When Richard Parsons grew to become chief govt of Time Warner Inc. in 2002, he assumed he was pioneering a brand new period of Black CEOs in American firms. “I had envisioned that on the heels of the Nice Society initiatives of the Nineteen Seventies, there can be a wave of people that had been prepared,” he says. “However for a variety of causes, this didn’t occur.” Right this moment, solely six Fortune 500 firms are run by Black CEOs—a report excessive.
After a long time of main firms as diverse as Citigroup Inc. and the NBA’s Los Angeles Clippers, Mr. Parsons, 74, felt moved to deal with this pipeline downside himself. Along with a group of enterprise buyers, together with Ronald Lauder and Kenneth Lerer, he launched the New York-based Fairness Alliance fund in 2021 to “democratize capital” by backing enterprise funds and early-stage ventures led by girls and other people of colour.
