We Make It Better. Eric Rosswood
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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.”
Rick Welts
President and CEO, Golden State Warriors
“I hope that my being here is some recognition for all the people behind the scenes for the sport of basketball that they love.”
Starting his career in 1969 as a ball boy for the Seattle SuperSonics, Rick Welts spent decades rising through the ranks to become one of the NBA’s top executives, and eventually one of the most respected executives in the industry. From 1982 to 1999, Welts worked at the NBA league office in New York, and eventually became the Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of NBA Properties. During this time, he created the massively successful NBA All-Star Weekend, in addition to the marketing program for the 1992 Olympics “Dream Team.” When America’s interest in the sport soared, Welts was credited with enhancing the league’s image and making basketball the popular sport it is today.
One of his basketball legacies came about when he joined sports attorney Val Ackerman to create the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA). The two were instrumental in launching the women’s professional basketball league and securing partnerships with some of the biggest sports advertisers in the world, including Nike, Coca-Cola, and McDonald’s. Together, for their efforts, he and Ackerman were named BRANDWEEK’s ’97 Grand Marketers of the year. Later, Welts became the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Phoenix Suns, and they won three Division Titles (2005, 2006, and 2007) during his tenure with the team.
But one of his most meaningful moments was in 2011, when he publicly came out in a front-page story in the New York Times. By doing so, Welts became the first openly gay executive of a major sports team, and an inspiration to many. He received awards from GLAAD, GLSEN, and even served as the celebrity Grand Marshal in the 2015 San Francisco Pride Parade. He also became an Advisory Board Member for the You Can Play Project, an organization dedicated to ensuring the safety and inclusion of all people in sports, including LGBTQ athletes, coaches, and fans. Shortly after coming out, and weeks after leaving the Suns, Welts was recruited by the Golden State Warriors. During his time as President and Chief Operating Officer, the Warriors have excelled, winning three NBA Championships (2015, 2017, and 2018). Welts has had a remarkable career spanning over forty years, and in 2018, he was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. In his acceptance speech, he acknowledged his lifelong love of sports and its power to bring people together. He also thanked his partner, Todd Gage, and said that, even though he has accomplished many things throughout his career, coming out was the most important thing he had ever done.
Suze Orman
Personal Financial Expert
“People first. Then money. Then things.”
For fourteen years, every week, Suze Orman reached three million people with The Suze Orman Show, an Emmy Award-winning program about money and personal financial independence. She became America’s go-to person for financial advice and, in addition to hosting her own show, made regular appearances on various others including The View, Anderson Cooper 360, Good Morning America, and Larry King Live. As the host of one of CNBC’s most successful television shows, Orman would take calls from viewers and give them advice on how to fix their financial problems, discussing everything from paying off student loan debt to saving for a mortgage. She educated millions of people on stocks and bonds, and explained how long it would take to pay off their credit cards if they only made the minimum payment. Orman is known for tough love, telling it like it is, and never sugarcoating her message to viewers.
In addition to her television show, Orman is the author of nine consecutive New York Times bestsellers. Her books educate readers on how to be smart with money in any situation. She was a longtime contributing editor to O, The Oprah Magazine and a regular columnist for AARP magazine. She was included in Forbe’s list of the World’s 100 Most Power Women and was twice named to Time magazine’s list of the World’s 100 Most Influential People. While on top of the world, Orman came out in a 2007 interview with the New York Times. She said she was in a seven-year relationship with her life partner, K.T. The two were married in 2010 and have since retired to a mansion in the Bahamas. Her advice to you, no matter what your background or challenges are, is: “If you hold on to your goals and dreams, you will get there.”
Tim Cook
CEO, Apple
“The sidelines are not where you want to live your life. The world needs you in the arena.”
Many people know that Steve Jobs was the co-founder of Apple and the product visionary of the company, but did you know it was a gay man who turned their leading product, the iPhone, into one of the most successful tech products in history? Tim Cook became the CEO of Apple in 2011, and, three years later, became the first openly gay man to run a Fortune 500 company, after coming out of the closet in a Bloomberg editorial. As if that wasn’t enough, Apple became the first one-trillion-dollar publicly traded US company under his leadership.
Most of Apple’s profits have been driven by the iPhone, which tens of millions of Americans use in their everyday lives to make calls, send texts, take pictures, check email, listen to music, post on social media, play games, and more. Cook used the product to take high-tech security features normally only used by businesses and made them available to homes around the world. Ordinary people suddenly had the capability of unlocking their devices using fingerprint technology or by scanning their faces, something that was previously only seen in sci-fi movies. He also revolutionized the way consumers make purchases when Apple rolled out a digital wallet, giving people the ability to replace their credit cards with their phones when making in-person purchases.
In addition to being a leader in the business and technology fields, Cook is also a leader when it comes to social issues, and has a long history of supporting LGBTQ equality. In 2013, he wrote an