can hire any expert, but I look beyond a person’s function or job title and give them the opportunity to offer the added value of truly being themselves and letting their talents show.”

Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, the CFO and her team have continued to roll out new systems and processes that have helped Beecan put its best foot forward, including a new accounting system, HRIS, and a new, easy-access payroll system for employees. “All of these would be implemented one-at-atime at a normal company,” Valle notes. “But we felt like this was a foundational year at Beecan, in which we needed to put all of these pieces together to strive to be best in class.”

As Valle has worked to build a legacy for Beecan Health, she has reflected on her personal journey, as well as that of her parents. Her mother, she explains, worked for the telegraph company in Guatemala but gave up her professional life for many years to clean houses in California. Now a retired financial counselor, her mother still isn’t entirely sure just how high her daughter has climbed. “I’ve tried to explain that I wouldn’t have been her boss, but her boss’s boss would have reported to me,” the CFO says, laughing. “Maybe this article will help her see how far we’ve come.”

“I believe there is an extraordinary resilience within every immigrant that comes to this country.”

Where Chemistry and Counsel Converge

BY LUCY CAVANAGH

Clara Jimenez has two great passions: the law and science. As senior counsel at Johnson & Johnson, she leverages them both to help drive critical healthcare solutions.

Clara Jimenez Senior Counsel, Patent Litigation Johnson & Johnson

“One of the earliest memories that I have of being attracted to science was when my grandmother, who raised me, survived a heart attack,” Jimenez says. “I became infatuated with the work of cardiologists—I wanted to know all about the heart and how it worked.”

Jimenez graduated top of her high school class in Colombia, but when her family immigrated to the US shortly thereafter, she faced brand-new challenges to navigating and pursuing an education. “After moving to Boston, I was in a very interesting situation because suddenly, going to college became a more realistic option than it had been. But I had also landed in this place where I couldn’t even speak the basics of the language,” Jimenez recalls. “And so it was a really transformational period for me, because I didn’t even know where to start.”

Jimenez went on to be the first member of her family to graduate from college; she began by studying chemistry but quickly switched to chemical engineering when she realized how advantageous that degree could be for future professional opportunities.

After graduation, she landed her first job as a process engineer, in which role she helped design and start up chemical plants. But the role was formative because of more than just the technical processes she learned.

“I think that’s when I started to become cognizant of the lack of representation of Latinas in STEM. Oftentimes, I would be the only woman in the site, or the only non-native English speaker,” Jimenez reflects. “Those days really shaped my ability to adapt and work with people from different backgrounds, and just be comfortable being in those spaces where it was unusual to see someone like me walking around.”

Later in her career, however, Jimenez began to fear that her day-to-day was in danger of becoming repetitive and that she would eventually get bored. Looking to expand her horizons, she decided to apply for a PhD program. But friends and colleagues also pointed out that she had the makings for a great lawyer.

“At first I just laughed and said, ‘Have you not heard me speak English?’” Jimenez

IMAGINE THE POSSIBILITIES

When Clara Jimenez isn’t working at Johnson & Johnson, she can be found lending a hand as a volunteer Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA). She works directly with children in the New Jersey foster care system—many of whom are from Latin America—who have experienced abuse and neglect and are in need of a permanency plan. “Sometimes I am the first person they come in contact with that is also a native Spanish speaker,” Jimenez says. “I get to share a little bit of my experience with them and encourage them to imagine life outside their immediate box of possibilities. It’s a full-circle moment.”

Clara Jimenez has been drawn to science for as long as she can remember. She recalls getting fixed on medical and chemical questions when she was a young girl living in Colombia.

recalls. “In fact, one of my favorite things in engineering was that when I was at a loss for words, I could come up with an equation, formula, or diagram that could speak for me. But then again, I’m a really curious person, and so I decided to also study and prepare for the LSAT.”

In what Jimenez describes as “divine timing,” her two letters of acceptance arrived at the same time, and she was given the freedom to choose between the two paths. “It was very empowering to have these two letters before me and to know that I could make a choice,” Jimenez says. “Ultimately, I decided to go to Boston College Law School because the opportunity to learn a completely different body of knowledge was very appealing to me.”

After law school, Jimenez dug into patent law at Finnegan in Boston and Washington, DC. Her scientific background turned out to be an extraordinary asset as she helped her team craft

and defend patents. Even her earliest interest, in cardiology, resurfaced when she needed to become an expert in defibrillation for one of her cases. “That is really where I noticed the common thread through my whole career. I am curious and I love to solve complex problems. My approach to science is not that different from how I tackle my legal strategy questions,” Jimenez explains. “There is always a goal, and I see my legal knowledge as another tool to accomplish an outcome.”

The Changing Face of Leadership

Now a senior counsel in patent litigation at pharma giant Johnson & Johnson, Jimenez gets to exercise her scientific prowess every day— and constantly learn about the newest technologies, products, and therapies that both her company and its competitors are developing.

“This is really my dream job,” Jimenez enthuses. “What I’ve found about myself over the years is that in my core, I like to find solutions— that’s how I thrive. My work at Johnson & Johnson allows me to exercise that part of myself daily.”

As Jimenez explains, her ability to visualize solutions extends to both her leadership of her team and her passion for advancing women of color in intellectual property law and STEM fields. “I can easily connect seemingly unrelated people and concepts to maximize impact,” she says. “And I am intentional about understanding the people I engage with. As an immigrant, I have felt unseen and unheard so many times that I want to make sure that whenever someone works or interacts with me, regardless of the scenario or substantive outcome, each person leaves knowing that their opinion was heard and it mattered.”

“We are proud of our partnership with Johnson & Johnson’s Clara Jimenez. We admire Clara’s leadership and dedication to improving the lives of patients and underprivileged children in the United States and South America. We congratulate Clara on this very welldeserved recognition.” –Irena Royzman, Partner, Kramer Levin

“As an immigrant, I have felt unseen and unheard so many times that I want to make sure that whenever someone works or interacts with me . . . each person leaves knowing that their opinion was heard and it mattered.”

Kramer Levin salutes corporate America’s Hispanic leaders and is committed to promoting diversity and inclusion.

CFO Alejandro Huerta has helped transform Tucker Powersports into a profitable organization—and is now guiding the business toward even more ambitious goals

Powering to the Front of the Pack

BY KEITH LORIA

ALEJANDRO HUERTA CREDITS HIS CAREER and life success to a willingness to learn and open-mindedness to others’ ideas. It is those values that have made him such a strong leader—and propelled him to his current position as chief financial officer at Tucker Powersports.

Growing up in Tucson, Arizona, Huerta was something of a math whiz and was interested in business early on. He studied accounting and finance at Western New Mexico University and landed a job at then-defense contractor Raytheon, directly out of college.

“That’s where I first got my experience in finance: I learned how to do analytics and use systems,” he recalls. “It was also in those first two years of working that I learned that if you want to make something of yourself, you have to set your own course and do your own thing.”

Huerta’s journey to make something of himself included a position as senior finan-

cial analyst at Jarden Corporation, a startup based in Rye, New York. Huerta was impressed with the company’s entrepreneurial spirit and the passion of the employees who were looking to change the world.

“Being an analyst, and to meet the CEO in my interview, that was crazy,” he recounts. “That attitude and spirit has gotten me so far in my career—that willingness to do anything.”

Huerta spent five years in the corporate office at Jarden before moving into the operating businesses: he dedicated himself to learning about every aspect of the company and raising his hand for any challenging project that came his way. “I spent time in China, and I spent time in South Africa. I really didn’t have any business leading those projects because I’d never done them—I was a finance guy—but I told them I would figure it out and make sure the projects were successful, and they let me run with it,” he says. “That ambition really lent itself to Jarden’s culture.”

Over the course of eleven years, Huerta rose to the position of operating CFO for Jarden Home Brands. In that role, he was responsible for the entire group—which was doing more than $500 million in revenue and had $100 million in earnings—and continued to focus on creating close partnerships with the operations department.

After leaving Jarden, Huerta spent two years as a consultant for a private equity group, which enabled him to fill some “cool” interim CFO roles at hotels, casino gaming businesses, and other businesses he never thought he would be able to work with.

In 2019, Tucker Powersports came calling. The Fort Worth, Texas-based distribution company was coming out of bankruptcy, and Huerta was hired to make it profitable. He did just that, turning things around quickly and creating value in a company that is now poised to double its profits in 2021 over a very strong 2020.

According to the CFO, his success was founded in reorganizing the business and setting up strategic initiatives and processes that made a difference for Tucker on a day-today basis.

“It took a lot of hard work, but through analytics, right-sizing the business, and having great business partners to see where the shortfalls were, we drove things forward,” he explains. “We added solid but not overly complicated policies and procedures to put some guardrails up around the business, which was quite frankly a little bit like the Wild West. And we exponentially improved the profitability.”

As CFO, Huerta oversees Tucker’s finance, accounting and IT teams and works on cost reduction, cost efficiency, automation, and financial integration projects. But to his mind, one of his most significant

“That attitude and spirit has gotten me so far in my career— that willingness to do anything.”

Alejandro Huerta CFO Tucker Powersports

responsibilities is to partner with the business and its leadership.

“The way I look at it is, the CFO is the number two to the CEO: we’re in this together,” he says. “We’re business partners. We bounce ideas off each other, and we are the two people who are fully responsible for delivering the business results to the board of directors.”

Huerta credits his team with being a major part of the company’s turnaround and success.

“Being a good leader is about listening,” he says. “I don’t know everything and am still relatively young in my career, so I think the most important part is giving my team a voice and the opportunity to come to me with ideas and to let me know when they think things aren’t working or are working well.”

Huerta tells his team members he is always there to offer help and direction, in terms of both their work at Tucker and their personal leadership development.

The CFO and his team are confident that they can rise to the next challenge: in 2021, Tucker is aiming to double its year-over-year numbers. This is an ambitious goal, Huerta notes, but feasible.

“We’re riding the wave of a really good market right now; powersports is very successful. COVID has been good to us, given the need for people to be outdoors and people having discretionary income that they’re not spending elsewhere,” he explains. “It’s really about stabilizing the business so we’re in a place where we can win when the economy comes back. We’re really setting ourselves up for success.”

“Alejandro is a talented and collaborative colleague. He especially enjoys the challenge of finding creative solutions to the problems presented to him. We are proud to be part of the Tucker Powersports team and to work with Alejandro to address the legal needs of Tucker Powersports.” –Steve Thornton, Partner, Barnes & Thornburg LLP

The Nontraditional Path

BY NATALIE KOCHANOV

CLAUDIA SANCHEZ WILSON’S PASSION for learning started with her mother. An immigrant from Colombia, her mother was determined that Sanchez Wilson receive access to the many opportunities available in the United States.

“My mom had not been fortunate enough to have a very lengthy education, but despite that, she is probably the most well-read woman I have ever met,” Sanchez Wilson says. “She raised me with a very strong emphasis on education and with the belief that education was the best way to take advantage of every opportunity.”

For Sanchez Wilson, honoring her mother’s teachings has meant forging a nontraditional path in the legal field. Today, as vice president of legal at social game developer Zynga, she uses that path to her advantage to navigate the challenges of legal leadership, litigation and compliance, and interdepartmental relationships.

Although she initially followed the expected career trajectory of joining a large law firm out of law school, Sanchez Wilson soon diverged from that path by leaving the firm to clerk at a US Federal Court. “It was

originally supposed to be a two-year commitment,” she says of the clerkship. “It ended up being six and a half years, but it was the best legal job I’ve ever had.”

By the end of those six and a half years, Sanchez Wilson knew that she wanted to go in-house. However, she first circled back to a law firm to ease the transition. “It felt like a really large leap at the time,” she admits. “But now that I look back on it, there was such a great payoff to taking that nontraditional path. I never practiced law the same way after my clerkship.”

Sanchez Wilson’s evolution as a litigator continued in her next two roles. The active litigation docket at SolarCity—a company dealing in solar energy generation systems— gave her ample opportunity to shift her perspective from outside to in-house counsel, all while preparing her to make the jump over to Tesla after the electric vehicle manufacturer acquired SolarCity in 2016.

When Sanchez Wilson left Tesla to come on board at Zynga, she found herself not only in a different industry but also on a different type of team. “I’d moved from being one member of a litigation team to a role where

I could make decisions about the litigation, because Zynga had, by that point, streamlined into a very lean team,” she explains.

Sanchez Wilson has only seen her legal and leadership duties expand over time. On top of directing ongoing litigation, she now serves as one of Zynga’s chief compliance officers. In that capacity, she has contributed to the rollout of a company-wide data retention program and to the development of global compliance protocols as the company continues to expand internationally.

Beyond her legal achievements at Zynga, Sanchez Wilson is proud to have played a part in strengthening the legal team’s connection to its business partners. “Part of what helps us succeed as a legal team is being open when the business comes to us with an issue or a problem or a new initiative. We hear them out and then think really practically about how we can get them from Point A to Point B,” she says.

Sanchez Wilson’s partners at Orrick celebrate her dedication to the business. “Claudia has an incredible strategic mind for litigation,” says Amy M. Ross, chief practice officer at the firm. “She can see around corners and mitigate risk. Her business-first mindset and

Claudia Sanchez Wilson may have taken the long road to get to Zynga, but she made the most of her journey—and arrived exactly where she’s meant to be

proactive approach leads Zynga and its outside counsel to the right solution for the business.”

Sanchez Wilson highlights the importance of emotional intelligence in her interactions with the business and the legal team alike. “To me, emotional intelligence boils down to reading the room, focusing on people, and understanding where someone is coming from and what that person is communicating,” she explains. “Trying to grasp the overall context in which you’re operating is absolutely key in terms of being able to get to the right result in the end.”

Within Zynga’s legal department, Sanchez Wilson fosters collaboration through open and direct communication. Her leadership style involves creating space for her

reports to talk through problems, appreciating what each individual member adds to the conversation, and incorporating humor and relatability into the workplace. She also seeks to guide her team members through their development as attorneys and as leaders.

As Sanchez Wilson’s own experiences have taught her, growth can come from anywhere—regardless of the path that you choose. “You can still arrive where you are meant to arrive by taking a nontraditional path,” she says. “Throughout the years, I’ve gained confidence and the ability to trust my own judgment. It’s been such a great journey, and I want to continue to move toward a place of balance, where I can rest in that knowledge.”

Claudia Sanchez Wilson VP of Legal Zynga

“I never practiced law the same way after my clerkship.”

Accounting for Success

BY TAYLOR KARG

WHEN SUSANA PICHARDO TOOK AN accounting class in high school, the concepts just clicked. “It was all very logical,” she recalls. “It was easy for me to grasp the concepts and apply them to real-world scenarios.” Now, with twenty-five years of experience under her belt, she’s the senior vice president of accounting at Convey Health Solutions, a specialized Medicare technology company designed to provide clients with member support solutions, engagement, and analytics.

Since joining the company in 2019, Pichardo has worked to create structure and discipline within the accounting department to set it up for future growth opportunities, including acquisitions and a potential public offering. She oversees a team of approximately fifty people, which requires her to stay highly organized and set clear directions. “As accountants, we work from deadline to deadline, so it’s a lot of planning, orchestrating with the staff, setting expectations with the C-suite, solving any issues that arise, and figuring out the best path forward,” she explains.

Pichardo thrives in her current position, but she had to work hard to get where she is today. She immigrated to the United States from the Dominican Republic when she was thirteen years old. Her father, a minister,

Susana Pichardo on the skills and lessons that have helped her thrive at Convey Health Solutions

was transferred to the States to help get the Hispanic community involved in the church. “I have five sisters, so when my father was transferred to the US, he thought it would be a great opportunity for all of us,” she says. “He’s self-educated, but he understood the value of education. So having all of his daughters come to the States to get good educations was really important to him.”

Naturally, immigrating to a new country as a young child was challenging. In addition to the culture shock, there was also a language barrier. “My mom was a school principal back in the Dominican Republic, so my sisters and I had some experience taking English classes,” Pichardo says. “But learning the language was still a big challenge. You go from understanding everything to really struggling.”

But Pichardo never let hardships get in the way of her goals. In fact, she used them as motivation to forge a successful career path. “At the end of the day,” she says, “it was the quality of my work and my ability to solve problems that allowed me to overcome a lot of the challenges that were thrown at me.”

After graduating from Florida Atlantic University, Pichardo secured various financeand accounting-related positions at companies across southeastern Florida, including Althin

SVP of Accounting Convey Health Solutions

Susana Pichardo

Medical, Sunbeam Products, Jarden Consumer Solutions, C3, Biomet 3i, Sheridan Healthcare, and Envision Physical Services. While each position’s titles and specific responsibilities varied, Pichardo learned the same key lesson from those roles. “In each one, I found myself taking charge and becoming a leader,” she explains. “I’ve always viewed things from an organizational and problem-solving standpoint, which I believe has really helped me excel.”

Pichardo says she’s learned two other important lessons throughout her career journey. First, she emphasizes, “if you want something, you can’t be afraid to ask for it.” In her time at Sunbeam, she says, she was working as a controller in the finance department and learned that the vice president was leaving the company. She was interested in the job, so she asked the company’s chief financial officer if she could take over the position.

Pichardo was subsequently appointed as vice president and controller at Jarden, Sunbeam’s parent company.

“Asking leadership for a promotion isn’t something that women, especially women of color, typically do,” she says. “I was even seven months pregnant at

the time. However, I was ready for the next step, and I knew that if I wanted it, I was going to have to ask for it.”

The second key lesson Pichardo has learned is that it sometimes doesn’t matter which industry one works in. She’s been in consumer products, staffing, and healthcare, and her skills translated smoothly to each of those spaces. “You can learn the nuances of any industry,” she remarks, “but what a lot of people have a hard time doing is bringing forth the organizational discipline and problem-solving skills it takes to run a department. Those kinds of skills work, no matter where you go.”

Indeed, the SVP attributes much of her professional success—at Convey as well as at each position she’s held previously—to her organizational and problem-solving skills.

“I don’t shy away from conflict,” she says. “Typically at large organizations, when things get difficult, people punt. They punt the task to someone else because they won’t want to deal with it themselves. I don’t punt. Whether it’s brainstorming, troubleshooting, or conflict resolution, I make sure we don’t stop until we reach a solution together.”

“At the end of the day, it was the quality of my work and my ability to solve problems that allowed me to overcome a lot of the challenges that were thrown at me.”

PUBLIC

These individuals have leveraged every tool at their disposal, from their legal acumen to their military experience and corporate expertise, for the sake of the greater good

POLICY

P62 Senator Bob Menendez (D-NJ)

P72 Carrie Ricci, Associate General Counsel of Marketing, Regulatory & Food Safety Programs, US Department of Agriculture

P76 Nellie Gorbea, Secretary of State, State of Rhode Island

SENATE THE

BY BILLY YOST • PORTRAITS BY NOAH WILLMAN

THIRTY YEARS CAN EITHER SEEM LIKE A LIFETIME OR THE BLINK OF AN EYE.

Three decades ago, America was engaging in Operation Desert Storm. The Cold War was reaching its official end, the European Union was just becoming a reality, and nobody yet knew about the impact technology would have on our daily lives.

