Blazing new paths in corporate America: American Express president set to become first black to lead a Fortune 500 company - Kenneth Chenault

Ebony, July, 1997 by Ponchitta Pierce

I BELIEVE very strongly in keeping balanced. Don't get too up about the ups and too down about the downs,: Kenneth Chenault tells me, looking very calm and collected for a man who has just rocketed to the top of corporate America.

Ken--everybody calls him Ken--offers me a cup of coffee, and fixes it himself, not quite what you would expect from the man who has been selected as president and chief operating officer of a company that ranks 65 on the Fortune 500, has 70,00 employees worldwide, and $16.2 billion in annual revenues. But that's how Ken operates: low key, modest, courteous, an ordinary kind of guy who just does extraordinary things. Harvey Golub, chair and chief executive officer of American Express, says he experts to turn the reins over the Ken in seven years when he retires at age 65. If he does, Ken could be the first African-American to run a Fortune 500 company.

With his current appointment, Ken succeeds his boss as chief executive officer of American Express Travel Related Services, which operates the domestic credit card and travel agency business and provides 75 percent of the company's revenues. Within two years, American Express Financial Advisors and American Express Bank, the only two areas now not reporting to Ken, will come under his wing. Ken, now responsible for the day-to-day operations of American Express, also joins the 14-member Board of Directors.

What Kenneth Chenault has done, at 46 years of age, is singular and beyond race. It's about accomplishment, hard work, drive, ambition, and being the best, about a man confident and secure, focused, above the crowd, but one of the crowd, about a man, as his father often told him, being equal to the task. It's about a born leader honing his skills, creating a vision for a company he loves, convincing people that they can win, and cheering them on as he plots the course. So race is not a factor, but even Ken Chenault doesn't forget it. "Remember we are very visible," he told students last year at Howard University School of Business. "Make sure when you speak up, you know what you are talking about. We have to be prepared. You need to understand eyes are on us. It may not be fair, but it's real. In business you have to be pragmatic."

You may have thought MasterCard or Visa was you best friend, but Ken is out to convince you otherwise, to show consumers that they can achieve their aspirations, do anything they want, anywhere they want, with a variety of American Express cards, all aimed at helping you do more. As a result of his aggressive campaign, you can now take your card to Sears and Wal-Mart, something that might have been unheard of years back, viewed as a step down for a card that prided itself on symbolizing prestige and a certain exclusivity. Today, in a world where 98 percent of American Express' 42 million cardholder use other cards, Ken knows lifestyles have changed, values are different, the numbers are where the people are, and he's out to go with the flow, without losing the qualitative difference.

"Ken has a natural instinctive feel for what types of marketing strategies and propositions will work and the extent to which they need to be tested or don't need to be tested," said David B. Hilder, a research analyst at Mortan Stanley who has covered American Express for several years. "He is more likely to succeed Harvey if he can show progress in regaining significant market share..."

Snatching that market share is no easy task, even for Ken, who doesn't know what failure means. American Express has only 16 percent of the United States card market, compared to Visa's 49 percent and MasterCard's 27 percent. One of Ken's greatest challenges is to get banks in America to issue their own American Express Cards, as they do in other countries. Thus far they can't if they have contracts already with Visa and MasterCard. The restriction is under an antitrust probe by the Justice Department. "Why should we have artificial limits on how fast we can grow?" Ken asked me, a fighting spirit shining through the friendly, gracious exterior; the signs of a fierce competitor who might be willing to lose a few battles, but never the war. "Ken is not afraid of challenges," said John Utendahl, founder of Utendahl Capital Partners. "He thrives on them. If he was on Wall Street, a trader, you would say he enjoys the kill."

Chenault has been on a meteoric rise since he joined American Express in 1981 as director of strategic planning. Major appointments included being named president of the Consumer Card Group in 1989, and president of American Express Travel Related Services in the U.S. in 1993. By 1995, as a company vice chairman, and one of the five members of the Office of the Chief Executive running American Express, Ken performed many of the functions of president, a position that had not been officially filled in two years. So when Harvey Golub officially confirmed what many suspected, that Ken was his choice to succeed him, employees cheered.

"You would go in elevators and hear, `Isn't it exciting about Ken? Can you believe that Ken got promoted? Isn't it fantastic? Oh, I fell much better about the company now that Ken is president,'" Anne Busquet, president of American Express Relationship Services told me, reliving the euphoria that gripped the company. "People wrote him notes; he was flooded with E-mail; there were flowers and calls from corporate and political leaders."