Читать книгу We Make It Better - Eric Rosswood - Страница 21

Beth Ford is a living example of the American dream. She started small, worked hard, and climbed her way up the corporate ladder, becoming one of the top business executives in the United States. Ford was born in Iowa, and she has seven older brothers and sisters. Her first job as a teenager was de-tasseling corn and cutting out weeds in soybean fields for two dollars an hour. By age fifty-four, she was the first out lesbian CEO of a Fortune 500 company and just one of the twenty-five women CEOs in the same list. Ford got her undergraduate business degree from Iowa State University and her master’s degree from Columbia University. She went on to hold senior-level positions at large organizations such as Mobil Corporation, PepsiCo, Scholastic, and Hachette before joining Land O’Lakes in 2011.

Land O’Lakes is a farmer-owned dairy and agriculture company with ten thousand employees working in fifty US states and fifty countries. They have a farm-to-fork view of agriculture, and are focused on the challenge of feeding more people while using less water and less land. During her tenure at Land O’Lakes, Ford was able to get the company to invest in technology and R&D, resulting in more plant-friendly farming techniques. She led them through record performance and growth, and helped the cooperative move beyond its reputation of just selling butter. When Land O’Lakes promoted Ford to CEO in 2018, she had helped the fourteen-billion-dollar co-op become one of the nation’s largest food and agriculture cooperatives, ranking number 216 on the Fortune 500. The company’s press release welcomed Ford to the new role and detailed her extensive experience. It ended by saying, “Ford and her spouse, Jill Schurtz, have three teenage children and live in Minneapolis.” That statement made headlines around the world when people realized a company on the Fortune 500 would finally have an openly lesbian CEO.

In 2018, she was ranked number thirty on Fortune Magazine’s “Most Powerful Women in Business List.” At a time when a Human Rights Campaign survey has found that nearly half of all American LGBTQ workers are in the closet, Ford’s rise is impressive. “I made a decision long ago to live an authentic life, and if my being named CEO helps others do the same, that’s a wonderful moment.”