During that same thirty years, the fastestgrowing minority in America was rapidly gaining influence and recognition. Federico Peña was sworn in as the US Secretary of Transportation under the Clinton Administration, becoming the first Hispanic to hold the position in US history. The Latin American music explosion dominated the airwaves of pop radio in the late nineties. The North American Free Trade Agreement lifted tariffs between the US, Mexico, and Canada, establishing a trade-free zone in North America for the very first time.

For every one of those last thirty years—and even before then—Senator Bob Menendez (D-NJ) has been an essential voice for both New Jersey families and the broader Latino community. At twenty, Menendez was elected to the Union City Board of Education, making him (at the time) the youngest person to ever win and hold elected office in New Jersey. Later elected as the

city’s first-ever Latino mayor, Menendez went on to serve in the New Jersey State Legislature, the US House of Representatives, and, for the past fifteen years, as a US senator representing the state of New Jersey.

Today, Menendez is the highest-ranking Latino in Congress: he is chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations; a senior member on the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, where he chairs the Subcommittee on Securities, Insurance, and Investment; and a senior member on the Senate Committee on Finance. But to Menendez, each of these committees helps him serve a common goal— to facilitate and support the efforts of Latinos working to make better lives for themselves and their families in the United States.

A Lesson from Every Struggle

Much of what has informed Menendez’s prolific political career can be traced back to his early family life. “My mother, the person I admire the most in my life, even if she is no longer with us, made the decision for our family to come to the United States,” the senator explains. “I wasn’t born yet, but she didn’t want to stay to see what was going to happen in Cuba, so she came here with my brother and sister to start all over again.”

Menendez’s mother didn’t speak English, didn’t have a job waiting for her, and didn’t know anyone in the States. The courage she displayed while working to make a better life for her family has impacted many of the decisions Menendez has made as an advocate and politician. “My mother gave me the insight into the whole question of immigration reform, and it’s why I’ve been such a champion of it my whole career,” he affirms.

In fact, many of the senator’s political beliefs are grounded in his parents’ experiences. “I saw my mother work in the factories of New Jersey as a seamstress,” he says. “She was so good that the owner would ask her to basically manage the floor. But she never got paid as a floor manager, while the men did. It taught me a lot about equal pay for equal work.”

Menendez also witnessed the struggles of his father, an itinerant carpenter who was unable to gain access to capital to try to grow his business. “That was a lesson about the importance of access for small and midsize businesses.”

Senator Bob Menendez (D-NJ)

Every day when Menendez returned home from school, his mother—fresh off a long day in the factory and beginning the work of cooking and cleaning for her family—asked him to read his homework aloud to her. “I would say, ‘Mama, you don’t even speak English. You’re not going to understand what I’m saying.’ But she would still make me do it,” Menendez recalls. “That focus on education would enable me to be the first in my family to go to college.”

Menendez also credits federal student aid programs like Pell Grants and the Perkins Grant, without which he would never have been able to attend Saint Peter’s University (then known as St. Peter’s College). More than that, he wouldn’t have been able to enroll at Rutgers Law School and develop the strong legal grounding that has driven his ability to draft and advocate for progressive legislation.

Opportunity for All

For thirty years, Senator Menendez has fought to lower barriers for entry into the United States and advocate for a wide range of issues that resonate strongly with Latinos, immigrants, and undocumented workers. As chairman of the Senate’s foreign relations committee, he has helped open up economic and political engagement in Latin America as well as the Caribbean.

The senator has also come out in strong support of President Biden’s increased sanctions on Cuba. “This new wave of targeted sanctions on regime officials represents another essential step to put the dictatorship on notice for persecuting the pro-democracy movement on the island,” Menendez said in a July 2021 statement. “The message today could not be clearer: The United States stands with the people of Cuba and there will be consequences for those with blood on their hands. I look forward to working with the Administration to levy additional sanctions against those who insist on violating the human rights of the Cuban people.”

Corporate Diversity Through the Years

2017

Senator Menendez completes the Corporate Diversity Survey, which found that just 11.5 percent of top-performing US companies had established specific targets for the recruitment of diverse board members.1

2019

The House passes the Improving Corporate Governance Through Diversity Act of 2019, but it was not taken up in the Senate. 2

February 2021

Senator Menendez reintroduces that legislation as the Improving Corporate Governance Through Diversity Act of 2021. 2

August 2021

The US Securities and Exchange Commission approves a proposal from Nasdaq to require its listed companies to publicly disclose the diversity of their boards. Those companies must also have at least two diverse board members, or explain the lack of diversity on their boards.3

1. Source: menendez.senate.gov

2. Source: The Hill

3. Source: Reuters

Domestically, the senator continues to look for new and progressive means of creating access to capital for those routinely overlooked by the financial establishment. “My access-to-capital agenda, of which several components have become law, is really about finding a way to end the payday lenders, the check-cashing establishments, and the pawnbrokers as the portal of entry for Latinos to the financial world,” he explains. “How do we create greater access to capital for small and midsize businesses?” Menendez is also fully conscious of other ways Latinos are overlooked by the financial establishment, including the lack of representation for that population within the financial space.

And the senator is out to increase Latino representation, but not just in the financial industry. In February 2021, the senator reintroduced the Improving Corporate Governance Through Diversity Act of 2021, which would require public companies to disclose race, gender, ethnic, and veteran statuses of executive board members and senior management in an effort to help promote diversity in statistically monocultural roles. The move follows an avalanche of studies and surveys indicating that organizations who actively work to create more diverse leadership teams and workforces universally benefit from a broader array of perspectives and ideas.

“Without greater diversity in top corporate positions, the US will fail to compete with other leading economies and stall our nation’s progress towards full inclusivity,” Menendez noted in a February 2021 statement about the legislation. “This bill will ensure transparency in corporate America, while highlighting the need for further accountability for public companies. It’s time corporate boardrooms mirror the rich diversity of our country.”

This focus on the private sector highlights Menendez’s belief that the government can’t simply establish a mandate for equality and

walk away. Unless the market is motivated to seek out diversity of experience and background, nothing will fundamentally change.

And Menendez is hopeful that things will change, for the betterment of both individual businesses and the American people. “Improving diversity is not just an act of benevolence. It is the smart thing to do for your bottom line. This is about your ability to compete in a country where nearly 20 percent of the population is already Hispanic,” he explains. “This is about catering to a fast-growing Latino consumer base that commands nearly $1.5 trillion in purchasing power. And when Latinos are on corporate boards and senior executive management, they have opportunities to make judgments and make the argument for investments in our community.”

Long-Haul Fights

Unfortunately, for many of the issues that are important to Menendez, it is nearly impossible to attain an overnight victory. It took more than twenty years for Congress to pass legislation, led by Menendez, for the construction of the National Museum of the American Latino, which will have a place of pride in the National Mall in Washington DC.

“This is a seminal project that celebrates Latino leadership in history throughout the years and is something that has been completely absent from both the National Mall and the education of our children,” Menendez notes.

But even twenty years seems preferable in comparison to the most enduring and politically controversial effort of the senator’s tenure: immigration reform.

Years ago, Senator Menendez and his colleagues did reach a significant milestone in their efforts. “Along with Congressman Luis Gutiérrez, we were able to convince President Obama that he had the power to give Dreamers [children brought to the United States

by undocumented parents] a chance to truly dream,” the senator remembers. “DACA was an opportunity to at least give a segment of the undocumented some stability in our country.”

But that was just the beginning. Senator Menendez—along with his fellow members of the bipartisan group known as the Gang of Eight—helped pass the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013 with sixtyeight votes in the Senate, only to see the bill languish and die in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives.

DACA suffered a setback when President Trump attempted to repeal it during his presidency. In 2018, a district court judge from Texas held that DACA is likely unconstitutional and issued a ruling barring new applications. This ruling, Menendez says, has only augmented the urgent need for inclusive and

humane immigration reform for Dreamers and the largest number of the undocumented community as possible.

Despite such challenges, the senator encourages every member of the Latino community, regardless of their legal status, to stay in the fight. “Those of us who are US citizens and permanent residents think this isn’t something we should think about, that it’s about someone else,” Menendez says. “This is about all of us. There are eleven million people, largely from our community, who are sitting as an underclass, unable to work legally and unable to fulfill their full promise. When they have a chance to be legalized, who will they go to? They’ll go to Latino lawyers. When they have income, they’ll go to Hispanic businesses. When they need to fill out their tax returns, they’ll go to Latino accountants. The list goes on.”

Senator Bob Menendez joined Dreamers and activists gathered outside the US Supreme Court on November 12, 2019.

My mother gave me the insight into the whole question of immigration reform, and it’s why I’ve been such a champion of it for my whole career.”

By the Numbers

A lifetime of public service has produced some key stats from Senator Bob Menendez:

15 Years in the Senate

1,689 Sponsored pieces of legislation

3 Current Senate committee assignments

19 Age at which Menendez entered politics

0

Other Latinos who have served as chairman of Senate Foreign Relations Committee

Source: congress.gov

Of course, the rest of America has a stake in this issue as well. As the senator explains, a nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office report released in 2013 found that the Gang of Eight’s 2013 immigration bill would have added billions of dollars to the US GDP, reduced the national deficit, added huge amounts to the Social Security Trust Funds, and eventually raised wages for all Americans. “Every economic factor comes out with positive ratings,” Menendez says frankly.

That’s part of the reason the senator has come forward as the lead sponsor of the US Citizenship Act of 2021. If Congress is unable to pass meaningful immigration reform, he says, he will push to get significant immigration reform measures enacted through the budget reconciliation process to provide a pathway to citizenship

to as many members of the undocumented community as possible.

There are always pressing issues facing the Latino community—gaps in educational opportunities, healthcare disparities, economic access for fledgling businesses, and the second-class treatment of Puerto Rico by a country that considers it part of its own.

And Menendez is keenly aware that much still needs to happen. The last thirty years have brought battle after battle, and some of the senator’s most important efforts still remain just that, a battle. But he continues to advocate for the Latino community, and for the American people as a whole, because he wholeheartedly believes that everyone deserves a chance to rise to their full potential. His mother did, his father did, and their son continues to live their beliefs every day.

Diversity Matters

Latinas hold 1% of board seats in the Fortune 500

Source: Deloitte and Alliance for Board Diversity (2020)

Latino men hold 3.1% of board seats in the Fortune 500

Source: Deloitte and Alliance for Board Diversity (2020)

Hispanics hold 3% of Fortune 1000 seats

Source: Latino Corporate Directors Association and KPMG (2021)

Not a single company in the Fortune 500 is “representative of the demographics of the United States.”

Source: Deloitte and Alliance for Board Diversity

Diverse companies see a 2.3 times higher cash flow per employee.

Source: Bersin by Deloitte

43% of companies with diverse boards enjoy higher profits.

Source: McKinsey & Company (2018)

Revenue rises 19 percentage points for companies with “above-average diversity on their management teams” compared to companies with “below-average leadership diversity.”

Source: Boston Consulting Group (2018)

BELIEF MISSION IN THE

A US Army veteran and now a legal leader at the US Department of Agriculture, Carrie Ricci thrives on serving her country

BY NATALIE KOCHANOV

WHEN CARRIE RICCI REALIZED THAT she didn’t have enough scholarship money to pay for all four years of her undergraduate program at Georgetown University, she looked to the US Army Reserve Officers’ Training Corps as a way to make up the difference. Little did she know, that decision would shape the trajectory of her career.

“I wasn’t necessarily feeling the need to serve my country,” Ricci admits. “But once I got in the military, I fell in love with it and with the mission.”

Over the course of her two decades of military service, Ricci not only achieved the rank of lieutenant colonel but also obtained her JD from the University of Maryland. She has since become an employee of the federal government in order to continue in the same vein of mission-driven work that kept her in the military for so many years.

Carrie Ricci

Associate General Counsel of Marketing, Regulatory & Food Safety Programs US Department of Agriculture

Today, as associate general counsel of marketing, regulatory, and food safety programs at the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), Ricci applies her legal expertise to advance agency policy goals and ensure the health and safety of the American public. At the same time, she remains passionate about the Army, its mission, and its ongoing transformation for the better.

Just as she had not planned to enter the military, Ricci had not planned to become an attorney. However, while serving as an Army platoon leader during her first tour, she got a chance to observe the legal process when one of her soldiers was court-martialed. “I saw the military

lawyers and what they did, and I decided that it was what I wanted to do,” she says. With that, she applied to the Army’s Funded Legal Education Program, through which she was able to attend law school without paying out of pocket.

As an Army attorney, Ricci gained experience handling a variety of criminal, national security, and administrative matters. But by the time she decided to leave the military, she was ready for a new challenge. She landed an assistant general counsel position at the Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA), a school system for the children of US military and

My primary role was to interview soldiers one-on-one about their experiences with sexual assault and sexual harassment. I saw the pain and damage that had been inflicted on those who had suffered and who hadn’t been heard. It was gut-wrenching, but very important work.”

other Department of Defense (DOD) personnel. She learned education law for the role, which saw her coordinating with colleagues around the world and running a nationwide ethics program.

Ricci made the jump to USDA in 2012 after less than three years at the DoDEA. Once again, she picked up a new area of law on the job, which led to her selection for promotion just eighteen months later.

In her current role, Ricci supervises a two-team division that provides legal services to three different agencies within the USDA. She established standard operating procedures for the division early on to facilitate the efficient execution of the USDA’s mission. She has also prioritized employee engagement, support, and career growth to keep her team members on their toes.

“We want to help the new political appointees who are leading our organization achieve their policy goals, and achieve those goals within the limits of the law,” Ricci explains. “That takes a lot of discussion and a lot of flexibility and creativity.”

For her part, Ricci stays abreast of congressional developments related to her mission areas so that she can stand up new programs in accordance with the latest legislation. She also collaborates with the US Department of Justice and other external agencies on matters of the law, in addition to tackling major food health and safety concerns when they arise. For instance, Ricci worked and her team worked closely with agency officials to devise legal solutions that provided much-needed regulatory flexibility for both regulated entities and the USDA employees that enforce the regulations.

On top of her USDA duties, Ricci stays involved with the Hispanic National Bar Association (HNBA): she worked on the HNBA’s Latina Commission for many years and served as cochair for three. She also recently participated in an independent review of Fort Hood, a prominent Army post in Texas where Ricci held her first post as a Judge Advocate General’s Corps officer. Along with four other appointees, Ricci spent twenty days at the post to conduct a review of its culture and climate.

“My primary role was to interview soldiers one-onone about their experiences with sexual assault and sexual harassment,” she explains. “I saw the pain and damage that had been inflicted on those who had suffered and who hadn’t been heard. It was gutwrenching, but very important work.”

Ricci and her fellow review panelists produced a 140-page report to document their findings and make recommendations to the Army and DOD. “This has become another passion of mine,” she says, referring to her ongoing advocacy for military survivors of sexual assault and sexual harassment. “Right now, there’s this momentum, and I don’t want that momentum to fade out without bringing about real change.”

Whether Ricci is leading difficult conversations about the Army’s future or counseling the USDA on policy proposals, her commitment to her country and its citizens shines through. “When you’re working at this level, you really do feel like what you’re doing is important, no matter what your job is,” she says. “I love the work here at the USDA, and I know that the mission will get accomplished.”

TO GO

FIRST READY

Nellie Gorbea made history with her election as Rhode Island’s secretary of state. After two successful terms in office, she is leading the way once again with an equally historic run for governor.

BY NATALIE KOCHANOV

Nellie Gorbea Secretary of State State of Rhode Island

That first taste happened back when Gorbea was a student in a classroom in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

“I was that kid who, when they explained what student council was, thought that it sounded like an interesting thing to do. I raised my hand, and I ended up serving for seven years,” Gorbea says. “I guess that’s where it all got started.”

Gorbea felt as ready to take on the office of secretary of state as she had been to join student council years prior. The experience that she had gained in the interim—spanning the private and the public sectors, the for-profit and the not-for-profit worlds—gave her the confidence to step into the role, intent on making a difference. Over the course of her two terms, she has driven civic engagement statewide, defended the democratic process, and demonstrated the value of a government that is accessible and accountable to its people. Now, she is once again ready to run—this time, for governor of Rhode Island.

Gorbea left Puerto Rico to obtain a bachelor’s degree in public policy from Princeton University, followed by a master’s degree in public administration from Columbia University. She then further developed her background through board memberships and varied roles in state government, public finance, internet consulting, and nonprofits—including HousingWorks RI, an organization focused on affordable housing where she served as executive director.

Finally, Gorbea decided to put her skills and experience to the test with a run for secretary of state. “I’ve always been interested in working on problems in the communities around me, so why not run for office?” she recalls wondering. “I wanted to make the Department of State an agency that helps people improve their lives and that holds government accountable.”

Despite her historic win, Gorbea admits that she didn’t register the rarity of Hispanics in elected statewide offices right away.

NELLIE GORBEA GOT HER FIRST TASTE OF POLITICAL SERVICE FAR AWAY FROM RHODE ISLAND, WHERE HER 2014 ELECTION AS SECRETARY OF STATE WOULD MAKE HER THE FIRST HISPANIC TO WIN STATEWIDE OFFICE IN NEW ENGLAND.

“Where it hit me was when I would go read to classrooms in schools. I realized that for the Hispanic kids in those classrooms, it was such a big deal that I was Hispanic,” she says. “It’s been an amazing blessing to show them that I’m like them.”

Upon taking office in 2015, Gorbea immediately implemented a strategic plan to upgrade all elections technology and increase ballotbox access across Rhode Island. “We passed online voter registration and automated voter registration, rebuilt the central voter registration system, and implemented electronic poll books for the first time in the state,” she states. Her incremental efforts to modernize the election system played a crucial part in supporting another of her aims as secretary of state: to increase election security, especially in the face of rising cyberthreats.

Gorbea knew that election security would be more important than ever in 2020. After connecting with federal resources to prepare her team for the challenges ahead, she set about educating Rhode Island’s cities and towns on the importance of cybersecurity and the nonpartisan nature of the issue.

With the local governments up to speed and backup systems in place, Rhode Island weathered the storm of the election far better than most states. Through a combination of at-home voting, early voting in person, and in-person voting on Election Day, Rhode Islanders turned out in November 2020 in record numbers—and enjoyed the smoothness of the experience. “As somebody who has worked all her life to make sure that people are civically engaged, it gives me incredible joy that we had that kind of turnout, response, and results,” Gorbea says.

Beyond keeping elections safe and secure, Gorbea has improved government transparency and increased the accessibility of civics education materials during her time in office. In addition, she has streamlined the process for business incorporation by upgrading business services systems and launching a

new website that enabled Rhode Islanders to start businesses at high rates even amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Gorbea achieved her goals as secretary of state by concentrating on communication and by centering diverse perspectives in policy discussions—an approach that she plans to continue if elected governor. “I’m excited for the opportunity to show Rhode Islanders that they can have a government that works for them and to do it in a way that harnesses the energy, the enthusiasm, and the knowledge of state employees—and combines it with communities that may not always have been asked about their opinions on how we can improve government,” she says.

With the encouragement of many Rhode Islanders, Gorbea announced her campaign

in May 2021 with videos in both English and Spanish. In so doing, she became the first Latina ever to run for governor in New England. “We need to provide a quality public education to everybody in the state, provide affordable housing across different socioeconomic levels, and face the challenges and the opportunities of climate change,” she says of her platform. “I’m focused on making those three areas the pillars of a much more just and equitable local economy.”

