Jorge Figueredo: Liz Claiborne's Senior Vice President of International Operations: a Latino human resource

Latino Leaders: The National Magazine of the Successful American Latino, June-July, 2004 by David Everett

Born in Cuba during Fidel Castro's revolution, Figueredo fled the island with his parents, who refused to raise their children under the stifling air of Castro's communist regime. The Figueredos moved to Union City, New Jersey and thus began for the family the pursuit American Dream. Today, as the Senior Vice President of Liz Claiborne's International Operations, Jorge Figueredo can safely assess that for him, the dream has finally come true.

Jorge and his four younger sisters were raised in a predominantly Anglo environment, but as Jorge explained, "My mom, thank God, insisted that we speak Spanish in the house. Even though I grew up in a town where there weren't many Latinos, I was very conscious of my Cuban heritage."

That heritage has remained a vital part of his life. "I am bicultural and bilingual," he says. "I really learned at an early age how different cultures can look at the same thing in different ways." This bicultural perception has been an asset for him throughout his professional life, and especially now as president of Liz Claiborne International where "I am dealing with so many different cultures all the time."

During the years that Jorge was climbing the corporate ladder, his parents were pursuing their own parts of the American dream. His father went into the flavors and fragrance industry and rose through the ranks to become vice president of a large New York-based firm. Then acting on an entrepreneurial impulse, he launched his own company. His mother, during the child-raising years, was a homemaker. Today she runs a real estate brokerage company in Tampa, Florida. Jorge's parents moved to Tampa in 1982 after he had graduated from Fairfield University in Connecticut, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree with a major in English and a minor in international business.

From his dad, he said, "I got my passion for international work and travel. When I was small, my dad was a member of the Pan American Airlines Club, and each year he would pull out a map of the world on which were traced the routes he had traveled that year. I would look at that map, and I wanted to go to all the neat places that he had been to."

From his mom, he said, "I was encouraged--no, I was pushed--to achieve in everything I could. She set high expectations for her children to achieve in life. A lot of that was because she left her native country so that we would have opportunities in the United States."

Jorge started out his professional life with a desire to become a journalist until "I realized that I couldn't type 95 words per minute, and the entry-level journalist positions did not pay very much, so I explored the business world and found a job as a warehouse personnel assistant in a distribution center in New Jersey. I got my first job because I was bicultural and bilingual. Many of the people working in the distribution center were Latino, and I could speak to them in their own language, so I got my foot in the door."

Then he went to work for Liz Claiborne in the division of Human Resources, where he held several increasingly responsible positions--from manager to director, and then to acting head. His accomplishments in this field were recognized in 1998 by Human Resources Executive Magazine, which named him Human Resources Executive of the Year.

"I got a big break when my boss left the company and I became acting head of Human Resources," he said.

At the time, Liz Claiborne International brought on board Paul Charron as the new CEO, who had ambitions to turn the company around, and he wanted someone in Human Resources with a lot of experience.

Jorge went out to dinner with Paul in what he quickly dubbed "The last Supper," because upon sitting down at the dinner table, the first question Paul asked was, "So why should I keep you in this job?"

"I figured it was my last supper, so I ordered the most expensive item on the menu."

His answer was that after having spent ten years with the company, he knew the culture and the ins and outs, and that Paul would need that knowledge to be successful in turning around the company. Jorge felt that he was qualified to help with the company's transformation.

"He agreed to give me a chance," said Jorge, "and promoted me to Senior Vice President of Human Resources, and I helped him reach his goal.

"He also asked me what I wanted to do in the future at Claiborne. I said that once we had turned the company around, I really wanted to run an operating division. He was intrigued by my choice because it was a highly unusual move to go from a Human Resources role to an operating position.

"The success that I had had in Human Resources," Jorge said, "coupled with my recently acquired Masters of Business Administration degree in International Finance (earned at the Shaw School of Business, a division of New York University) gave Paul the confidence to offer me the position of heading up International in 1999."

At that time the International division of Liz Claiborne accounted for only about four to five percent of the company's sales. The division was small, insignificant, and not many people knew about it. "I had gone from heading up Human Resources, where I was one of the principle executives in the company to leading the smallest operating division," said Jorge. "Frankly, a lot of people asked me why I had chosen to do that."