Herb Stokes knows how to make diversity work for his $6-million company. Now he's on a mission to make it work for the rest of corporate America as well.
Herb Stokes is outspoken, aggressive, and controversial in his quest for diversity. He's also effective
One morning last spring, Herb Stokes descended on Bob Chinn's Crabhouse, a cavernous restaurant in Wheeling, Ill. The owner of Alliance Relocation Services LLC had arranged to provide English-language training programs to the restaurant's predominantly Hispanic cooks and busboys, and he was there to talk logistics. Before the lunch crowd arrived, an appreciative audience of 30 employees, many of them clad in yellow T-shirts proclaiming "I got my crabs at Bob Chinn's," swarmed around him.
This is the Herb Stokes people love.
As the meeting wrapped up, Stokes's cell phone rang. Taking the call in an adjoining dining room, the entrepreneur began to pace, visibly perturbed. On the line was Jorie Thompson, a principal at Grayscale Inc., an advertising and graphic-design company that was working on a routine $15,000 project for Alliance. Stokes had hired Grayscale, in part, because Thompson is African American. But when it came time to present the work, Thompson had sent two white employees to Alliance's offices. After they left, Stokes groused to his vice-president of marketing, "Why didn't they have anybody who looked like me -- like us -- at that meeting?"
Thompson subsequently explained that although her agency employed African American designers, she had trouble finding skilled minority candidates. Sensing an opportunity, Stokes persuaded Thompson to help him develop a youth training program for her company. The day before the gathering at Bob Chinn's, Stokes and Thompson were scheduled to discuss the program, but Thompson, who had a family emergency, missed the meeting without calling to explain. When the subject is diversity, however, Stokes accepts no excuses.
On the phone, Thompson complained that she felt as though she were "under a microscope" and even offered to resign from Stokes's account. "I was trying to send him the message that he's not going to tell me how to run my company," Thompson says.
Later, Thompson struck a conciliatory note when discussing her relationship with the Alliance CEO. But Stokes still bristled. "If people want to say I'm a bully, so be it," he says. "I don't think I'm a bully -- -just adamant in what I believe in."
Alliance moved from a tiny suburb to the inner city. 'A luxury high-rise didn't recruit the type of people I wanted to employ,' Stokes says.
Stokes's dispute with Thompson underscores how charged and complex the diversity issue has become, even among people with similar perspectives. The difference between Stokes and Thompson is that while she cares about advancing minority opportunities, he is fanatical about it -- both within his own company and in the companies with which he does business. "I'm like a pit bull," he says. "When I get my teeth in an idea, I'm going to own it."
For Stokes, 50, diversity is more than just a noble cause. The CEO has discovered that the louder he talks about the issue, the more big companies listen to him -- and buy from him. These days corporations are eager to award contracts to qualified minority-owned businesses. Discrimination lawsuits have hit such powerful companies as Coca-Cola, Texaco, Xerox, and Microsoft, spurring CEOs to embrace diversity for their own legal protection. New census statistics reveal that the U.S. population is more racially and ethnically mixed than ever before. Consequently, so are the customer bases of many large corporations. What's more, the federal government often takes minority representation into consideration when awarding contracts.
"There was a time when I had to do a lot to explain what I did for a living, but not anymore," says Maye Foster-Thompson, the executive director of the Chicago Minority Business Development Council, which introduces minority-owned businesses to large corporate buyers.
With just nine employees and $6 million in revenues, Stokes is under no external pressure to turn his company into a diversity showcase. But Chicago-based Alliance, which contracts with companies to move employees who have been transferred, profits from its CEO's philosophy. Customers attracted by Alliance's rainbow initiatives include Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Popeyes Chicken & Biscuits, UPS, McGraw-Hill, and Nordstrom. "He has the quality, he has the service, he has the delivery, and also he's doing philanthropy in the community and bringing others along," says Brenda Dizer, the supplier-diversity manager at Nike Inc., who wants Stokes to bid on upcoming contracts. "It shows he has aligned his goals and objectives with ours, and that really makes him attractive."
Stokes has grander ambitions as well. The CEO believes his expertise in training and integrating minority employees can become a viable enterprise in its own right. Much as W. Edwards Deming -- whose books Stokes has studied -- built a reputation by championing corporate quality, Stokes would like to become a leading guru of diversity.
To that end, he has begun informally advising his Fortune 1,000 customers regarding their recruiting and contracting practices. If his plans to launch a diversity-management consultancy pan out, Stokes says, he can go to his relocation customers and say to them, "What's your strategy in the inner city? I can help you with that."
Recently relocated to a building just blocks from the notorious Cabrini-Green housing project, Alliance has a setting that seems congruent with Stokes's desire to be at gritty ground zero of the diversity movement. The building's interior, however, is the picture of opulence. Stokes's loftlike office is filled with Tiffany lamps, large paintings in gilt frames, objets d'art, and photos of the CEO with such luminaries as Henry Kissinger and Bill Clinton. The decor mirrors Stokes's personal fashion style. He's a peacock, typically clad in perfectly tailored suits, shirts with French cuffs, and vintage cuff links.
If Stokes is choosy about his silk ties, he is even more meticulous about selecting employees. The Alliance staff consists of five African Americans, two Latinas, and two Caucasians. That mix is no accident. Several years ago, when Alliance needed to hire a customer-service representative, Stokes says, he told one of his managers, "I want a Hispanic in here." Finding a qualified person required more than 20 interviews, but the CEO never relented. On another occasion, when Stokes was recruiting a grant writer for a nonprofit that he also runs, he thought it would be nice to have a person from India. A.K. Hazari, a native of Hyderabad, in Andhra Predesh, got the job. "When I want something, that's what I want, and there's no discussion," Stokes says with a smile.