Gorbea believes strongly that applying a different—and more inclusive—approach to policy-making will create a government that benefits all Rhode Islanders, not just a select few. And though she may be the first Latina to seek to bring about that change as governor, she is certain that she won’t be the last.

I wanted to make the Department of State an agency that helps people improve their lives and that holds government accountable.”

Chan

Andrea Clavijo decided early on that she would prioritize happiness and fulfillment. The journey has taken her to GE, where she’s revamped a compliance program and stepped into an important human rights role.

The Path Worth Taking

BY ZACH BALIVA

Andrea Clavijo Senior Compliance Counsel and Deputy Human Rights Leader GE (General Electric)

ANDREA CLAVIJO SPENT 2020 INNOVATING

a new approach to company-wide policies for one of the most respected and recognizable brands around: GE (General Electric). The words she writes, strategies she develops, and efforts her team leads impact the global conglomerate’s 205,000 employees as well as countless other people around the world.

Clavijo currently serves as senior compliance counsel and deputy human rights leader, a role she earned after just four years with the company. But she never set out to emerge as a rising star in corporate compliance. Clavijo’s is a story about never settling. About admitting when things aren’t working. About the relentless pursuit of happiness.

Born to Venezuelan parents in South Carolina, Clavijo moved to Florida at age two. She grew up watching Today and dreaming of visiting the show’s Rockefeller Plaza set. When it came time to pick a college major, Clavijo chose journalism. She wanted to become the next Katie Couric.

In her final year of studies at the University of Florida, Clavijo found herself in a First Amendment and media law class taught by a former journalist and practicing lawyer. Clavijo, whose only exposure to the law had come from what she saw on TV, had an epiphany. “I realized I could use my love of

journalism and media in other career paths,” she explains. “Suddenly, more options were opened for me.” Upon graduation, Clavijo decided to pursue her JD at Boston College Law School.

Back at home, Clavijo’s father was also going through a major change: formerly a successful pharmacist, he hung up his lab coat and became a licensed FIFA soccer agent. Watching this made a lasting impact on Clavijo. “My dad prioritized happiness and fulfillment over earning a paycheck. He encouraged me to do what I love,” she says.

Clavijo’s father knew that happy people perform better, and that a rewarding career usually follows a person who finds his or her true passion. That lesson stayed in Clavijo’s mind as she was placed with National Grid in an internship for diverse law students. As the only legal intern at one of the world’s largest utilities, she was exposed to attorneys working in different areas. She used the opportunity to figure out where lawyers seemed the most fulfilled.

As Clavijo observed her colleagues and conducted informal interviews, what she discovered surprised her. Most of National Grid’s lawyers enjoyed their work. They liked collaborating with experts, digging deep on issues, and serving the needs of just one

Building a world that works for everyone, takes diverse teams and perspectives.

client. That’s when Clavijo knew she wanted to be an in-house attorney—but she needed to reconcile that with her love for media.

Clavijo spent a summer in the nation’s capital working for an international telecommunications consulting firm, which helped her realize she could leverage her Spanish language skills and work on a global scale. “Each experience showed me what I wanted to seek out in the next, and slowly but surely I was putting myself on the right path that made sense for me,” she says.

In 2016, Clavijo saw a posting for the Heineman Compliance Fellowship at General Electric. As she read the details, she felt like the position was custom-made just for her. The employer wanted someone with international experience to develop training, communications, and compliance materials. She applied and got the job.

As she stepped into the role, Clavijo focused on mastering compliance. Two weeks into the position, she was traveling to Europe and assisting in compliance investigations, all before she had received the results from her bar exam. Upon completion of the one-year fellowship, Clavijo transitioned into a full-time role on the Corporate Compliance team, where she focused on supporting global compliance operations, external reporting, and policies.

However, as Clavijo reviewed GE’s compliance policies, she noticed a problem. They were dense, full of legalese, and difficult to understand. The rookie employee approached veteran leaders with a major pitch: to overhaul and improve these impactful documents.

Clavijo partnered with internal subject matter experts and embarked on an eighteen-month journey to streamline policies related to privacy, intellectual property, antitrust, and other critical areas. She worked to make sure each document told a story the

“My dad prioritized happiness and fulfillment over earning a paycheck. He encouraged me to do what I love.”

average employee could understand, working directly with non-legal/compliance employees to get their take on policy drafts, running focus groups that spanned all GE businesses and regions. Her team also used readability statistics to keep progress in check and reduce the grade-level reading score of each document, an approach that included replacing long paragraphs with digestible bullet points (without sacrificing the intent of the policy).

Now GE has nineteen clear and concise policies its employees can comfortably read, understand, and follow. Less than a year later, Clavijo packaged condensed versions of those policies and other integrity expectations into the most important compliance document at GE, the code of conduct known as The Spirit & The Letter.

One of the nineteen policy areas Clavijo helped streamline was human rights, which she took a keen interest in. Today, she works as the company’s deputy human rights leader: she focuses on the development, expansion, strategy, and execution of GE’s human rights program. That includes making sure GE and its vendors and partners respect the human rights of its global workforce and the communities they serve in the 170-plus countries where GE operates. Currently, she’s partnering with industry leaders and nonprofit organizations to learn about how modern-day slavery has evolved in the world and about its impact on the organization. “I feel accountable to the people I work with and the communities we serve, so we are making sure to stay vigilant,” she says.

Life may have turned out a bit differently than Clavijo had planned. She’s not hosting a daily talk show or occupying the anchor desk at a major news network. She found her own path, and that’s brought joy and fulfillment. “I followed my dad’s lead and prioritized happiness,” she says. “And when you do that, there are no regrets.”

Work for It

After a meteoric rise at the intersection of law and financial services, Hasan Ibrahim continues to make his own opportunities at Prudential

BY NATALIE KOCHANOV

Hasan Ibrahim Chief Compliance Officer of Retail, Advice & Solutions (RAS) and Distribution Prudential

YEARS BEFORE HE BECAME CHIEF compliance officer (CCO) of retail, advice, and solutions (RAS) as well as distribution at Prudential, a national sales organization that encompasses more than three thousand financial professionals, advisors, and fee-based financial planners who offer clients a broad range of financial solutions, Hasan Ibrahim was a student weighed down by hefty reading assignments. Ibrahim complained about the workload to his maternal grandfather, a factory worker who had immigrated to the United States from Cuba. In response, his grandfather—a parental figure who has had a lifelong influence on Ibrahim—invited him to the factory for an afternoon of hard labor.

“At the end of the day, he looked at me and said, ‘Would you prefer to keep reading books or do you want to do this for a living?’” Ibrahim recalls with a laugh. “Point taken.”

Today, Ibrahim never forgets to be grateful. His role at Prudential is the latest in a career defined by rapid advancement, courtesy of hard work and relationship building. That same hard work has garnered Ibrahim an in-depth understanding of law and the financial services sector that allows him to navigate the complexities of both of those spheres at Prudential, as well as to bridge gaps between seemingly adversarial parties.

As the proud son of immigrants, Ibrahim knew from a young age that he would need to strive to get ahead. “My brother and I were taught as kids that you make your own destiny through hard work, hard work, and even more hard work,” he confirms.

Ibrahim channeled his energy into education, obtaining a bachelor’s degree from Rutgers University, a law degree from Seton Hall University, and an LLM degree from New York University. By the time he joined the firm Drinker Biddle & Reath as a general litigator out of law school, he already had his eye on the financial services industry. “I would consistently pepper the head of the financial services practice on Wall Street to give me an opportunity, to give me some assignments, to give me anything,” he explains. He nailed the opportunity when it did come, and with that, launched himself into the world of financial services.

A mere two years later, Ibrahim nailed another opportunity: the chance to move in-house at global financial services and wealth management firm UBS. During his time at the firm, he not only climbed to roles such as chief privacy counsel for the Americas and deputy general counsel of the firm’s industrial bank, but also gained insight into the relationship between business leaders and their attorneys.

“I learned that it’s about being practical and definitive in your advice: mastering the subject matter, giving practical options, and steering the business toward a risk-smart option,” Ibrahim says. He credits his UBS mentors with helping him become a trusted partner in business dealings and empowering him to make the most of each opportunity.

Ibrahim sought out his own opportunities as well by continuing to volunteer for projects and responsibilities outside the scope of his role. “I developed all these skill sets in my toolbox. I exponentially grew my knowledge and my industry expertise,” he says. “And at every step, I was working hard, garnering results, and building trust from partners and peers.”

Searching for a company where he could continue to grow, Ibrahim landed at Prudential in 2014. He carried his results and intelligent, risk-driven approach with him and deepened his focus on building internal and external relationships to support the business. “The strongest relationships are built on transparency and authenticity,” he notes. “If someone knows where I’m coming from and what I’m about, that’s the critical key factor for me.”

Ibrahim has used his knack for building strong relationships to bridge the traditional divide between industry and regulatory entities. After getting both sides into the same

“The strongest relationships are built on transparency and authenticity. If someone knows where I’m coming from and what I’m about, that’s the critical factor for me.”

room, he highlights their shared client-centric philosophy to show that their interests do in fact align.

The lawyer places equal value on internal relationships. He recognizes a need to empower his teams: in his first days in his previous role as vice president and chief legal officer, he made certain his team was aware of his approach. “I told them that if they used sound judgment and something goes sideways, it’s my problem. I’m the accountable party, and I will deal with it,” he says. “It worked amazingly. I got feedback from business partners within a month or two telling me that the team were like different lawyers because the empowerment enhanced their confidence to make decisions and provide practical advice.”

Today, as CCO, Ibrahim pushes a leadership style that plays a critical part in motivating the team. Emulating mentors from his own career, he stays true to himself while supporting his colleagues—regardless of whether they report to him. “There is no way that I could have gotten to where I am today without incredible mentors and others who voluntarily took time to support me,” he says. “And I want to pay that forward, especially as a lawyer of color and as part of the Hispanic community.”

To that end, Ibrahim offers his time, expertise, and connections to current law students at Seton Hall as well as to local grade-school students participating in mock trials. In addition, he remains active in the Hispanic Bar Association at the local and national levels. “It’s incredibly rewarding to give back through affinity bar programs and mentorships, both official and unofficial,” he says.

Ibrahim seizes every chance that he gets to make an impact by giving back, much like he has always swung for the fences in his career. And as he eyes the future at Prudential and beyond, he still keeps his grandfather’s lessons and other moments from his upbringing at the front of his mind.

“I started with nothing and without a safety net, so to me, every assignment and challenge is an opportunity,” the CCO says. “It’s always glass half-full.”

“Hasan is an excellent attorney and leader. He believes in building relationships and is always willing to take on the toughest challenges. We know his drive, commitment, and leadership result in strategic thinking that drives results for all involved.” –Johanny

Olmedo, Senior Director, Consilio

Hasan’s deep intellect, excellent judgment, and collaborative spirit make him an exceptional leader and we are honored he chooses to partner with Debevoise

Leadership Is Service

Benny Agosto continues to find new ways to give back as a mentor, board member, community leader, and partner at Abraham, Watkins, Nichols, Agosto, Aziz & Stogner

BY BILLY YOST

Benny Agosto Partner

Abraham, Watkins, Nichols, Agosto, Aziz & Stogner

BENNY AGOSTO’S CAREER JUST DOESN’T seem to slow down. Since the last time Hispanic Executive highlighted him as the first Latino ever hired (let alone the first Latino to become partner) at Texas-based firm Abraham, Watkins, Nichols, Agosto, Aziz & Stogner, Agosto has kept racking up awards and accommodations.

In 2020, Agosto was named to the Top 100: Houston Super Lawyers list and the Texas Super Lawyers list (his sixteenth appearance on the list). Agosto has also been named to the Top Latino Lawyers list by Latino Leaders Magazine, who recognized him as one of the 25 Most Influential Hispanic Lawyers as well as one of the 101 Most Influential Leaders of the year.

From 2019 to 2020, Agosto served as president of the Houston Bar Association. Moreover, he helped establish the Ruby Kless Sondock Award for top female attorneys in Houston as well as the organization’s first Diversity Summit and its first LGBTQ+ committee. Agosto currently serves as the founder and president of the Mexican American Bar Association of Texas Foundation, a member of the State Bar of Texas Board of Directors, and the president of the Hope Disaster Recovery Board of Directors.

Committed to Giving Back

Every one of those awards, honors, and board appointments has been announced just since we last spoke with Agosto, who has also advised multiple presidential administrations on immigration reform throughout his career. Even with twenty-six years of undeniable legal success under his belt, Agosto keeps finding new arenas in which to demonstrate his passion for the legal profession.

“One of the things that I’m really focused on now is being a positive role model for other Latinos and minorities,” Agosto says. “My wife and I are really focused on raising money, giving our time and resources to assist underprivileged folks, and raising scholarship money for people of color.”

Agosto and his wife Nichole are giving back on a multitude of different fronts. There is the Nikki and Benny Agosto Jr. Houston Baptist University Scholarship, awarded to students who are also single mothers. Through their foundation, the Agostos raise money for law students attending three Houston-area law schools. Agosto also serves on the regional board for the United Negro College Fund. Both Agostos also work on behalf of Cy-Hope, a nonprofit working to impact at-risk schoolchildren in Cypress, Texas.

“I don’t care if the other lawyer went to Harvard. We’re studying the same law and the same case. Being the best that you can be allows us to be strong advocates and strong lawyers.”

“Having the privilege to help other people is a wonderful thing,” Agosto remarks. “The difference one person can make by giving a few dollars is so important, and we try to support these organizations in all the ways we can. We’re thankful to God for the blessings we’ve been given in our life, and we think it’s important to give back to our communities.”

A Different Kind of Work/Life Balance

Agosto is also a dedicated mentor. One of his mentees—a Houston attorney and DACA recipient—has become “an amazing woman doing great things in the city of Houston,” he says.

One of the most important parts of this kind of work, the partner explains, is honesty. “Unfortunately, there is still a double standard, and that means Latinos and other minorities have to work extra hard,” he says. “When people talk about work/life balance, I tell our young lawyers that you really have to put your clients first. That balance may not be there as much as you’d like at first, but by being the best at what you do, you will have those opportunities to do what you want to do with your family, your children, and those organizations you care about.”

Agosto quotes the oft-repeated, yet somehow overlooked numbers from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics that reveal the legal profession as one of, if not the single, least represented industry for minorities. “That is why it’s so important to be the best lawyer in the room,” he says. “That sounds hard, but remember:

there’s only one set of rules for each case. I don’t care if the other lawyer went to Harvard. We’re studying the same law and the same case. Being the best that you can be allows us to be strong advocates and smart lawyers.”

The partner imparts a second piece of advice for young lawyers hoping to maximize their impact. “Be active in volunteering, be active on boards, and [look for] opportunities to widen your net,” Agosto suggests. “You’ve got to serve first to become a leader. Hand out the water bottles or serve the coffee. I’m serious. That will lead you to management.”

Though his charitable activities could occupy him for another few lifetimes, Agosto remains happily on the clock at Abraham Watkins. “When I started here, there were just eight lawyers. Now there are twenty-four. I want to help shape this firm for the new age of being a trial practitioner,” he says.

The Texas firm, which is the longestrunning plaintiff firm in the state, has now expanded to national litigation. “Because we have such a great training ground here, and we’ve been able to do such great work, there is opportunity for expansion. We just have to do it right,” Agosto says. “This firm has been here for seventy years, and I want to make sure it’s here for another seventy.”

There is yet another job Agosto says he eventually looks forward to taking on full time. “I look forward to helping raise my grandkids at some point,” he says, chuckling. “I think part of all of our jobs is to enjoy life as much as we can. I have a lot to look forward to.”

A Lifetime of Advocacy

Evelyn Pérez-Albino knows the challenges of being a first-generation woman of color in corporate America. It’s what inspires her each day, not only in her current role but in every facet of her life.

BY ABIGAIL SUTTER

EVELYN PÉREZ-ALBINO HAS BEEN AN ADVOCATE PRETTY MUCH her whole life. She grew up as a first-generation Dominican-American and the only child of a Spanish-speaking single mother, which she says led her to become the official translator for the house as soon as she was old enough to know the language. This sometimes made for some awkward experiences, as Pérez-Albino even had to translate her own parent-teacher conferences.

“It instilled in me that I was a representative,” she explains. “I was empowered to speak for others, and I needed to take that responsibility very seriously.” Becoming a lawyer, Pérez-Albino says, felt like a natural career transition where she could do what came naturally to her—advocating for and empowering others to raise their voices.

Adaptation and Authenticity

As a young lawyer, Pérez-Albino had to learn to navigate corporate spaces and eventually find the courage to do so authentically. And many of those spaces, she notes, had to figure out how to include her in the workplace in a meaningful way that fostered an environment in which a first-generation Afro-Latina could thrive and still be herself.

It was a delicate balance and, as is often experienced by professionals of color, there were often misalignments.

But eventually, Pérez-Albino found herself in an in-house role where she could not only be at the core of what was happening within the company but also leverage the diversity of her experiences and of the wider US culture. Until recently, she worked as the director of employment and labor at JetBlue Airways, where she oversaw a large scope of projects, including cross-functional matters and collaboration with third parties. She describes that role as a “jack-of-all-trades” position that gave her a level of insight and accelerated professional growth that is difficult to achieve in private practice.

“[My day-to-day was] about constant change. It’s a lot of being comfortable in constant discomfort,” she says. As a subject-matter expert in a fast-paced environment, particularly in light of the impact of the past year and the COVID-19 pandemic on the aviation industry, Pérez-Albino had to quickly adapt to leading and problemsolving amidst uncertainty. “It’s getting OK with not being OK. It makes you a better problem-solver because you realize you don’t have the bandwidth to get 100 percent ideal. It’s all gray area.”

Throughout her career, Pérez-Albino has consistently gravitated toward work that centers on diversity. It’s a topic that hits close to home for her and is always at the top of her mind as she navigates professional environments, informing her perspective on employee relation issues and allowing her to be a more empathetic leader and advisor. “It can be hard to walk in [with] the only brown face,” she notes. “There’s feelings of imposter syndrome that you deal with. You worry about your ability to ascend if no one that’s at the top looks like you.”

Pérez-Albino adds she’s fortunate to have felt welcomed and included at JetBlue, the most diverse company she’d ever worked for—

Director of

one that had deliberately put in work on the D&I front and was passionate about making continued progress on that front. She’s equally excited about her new role as assistant general counsel of L&E at Facebook, where she’ll be focusing on global diversity.

Empathy and Elevation

For years, Pérez-Albino has volunteered her time for a number of affinity organizations where she’s been able to share her insights with others in the hopes that her path and insights can pave a smoother climb for those

Evelyn Pérez-Albino

Employment & Labor JetBlue Airways

“If I am authentic and true to who I am, I can be on the fiftieth floor of the One World Trade Center and still [be mindful] of what was important to me when I was sitting on the stoop of my tenement building in Washington Heights.”

coming up behind her. Still, Pérez-Albino is constantly looking for more tangible ways to make a difference. It’s what led her to found her own company, Ella Elevates, a career strategy firm dedicated to helping professional women of color own their careers and chart a path toward success.

“It’s not that these conversations aren’t being had,” she explains. “It’s just that, often, we’re not the ones benefitting from them.” Ella Elevates offers career strategy and advice while encouraging confidence in high-achieving professionals of color so they can feel empowered in cultivating the same opportunities and thrive in their corporate careers.

