J. Alberto Gonzalez-Pita is accustomed to meeting challenges head on, as recently demonstrated in his move from Atlanta-based telecommunications giant BellSouth to the second-largest food company in the Fortune 500, Arkansas-based Tyson Foods, Inc. “Tyson operates a lot of businesses and my greatest challenge has been learning them all—quickly,” says Gonzalez-Pita. “I liken it to drinking from a fire hose.”
“…most management teams and corporate leaders are sensitive to, and have a heightened awareness of, the remaining concerns regarding diversity, and many are aggressively dealing with these issues. The challenge, now, is to continue to do something about it.”
-Alberto Gonzalez-Pita
In conjunction with being the largest processor and marketer of chicken, beef, and pork, Tyson is one of the nation’s biggest purchasers of grain and producers of hides used to make leather. Its products are marketed in over 80 countries, and the company maintains a team of roughly 114,000 people throughout 300 facilities and offices in the United States and around the world.
Gonzalez-Pita, whose legal department sits at the center of corporate functions, is intent upon understanding the nuances of each business. “On the one hand, I’m learning about genetics, breeding stock, live animal production, and processing,” he says, “while on the other, I’m dealing with wholesale, retail, and food service customers—the supermarkets, food chains, and restaurants we do business with. It is a lot to take in, but it is also exciting.”
In the wake of Sarbanes-Oxley, Gonzalez-Pita now faces a host of additional responsibilities. “The heightened awareness around governance and compliance issues means more board training, for one,” he says. “[General counsel] have to be ready to take calls from a board director who has seen an article about an issue that may impact the business, who wants to know what should be done about it right away.”
Gonzalez-Pita’s move has also brought its fair share of cultural challenges. “BellSouth was an established and traditional culture, one that was more formal and engraved, with a history dating back over 100 years if you start with AT&T,” says Gonzalez-Pita. “In contrast, today’s Tyson Foods is the product of a number of mergers, including a very large one about four years ago. Culturally, it is still in transition, which offers a terrific opportunity for me to influence the culture that is developing.”
It was his early experiences that whet his appetite to explore and appreciate difference and is what taught Gonzalez-Pita the value of perseverance when facing life’s challenges. Raised by parents who loved to travel, he developed a taste for new cultures and experiences. Then, in 1960, his family moved from Cuba to the U.S. “Watching them rebuild their lives in a new country where they didn’t speak the language and with three kids, $200 in their pockets, and no recognized credentials showed me the value of a good education and determination,” says Gonzalez-Pita. “It’s not a unique immigrant story, but it had a deep impact on me nonetheless.”
Still, Gonzalez-Pita says the challenges he faces today are considerably different than those he faced 30 years ago. He was the first Hispanic attorney at the Miami firm he worked in upon graduation. “There were few women and no African Americans at that firm, and only a handful of Hispanic attorneys in any of the local firms at the time, despite the large population of Hispanics and African Americans in Miami,” he recalls. “Needless to say, in other cities where the minority populations were low, there were hardly any minority attorneys at all.”
“I frequently heard: ‘Gee, you don’t talk with an accent’ or ‘You don’t look Hispanic,’ or even, ‘You write English very well’—as though because of my surname, I was only supposed to speak Spanish.” Fortunately, he adds, there has been quite a lot of progress and more enlightened thinking since then.
Diversity initiatives have gone a long way toward illuminating and eliminating cultural insensitivities such as these, says Gonzalez-Pita, opening up opportunities for minority attorneys. “Still, issues remain. The number of Hispanic general counsel relative to Hispanic attorneys is very low. The number of women and minority partners at law firms and in corporate counsel positions,” he continues, “is disproportionate to the population. The same is true of boards of directors of major corporations. Much has been accomplished, but we still have a long way to go. We must continue to challenge ourselves, our law firms, our companies, and our communities.”
“I want to be positive, too: I think most management teams and corporate leaders are sensitive to, and have a heightened awareness of, the remaining concerns regarding diversity, and many are aggressively dealing with these issues,” concludes Gonzalez-Pita. “The challenge, now, is to continue to do something about it.”, is to continue to do something about it.”
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From the May/June 2005 issue of Diversity & The Bar®