The corporate world is in constant flux. The economy gets more global every day. Business is more competitive. Technology quickens the pace of change. Corporations are forced to adapt, to morph, to be agile. That pressure is passed on to employees. “The implications for individuals is that they must bring an ability to be agile, to be flexible, not with who they are, but with what is going on in the market and how it impacts business and business needs,” says Juan Johnson, president of the Diversity Leadership Academy in Atlanta. Add to the mix an anemic economy and it makes for a challenging situation for African Americans.

“When America gets a cold, African Americans get pneumonia. We are the last hired, and first fired. While we’ve maintained our numbers in some corporate downsizing, in others our numbers dwindled,” says Price Cobb, a psychiatrist, executive coach, expert on corporate diversity and co-author with Judith Turnock of  Cracking the Corporate Code: The Revealing Success Stories of 32 African-American Executives.

Without question, African Americans have seen progress. A decade ago there weren’t African-American CEOs at Fortune 500 companies. Though there are only a handful – there are a handful! Over a quarter of a million African Americans are firmly entrenched in managerial and executive positions at companies that are household names. Diversity is on the radar. Read the full story