Pérez-Albino also puts her passion for mentoring into action through her involvement in the Hispanic National Bar Association (HNBA). The group has enabled her to establish key relationships that have given her greater insight into the legal industry. “It brought us all together,” she says of the small but mighty Latinx attorney community in the tri-state area, emphasizing the value of seeing successful professionals who looked like her thriving in their own careers.

Having worked under various employment structures, Pérez-Albino has found empathy and support to be crucial to her success as a team leader. “Empowering your team and championing them gets better output every time. And it makes it easier to develop authentic relationships with people. It incentivizes them to take ownership of their work because they don’t feel as if they have to fight for recognition.”

It’s a philosophy that she applied in her role at JetBlue and consistently applies to her pro bono work, mentorship, and personal life. She credits her family with teaching her the value of support: Pérez-Albino herself is now the mother of a “very energetic” three-year-old, and pushes herself to set a good example for her son and lay the groundwork so things can be easier for him, much like her mother did for her.

Raising her son has also made Pérez-Albino reflect on her upbringing—straddling two different cultures—and the strength that she gained through that experience. “Early on in my career, I thought my background and origins might have been a detriment, but I now value all of my experiences and clearly see how it’s that diversity of experience that has allowed me to come this far. I want my son to also have those two worlds: in and outside of home,” she says. “It builds resilience and character. If I am authentic and true to who I am, I can be on the fiftieth floor of the One World Trade Center and still [be mindful] of what was important to me when I was sitting on the stoop of my tenement building in Washington Heights.”

A Greater Purpose

At Pfizer, Nikki Adame-Winningham makes a difference not just for her colleagues and community but for the world as a whole

BY TAYLOR KARG

Nikki Adame-Winningham

Corporate Counsel for Environmental & Sustainability Law Pfizer Inc.

NIKKI ADAME-WINNINGHAM ALWAYS knew she wanted to become a lawyer. Growing up in El Paso, Texas, she watched countless episodes of Night Court, a sitcom centered on a municipal court in New York City, and LA Law, a drama following a high-powered law firm in Los Angeles. Today, she works to support environmental, health, safety, and sustainability efforts at Pfizer—and she has found a far greater motivation for her work than a television show.

As corporate counsel in environmental and sustainability law, AdameWinningham’s role involves a lot of moving parts. “There are four attorneys and two legal professionals in the [environmental and sustainability law] group, and together we provide regulatory compliance counselling, transactional support, and enforcement defense for our facilities globally, including manufacturing, research and development, and commercial sites,” she explains. “We also support the company on environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) issues, which includes both shaping the strategy and providing legal support for disclosures.”

Attaining an in-house position at a prominent biopharmaceutical corporation like Pfizer requires years of hard work. But Adame-Winningham’s success can also be credited to her clear passion for the environ-

ment, sustainability, and doing her part to better the community.

Adame-Winningham’s interest in the environment began in high school. “When I was on the debate team, one of our topics was about worldwide pollution, which really opened my eyes to the importance of both the environment and sustainability,” she says. “Another thing that really resonated with me was the fact that my grandmother recycled and reused everything.”

Although law school was always on the agenda, Adame-Winningham chose to study environmental engineering at Cornell University when it came time to choose an undergrad major. “Most colleges don’t have a defined pre-law curriculum, so when I saw environmental engineering as a major, I figured it would give me a solid background to later pursue a career in environmental law,” she explains.

Adame-Winningham went on to attend Tulane Law School: she obtained her JD in 2004, officially marking the start of her journey as an environmental lawyer.

Adame-Winningham spent the next fourteen years working for various private practice firms in Texas, New York, and New Jersey. “The foundational practice between each firm was regulatory compliance counselling,” she says, “and answering the clients’ questions about environmental laws in the US.”

In March 2018, she made the jump to Pfizer. Headquartered in New York City, the company operates on a global level—a scope of work that was very attractive to Adame-Winningham. She adds that the opportunity to work on sustainability issues—an area of environmental, health, and safety law she hadn’t previously tackled professionally—was very enticing.

Since joining the company, however, Adame-Winningham has expanded the breadth of her role beyond traditional environmental issues. In fact, she’s currently working on Pfizer’s response to evolving modern slavery statutes.

“Pfizer is committed to human rights and environmental protection. In providing legal counsel on these important issues, I have the opportunity to help the company enhance its programs and governance processes to address emerging diligence and disclosure requirements,” she says. “The statutes have evolved over the past few years to require deeper dives into the risks across more jurisdictions. My role is to help evaluate the new laws and work with our business leaders to implement the requirements and communicate our performance to our stakeholders.”

Adame-Winningham also serves on two of the Legal Division’s three committees, the Development and Equity Committee and the Community Committee. The Development

A Can-Do Attitude

In addition to both her in-house and committee duties, Nikki AdameWinningham also volunteers for the National Association of Women Lawyers. In fact, in 2021, she was named vice chair of the General Counsel Institute—which positions her to become chair in 2022. But Adame-Winningham isn’t focused on the title. “I don’t necessarily think of myself as a leader,” she says. “I’m definitely more of a ‘do-er’ and a firm believer in always doing your best.”

“When I was on the debate team [in high school], one of our topics was about worldwide pollution, which really opened my eyes to the importance of both the environment and sustainability.”

and Equity Committee’s goal is to approach diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) from a development perspective: committee members are divided into five smaller teams that approach that goal from different angles. As a member of the metrics and communications team, Adame-Winningham helps determine specific metrics to measure the Legal Division’s progress on reaching its DEI goals.

She is also deeply committed to the Community Committee’s work to inspire pro bono service. As part of her work with that committee, she and another colleague spent a year developing criteria for an award the division created to honor a colleague who passed away in 2019. “She was devoted to service, both in the pro bono area as well as within the division, so we created a yearly award to not only honor and memorialize her work but also honor colleagues who are working hard to make a difference,” Adame-Winningham explains.

While her days are certainly busy, AdameWinningham is grateful to have strong outside partners with whom she works on EHS [environment, health, and safety] and ESG matters, and grateful in general to have the opportunity to work on these issues.

“I’m truly proud to be part of a company that works to improve people’s health, which is linked to sustainability, and the positive impact we can have on health through environmental protection,” she says. “I’m also grateful that I get to pull in other issues that I really care about such as [DEI]; ESG creates the space to work on climate action and DEI to protect our communities.”

As she sees it, Pfizer’s future is bright. “In addition to working toward our new generation of sustainability goals—being carbon neutral across all internal operations by 2030—we’re really focusing on our purpose, which is ‘Breakthroughs that change patients’ lives,’” she says. “It’s going to be exciting to see what those new breakthroughs turn out to be.”

Baker McKenzie is dedicated to helping clients achieve their sustainability goals.

Baker McKenzie congratulates Nikki Adame-Winningham from Pfizer on her well-deserved recognition as a dynamic changemaker in the legal community. As a leader in the ESG legal field, Baker McKenzie is proud to partner with Pfizer’s team to further its strategic initiatives and to advance the company’s sustainability goals.

The Best of All Worlds

BY BILLY YOST

As a VP and assistant general counsel at Oportun, Marta Miyar Palacios leverages every aspect of who she is: her passion for serving the community, her international legal expertise, and her deep knowledge of the nonprofit world

FOR THE PAST SEVEN YEARS, MARTA MIYAR PALACIOS has tapped into her longtime passion for nonprofit work at a business that takes its role in the community seriously—Oportun, a financial services company that leverages its digital platform to provide responsible consumer credit to hardworking people.

The current vice president and assistant general counsel for commercial, global, and IP spent five years of her early career working on behalf of both the American Diabetes Association and the Day Labor Program of San Francisco. But she noticed a trend in the nonprofit world that challenged her to find another way to give back to her community.

“In my own experience in nonprofits, you spend maybe half of your time doing the good work of the organization,” Palacios explains. “But you also spend so much time asking for financial support for the organization. I knew there had to be a for-profit avenue that could still accomplish this kind of work.”

Palacios’s desire to give back to her community stems from her years watching her parents help others after finding their own success: her parents started out doing work designed for non-English speakers (e.g., work as janitors and elevator operators) and attended school at night to obtain their US degrees as well as learn English. “They taught us to value education and help others less fortunate,” Palacios says. Both her parents established successful careers in accounting, and they used their resources to help others. The young Palacios followed in their footsteps.

It would take a number of years before Palacios eventually found her way to Oportun in 2014. Her Stanford JD would help open the gateway to several prestigious private law firms, where she built out extensive international and complex litigation experience, but her desire to connect with her community continued to drive her to find a company aligned with her values and mission.

Global Opportunities

The Oportun of today is a far different organization than the one Palacios joined years ago. “The legal department was just the general counsel when I joined,” Palacios recalls. Now, the department encompasses a multitude of legal professionals. And as the legal department has grown, so has the Oportun footprint.

At present, Oportun operates in three different countries. Palacios acknowledges that may be a small purview at other companies, but says it’s enough to challenge her skills and never have a predictable day.

“There’s a matrix of law and practices that you get when working internationally, and you have to have some visibility for it and learn how to navigate it,” the VP explains. “I already had several years of international experience in different areas, and I think that, as well as being bilingual, was part of the desired skill set that brought me here.”

On Palacios’s watch, Oportun has expanded and evolved its Mexico operations and has also launched a technology center in India. Palacios has advised the

Marta Miyar Palacios VP and Assistant General Counsel, Commercial, Global & IP Oportun Inc.

company on the transformational changes underway in Mexico while also aiding the opening of the India location. “It’s so important to provide a cohesive approach as we continue to grow,” she notes. “Achieving consistency across cultures when you’re operating in different countries and time zones can be very challenging at times.”

Bridging the Gap

Over the past seven years, Palacios has witnessed Oportun’s commitment to the communities it serves, both in terms of the affordable financial products it provides and the many nonprofits the company helps support. Oportun supports a variety of community organizations, including the Chicano Latino Youth Leadership Project, UnidosUS’s Financial Coaching

Program, and DIY Girls/Social and Environmental Entrepreneurs.

Altruism, Palacios explains, is part of Oportun’s day-to-day business focus. “There’s a shared value in the purpose of Oportun and our mission,” she says. “We are here to help our customers get more access to credit, obtain credit scores, and start that path to receiving access to mainstream sources of credit.”

As Palacios knows, many members of the Hispanic community, including immigrants, are often forced to deal in a cash-only economy. As a result, their access to larger opportunities—such as buying a house or going to college—is limited.

Oportun acts as a bridge for those who have traditionally not had access to credit of any kind. And while Palacios’s work doesn’t entail working directly with customers, she is

helping support the organization in its efforts to provide new means of economic participation for millions of customers who had been excluded from the financial mainstream.

“Oportun is the perfect marriage of a lot of the areas I’m interested in,” the VP says. “I am able to do the legal work that I love while also serving a mission that reflects the lens through which I view the world.”

Inspection at Any Time

A global expansion is challenging in and of itself, but the COVID-19 pandemic has provided still further challenges for the international legal team at Oportun. Mexican law, Palacios explains, allows for spontaneous inspections to ensure that companies are complying with COVID-19 regulations. “If someone shows up at your doorstep, you can have an inspection,” she says. “At that moment, you need to be prepared to show that you’re complying with all of the health and safety requirements.”

Such experiences were made even more difficult by how regulations and requirements frequently changed throughout the crisis. But Palacios says the international legal team came together to form a cohesive, overarching strategy that protected workers and met the evolving guidelines.

“There was a period of time where we were working very, very hard,” Palacios admits. “It was an even bigger endeavor on the operations side, but we were there to support them.”

“Support” is an underappreciated word, yet it seems to lend itself to so much of Palacios’s journey. From watching her parents make their way in a new country to her nonprofit work and international legal endeavors, the VP continues to find value in the support and service of others. And at Oportun, she truly gets the best of all worlds.

“Oportun is the perfect marriage of a lot of the areas I’m interested in. I am able to do the legal work that I love while also serving a mission that reflects the lens through which I view the world.”

INSIGHTS

The philosophies of innovative leaders have the power to inspire and spark change. Read on for the thought-provoking insights of these successful executives.

112. Jorge de Cardenas, American Campus Communities 116. Luis Guzman, Fragomen 120. Juan Perez, UPS 123. Francisco Leon, California Resources Corporation 126. Lisa Iglesias, Unum 130. Philip Ramirez, Prominence Health Plan 134. Julio Covarrubias, Delek US Holdings Inc. 138. Dimas Ortega, Sinai Health System

A Journey Worth Taking

BY DONALD LIEBENSON

Inspired by his parents, Jorge de Cardenas has worked hard to pursue his dreams. Today, he leverages all the lessons he’s learned along the way as EVP and CTO of American Campus Communities.

Imagine they spent their first night in this country on a park bench in Miami—and then went on to raise you and three siblings and also support your grandparents. It would no doubt instill in you a strong work ethic.

So it was for Jorge de Cardenas, executive vice president and chief technology officer at American Campus Communities (ACC).

“I saw how hard they worked to make a good life for us,” de Cardenas says of his parents. “They valued education. My father finished his engineering degree and got a master’s in metallurgy. He went to work for Shell Oil and retired as director of Shell Development Co. My mother, at thirtythree—while also working—went back to college to improve her opportunities in banking. She started out as a receptionist and worked her way up to become senior vice president at JP Morgan Chase.”

A first-generation American, de Cardenas credits his parents with instilling in him both a firm belief in the American dream and an appreciation and respect for the hard work it takes to achieve one’s full potential. Unlike de Cardenas’s wife (his high school sweetheart), who knew she wanted to be a teacher since kindergarten, he has worked in a broad range of industries. But his career has always been aspirational.

EXPLORATION, AT NASA AND BEYOND

After graduating from Texas A&M University, de Cardenas began his career developing software for the F-16 fighter jet for General Dynamics and went on to complete mission evaluation work at NASA. “It was a very motivational and inspiring environment,” he reflects. “What drove me to different industries was learning about their challenges and what value I could bring to the table.”

From NASA, de Cardenas’s career really took off. In the early ’90s, he cofounded and was principal consultant of Everest Technologies Inc., an oil and gas IT consulting firm, which was sold to SAIC. He later served in various capacities at technology start-up companies, all the while moving from, as he describes it, “pure technology guy to a product manager.”

He also served as director of product management for emerging technologies at Visa before meeting with the CEO at American Campus Communities about the challenges the company was facing in taking the

company public. De Cardenas decided to join them.

American Campus Communities is the nation’s largest developer, owner, and manager of high-quality student housing communities. De Cardenas’s role as EVP and CTO is to define and lead technology and digital transformation strategy for the organization. According to the EVP, one of the most forward-thinking initiatives the company has established is NextGen, a technology platform that provides scalability in the company’s current business segments and adaptability to address new and emerging market segments. It’s a departure from one-size-fits-all housing solutions.

LESSONS LEARNED

If there is a common thread de Cardenas has discerned over his more than three decades in the tech space, it is this: “If you put the right people in the right seats, you can solve any problem.” This, he says, means diversity in executive positions. “Diversity brings ideas

“If you’re not making a mistake from time to time, you’re probably not innovating.”

Imagine your parents were political exiles from Cuba who came to the United States as teens to restart their lives after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion.

from different perspectives and experiences and produces innovative solutions to complex problems. In our case, it also helps us have a better understanding of our diverse student body.”

But this is not the only lesson the EVP has learned. Based on his wide range of experiences in corporate and start-up environments, de Cardenas has developed five rules of leadership for chief information officers. First, he says, CIOs must strive to be the leaders they’ve been waiting for (i.e., they must take the initiative).

Second, they should remember that doing things right is not as important as doing the right things. They should also know and accept that what got them “here” will not get them “there.” They need to realize that trust only comes from delivering. And finally, they must understand that people and culture are everything.

That last one is especially important, de Cardenas says. “Leaders are developed in an environment in which the bar is continually raised and setbacks are reframed as learning opportunities,” he says. “If you’re not making a mistake from time to time, you’re probably not innovating.”

But despite everything he’s learned from his professional experiences, de Cardenas still cites his father as his most important mentor and source of wisdom.

“The biggest impression isn’t in any specific counsel, which I still seek,” he explains. “It is more how he’s lived and modeled himself in both his professional and personal life. From core values such as integrity and respect to the lessons I learned about overcoming adversity, like losing your freedoms and your country, he taught me to not be a victim and to take responsibility for my own destiny.”

Fortimize is proud to be a preferred technology partner for American Campus Communities (ACC) since 2018, automating and enhancing real estate business processes on Salesforce. Partnering with more than 250 companies on more than 650 projects, we empower our clients to humanize their customer experiences. Connect with us at fortimize.com.

Removing Risk from Success

BY ZAYVELLE WILLIAMSON

Luis Guzman fosters a data-driven, collaborative culture to ensure Fragomen can grow without obstacles

LUIS GUZMAN LOVES A GOOD CHALLENGE.

“I’ve always hated hearing that I can’t do something,” he says, laughing. “It just makes me crazy.”

Fittingly, Guzman has carved a niche for himself in the world of cybersecurity, where “the challenges and threats continue to evolve and change” and where business success and growth come with a whole new set of risks. As director of information security and compliance operations at Fragomen, one of

the world’s top immigration law firms, Guzman has put that reality at the forefront of his team’s operations, working to ensure that the company continuously evolves in its evaluation of and response to cyberthreats.

Guzman first discovered his passion for the field while serving in the military. “I loved analyzing information and learning how to communicate that for decision-making,” he says. “I was really

attracted to the analytical components of the intelligence field—having structured ways to break down information, gather the best information available, and understand the capabilities of the organization I was supporting and how the environment and culture affected what we were doing. It was just fascinating.”

When Guzman left the military and moved back to the United States, he quickly realized that the cybersecurity field was a natural fit for all the skills he had been cultivating. And what

Luis Guzman Director of Information Security & Compliance Operations Fragomen

INDUSTRY INSIGHTS

Luis Guzman has learned a lot over the years—from colleagues in the field as well as from his own experiments and explorations. Here, he offers his top pieces of advice for anyone interested in cybersecurity:

1. Get your hands dirty. “I’ve self-taught for much of my career, even if that meant rushing home to wipe Windows off my personal machines to learn Linux.”

2. Don’t be afraid to take the next step. “People will take a chance on you if they understand that you’re bringing a passion and willingness to learn and a hunger to be better.”

3. Be a positive force.

“In this field, it’s all a challenge, it’s all difficult—you have to frame things in a way that helps people understand what is there and how to [proceed].”

he didn’t already know, he was more than willing to learn. “I can absorb anything if I’m around somebody long enough,” Guzman says. “I have learned so much from my colleagues and from diving in, ranging from forensics to scripting.”

By 2013, Guzman had gained sufficient knowledge of cybersecurity, intelligence, and analysis operations to begin developing those functions for a company. He joined PNC as vice president of cyberthreat analysis and immediately set to work creating a cyberthreat analysis team. Eighteen months later, the team was a dozen people strong and providing consistent, actionable results to the organization.

In the following years, Guzman was asked to take on yet more challenges. He led the security operations center for PNC, then transitioned to Uber in 2016 to mature the detection and response team. In each position, Guzman says, he learned “a tremendous amount” from colleagues just as focused on data-driven decision-making as he is.

True to form, though, Guzman kept an eye out for other opportunities to stretch himself. And when a former colleague recommended him to Fragomen’s CIO in 2017, he knew that that opportunity had come.

