On Friday afternoon, I try to catch up with the ever-busy investor and management consultant Arnold Donald about his newest appointment, the Bank of America Corporation Board of Directors. When he answers, he is talking to his grandchild, saying, “I love you, buddy, have fun.”
On Friday, Donald traveled to Chicago for Grandparents’ Day at his grandchildren’s elementary school.
“It was fantastic,” he said. “They sang songs, and we visited their classrooms. The older one read a poem. It was a lot fun to see them in their environment.”
Donald is a former chairman and chief executive officer of Merisant Co., and he has his own management advisory and personal investment firm, AWDPLC, LLC. He sits on several corporate boards, including Carnival Corp., Crown Holdings Inc. and The Laclede Group, Inc., as well as not-for-profit boards including Carleton College, Washington University and BJC Healthcare.
Bank of America, which has $2.2 trillion in assets and earned $4.2 billion last year, is his most recent board appointment. However, he declined to speak about his new role with the bank, but said he would be happy to speak about all of his board appointments in general.
Since he spent his morning in an elementary school, I decide to steer the conversation in an education direction. I told him that I had just visited Froebel Elementary that morning to observe how teachers and students are using The St. Louis American’s Newspaper in Education tool, which focuses on science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) topics. It’s the largest Newspaper in Education program in the state, and many students in St. Louis will read this article about him, I explain.
Since he has years of experience applying math, science and business in the real world, I asked him to give these students some advice on how to become successful in STEM career paths.
“From an elementary school standpoint, it’s a time to dream big dreams and to learn the fundamentals,” he said. “It’s very important to get the reading, writing, and arithmetic fundamentals down and to develop a curiosity and a passion for continuous learning.”
He told a story about his first successful business venture, which happened to be when he was in elementary school.
“I was the youngest of five, and my older siblings were a little lazy,” he said. “They would send me to the local shop to get the snacks that they wanted. And they’d give me an extra nickel if I went for them.”
Along the way, he figured out that if he bought a bunch of snacks and kept them in the house, then he wouldn’t have to go to the store.
“I would just go to my room,” he said, “and I also discovered that I could charge them a lot more than a nickel for the convenience. So basically I started a little store in my house. It worked really well until my older sister discovered my stash and ate it all.”
Donald also liked to play Monopoly with his siblings, and that’s where he learned how to apply math and negotiating skills at a very early age, he said. It’s also where he developed a passion for learning.
His childhood also primed him for another important lesson in business: diversity of thinking. Aside from raising five children, his parents were also foster parents. And over the years, Donald had 27 foster siblings. He learned how to play and create with many different minds.
“As an African American on several major corporate boards, diversity is a business imperative,” he said. “Business thrives over a long period of time through creativity and innovation. The key to innovation is diversity of thinking.”
Donald has been a business leader for many years. From 2000 to 2003, Donald served as chairman and CEO of Merisant, a global manufacturer of tabletop sweeteners and remained chairman until 2005. Prior to co-founding Merisant, he spent more than 20 years at Monsanto Co., where he held several senior leadership positions with global responsibilities in the agriculture and nutrition operating divisions.
Now as a board member, he said his main role is to help maximize returns for the company and its shareholders. Board members also hire the CEO and make sure this person leads the company by best practices, he said.
Having people of different ages, races and cultural backgrounds doesn’t necessarily guarantee that a company will achieve diversity of thinking, he said.
“But if you have people from different backgrounds and different cultural experiences and they are organized around a common objective, they are far more likely to create breakthrough innovation than a homogenous group. At the board level, the same is true. That same diversity of thinking is a powerful advantage.”
