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Bernice Ledbetter Helps Turn Women Into Leaders

Bernice Ledbetter Helps Turn Women Into Leaders

By Ronald D. White, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

The Gig: Bernice Ledbetter, 57, is a faculty member at Pepperdine University’s Graziadio School of Business and Management. Ledbetter was recently awarded $150,000 to start the Malibu, Calif., university’s Center for Women in Leadership, which will open in the fall semester. One of the center’s aims is to help prepare female students for successful careers through skills development, mentoring, and roundtable discussions with industry leaders. Ledbetter said she intends to call on the approximately 37,000 graduates of the Graziadio school to provide some of that mentoring and business executive expertise.

Learning To Think: Ledbetter was born in San Jose and raised in Fresno. She was the first member of her immediate family to go to college, earning a bachelor’s degree in liberal studies at Cal State Fresno. She next went to Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena for a three-year master’s degree in divinity she finished in 1987. “I learned about the classic philosophers. I took my first foreign language, which was Greek, and also Hebrew. I learned how to think there. I learned to look for nuance in everything.”

Strong Women: Ledbetter’s mother, Binnie, was a single parent who worked seven days a week as a waitress at two restaurants to keep the family afloat. “She taught me that hard work was not something to shy away from; it was something to embrace. I do her honor by working hard because that is what she did for me.” Grandmother Bernice took care of the daily child care while Binnie was working. “She instilled a sense a duty, that we owe things to certain people, gratitude and obligation,” Ledbetter said. “She’d say, ‘You have a duty to succeed because of how hard your mom is working for you.'”

Mentor Max: In 1995, Ledbetter was invited to help put together the Max De Pree Center for Leadership in Pasadena. That gave her the opportunity to work directly with De Pree, the former chief executive of Herman Miller Inc., the furniture and design company, and author of books including Leadership is an Art. “He taught me that every person is special and valuable and unique and equal, whether it’s the CFO or the guy who makes sure the lights are turned on,” Ledbetter said. “He made sure everyone felt they were valued, and I think that encouraged them to work harder and contribute more.”

Leadership Niche: Ledbetter stayed on to be director of the De Pree Center but felt she needed a stronger foundation in leadership to do her job. She pursued a doctorate in organizational leadership from Pepperdine University, which she completed in 2005. Her focus was on women in leadership. Ledbetter’s doctoral study of female leaders found a running theme. All of them, whether they were business or political leaders, were able to “combine benevolence and achievement. They were able to show compassion and empathy while still being able to achieve organizational results.”

Powerful Obligation: When Ledbetter talks about the goals of the new Center for Women, she mentions a Chinese student at Pepperdine who asked her, “How can I, as a woman, change my country?” Then there’s the Saudi student who began an essay with the statement, “As fate would have it, something terrible happened to me at the beginning of my life, I was born a girl.”

Ledbetter said those young women and others convinced her that “we have such a moral obligation to help these women. I can’t let them leave here without being fully equipped to lead well.”

Advice: Don’t worry about the past because every experience helps to lead to the person you have become, Ledbetter said. “I always tell my students who think, ‘Oh that was a dumb job’ or ‘I took too long to finish that’…[that] no, every single thing you did was needed. I can trace my opportunities to things that happened long ago and see the necessity of that job or that decision instead of wishing I had done things differently.”

Get It Done: “You’ll hear things like, ‘I have to work twice as hard as the men,'” Ledbetter said. “Fine, so do it. The more time you spend whining about it, the less time you have to spend getting it done.”

Personal: Ledbetter lives in Los Angeles with her husband of more than ten years, Jim Olson, an independent real estate broker and investor. She has a stepdaughter, Carly, and a baby granddaughter, Rose. In her “little bits of free time,” Ledbetter loves to solve Sudoku number puzzles.

She and her husband have also embraced the need to respond to California’s drought by getting rid of their lawn and putting in, on their own, 300 plants that require little water.

Photo: Genaro Molina via Los Angeles Times/TNS

‘We’re Americans. We Don’t Walk Around Terrified.’ — Wrong!

Now, let’s mark the anniversary of something that happened AFTER 9/11.

On 9/12, as a shaken nation reeled, an old soldier gave a pep talk. Do not let this change you, warned Secretary of State Colin Powell. Do not cower or walk around terrified. “We’re Americans,” he said. “We don’t walk around terrified.”

It was bracing medicine, designed to stiffen watery spines and lift downcast eyes. In that, it was like Franklin Roosevelt’s 1933 first inaugural address to a nation mired in economic ruin. “Let me assert my firm belief,” he said, “that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror…”

Nine years later, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt gave in to a nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror of some of his own citizens and authorized the internment of Japanese-Americans whose only crime was being Japanese-American. It is a blot on our national honor that neatly sums up the contradictions in what he said 78 years ago and Powell echoed a decade back.

Yes, the physical bravery of Americans is incontestable, as proven on battlefields from Concord, Mass., to Peleliu Island in the South Pacific to the Meuse-Argonne region of France to Paktya Province in Afghanistan.

Similarly, Americans have always found courage to conquer the trials of national life, from Dust Bowl privation to presidential assassination to the bombing of children in church to the explosion of a spaceship arcing toward heaven.

But when it comes to finding courage to simply be Americans, to venerate the values upon which we were founded, the things we say we believe, we have too often been conspicuous by our cowardice, our spineless eagerness to throw sacred principle aside as a sop to expedience and fear. Or, as Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy said days before Roosevelt issued his order, “If it is a question of the safety of the country (and) the Constitution … why the Constitution is just a scrap of paper to me.”

In times of danger or fear, we seem to feel it OK to curtail the freedoms — of religion, association, speech — codified in that “scrap of paper.” We never seem to get that it is precisely in such times that those freedoms are most important and most in need of defense.

So everything that has happened since Powell spoke — the curtailment of civil liberties, the domestic surveillance, the demonizing of all things Muslim — is troubling, but predictable to any student of American history.

In his new book, “Manufacturing Hysteria,” author Jay Feldman traces the depressing line from a German-American being lynched during the First World War to the murders of Arabs after 9/11.

Along the way, union leaders, alleged communists, Mexicans, gays, peace activists and African-Americans all take their turns in the barrel, all get brutalized, detained, fired, illegally searched or killed outright because they, we are told, are the people we should fear. As a nation, we seem to need that, seem to need a people to fear. But fear interdicts intelligence.

It is almost impossible to reason and fear at the same time.

We ought to know this. Our history should have taught us. But we are, it seems, resistant to learning. And 10 years after 9/11 one thing now seems obvious.

Colin Powell was wrong.

(Leonard Pitts is a columnist for the Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, Fla., 33132. Readers may contact him via e-mail at lpitts@miamiherald.com.)