As Guzman explains, Fragomen’s CIO was looking to start a technology innovation center in Pittsburgh, a center that would enable the company to “recruit the best and the brightest to come and work on not only our current technology but the emerging technologies the firm was looking to employ.”

The Pittsburgh office had an in-house technology team but no security professionals—until Guzman joined. “It was very exciting to me to get another chance to build

a team—I love building teams,” the director says. “And Fragomen is a technology company in the end. We deliver immigration and employment support, but we do that through technologies that we create.”

Fragomen, Guzman points out, does not follow the traditional law firm model. They work at scale, gathering information and documentation from individuals, families, and businesses across more than 120 countries.

And all that data needs to remain secure and private—which is where Guzman and his team come in. “It’s about becoming part of the solution on how we deliver technologies that take into account security and data privacy by, as someone wiser than me said, design and default,” he says.

Guzman has helped further reduce risk to the organization by founding a governance risk and compliance committee and by ensuring that his team members are as transparent as possible about what they do. “Nothing moves forward without risk,” he admits, “but you can reduce it in a way that you can deal with it.”

But to the director’s mind, his team’s success isn’t measured only by their technical innovations and insights. Throughout his tenure at Fragomen, Guzman has striven to foster an open, collaborative mindset in his team members.

“There is this dichotomy I’ve seen, even back when I was in the government, between operators and intelligence people,” he explains. “There was so much unnecessary friction, so I learned early on to become much more of a collaborative partner with all of the other elements that make military operations function. And when I came into this field, I

saw that same problem wherever I went: there were security people over here, and the operation guys were over there. I was just not going to operate that way.”

This approach has caught the attention of Fragomen’s partners, including Blake Sallé, chief revenue officer at Proofpoint. “Luis has been instrumental in advancing Fragomen’s security mission, and we’re thrilled to be a part of that,” Sallé says. “We’ve always believed in a peoplecentric approach to cybersecurity—and in strong, collaborative partnerships to achieve it.”

Of course, Guzman has seen a lot of internal support as well. From the beginning, Guzman says, Fragomen’s leadership supported him in his effort to “build a strong interplay across teams.” Together, he and his colleagues have successfully identified and resolved weaknesses in the company’s system, brought the organization up to international compliance standards, and supported the company in its continued growth—and they’ve got the data to prove it.

At DeFY Security, our twenty-plus years of experience in and dedication to cybersecurity have led some of our nation’s leading financial institutions, healthcare organizations, manufacturers, and retail outlets to entrust their cybersecurity needs to us. Congratulations to Luis Guzman. You are a leader and innovator in cybersecurity.

Attackers start with people. Your security should, too.

Proofpoint protects your people, data and systems by stopping threats, training users and securing information everywhere it lives.

Learn how Proofpoint protects organizations like yours at proofpoint.com/us/customer-stories

“Fragomen is a technology company in the end. We deliver immigration and employment support, but we do that through technologies that we create.”

Proofpoint is proud to partner with and support Luis Guzman and Fragomen.

Juan Perez has spent the past thirty-two years learning, innovating, and leading at UPS

Decades of Dedication

BY BILLY YOST

CONTINUALLY CHALLENGING ONESELF DOESN’T necessarily mean changing companies every three years.

Juan Perez is a shining example. The current chief information and engineering officer at UPS didn’t transition into his role after stints at other companies. He started at UPS thirty-two years ago as an intern. Then he became a loader and then a driver. Through promotion after promotion, Perez built out new skills in engineering, IT, supply chain, the domestic business, the international business, and a whole host of areas that have made him the ideal candidate for his current role.

As Perez sees it, this position is the best one he could ever have. “I’m so happy to be in this role,” he says. “I respect it immensely. Every day that I come to work at UPS, I recognize the obligation and responsibility that I have to this position—not just to myself but to the thousands of employees in the company and the millions of customers we serve every day who depend on our solutions, our technologies, our facilities, and our processes.”

THE BEST TEACHERS, THE BEST GIFT

Perez spends a great deal of his interview trying to distance himself from his own accomplishments. He

credits the mentors he’s had during his three decades at UPS, who have given him opportunities to fail and learn from his mistakes, and the many IT and engineering professionals he works with each day. And before that, there was his father.

As Perez explains, his family had to leave Cuba after the 1959 revolution and begin again. “My dad was just a true professional in everything that he did,” he says. “He left Cuba and came to the United States—and eventually restarted his textiles business in Mexico, primarily because of his language limitations, but filled with pride, a vision, and motivation.”

Perez’s father taught him the value of treating people with dignity and always making sure that he was connected to the people he worked with. Perhaps most importantly, he stressed the importance of finding passion in his work. Perez, like his father, is an avid learner, a key to success in any job. He recently finished his first course in pursuit of his doctorate. Perez firmly believes that UPS supports and encourages the development of its people.

“My dad used to say that the best gift you can receive is when someone teaches you something,” Perez

says. “As leaders in this company, I believe we should constantly be teaching and developing the next generation of UPSers while also acknowledging that you won’t always have the answers.”

MORE THAN NEXT-DAY DELIVERY

While thirty-two years seems like more than enough time for Perez to have learned all there is to know about UPS, there is always more to learn. His curiosity remains his constant driver in partnering with new CEO Carol B. Tomé and furthering her goal of providing the best customer digital experience and service that any company can offer, supported by the smartest logistics network. “Our new CEO has helped us navi-

gate through some challenging times already, and she’s established a fantastic goal for UPS,” Perez emphasizes.

For Perez’s part, this customer service goal will mean providing support through the UPS Smart Logistics Network. “We will continue to make investments in operational technologies like drones, electric aircraft, and advanced technologies of all kinds, including smart packages, handhelds, and robotics,” Perez says. “The goal Carol has established has to be well supported by engineering and IT, and that’s why I’m so excited about the work that I do.”

Perez’s team members are equally passionate about the work they do each day. Recently, the team was recognized with a CIO100 award for its innovative

Juan Perez Chief Information & Engineering Officer UPS

WHO

Harmonized Enterprise Analytics Tool, which provides up-to-date statuses on UPS packages across the company’s entire network. In other words, a digital twin of its physical network to help plan and run operations more effectively. In addition, in 2021, UPS was recognized as one of the best places to work in IT by Computerworld magazine.

More important than any award, however, is the tangible help that UPS’s technology innovations provide to its customers. As Perez explains, the company’s visibility solutions and network planning tools have helped improve the efficiency of the entire UPS network as well as the resilience and flexibility of the entire operation. In early 2021, when a rogue snowstorm hit Texas and caused power outages across the state, UPS’s network planning tools and operational know-how played a key role in helping mitigate the crisis.

CREATING THE FUTURE

Perez is immensely grateful for all of the opportunities UPS has afforded him over the years. The organization places great value on its people, he says, which is part of the reason he’s remained with the company for so long.

“UPS creates opportunities for all, including immigrants just like me,” Perez explains. “By working hard, educating yourself, and committing to the organization, you can do anything here. There are so many stories like mine at UPS, of people who have found opportunities and have been put in a position to help create the future of this company, and it’s a responsibility I take very seriously.”

UPS’s 114-year history began with Jim Casey and his partner working out of a basement in Seattle, Washington. Perez is well versed in the story of the company’s founders. It’s a story of perseverance, partnership, and commitment. And thanks to innovators like him, and his continual desire to keep pushing for the company’s technological evolution, UPS’ future remains bright for generations to come.

“My dad used to say that the best gift you can receive is when someone teaches you something.”

LEADS UPS FORWARD? VISIONARY PEOPLE LIKE YOU.

Francisco Leon joined the energy industry for the opportunity to travel and gain international experience. He’s stayed because of the meaning and purpose he’s found within that community.

Energizing an Industry

BY WILL GRANT

AS THE CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER AT CALIFORNIA Resources Corporation (CRC), Francisco Leon admits that he may not always be the loudest voice in the room. He tends to let his work do the talking.

That said, Leon is quite vocal about his passion for the energy industry—which has changed his life as well as provided thousands, if not millions, of jobs to Latinos of all backgrounds. Indeed, the oil and natural gas industry has quite a diverse workforce, from the employees “turning the wrenches” (as Leon puts it) all the way up to those who have risen to positions of leadership, like himself.

But Leon’s sense of fulfillment isn’t just because of how welcoming the industry is to people of diverse backgrounds. His own background has helped him see the myriad ways in which affordable, reliable, and sustainable energy can impact an entire society.

TWO CONNECTED BUT DIFFERENT WORLDS

Leon grew up in Tijuana, Mexico, and frequently crossed the border into San Diego. As a child, he quickly noticed a stark contrast that would forever impact his mindset. “We have two cities that are incredibly interconnected, but they’re also very different,” Leon explains. “You had a very capitalist country that saw so

Francisco Leon CFO California Resources Corporation

BY

THE NUMBERS: THE CALIFORNIA ENERGY INDUSTRY

92 percent of all transportation fuel in California is based on crude oil, including gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel.

The state’s energy deficit requires California to use 70 percent of all the oil it produces on jet fuel alone.

In California, more than 25 state and federal agencies oversee all aspects of the exploration and development of properties, production, transportation, and sale of oil and natural gas.

California’s oil and natural gas industry is much more diverse than other industries, with more than 28 percent Latino, 11 percent Asian, and 6 percent Black employees .

many signs of progress, and it’s right next to a third-world country that lacks urban planning and underinvests in infrastructure.”

Leon’s cross-border experience would be further solidified by a college summer internship for a natural gas pipeline company in Colorado that was looking to make inroads to Mexico. “Prior to that experience, I didn’t know much about the energy sector,” Leon admits, “but it fit everything that I was looking for. I wanted international experience, I wanted to meet people from all over the world, and I wanted the opportunity to do business and travel extensively.”

Travel and international business experience aside, the CFO has stayed in the energy sector for all these years because of one simple reason: he believes in it. “I often think of the people back in Mexico that are resources rich but energy poor. They simply do not have access to the kind of quality of life we have here in the United States,” he says. “Mexico is an incredible country, but there are energy blackouts, interruptions of service, and a large part of the population doesn’t have access to the basics that are commonplace here.”

THE IMPETUS FOR GREATNESS

“That’s the narrative I entered this country hearing,” Leon says. “You saw people in Texas with incredible innovation and entrepreneurial spirit find a way to drill for oil in ways they hadn’t before. They created a boom in the industry, and the US went from having to depend on foreign oil to being a net exporter. To me, that is incredible. We took what was a problem and came out better for it.

“Fast-forward to today,” the CFO continues, “and this is what California needs now. I believe we can meet the social and economic needs of our working families and our state’s ambitious environmental goals by replacing our chronic dependence on imported energy with locally produced oil, natural gas, and renewables.”

(Source: California Resources Corporation)

Leon acknowledges that the energy industry has more critics than ever before but says that the industry, by and large, doesn’t get the chance to balance the argument. The CFO remembers prior presidents speaking about the importance of energy independence and the industry’s desire to find an alternative to getting oil from the Middle East.

According to Leon, the industry is also incredibly rigorous about the resources that it uses and distributes. It is perhaps doubly, if not triply, tougher in California, where CRC is based. “We have some of the highest operating standards here, and we produce some of the cleanest energy,” Leon explains. “It can be frustrating to see that the state wants to continually subsidize technologies that are frankly inferior. But I think it just makes me double down on my efforts for an industry that I care so much about.”

The CFO says that if more people were cognizant of exactly what his industry produces, and how, it might create a more even-keeled conversation that would lay the groundwork for the future of energy for the world.

“We focus on safely and responsibly supplying lower-carbon-intensity energy and

are committed to decarbonization and the energy transition,” Leon says. “And oil is not just a source of energy—it is also an important raw material for many products we use every day. Some are obvious, like rubber, nylon, and plastics. But perhaps more surprisingly, oil is used in things like aspirin and medicines, ink, plastic for glasses and contact lenses, fibers in clothing, as well as the energy that powers most transportation around the world.

“Oil and gas have made humanity better,” he adds, “and it continues to enhance the quality of life for people here. I have a deep sense of passion around the benefits that my industry provides.”

THE ENERGY TO GIVE

The many mentors Leon has encountered throughout his career have motivated him to continue helping the next generation of leaders find success in the energy sector. And the mentoring program at CRC has helped formalize the CFO’s desire to give back.

Outside of CRC, Leon’s passion continues to drive him. The CFO is a board member of the Union Rescue Mission (URM) of Los Angeles. The largest privately funded homeless shelter in the US, the URM serves more than sixty-six thousand homeless individuals in Los Angeles County alone.

“I’m blown away by the quality of the URM staff and other board members,” Leon says. “These are people who truly want to help people get back on their feet—to make a difference.”

COMMITTED TO OUR COMMUNITIES AND THE ENVIRONMENT

California Resources Corporation takes pride in safely and responsibly providing ample, affordable and reliable energy to help meet your energy needs in a sustainable way.

“We have some of the highest operating standards here [in California], and we produce some of the cleanest energy.”

Lisa Iglesias

EVP and General Counsel Unum

Lisa Iglesias has adapted to challenges throughout her career— and become a better attorney for it

BY LUCY CAVANAGH

Flexibility and Resilience

“YOU CAN’T GET TOO INGRAINED IN your own opinion because there are definitely different approaches—different ways to meet the needs of different companies,” says Lisa Iglesias, executive vice president and general counsel at Unum. “Even one company can change over time. Being prepared and being able to react to external circumstances teaches you flexibility and resilience.”

Iglesias has no shortage of experience adapting, and in a wide variety of industries. After earning her bachelor’s and master’s in accounting at the University of South Florida, she started her career as a certified public accountant at KPMG, advisory and tax audit. Though she enjoyed working in accounting, she had another plan—to enter the legal industry. And in 1991, she took the first step toward that goal, enrolling in the JD program at the University of Miami.

Iglesias knew she eventually wanted to work as an in-house attorney, she explains, but first she built up her experience as an associate counsel at Greenberg Traurig. There, she worked on a variety of projects but specialized in securities and mergers and acquisitions. Through some of the connections that she made, she found her first in-house position in 1998 at Spherion, a recruiting and staffing company that was in the midst of a series of acquisitions at the time.

After nearly ten years at Spherion, Iglesias moved to Nordstrom Inc. to become the iconic company’s first general counsel, EVP, and corporate secretary. The timing, however, was less than ideal. “It was a great move in 2007, but the next year the economy collapsed, which limited the law department’s ability to expand,” Iglesias explains. “It was a change and more of a challenge, and Nordstrom was a great company with an amazing family where I was able to learn a lot.”

After a year at Nordstrom, Iglesias was ready for a new challenge: she accepted a position as vice president and assistant general counsel for securities at WellCare Health

Plans. As she explains, WellCare was just emerging from a rather turbulent period— the company had undergone an FBI raid as well as a government investigation that resulted in the indictments of three of its top officers. Iglesias helped WellCare reinvent itself and recover enough to be purchased by another company.

Since 2015, Iglesias has helped lead the legal department at Unum, an international insurance company that specializes in affordable access to critically needed policies. “I was drawn to Unum by the type of work that they do,” Iglesias says. “We help employees obtain disability, life, accident, critical illness, dental, vision benefits, and more through their work-

place—and those benefits help protect their families, their finances, and their futures, for real times of need.”

At Unum, Iglesias has also found a familylike culture—one that enables employees to grow, no matter how long they’re with the company. “Almost every person I interviewed with had really made their career here. They had decades-long tenures and still loved being here every day, and that was so refreshing,” Iglesias reflects. “I had previously been at places where it was a more entrepreneurial culture, and people tended to stay three years, work hard, and then go to a competitor and bounce around. And that’s really tough because you lose so much institutional knowledge.”

“We help employees obtain disability, life, accident, critical illness, dental, vision benefits, and more through their workplace—and those benefits help protect their families, their finances, and their futures, for real times of need.”

The supportive culture at Unum has been key to the company’s business success as well, giving employees a steady foundation for the company’s rapid growth. To further support that growth, Iglesias has made it a priority to unify the various departments within Unum. Some, she explains, had learned to exist in silos, but she wanted to bring everyone together to improve operational performance and provide all legal resources with a broader view of the business.

“We have definitely focused on efficiency. With all the growth that we have had, we want to make sure to focus on what adds the most value for the business,” Iglesias notes. “As technology develops, we have also worked on incorporating it into our work to improve our efficiency.”

In addition to all her efforts within Unum, Iglesias also makes time to contribute to the office’s surrounding community of Chattanooga, Tennessee. Iglesias sits on the board of the Public Education Foundation in Hamilton County, which focuses on providing support for students in underserved populations and removing roadblocks to success, as well as the board of the River City Company, which is devoted to continuing to revitalize the downtown Chattanooga area.

Iglesias is also involved with the Hispanic National Bar Association and was even highlighted by the HNBA in 2021 as one of just fourteen Latinos to be working as a general counsel for a Fortune 500 company.

But perhaps most importantly, to Iglesias’s mind at least, the EVP works to support up-and-coming lawyers through her involvement with the Chattanooga Legal Diversity Consortium, which targets diverse first-year law students and offers them a unique summer internship opportunity.

“We sponsor each intern and try to create a sense of community between all the diverse interns that show up for the summer,” Iglesias says. “We hope that they come back to Chattanooga and that, little by little, it leads to increased diversity in the law practice here.”

The Best Right Way

BY BILLY YOST

As a compliance expert and dedicated mentor, Philip Ramirez has helped reinforce the culture of caring at Prominence Health Plan

Philip Ramirez Chief Compliance Officer

Early in his career, Ramirez and several others had helped found a start-up company, but with the departure of the CEO, a new leader came in and abruptly parted with most of the people who had helped get the business to where it was. “It was really a shock to my system and a huge challenge I had never experienced in my life,” Ramirez remembers. “If you work long enough, you find that we’re all going to be on the other side of a layoff one time or another.”

It wasn’t the layoff that defined Ramirez’s future, but what came next. Rather than limiting his job search to his hometown of San Antonio, Texas, Ramirez and his wife opened their search to just about anywhere in the US. After one interview, Ramirez fell in love with the Sierra Nevada Mountains and the Reno–Lake Tahoe area that he calls home today.

“I took that job, and the rest was history,” Ramirez says. “Both my wife and I have had the opportunity to excel here—so much more than we ever imagined.”

Ramirez has been at Prominence Health Plan for the past three years, and the CCO brings a deep and enduring passion for compliance and operational excellence to his role. It was a journey that began in graduate school. “I really consider myself drawn to ethics and compliance theory and finding the best way to do the right thing,” Ramirez says.

“This approach really would guide the rest of my career.”

Integrating compliance into the broader company culture, the CCO says, creates a halo effect that grounds an organization not just in regulatory compliance but in the service and care of Prominence’s patients. That foundation has proven especially beneficial in serving the members of the insurance plan who are most in need.

Prominence’s Medicare Advantage plans are tailored to Medicare-eligible beneficiaries who prefer the delivery of their medical benefits by a local health plan rather than by the government.

“We’re able to provide an insurance product to people that is richer than any benefit they can obtain from the state or federal government,” Ramirez explains. “We’re able to offer this by leveraging the partnership and reputation of our parent company—Universal Health Services, a Fortune 300 hospital management company—and by putting our local resources and clinical expertise to work to exceed our patients’ care needs.”

