Juanita James may yet fulfill her childhood dreams of becoming a college professor. For the time being, however, she”™s content to be chief communications officer at Pitney Bowes in Stamford. “I could envision myself being a guest lecturer or putting together courses at the university level,” the 55-year-old James said ”“ even though her initial steps to a teaching career evaporated after graduating from Princeton and going to New York City to teach junior high school French. That”™s when she heard “a lot of horror stories” about the city”™s public school system ”“ she had attended all-girl Catholic schools in Brooklyn ”“ and changed her mind about teaching.
Instead, James went to work for a French electronics firm ”“ “The GE of France” ”“ that catapulted her on a career trajectory that brought her into upper-management levels of corporate America, where she put some innate skills to work, big time. “I found I had a talent for doing managerial work in terms of planning, executing the plans, pulling staff together, training people,” she said.
“I think elements of that probably showed up in childhood. As a kid, I always organized the weekly outings to the beach. In high school, I would call everybody and say ”˜You bring the Kool-Aid,”™ and ”˜You bring the sandwiches,”™ and ”˜We”™ll all meet on the bus at a certain time.”™ My mother used to call me the ringleader.”
But James had more than innate managerial skills. “I found that I loved the world of business,” she said. “I loved going to work every day, loved working with other people in the office. I thrived on that environment. It was very exciting and energizing for me, and it still is.”
Temporary assignment
When James put her teaching plans on hold back in 1974, she joined the New York office of the French Thomson CSF as an expediter. “The only criterion for the job was that they needed someone who spoke French.” She had majored in French at Princeton, which she attended on scholarships ”“ as she did at the Catholic schools. “Princeton appealed to me because it had one of the most beautiful college campuses I had ever seen,” she said. In fact, it was the first college campus she had seen. “When you”™re 17, you don”™t necessarily make decisions for the right reasons,” she said.
Attending Princeton as part of the university”™s second class of women “was a huge jump in terms of going from 12 years of all-girl Catholic schools to a predominately male Ivy League university,” she said. But she had something driving her that helped her to succeed in that environment. “I was the first person in my family to go to college,” she said. “My father was a mechanic and my mother was a seamstress. My job was to go to school and get A”™s. We understood that.”
Two years after joining Thomson CSF, “I moved to Washington because I married my college sweetheart and he was a medical student at Howard University,” James said. The marriage only lasted five years, but a job she took with Time-Life Books in Alexandria, Va., lasted a bit longer ”“ 20 years. Time-Life even tapped her to participate in a Columbia University MBA program.
For her case study James wrote how Time-Life Books could be turned around. “They were in trouble because they didn”™t have any new products in the pipeline, a lot of the product was stale, the whole development cycle was too long, and they started to lose touch with what people wanted in the marketplace,” she said.
“As a courtesy, I sent the study to the head of the books group, who had sponsored me to go to the MBA program,” James said. “She shared it with the new CEO, who called me and said he wanted to meet with me. He said, ”˜I want to know why I spent a half million dollars on a study and you made the same recommendations.”™”
The CEO recruited James to return to Alexandria “on a temporary assignment” as his executive assistant. Six months later, she was promoted to vice president of human resources and then, in 1987, president and chief executive officer of Time-Life Libraries. Her charge was either to turn the telemarketing subsidiary around or shut it down.
Her managerial skills blossomed as she immersed herself in the business, consolidated the division”™s 16 locations to five, trimmed layers of management and shrank the workforce from 850 to 800, introduced a standardized training program for the telemarketers, and “re-jiggered the whole bonus plan so that when the company made money, they made money.”
“That was fun,” she said of her three years at the helm of the then-profitable and growing operation. “Then a number of things happened simultaneously. I remarried, and for two years commuted between New York and Alexandria. We decided to have a family and agreed to live in one city and one home.” Her husband, Dudley N. Williams Jr., had a home in Stamford, “and I decided to transfer to one of the Time-Life companies in New York.”
The couple”™s son, however, had other plans.
Early arrival
While at a business meeting in Columbia, Md., “I just suddenly went into labor,” James said. Dudley N. Williams III was born four months early and spent four months in a Baltimore hospital. “I ended up in a temporary apartment in Baltimore so I could see him every day,” she said. She resigned her position with Time-Life Libraries and took a year off to care for their son. “It was touch and go,” she said of their “miracle child” who is now a senior in high school, is active in their church youth group and is going through the college application process.
She returned to work as vice president and general manager of Special Clubs for Book of the Month Club, then senior vice president, editorial, of Book of the Month, leaving Time-Life in 1996 to join Doubleday Direct in senior level positions. She left three years later because “I was commuting from Stamford to Long Island, my mother was in her early 80s and her health was suffering, and our son was ready to go through a new stage from elementary school,” she said. “I found it impossible to care for my mother, care for my son and commute two or three hours a day,” so she decided to take a few months off and concentrate on her family “and decide what I wanted to do next.”
In her free time, James became even more involved as a volunteer on the board of a host of local, regional and national groups and organizations, including the Ferguson Library in Stamford, the Stamford Museum and Nature Center, the Child Care Learning Center, the Stamford Symphony. “I”™ve been active in my church now for at least 15 years,” she said, as an ordained deacon and an elder at the First Presbyterian Church.
She serves on the national board for Reading is Fundamental; is an emeritus trustee at Princeton, where she has served on several committees; and is on the corporate advisory council for the Congressional Black Caucus ”“ among other things. “There is a theme in terms of all these organizations,” she said ”“ “education, literacy and trying to improve the quality of life for children.”
James joined Pitney Bowes in 1999 as vice president of human resources, served in other leadership positions and is currently chief communications officer responsible for corporate marketing, brand management, public, media and investor relations, executive communications and corporate philanthropy. “This is very exciting and changes constantly,” she said of her responsibilities. “I still have some runway here to make a difference.”
Her remarkable career is a bit of a surprise to her. “I don”™t think any of us had any idea of where college would possibly lead,” she said of her family when she was back in Brooklyn. “My mother came from Guyana, the only English-speaking country in South America. She grew up in the British class system where there is a wealthy class and a working class or poor class. She wanted to come to America because she heard it was very different.”
Her mother, James said, “passionately believed in the American dream,” and passed that passion along to her daughter. “Her philosophy was that if you get a good education, you can do anything and accomplish anything here.”
