"Business is the emancipator." - African-American business leader J. Bruce Llewellyn

Nation's Business, Sept, 1990 by Glen Macnow

His assessment of the public sector? "I didn't like it," he says. "There was too much red tape, too little innovation, and the people working in it seemed lazy and not too bright."

Llewellyn is equally blunt in his appraisal of private industry. He looks at the state of American business, and he sees mistakes. A sampling:

Racism. "These days," he says, "blacks can get into the candy store, we can even manage the candy store, but there's still a glass ceiling holding us down when it comes to owning the store." Llewellyn believes that lending institutions remain reluctant to finance blacks, largely because there is a history of exclusion. "A lot of bankers don't want to be in the position of taking what they believe to be a risk by lending to some black guy who's not part of their network," he says. "They figure, `Things have worked for me the way I've done them, so why change now?'"

Still, he believes things have improved vastly in the past decade and will continue to do so as blacks show themselves able in new areas. He cites himself as a pioneer: "When I bought New York Times Cable, we borrowed over $300 million. We paid it back - we didn't take the money and run. That establishes a track record and helps all minorities. It dampens the enthusiasm for racism."

Complacency. American business, Llewellyn argues, has generally grown too comfortable and too accepting of mediocrity. Many companies not only lack innovation, he says, but also lack the drive to excel. "When we took over the Coke bottling business in Philadelphia, the previous owner told us that things were going about as well as they could," he recalls. "Well, we studied things and determined that even as solid a product as Coke suffers unless the owner really hustles."

Llewellyn stressed execution - getting his products on as many store shelves as possible, especially in the long-ignored inner city and outlying rural areas. He also chased new accounts - such as Evian and Saratoga mineral water - and pushed new products. "We were able to take Barq's from nowhere to the largest-selling root beer in Philadelphia in a very short time," he says. "How? Pure hustle."

Selfishness. Too many top executives, Llewellyn argues, are unwilling to delegate authority and extend equity to the people working for them. The result: a diminished sense of pride among high-ranking employees.

"Some CEOs say, `It's my business, why should I give up control?'" he says. "But I've always found that if you really want your people to have a concern about the business, they should have a stake in it. If you want good managers and don't want them leaving, if you want them motivated to look at this business as their own, give them an equity stake."

In Llewellyn's firms, 10 to 15 percent of the stock is split among top executives, under the proviso that anyone leaving the firm must sell his or her share back to the company.

Squeamishness. This criticism is largely aimed at black business leaders, who, he says, tend to look inward and limit their ambitions to selling consumer goods to other blacks. He worries about a failure of black businesses to become integrated in the overall U.S. economy.