While Prominence Health Plan is headquartered in Nevada, according to the CCO, its Medicare Advantage plans are particularly impactful in the company’s key markets in two of the most underserved areas in the

nation: South Texas, along the US/Mexico border, and South Florida. Members can access an interdisciplinary team of healthcare professionals, including primary care physicians, specialty providers, behavioral health and mental health care, case managers, and social workers. They also enjoy a comprehensive suite of supplemental benefits, including dental, vision, hearing, meal delivery, transportation, health and wellness, and over-thecounter drugs.

“We have found that one’s health is inextricably linked not only to traditional medical and prescription drug benefits but other products and services that address the psychosocial aspects of health,” Ramirez says, “such as transportation to doctors’ appointments, to the grocery store to obtain healthy nutrition, and to the pharmacy to help the patient comply with medication regimens.”

From a regulatory compliance perspective, the last year has brought on several developments in the insurance world. Two key pieces of legislation passed in the waning days of the Trump administration, the No Surprises Act and the Transparency in Coverage rule, were both written in the right spirit, Ramirez says. However, as the saying goes, “no good deed goes unpunished.” While these regulations aimed to create a more informed healthcare consumer and help providers and insurers unveil the cost formula for different medical services, they’ve also created an operational challenge for the healthcare delivery system, which must retrofit systems and process to comply with these new regulations.

“These are probably the most significant changes that the health insurance industry has seen since the Affordable Care Act, and while it may seem incredibly disruptive to day-today operations,” the CCO explains, “at the end of the day, it’s the right thing to do for healthcare consumers.”

Along with a passion for compliance and service, Ramirez is an ardent participant in mentorship activities to serve his community.

Of all the experiences in the impressive career of Prominence Health Plan’s Chief Compliance Officer Philip Ramirez, the one he sees as the most impactful might be a strange one. It was a layoff, and a particularly hard one at that.

In partnership with Prominence’s parent company, UHS, Ramirez was selected to mentor a director for one of Prominence’s markets in North Texas. The week of speaking, the CCO was preparing for another meeting with his mentee that would include coaching, discussion, and collaboration.

“Mentors have been a big part of my own success,” Ramirez says. “I’m just happy to be able to pass along some of the things I’ve learned along the way.”

But there is another beneficiary of Ramirez’s time, talent, and experience. As part of the Big Brothers Big Sisters program, Ramirez has acted as a mentor and friend for his pal Jose for the last four years. Ramirez has shared his love of the outdoors, fishing, cooking, and camping when watching a ball game or heading to the arcade.

“I just believe in reaching back to those who might need a hand,” Ramirez says. “That’s the mark of a true leader. Someone has to step up to the plate and say, ‘I’m going to make a difference, and this is how I’m going to do it.’ And that investment in one’s brother or sister is really what it’s all about.”

“I really consider myself drawn to ethics and compliance theory and finding the best way to do the right thing.”

Supply chain expert Julio Covarrubias pulls from his international and cross-industry experience to help direct the decision-making process for Delek US Holdings Inc.

A Diversity of Data

BY ANDREW TAMARKIN

JULIO COVARRUBIAS IS AN EXPERT AT translating data into meaningful information.

Born and raised in Mexico, Covarrubias fell into the energy industry almost by luck. An engineer by trade, he held several roles at an array of companies and even started his own small business building electric vehicles for amusement parks. Later, when a colleague offered him an opportunity in supply chain management for a large German automotive company in Mexico, he decided to take a risk.

“Every company is different, every team is different, and every circumstance is different,” he says. “So if you set your mind to it, you can use these differences as an advantage to make it work.”

As he grew professionally, Covarrubias’s family support gave him the motivation to stay driven in his work and cement his niche expertise as a supply chain leader. He moved from Mexico to the United States, worked with great mentors, and become known for his ability to visualize the big picture while accounting for the smallest details.

When Covarrubias joined diversified energy company Delek US Holdings Inc. in January 2020, he brought these skills to the table. In his current role as senior director of supply chain planning and performance, he monitors leading and lagging indicators that measure the progress of all current initiatives within the supply chain function.

Julio Covarrubias Senior Director of Supply Chain Planning & Performance

Delek US Holdings Inc.

“There is a lot of good data; there is a lot of bad data,” he says. “With my experience in different companies and industries, I have been able to develop expertise in using information to present a clear picture to inform any decision-making process.”

He and his team source data that tracks the company’s commercial transactions with third-party vendors. They study transactions, material and service requirement volumes, performance, and spend, making sense of their findings in comparison to market trends. “We use this data to trigger alerts, verify that we’re on the right track, and develop strategies that improve our spending performance,” the senior director explains.

According to the senior director’s partners, this work requires a highly specialized mindset. “Julio has a unique ability to understand the context in a data-rich world. He consistently uses this strength to implement and scale technology by testing and sharply prioritizing outcomes that maximize shareholder value,” explains Jorge Saenz, CEO of Matrix Scientific (AeroCore Technologies).

The job is full of complexities. Luckily for Delek, Covarrubias’s global background and cross-industry experience have enabled him to source, review, interpret, and present data with a growth-oriented mindset and an eye for nuance.

A MULTIFACETED PERSPECTIVE

As the world grows more connected, professional differences among nations decrease. That said, having worked in both the United States and Mexico, Covarrubias utilizes cultural divergence to his benefit. In the United States, he has noticed that professionals follow career opportunities, and family will follow. In Mexico, on the other hand,

Specialty Services

Complex Tank Cleaning

Vapor Control and Degassing

LDAR

Specialty Mechanical Services

Online Leak Repair

Technical Bolting

Cut/Isolation/Test

Field Machining

Hot Tap/Line Stop

For more information, contact Joe Davis at joe.davis@hydrochempsc.com

www.hydrochempsc.com

individuals seek out career development in specific geographic regions to stay near extended family. He balances both these perspectives on the clock and at home and, as a leader, considers these cultural differences within his professional environment.

Covarrubias also thinks about differences and overlap points between industries, which in turn helps him think outside the box. Though the automotive and energy industries complement each other—one builds vehicles, the other builds fuel for these vehicles—they have their share of differences. In his experience, automotive companies invest in the technological development of new products for the market, whereas energy companies invest in equipment and processes to guarantee safety, operational availability, and efficiency for said products.

“Considering these different influences gives you a better perspective,” he says. “On many occasions, I find new situations that are not easily addressed; these points of reference are always useful.”

Covarrubias’s broad-ranging background was also essential to his ability to support the reorganization of Delek’s supply chain function. Supply

“I am fortunate to be a part of a company that values its people and their diversity, a company that has that hunger to be a trailblazer within the energy industry.”

HydroChemPSC is the national leader in industrial cleaning (Hydroblasting, Vacuum, Chemical) and Specialty Services for the Refining and Petrochemical industries.

chain, he explains, is neither solely administrative nor simply reactive. “It has to contribute value to the company, eliminate waste from the sourcing and negotiating process, and provide the right material or service to the right place at the right time.”

As part of the organizational redevelopment, Covarrubias was involved in the redesign of the operational structure of the department, the roles, the policies and procedures that guide the function, and the tools and systems in place to facilitate and help standardize work methods.

“It’s one of the best teams I have been a part of,” Covarrubias reflects. “It has a lot to do with choosing the right people for the right roles.”

A FUTURE OF POSSIBILITIES

Throughout the reorganization process, Covarrubias has striven to ensure that his team remains receptive to the perspectives of other colleagues—a reflection of his broader leadership style. “I value everyone’s ideas and thought processes, even if they differ from mine,” he says. “This diversity of thought contributes to strong, effective teams and expands the possibilities of what can be achieved.”

This focus on possibilities and potential keeps his team members inspired. Covarrubias himself remains motivated by his family. “Without my wife and kids’ support, it would be very hard,” he says. “I need their support and tolerance to be successful at this job.”

As he looks to the future, Covarrubias only sees growth. He is certain new challenges will arise but equally certain that he and his team will continue to find success—in large part because of the support they receive from SVP of Supply Chain Sam Eljaouhari and Delek leadership.

“I am fortunate to be a part of a company that values its people and their diversity,” he says, “a company that has that hunger to be a trailblazer within the energy industry.”

The Mission Comes First

DIMAS ORTEGA’S MAIN PRIORITY IS helping people. As vice president of finance for Sinai Health System, his seasoned finance skills are put to work behind the scenes as the organization works to serve patients in Chicago’s west and southwest sides.

“The more you learn, the more you can help people,” Ortega says simply.

BY ANDREW TAMARKIN

Ortega has never sought grandiose titles or professional clout. Instead, he showed up for work, did the best he could, and pointed his efforts toward the mission of the organization. Like most young finance students, Ortega wasn’t sure at first exactly where or how he’d ultimately use his university training. But he believes he’s fortunate to have landed in healthcare, where the focus is always on patient care.

Ortega was granted his first opportunity in the field as an accounting assistant for

Dimas Ortega has always wanted to help people. As VP of finance for Sinai Health System, his skills are put to work ensuring the best patient care for the communities they serve.

Resurrection Healthcare, where he stayed for four years. During that time, he gained a foundational knowledge of how finance executives operate within the healthcare space— and of how vast and complex that space truly is. “Sometimes we don’t think of healthcare as a whole,” Ortega says. “We just think, ‘If we’re sick, we go to the ER.’ There’s a lot more that the healthcare industry does.”

Ortega’s next stint in the healthcare industry, at Swedish Covenant Hospital, helped further solidify his passion for this work: every day, he saw how his work helped both his colleagues and the hospital’s patients.

“That’s what I really love about healthcare,” Ortega says. “Knowing that I am— little by little—making a difference.”

After ten years, though, Ortega was ready for a change. So when United Therapies offered him an opportunity that includ-

ed substantial professional development, he took a risk. Unfortunately, six months in, when the company was sold to private equity, Ortega was suddenly without a job for the first time in more than a decade.

“We all have to look at life as a learning experience—good and bad. If we only focus on the good, then we won’t be ready when something bad happens,” Ortega reflects. “It was the first time I had to look for a job in ten years. I was not necessarily prepared for it, but I embraced it. You can sit back and say, ‘Why me?’ or look at challenges as opportunities.”

Determined to make the most of the situation, Ortega took time to plan his next career move. Having developed a niche expertise at the intersection of finance and healthcare, he knew he would stay in the industry he knew best—but only at an organization whose mission aligned with his professional values.

Sinai Health System caught Ortega’s eye. “The type of work being done [there] really interested me,” he says.

Ortega was hired to help stabilize Sinai’s finance division. He clarified processes, simplified procedures, and minimized costs. As he propelled growth, promotions followed in tandem. He went on to become controller, CFO, and finally VP of his division.

“Frontline workers are the real heroes,” Ortega emphasizes, “but my contribution to the patient is making sure we’re financially stable, that we have resources, and that I partner with the right leaders to help solve financial difficulties.”

In his current role, Ortega has worked with the operational program to foster a better understanding between departments. He has assembled teams with divergent skill sets, accelerated the audit process, and

“That’s what I really love about healthcare. Knowing that I am—little by little—making a difference.”

removed a layer of dust from age-old reporting techniques. Instead of going through the motions, Ortega inspires his team to approach the work thoughtfully. Moreover, with practical knowledge of the many layers within the finance function, he is happy to help where needed.

“I don’t mind getting my hands dirty and digging up accounts to reconcile,” the VP says. “I can do the work of an accountant if I can do the work of a vice president.”

By embodying an open leadership style, Ortega helps ensure that his team feels comfortable approaching him with new ideas. He enjoys open discussions and encourages disagreement. In this way, he can keep finetuning his own knowledge of the industry—which, in turn, supports Sinai in providing the best patient care across their network of hospitals, community clinics, and community institute.

Ortega’s passion for helping people echoes even outside the office. As treasurer of the board of directors for Latinos Progresando—a nonprofit organization that serves immigrants by providing high-quality, low-cost legal immigration services and other resources for the immigrant community—he uses his knowledge to the utmost. As he says, “If you have the God-given talent, why not use it for others?”

Looking to the future, Ortega is prepared to keep learning. Minimizing costs while providing high-level patient care will continue to be a challenge. But for Ortega, such challenges are opportunities—for learning, for growth, and for inspiration.

Xtend Healthcare is proud to partner with Dimas Ortega and his team at Sinai Health System, providing patients and staff with revenue cycle solutions. Thank you, Sinai, for including us in your extraordinary community.

“You can sit back and say, ‘Why me?’ or look at challenges as opportunities.”

© 2021 Xtend Healthcare LLC. Xtend Healthcare and the Xtend Healthcare logo are service marks of Xtend Healthcare LLC.

We’ll take care of your revenue cycle … so you can take care of your patients.

ENTREPRENEURS

Perhaps the ultimate form of leadership is business ownership, and the Latino community is rich with entrepreneurs. The men and women featured here tell stories of risk, reward, and the lessons learned along the way.

142. Lili Gil Valletta, CIEN+ 148. Danny Diaz Leyva, Diaz Leyva Group 152. Carmen Castillo, SDI International Corporation 154. Eddy Perez, Equity Prime Mortgage

Turning Cultural Trends into Profits

BY LUCY CAVANAGH

CIEN+ Cofounder Lili Gil Valletta proves how cultural intelligence drives business results

This philosophy serves as the bedrock for Gil Valletta’s leadership and mission: that businesses need cultural intelligence to win.

Gil Valletta moved to the United States from Colombia at just seventeen years old. “I moved here without speaking English, with a suitcase, a student visa, a pocket translator, and lots of ideas and dreams in my head,” she recalls. Unfortunately, many of her initial experiences in the United States were colored by stereotypes and clichés about Latinos.

“People would first assume I was Mexican, but then when they found out I was Colombian they would reference Pablo Escobar,” Gil Valletta says. “I thought it was very innocent, maybe a little oblivious, but I would try to have an open heart and not get offended. I would think, ‘OK, people are ignorant; I’ve got to teach them, to show them a better way.’”

This mindset inspired what she has codified and patented as cultural intelligence, the ability to be aware of, understand, and apply cultural competence and inclusive data to everyday business. For a decade, this framework has inspired the mission of both her market research tech firm CulturIntel and the consultancy and cultural marketing agency CIEN+.

“We have the privilege of influencing some of the biggest corporations in the world that want to better understand untapped opportunities and the impact of culture and market shifts to their business,” Gil Valletta explains. “We approach it from a place of empowerment; we demonstrate how it is mathematically impossible for a company to achieve their goals or street expectations without an inclusive approach to their business.”

Prior to founding CIEN+, Gil Valletta helped pioneer multicultural and inclusive marketing strategies at Johnson & Johnson (J&J) as director of global marketing services and the cofounder of the Latino employee resource group HOLA (Hispanic Organization of Leadership and Achievement). In 2009, Gil Valletta transitioned from her fast-track corporate career and joined former J&J colleague and now cofounder and business partner Enrique Arbelaez to create the company she says she couldn’t find to hire.

CIEN+ has since become an award-winning partner to Fortune 500 companies and other leading organizations seeking to understand and authentically engage with diverse, high-growth market segments worldwide.

However, as Gil Valletta points out, the word “diversity” fails to capture the full, profit-driving

Lili Gil Valletta embodies the true meaning of optimism. Where some might see an offensive comment, she sees an opportunity to educate. Where some might see an obstacle or a disadvantage, she sees a superpower.

Lili Gil Valletta CEO and Cofounder CIEN+

potential that cultural intelligence offers. More and more often, she says, D&I initiatives amount to little more than superficial box checking. Cultural intelligence, on the other hand, strives to wake businesses up to the market share they are missing out on by not understanding and embedding an inclusive approach into decisions.

“Inclusion is not an altruistic mission; it’s a superpower to future-proof your business. It’s not about reacting to social pressures or simply chasing representation, but anticipating market shifts and expectations with data, committed action, and dollars,” explains Gil Valletta.

This is what Gil Valletta describes as pursuing “purposeful profits.” “We limit the power of inclusion when we limit its reach to talent or corporate social responsibility efforts. It ultimately enables you to do well and do good, and that is the by-product of cultural intelligence in action,” she says. This was a message she boldly shared in a May 2021 TEDx Talk she titled “Diversity is overrated!” She challenged leaders to rethink and graduate from good intentions to lasting results, remarking, “I don’t want to be your charity project; I want to be your growth project.”

CIEN+ uses a three-step process to help companies unlock the power of cultural intelligence. First, they look at the data: they use their proprietary algorithm and AI CulturIntel to mine cultural insights, inclusive brand sentiment, and overall motivations across segments for a given market. Next, they sit down with the company’s C-suite to size the

THE POWER TO UNIFY

Lili Gil Valletta is one of the less than 2 percent of Latinas serving on a public board and was recently elected chairwoman of the Friends of the American Latino Museum (FRIENDS). The nonprofit is on a mission to support the building of a Smithsonian National Museum of the American Latino on the National Mall. As Gil Valletta explains, the museum will provide a complete look at American history, inclusive of more than five hundred years of American Latino stories and contributions that have routinely been left out of history books.

After more than two decades of advocacy, the bill to build the museum gained overwhelming bipartisan support and was signed into law by President Trump in December 2020. “The passing of this bill during a pandemic and in the middle of an election demonstrates that we Latinos have the power to find higher ground and unify,” she says. “People don’t realize that in a very divisive moment, this was one mission and cause that we all agreed on regardless of politics.”

opportunity, quantify market share potential, and design an acceleration plan. Finally, they bring theory into action, designing, launching, and measuring inclusive marketing campaigns that turn cultural trends into profits and growth.

That process has led to measurable change, Gil Valletta says. And after all that happened in 2020, she has perceived even further changes in the attitudes of her clientele. “There is a silver lining with COVID’s health disparities, Black Lives Matter, George Floyd—all of it, combined with isolation—which is making people pause and rethink the world, their decisions, and their role in business and society,” the CEO says. “I feel that there is a transformative power with crisis, if we choose to see it as such. In a very strange way, it’s been a great catalyst, almost like a blessing for that discussion to take a different turn.”

With her incredible capacity to see the bright side of everything, Gil Valletta even recognizes how COVID-19 has brought about positive change to her mission. With the power of virtual events, she explains, CIEN+ has expanded their reach to more executives and corporations around the world than they ever believed possible.

And while traditional focus groups and research methods were compromised during the pandemic, leaders craved real-time insights. The CulturIntel tech experienced increased demand from organizations including the CDC and the White House. To date, the AI-powered tech has mined almost a billion digital discussions to report sentiments, insights, and mindshifts by ethnicity, gender, and generation in healthcare, financial services, tech, and more.

Gil Valletta remains optimistic— cautiously—about the future. “The social tension has ignited an opportunity for us to now have a closer encounter with the topic. However, without it being measured and tied to goals, we as humans are forgetful, and so it remains to be seen if this will truly stick and be transformative,” Gil Valletta says. “If the awakening of 2020 doesn’t spark lasting action, eventually the demographic shifts will catch leaders by surprise, and their growth and stock price will have to play catch up. I want to be practical and action driven; that is why every leader needs cultural intelligence embedded into all they do. It’s not emotional—just follow the numbers.”

“We approach it from a place of empowerment; we demonstrate how it is mathematically impossible for a company to achieve their goals or street expectations without an inclusive approach to their business.”

By putting lives first, we’ve created a legacy that lasts

We are proud to recognize Liliana Gil Valleta for her leadership in helping to unlock the power of cultural intelligence and bridge the cultural gap to create a more inclusive and equitable future.

For 130 years, we have tackled some of the world’s biggest health challenges and provided hope in the fight against disease. At Merck, our mission to save and improve lives expands beyond inventing medicines and vaccines. We value diversity and inclusion in all its manifestations and strive to reduce disparities and advance racial, health, social and economic equity for our people, patients and communities.

Today, we continue in pursuit of medical breakthroughs that benefit patients and society for today, tomorrow and generations to come.

Copyright © 2021 Merck Sharp & Dohme Corp., a subsidiary of Merck & Co., Inc.

Danny Diaz Leyva Managing Attorney Diaz Leyva Group

After a decade in private practice, Danny Diaz Leyva founded his own law firm, Diaz Levyz Group, which combines the best parts of the legal world and sets his employees up for success

Every Inch a Leader

BY BILLY YOST

LAWYERS ARE TRAINED TO BE RISK AVERSE. It’s a mindset that’s inherently built into the profession. But there are those rare attorneys who are able to balance a natural aversion to risk with their own hopes and ambitions. Danny Diaz Leyva spent more than a decade in private practice, all the while building toward something bigger.

The now managing attorney at the Diaz Leyva Group has spent the past nearly five years leading a self-made law practice grounded in real estate and business transactions. The client roster includes one of the nation’s largest publicly traded homebuilders, several of the nation’s largest banks, regional developers, and various family offices. Building a successful and growing practice is only part of the story, however. Diaz Leyva has done so while drawing upon both the best and worst of his own private practice experiences (as well as a 2014 run for the Florida House of Representatives), electing not to lead with an iron fist but by the golden rule.

A NATURAL BUILDER

Entrepreneurship was imprinted on the budding lawyer from a young age. “My grandfather started our family business some sixty-odd years ago,” Diaz Leyva says. “My father eventually took it over, and I spent a lot of time with both of them. I was exposed to these selfmade men who taught me to tighten my belt and do what you need to do to survive. It’s just built into my DNA.”

Being surrounded by self-starters and entrepreneurs led Diaz Leyva to major in finance, and even after attending law school, he remained focused on businesses and individuals investing in business or real estate. Or, as Diaz Leyva puts it, “I have represented everyone from the Danny Diaz Leyvas of the world to major, publicly traded corporations and everything in between.”

While accumulating experience, the lawyer began to understand he wanted to lead his own practice. Part of his drive came from his family’s tradition of entrepreneurship, and another part arose from his faith. “I’ve had

so many friends and mentors guide me along the way,” the lawyer explains. “And frankly, I’ve felt God’s hand in my life, opening doors and guiding me through them.”

One of those doors opened up after Diaz Leyva’s 2014 bid for the Florida House of Representatives, which was ultimately unsuccessful. “Not winning that race was one of the best things that ever happened to me,” Diaz Leyva says. “Not only would it have set me down a completely different career path, but my son had been undergoing some medical challenges at the time, and I was able to spend time with him and be present for therapies and sessions to help get him to where he needed to be.”

From there, Diaz Leyva began identifying opportunities to open the law practice he had been dreaming of, and he never looked back.

SUCCESS WITH RESPECT

Building a business is a Herculean task, but it’s only the first step toward success. Diaz Leyva has created a flourishing practice by leading in a nontraditional way—at least, as far as private practice goes.

“I’ve been in places where everyone is jockeying for position and competing against their contemporaries, and your boss is trying to get all the credit,” he remarks. “At the end of the day, that is a toxic environment.” In building his own firm, Diaz Leyva has eschewed that type of culture and worked to create a workplace that combines the best practices of every culture he’s embraced and thrived in.

“I just subscribe to the golden rule with my team,” the lawyer says. “You treat others as you would like to be treated, and you try to be transparent and honest with others so you can help manage expectations.”

Diaz Leyva says he treats every employee at his practice as a family member. And while that is a common refrain among business leaders, Diaz Leyva truly puts that philosophy into practice: he wants his team to be fueled

by responsibility, not fear, and to see the work that they do as an extension of who they are.

THE GREAT EQUALIZER

In tandem with the successful law practice he’s built, Diaz Leyva continuously gives back to his own community, a habit that has stuck with the lawyer his entire career. He spent ten years supporting one of the largest foster care agencies in Florida, raising awareness and funds and visiting homes and foster parents. He also worked on behalf of organizations providing substance abuse and mental health programs.

Diaz Leyva later dedicated himself to education and educational opportunities. “Regardless of your background, I firmly believe that education can be the great equalizer,” he explains. “It’s a platform that provides for upward mobility, no matter where you come from.”

In 2015, Diaz Levya was appointed by Florida Governor Rick Scott to serve on the Board of Trustees of Miami-Dade College, a role in which he helped develop and expand the college’s mission, goals, and objectives.

Today, as Diaz Leyva and his wife prepare to launch a platform called Empower that will provide educational opportunities and sustained mentorship to those who need it most, it’s clear that Diaz Leyva’s ambition isn’t just to grow his own career. He wants to provide a chance at success to all those he encounters.

EDUCATE AND EMPOWER

Danny Diaz Leyva continues to flex his belief in and commitment to education with the new Empower platform he is launching alongside his wife. They hope the platform will help minorities and economically disadvantaged people guide their careers and lives to a more fulfilling place.

“We’re in the early stages now,” the attorney says. “My wife will be spearheading the effort, and our goal will be to both help provide educational opportunities for folks and to help them weaponize that education to find opportunities through a sustained mentorship program.”

“You treat others as you would like to be treated, and you try to be transparent and honest with others so you can help manage expectations.”

Danny consistently provides exceptional service as an attorney in such a specialized legal field. He uses his experience and skills to deliver top-of-the-line work while maintaining open and honest communication with his client throughout.

Maurice Bared, CEO, Farm Stores

I have worked with Danny for over 10 years on behalf of clients and the bank and have only experienced timely, exceptional service.

Ricardo Garbati, Senior Vice President, Private Bank Director Private Client Group, City National Bank

Working with Danny is always a pleasure. Over the years, we’ve developed a great friendship and professional partnership resulting in him being our trusted advisor. He protects our interests as if they were his own, and his professional advice has been instrumental in the growth of our business. I’m grateful for the partnership we have built.

Camilo Nino, Founding Partner & CEO, Linkvest

�ank you for being a part our our story!

Passion Project

Carmen Castillo couldn’t be more enthusiastic about her company, SDI International Corporation—but she’s equally committed to helping other minority and female entrepreneurs find success

BY NATALIE KOCHANOV

CARMEN CASTILLO DIDN’T WASTE ANY time in launching her company, SDI International Corporation, when she moved to Florida from Spain in the early 1990s. She was eager to capitalize on the era’s technology boom, but she was even more excited to realize an ambition she’d had since childhood.

“Ever since I was a little girl, I wanted to start my own business,” Castillo explains. “I fell in love with the United States, and I knew that I had found the opportunity that I’d been searching for all my life.”

Nearly thirty years later, SDI is now one of the world’s largest woman-owned procurement outsourcing program providers. As president and CEO, Castillo continues to steer the company that she built from the ground up toward ever-greater goals. Furthermore, she combines her passion for entrepreneurship with a commitment to community service by supporting and mentoring fellow minority business owners—paying forward

her hard-won success to help others achieve dreams of their own.

Castillo has always made the most of opportunities for advancement, perhaps because she grew up in a large family with minimal resources. She initially came to the United States to participate in a culinary arts exchange program, but upon recognizing the rapid growth occurring in the technology sector, she set her sights on entrepreneurship instead.

Not long after opening SDI, Castillo discovered a useful way to distinguish her company from competitors. “I learned that, being a Latina, I qualified as a minority as well as a woman,” she says. “So I got SDI certified as a minority-owned company and a woman-owned company, and that actually opened so many doors.”

Indeed, Castillo soon negotiated an IT staffing contract with Miami-Dade County. She also connected with computer technology

company IBM, which remains an SDI client to this day. “IBM needed to relocate about ten thousand people from Boca Raton to other locations across the country. I was able to facilitate that process by hiring and payrolling new people,” Castillo says of her early work for the company.

Along with its certifications, SDI owes much of its success to Castillo’s unusual decision to take the company global almost from its inception. She branched out into Canada within SDI’s first two years in business and subsequently opened locations in Europe, Asia, and South America—growing the company’s client pool in parallel to its reputation.

In fact, SDI impressed its clients to such an extent that Castillo began receiving requests to offer a wider range of services.

“Because we were very flexible and we provided extremely high-quality solutions, clients kept challenging us to see what else we could do,” she explains. “We got into managing

suppliers, and then we saw an opportunity to get into procurement services.”

Specifically, Castillo noticed that SDI’s clients tended to focus most of their attention on core suppliers. She therefore aligned SDI to manage the tail end of the supply chain, on top of the company’s payrolling, IT placement, and related legacy services.

To keep pace with SDI itself, Castillo has evolved substantially over the years. She makes a point of hiring the brightest talent so that she can learn from the people she brings on board. In return, she empowers her executives—60 percent of whom are women—to call their own shots when it comes to running SDI’s divisions and global offices.

Castillo strives to empower individuals outside SDI as well, especially minority and female entrepreneurs. To that end, she started a supplier diversity program to ensure that SDI gives 20 to 25 percent of its business to diverse companies. “SDI itself is a diverse company, and I thought that the supplier diversity program would be the best way to pay it forward to other minority- and womenowned businesses,” she says.

In addition, Castillo mentors eight to ten minority and female business owners each year. She spends significant time with her mentees and introduces them to members of SDI’s global network of suppliers and Fortune 500 company clients. “It’s the most wonderful feeling when I get to see minority- and women-owned businesses become really successful companies,” she says.

Carmen Castillo President and CEO SDI International Corporation

Unsurprisingly, Castillo’s dedication to giving back extends beyond the business world. “I take care of my community,” she says. “Any time that the community needs something, they know that they can count on me.” Castillo’s leadership and dedication to giving back have earned her admittance to two prestigious

organizations: the Concordia Leadership Council, a nonprofit dedicated to driving crosssector partnerships and social impact, and the Council on Foreign Relations.

As for her company, Castillo counts on continuing to expand SDI through new contracts and partnerships—including a strategic alliance with IBM that serves as a culmination of more than two decades of work together.

Even as she charts a course for the future, Castillo stays humble and appreciates what seizing every opportunity has already allowed her to accomplish. “Every morning when I wake up, I still have the biggest smile on my face, just like I did on the day that I first started the business,” she says. “SDI really is my life’s passion.”

“Ever since I was a little girl, I wanted to start my own business. I fell in love with the United States, and I knew that I had found the opportunity that I’d been searching for all my life.”

Hispanic Executive

Here to Make an Impact

BY TAYLOR KARG

YEARS AGO, EDDY PEREZ MADE A promise to his late father—one that has since become a guiding force in the way he leads both his company and his community. “My father had heart failure and knew his time was coming to an end,” Perez explains. “One day, he said to me, ‘Son, if my time ends now, I can honestly say that I’ve left the world a better place than I found it. Can you say the same?’ I looked inward and replied, ‘No, Dad, I can’t.’ This really struck a chord with me, and I promised him that from then on, I would do what I could to make an impact.” Today, as cofounder and CEO of Equity Prime Mortgage (EPM), Perez works to ensure his leadership does just that.

A CHANCE TO LIVE HIS VIRTUES

Perez and business partner KP Patel started EPM in Atlanta back in 2008. With Perez

serving as president and Patel as CEO, the duo grew the business from the ground up; it now has about five hundred employees and operates in forty-nine states.

While EPM has grown significantly since its inception, it has also had to overcome a few challenges along the way. EPM’s story began in the midst of the subprime mortgage crisis, and as a result, Perez and Patel had to take a leap of faith and invest their entire savings into the company to keep it afloat.

Then, in October 2018, Patel suffered a heart attack and stepped down from his position in the C-suite, leading Perez to assume the role of both president and CEO. “Becoming CEO was a chance to live my virtues,” Perez says. “It was never about the money; it was an opportunity to show my employees that I really do live by our mission to make other people successful.”

Guided by a promise he made to his late father, EPM’s Eddy Perez is determined to leave the world a better place than he found it

Eddy Perez CEO

Equity Prime Mortgage

Although grateful for the opportunity to serve his company in new ways, Perez stepped down as president after a year and a half. “I realized during my time in both roles that my skill set is better fit for being a CEO,” he says.

“I gave up the title of president to my righthand man, Phil Mancuso. It was a tough decision to make. However, I realized a long time ago that in leadership, sometimes you have to hang up a piece of your ego to really show people how much you care.”

Perez says the leadership changes were both a learning and growing experience— not only for him but also for the company as a whole. “Since my business partner stepped down, we’ve worked to evolve our culture and grow the vision of the organization,” he says. “We wanted to focus more on personal development from both an employee and customer perspective. It’s been about growing our people and the experiences we provide to our customers: we want to be a wealth of

WE BELIEVE DIVERSITY MATTERS

At MBA, we believe diversity, equity and inclusion is more than just a business imperative. It’s essential to the future of our industry. We’re about bringing people together with di erent ideas, perspectives and experiences so that we can better serve the American people. It’s up to us to ensure everyone has a seat at the table. Join us on our mission to ensure the real estate finance industry reflects the diversity of the communities we serve.

knowledge for them as they work to build their financial health.”

According to Perez, when he explains what EPM does, he says, “We’re in the personal development business, but we just so happen to do it through mortgages.”

This emphasis on personal development comes from Perez’s own experiences with the process. “We all make mistakes, and I’ve never been shy to admit that I’ve made a lot of them,” he says. “But it’s what I learned from them and the actions I subsequently took that matter. This type of authenticity is especially important as a business owner and a leader.”

KEEPING HIS PROMISE

In addition to leading EPM, Perez works to make an impact in his community. Through the Choose Kindness campaign, EPM makes annual or quarterly donations to a number of charities, including the American Red Cross, Leashes of Valor, MBA Open Doors Foundation, and St. Jude Children’s Hospital. “We wanted to do something to make every loan matter,” he says, referencing the

company’s #livesnotloans hashtag. “So we found organizations that align with our culture and mission and decided that we’re going to continuously donate a certain amount of dollars per unit sold.”

Perez also holds positions on multiple boards in an effort to make an impact on the broader mortgage industry. He’s been a member of the Mortgage Bankers Association since October 2017, has served as the MORPAC (Mortgage Bankers Association Political Action Committee) chairman, and is currently a member of the board of directors. Here, some of his duties have included fundraising efforts and housing affordability initiatives.

Perez currently serves as the chairman of the national corporate board of governors for the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals, where he handles and maintains relationships in an effort to grow Hispanic homeownership.

As he looks to the future, Perez remains focused on keeping the promise he made to his father. “I just want to be someone who makes a difference in my community,” he says.

“It was never about the money; it was an opportunity to show my employees that I really do live by our mission to make other people successful.”

LEARN MORE AT MBA.ORG/DIVERSITY

GLOBAL

International businesses present unique challenges— and opportunities—for corporate citizenship in multiple countries. The executives featured here thrive in navigating cultural shifts worldwide.

158. Dawn Valdivia, Honeywell 162. Carolina Serra, Inter-American Development Bank 165. Jorge Mejia, Tetra Pak 168. Diana Rosales, Sumitomo Corporation of Americas 172. Narda Zuniga, AAA Club Alliance Inc.

Finding Her Place

BY BILLY YOST

Dawn Valdivia wasn’t always sure where she fit in while growing up, but she’s found her purpose in her law career and role at Honeywell

Dawn Valdivia

Assistant General Counsel (Aerospace) and Chief Employment

Counsel for Latin America & Mexico Honeywell LINDSA JENKS

She grew up in a family that owned Mexican restaurants and began working in the business when she was just twelve years old. Because her parents were part of the first wave of assimilation-focused immigrants, she studied Spanish on her own, speaking and studying with the restaurant kitchen staff, who were like family to her.

But like many in the Latino community, Valdivia was forced to confront an identity crisis: feeling like an outsider wherever she went. She felt like “the brown kid” with cousins who had blond hair. While working at the Center for American Free Trade in Mexico, she was routinely referred to as “not a Mexican” despite her family’s roots in Guanajuato.

Now serving as assistant general counsel (aerospace) as well as chief employment counsel for Latin America and Mexico at Honeywell, Valdivia has found a way to embrace who she is and maintain close ties to a heritage that she cares about deeply. “Dawn’s authenticity and caring spirit makes her a standout in the legal community,” says Timothy Nelson, a partner at Fragomen, “and this transcends into the work she does every day and in the partnership we have created.”

Valdivia’s core work and expertise lies in bridging the distance between borders, but her most challenging effort to date has been helping Honeywell address a pandemic that knew no border.

A NONTRADITIONAL PATH

While Valdivia’s law career may look fairly traditional, her journey to it was not. As a college student, she was on a path to becoming a religious studies professor. “I just loved school and enjoyed the questioning that accompanied so many of the issues,” she says. Valdivia also realized that by taking just a few more classes, she could double major in Spanish. That choice would impact the rest of her career.

Valdivia would come face-to-face with her future in her honors program. “There was a lawyer who had returned to school, and I just found him incredibly articulate and always thinking about things from a different perspective,” she remembers. “We developed a friendship and that wound up putting me on the path to taking the LSAT.”

During law school, Valdivia went to Mexico to work on post-NAFTA free trade work as part of an exchange program, and her Spanish training was finally put to the test. While the locals called her an American, she noticed something about her surroundings. “None of the experiences felt completely foreign to me,” she says. “I don’t think it’s the same feeling I would have had if I went to China.”

Valdivia says her command of Spanish has not only helped her land two separate jobs, but also allowed her to gain significant cross-border expertise. No amount of experience, however, could have prepared her for the year 2020.

RESPONDING WITH COMPASSION

During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Valdivia’s wide purview meant having to monitor and continually evolve protocols for a number of different countries. “I would wake up in the morning, and Peru had just instituted a stay-at-home order,” she recalls. “The next day it would be Panama. The next day somewhere else. Every day, a different country was shutting down.”

Dawn Valdivia wasn’t born in Mexico, but she has a deep connection to her family’s country of origin.

Early on in the pandemic, Honeywell lost two of its Latin American employees to COVID. Valdivia was struck by her company’s response. “We had a real healthcare crisis in our border cities because the public hospitals didn’t have the bandwidth to treat people,” she explains. “Honeywell did the most amazing thing. They decided they were going to make sure that every one of our employees was going to get access to private hospitals. If they or a family member was sick, they called us and we got them the care they needed.”

Valdivia says two people were airlifted to better hospitals and survived. “I get goose bumps just thinking about it,” she says. “We were literally saving lives, and it’s one of the most impactful things I’ve ever had the opportunity to be part of. We didn’t want to lose another single employee, and we haven’t.”

Honeywell was also able to quickly stand up N95 mask production facilities to provide face coverings for employees and others.

The COVID-19 pandemic had an even more personal effect on Valdivia’s life, however: she lost her father to the virus in 2020. “Days are still hard,” she says. “I think about him every day, and maybe that’s why seeing Honeywell taking our workers’ health so seriously impacted me so much.”

Valdivia has long devoted her pro bono efforts to cases that will benefit the Hispanic community, including (prior to her arrival at Honeywell) an international kidnapping case where the lawyer was able to help reunite a child and father. Since growing up in a family whose livelihood was the very food of her culture, Valdivia has gone from interviewing migrant workers on broccoli farms to acquiring the cross-cultural legal expertise that has allowed her to be successful in global business. It’s safe to say that she’s no longer struggling to find her place in the world as a Mexican American.

We’re inspired by Dawn’s dedication to making a better future for her customers at Honeywell. Fueled by ingenuity. Inspired by you.®

“[Honeywell] decided they were going to make sure that every one of our employees was going to get access to private hospitals. If they or a family member was sick, they called us and we got them the care they needed.”

Carolina Serra is on a mission to make more of an impact than ever before—a mission she’s seeing realized thanks to her role at Inter-American Development Bank

On a New Path

BY ZACH BALIVA

CAROLINA SERRA HAS ALWAYS THOUGHT on a global scale. “I knew early on that I wanted to pursue an international career,” she says. And indeed, Serra has spent much of her career leading HR teams and departments in Latin America, Europe, and the United States. She’s brought all of that experience, as well as her experience volunteering with international NGOs, to the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).

After graduating with a degree in business administration, Serra started her career as an HR generalist at Itaú Unibanco, the largest private bank in Latin America. In 2006, Serra found her first chance to work abroad when she took an assignment in Portugal. A few months later, she accepted another assignment in Miami. Then, in 2009, she decided to pursue a master’s in employment relations and human resources management at the London School of Economics while still working part-time for Itaú.

As Serra grew as an HR leader, she made her dream of a global career well known. Roles of increasing responsibility took her back to Brazil and then to New York, where she ran Itaú’s operations in multiple regions. Although Serra found the work incredibly fulfilling, she found herself wondering about life outside of HR and financial services in big cities. She wanted to take some time off and see the world—and when she proposed a year-long sabbatical of volunteerism and self-exploration, her husband agreed, since this was also his dream.

During their sabbatical, the Serras volunteered as advisors for SASANE, a Nepalbased NGO that supports the re-integration of human trafficking survivors into society.

Next, they traveled to Cambodia to help a community center provide sustainable development and alternative sources of income. Then, they went to Tanzania to help the Woman Education and Economic Center (WEECE) provide microloans to marginalized and low-income individuals.

These experiences deeply marked Serra, inspiring her to make a further impact and reinforcing her lifelong passion for diversity and inclusion. “When you empower women,” she says of the WEECE’s microloans program, “it changes the community.”

Spurred by these experiences, Serra was determined to find a position at “an organization that had a higher impact on our society and planet.” As the year came to an end, a friend messaged her about a job opening at the Inter-American Development Bank. Serra researched the organization and quickly noticed a fit.

The IDB, which started in 1959, is now the leading source of development financing for Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). The bank, which provides loans, grants, technical assistance, and research, is the main source of development finance in LAC: it supports countries in their efforts to promote equality, reduce poverty, and improve lives in the region.

“Our purpose is improving lives. It’s not like a regular commercial bank: it brings knowledge to the region and offers solutions that countries need,” Serra explains. “The bank has a whole platform to share information—that’s part of my leadership values, sharing what you know and not just holding it for your advantage.”

Serra joined the organization as general manager and chief human resources officer in 2019. A year into her tenure, the COVID-19 pandemic put corporate HR into the spotlight. Serra led her team through the ambiguity of that period, but she also saw, when she left for parental leave, her team members rising to the occasion—both in the HR

Carolina Serra

General Manager and CHRO Inter-American Development Bank

Your Partner in New Possibilities

department’s efforts to break down traditional silos to help teams navigate the pandemic, and in their support of her as she began this new chapter of her life.

Those silos came fully down as Serra repositioned HR as a strategic advisor for internal clients. “We need to be by the side of the managers and leaders who are making important decisions that impact the business and its people,” she says, adding that she looked to elevate HR to make the function a true partner with the business.

Right before the pandemic, Serra and her team were also renovating policies regarding maternity leave, paternal leave, and diversity. Remembering the many ways in which she saw organizations supporting women and families during her sabbatical, Serra advocated for a new genderneutral parental leave policy that provides one hundred days for a primary caregiver and fifty days for a secondary caregiver. Since the program started, men have identified as the primary caregiver in 12 percent of requests.

At IDB, where people of forty-four nationalities work together every day, diversity and inclusion is a core part of the business. “Diversity, equity, and inclusion is part of the essence of the bank,” Serra emphasizes. “We have to be an example for our clients as well as the region.”

The organization is adding an equity focus to what was once a diversity and inclusion program, as it seeks to further level the playing field. The efforts have paid off. The IDB is the first development bank in the Americas and second worldwide to earn EDGE Move, a prestigious business distinction that recognizes efforts to be an equitable workplace. Today, women hold 42 percent of the organization’s leadership positions. Two hundred and ninety women have completed leadership development programs, and the IDB has eliminated gender-based pay gaps.

It’s been a busy three years. Serra, who says she’s happy with her decision to put herself on a purpose-driven career path, is ready for more. “This is a journey,” she says. “This new reality brought us new challenges, but I feel my team and I are ready to tackle them. There is still a lot of work to be done.”

“When you empower women, it changes the community.”

Jorge Mejia’s immigration experience was made easier not only by his employer Tetra Pak but by his own willingness to stay flexible, humble, and to make accommodations

Equipped for the Journey

BY BILLY YOST

WHEN JORGE MEJIA CAME TO THE

United States, he was given support that most other immigrants are rarely afforded. After helping to develop and implement a new maintenance methodology for food packaging and processing giant Tetra Pak (a methodology that would eventually be adopted worldwide), the Colombia native was promoted to a new role in the States. Tetra Pak took care of Mejia’s transfer. Of course, that didn’t mean it was easy.

“I was so lucky that Tetra Pak helped bring me to this country, but you are still changing cultures,” Mejia explains. “You are changing your life. You are leaving your family and your social network.”

The now cluster operations manager for the Americas at Tetra Pak has a wide range of responsibilities, from operational transformation to data-driven field service management planning and forecasting. He has gotten to know many immigrants over the years, both

to the US and to other countries. Some, he says, have endured hardships upon arrival and chosen to return home. And while Mejia and his wife endured hardships of their own within their first few years in the United States, they have made it their home.

Mejia hopes his advice can help those who have already arrived, or those who may be thinking about making a major geographic change in their careers.

ESSENTIAL FLEXIBILITY

As Mejia sees it, there are two qualities inherent in him that have made adapting to life in a new country feasible: flexibility and accommodation. The former is particularly key— Mejia learned almost immediately that his idea of how things would go in the US would need to be rethought.

Mejia’s parents had invested in their son’s English education to ensure he would have access to as many opportunities as he could

land. He spoke English with relative ease in Colombia and found that communicating with people from Latin America in English was also not a problem. Then he arrived in Dallas.

“I could not understand what anyone was saying,” Mejia says. “I thought my parents had wasted all of this money on my learning English in Colombia, and I thought I would have to start all over again.”

With time and exposure to the culture and dialect of Texans, progress came. Mejia chose to invest more in his English skills. “If you keep in mind that you have been promoted to do a job, and that you owe it to yourself to do it the best that you can, then you will do the things you need to in order to get where you want to be,” Mejia says.

The manager’s current role came as a result of a promotion he was asked to interview for while he was on holiday in Russia for the 2018 FIFA World Cup. The promotion was a huge opportunity: it would take Mejia from a local technical position to one where his responsibilities would span an entire continent. Realizing that the interview was the day after he would arrive back in the United States, Mejia spent an eighteen-hour train ride across Russia doing a mock interview with his wife, preparing his answers, and getting prepared for the role he would ultimately earn.

“I didn’t think there was any way I would get the job because I was so young in my career, but I wanted to do the best I could in the interview,” Mejia says. “I’m glad I was willing to forgo some of my vacation to get the confidence I needed to perform well in the interview.”

HUMILITY AND ACCOMMODATION

When Mejia talks about accommodation, he repeatedly stresses the need for the person, not the culture, to adapt—the essential caveat being that Mejia is incredibly proud of where he is from. Colombia is where he was born,

Jorge Mejia Cluster Operations Manager for the Americas Tetra Pak

raised, and where he learned to be the kind of person able to take on a global role. But in his effort to become the best that he could be, the manager says a great deal of humility was required.

“My family and I arrived here open and wanting to be included in a new culture,” Mejia explains. “You cannot come to a new place with the assumption that the culture will accommodate you. When you understand that you’re the one who needs to make the extra effort to make sure you make things happen for yourself, then you’re on your way.”

Mejia says frustration is an inevitable part of a transition to a new country, but it’s often borne of an individual’s unwillingness to try and grow in their new environment and their insistence on doing things the way they have always been done.

Mejia’s success is repeatable, he stresses. The immigrant journey is one filled with potential roadblocks and changes in course. But it is possible to make that journey— and thrive.

“If you keep in mind that you have been promoted to do a job, and that you owe it to yourself to do it the best that you can, then you will do the things you need to in order to get where you want to be.”

The Big Four

BY BILLY YOST

Sumitomo’s Diana Rosales shares four pieces of advice she has employed throughout her prestigious international legal career

Diana Rosales Senior Corporate Counsel Sumitomo Corporation of Americas

But her journey to her current employer already seems to be the stuff of legends.

Rosales was the first international attorney ever hired as an associate by prestigious firm Morrison & Foerster after the completion of a competitive student program, which was offered to exactly one of hundreds of applicants. Five years later, Rosales was offered her current role at the North American headquarters of Sumitomo Corporation of Americas, a subsidiary of global trading and investment giant Sumitomo Corporation.

In just over a year with the company, Rosales has helped win a first-of-its-kind bid from the Mexican government for the rail supply of two major portions of the massive Maya train project, which will connect much of Mexico by passenger rail.

The senior corporate counsel has also been a key negotiator in labor talks between a group company and Honduran union organizations, working with regulators from the United States. It’s international negotiation at its finest, and while Rosales racked up considerable legal experience as an associate at a law firm in Mexico prior to coming to the States, it’s an impressive testament to her knack for international legal work.

Given her experience, Rosales seems the ideal candidate from whom up-andcoming lawyers should seek advice. Indeed, the lawyer—who began mentoring other legal professionals as early as 2014—regularly offers four pieces of advice to lawyers looking to build out their experience and tackle new challenges.

BEING DIFFERENT ISN’T A WEAKNESS

According to Rosales, it’s imperative for international leaders to understand that their differences are what make them truly unique. “You shouldn’t try and hide the fact that you might be different or not speak the language as well,” the lawyer says. “It’s courageous to be able to speak in another language, and I think you will ultimately be rewarded for being who you are and trying your best.”

Rosales knows full well that the things that help professionals stand out may be the

very things they felt compelled to downplay or hide in the past. But the world is becoming more and more welcoming of diverse professionals, as organizations increasingly realize that the reason they are thriving is because of their employees’ different skills, passions, and backgrounds.

BE ACCOUNTABLE

Accountability is a word used so frequently that it sometimes seems to lose its meaning. But Rosales is able to define the word in a most memorable way. “Accountability is a very particular term that seems specific to the United States,” Rosales says. “In Spanish, it’s translated as ‘being responsible.’ I see accountability as being more people-focused. You keep your responsibility to things. You are accountable to people. Your word is all you have, and you should keep it.”

Currently a senior corporate counsel at Sumitomo Corporation of Americas, Diana Rosales is unbelievably young in her US law career (she wasn’t a practicing US attorney until 2016).

“You have to put aside your ego and learn everything from everybody. Be a blank page and collect experience and advice.”

KEEP CONNECTING

As someone who has moved a great deal, Rosales places a high premium on building connections that last. “You never know where you are going to wind up in life,” the attorney says. “If you build strong relationships, you can rely on them for future endeavors.”

Rosales has developed lasting relationships with those from her previous positions. Her first boss, Manuel Garcia, encouraged her to pursue international work at Creel, García-Céllar, Aiza y Enríquez, one of the premier law firms in Mexico. She credits attorneys Mike Doherty and Jeff Chester at Morrison Foerster for affording her highvisibility development opportunities. Today, Rosales seems as motivated to build strong connections with up-and-coming lawyers as those who have helped get her where she is today.

CHECK YOUR EGO

“This is a hard one for lawyers,” Rosales says, chuckling. “We’re used to being the best. The best grades, the best schools, the best mentors. However, when you’re starting a career in the United States, you have to be open to new things. You have to put aside your ego and learn everything from everybody. Be a blank page and collect experience and advice.”

The lawyer had her fair share of hard knocks early in her US career. A challenging partner kept Rosales busy for what seemed like twenty-four hours a day. “He challenged me in ways that I could never have imagined,” Rosales recalls. “It was very demanding, and I gave my best.”

Despite such challenges, Rosales has gone on to find success and a deep satisfaction in the work she does every day. She hopes her advice will help others do the same.

Narda Zuniga has forged her own path and is never afraid to take her career in a new direction. At AAA Club Alliance Inc., she’s focused on leading her team to create a stronger company.

In the Driver’s Seat

BY KEITH LORIA

NARDA ZUNIGA WAS THIRTEEN WHEN she decided to become a lawyer, inspired by an older brother who’d already chosen the law as his career. She grew up in Peru and didn’t speak English when she moved to the US for college at the age of seventeen, but she was determined.

Soon Zuniga was mastering the language, and after she completed her undergraduate degree at Montclair State University, she was accepted to Seton Hall University School of Law. “I didn’t know what type of law I wanted to pursue, but I did know that I wanted to be involved with Latin America someday,” Zuniga recalls.

First, though, Zuniga did stints at several law firms based in New Jersey and New York

City, paying her dues as an associate and gaining experience in different areas of litigation.

“I started as a litigator in a small family firm, but after only a couple of years, I felt I wasn’t being challenged enough. And when that happens, I know it’s time for me to move on,” she explains. “Through a law school connection, I eventually landed a job as an in-house contracts lawyer.”

Zuniga discovered that she preferred corporate law, and in 2006 she was hired as transactional counsel at QBE Insurance Group, which at the time was looking to grow its Latin American presence.

“I had no Latin American experience, but the company was seeking a lawyer to help this project take off, so I volunteered,” she says. “I

knew the culture and the language, and I was willing to learn and start over again—which has been the theme of my career path.”

Within less than two years, Zuniga was named assistant general counsel for the Latin American division. Within five years, she became senior vice president and general counsel for Latin America and soon thereafter emerging markets, which included Asia. Eventually, QBE decided to sell off its Latin American component, and after nearly fifteen years with the company, Zuniga realized it was time to reinvent herself again. “It was difficult to see something I had helped build from the ground up be sold, but at the same time, I was very proud to be a key member of the transactional team executing the sale,” she notes.

Narda Zuniga EVP and Chief Legal Officer AAA Club Alliance Inc.

In June 2020, with the COVID-19 pandemic in full gear, she joined AAA Club Alliance Inc. (ACA) as executive vice president and chief legal officer. When the recruiter first approached her, she was unsure she would be the right fit for the job, worried that the focus would be too narrow. “But as the recruiter explained, ACA is very innovative, offers a wide array of products, and has partnerships with so many different entities. It makes the business extremely diverse and challenging, which is exactly what I wanted,” she says.

For instance, the company recently partnered with a tech company that provides an informational digital platform to the Hispanic population. “We ran a pilot program and learnt that this platform was a viable option for building awareness of AAA offerings within the Hispanic community,” says the EVP.

As part of the executive team, Zuniga has a voice not only in managing the Legal Department but in the business itself.

Zuniga says that ACA makes a strong effort to promote diversity. “It’s something that they are very focused on, and that’s one of the things that attracted me to the company as well,” she says. “Diversity has always been extremely important for me and a must-have at the workplace. Diversity is not just gender, religion, or race. I believe that value comes from having employees who come from different socioeconomic and educational backgrounds as well.”

Zuniga’s legal team is small, but she describes it as “a team of experts.” In addition to the four lawyers who report to her, she’s in charge of the public and government affairs team. “Because it’s a small team and most business opportunities touch on multiple areas of the law, we have to work closely together and support each other,” she explains. “Even during the pandemic, thanks to ACA’s available technology, we have been able to collaborate with each other and get what we needed done.”

Zuniga still considers herself new at the job, but she’s proud that she’s part of a team with a clear mission and looks forward to what’s ahead.

“It’s very important to have a team that is constantly learning from each other,” she says. “It’s very exciting when you walk into a room where you know you will have a rich and interesting discussion, because the individuals in the room are culturally different and each of them will bring a different perspective to the table to solve a common problem or achieve a common goal.”

“Blank Rome congratulates Narda Zuniga on this well-deserved honor and is proud to be an integral part of AAA Club Alliance’s outside legal team. We enjoy working with Narda and her colleagues in developing practical, innovative, and effective solutions to complex legal issues.” –Charles Marion, Partner, Blank Rome LLP. For more information, visit blankrome.com.

“Diversity is not just gender, religion, or race. I believe that value comes from having employees who come from different socioeconomic and educational backgrounds as well.”

We asked the Hispanic Executive LinkedIn community about their Spanish fluency. Here are just a few of the sixty-plus responses we received:

“[I] grew up speaking Spanish with my grandparents and mostly English with my mom. Sadly, the Hispanics in my neighborhood were discouraged from speaking Spanish in elementary, so my fluency was hit-or-miss until I started conversing more with my relatives at social events. [I’m] glad I’ve taken it more seriously since then because I can now connect with my people, family, and community on [a] deeper level than [I] ever thought before. No more español mochado! [But] don’t let society make you feel less Latino because you don’t speak it well or at all; there’s nothing wrong with learning and growing as a person!”

—XAVIER “JAVI” COVARRUBIAS, SOFTCHOICE

like schools, where the language was literally beaten out of them. It’s why many Mexican Americans of my generation in Texas don’t speak Spanish, as it was unimaginably traumatizing for our parents to endure corporal punishment for speaking it. My parents, however, kept the language alive with me as a form of protest and as a sign of respect to speak with my grandparents. Being bilingual (now multilingual) has served me well!”

“Although my birth mother speaks fluently, I was adopted at birth and did not grow up learning Spanish. It is a goal of great interest to me, though—both for my personal heritage as well as for professional purposes.”

“To some extent . . . In Brazil, the focus was not really [on] learning Spanish, as the ‘marketplace’ valued more English skills. Growing up in a poor neighborhood, I had to take my chances with English and now I’m learning Spanish.”

—VITOR HUGO CID, PHILIPS

—NICHOLE TUCKER, TUCKER ACADEMY

Unfortunately, my parents’ generation experienced the brutality of English-only laws where Spanish was prohibited in public places

—MONA LISA FAZ, BAKER HUGHES

“Do you speak Spanish?”

Benny Agosto, Jr.

Managing Partner

Top Trial Attorney

Benny

A WORLD OF DIFFERENCE IN IMMIGRATION

We help bring together talent from all cultures and life experiences to provide companies with a smart, vibrant and creative workforce that embodies the richly diverse populations they serve.

At Fragomen, we don’t just facilitate immigration—we create opportunities. From individuals and small local businesses to the world’s largest companies, we support all of your immigration needs, all over the world. We are internationally local—with offices in the heart of each region and services stretching around the world. No matter where you’ve come from, or where you’re going next, Fragomen is here to propel you forward.

www.fragomen.com

Fragomen has more than 50 offices and serves more than 170 countries worldwide.