Hispanic Enterprise - December 2007/January 2008 - (Page 47) ot a problem? Tell Sally Garza Fernandez. Everybody else does. Sally Garza is no stranger to conflicts full of mistrust, bad blood, alienated communities, big money and bullheaded people. She’s well-acquainted with struggles that have gone so far that all concerned are about to crash over the cliff of their own intransigence. In fact, she has made a career of dealing with such situations. It began when Garza Fernandez, at age 24 newly graduated from Michigan State University and starting law school, was recruited by General Motors to assist with a crisis. A major boycott of GM products by the Hispanic community was in the works, prompted by accusations of discrimination. Garza Fernandez was called in because, despite her young age, she already had credibility and high visibility among Hispanics as founder of the Michigan Hispanic Scholarship Fund and as a board member of the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers. “People knew who I was,” she concedes. Her job was to identify ways to make General Motors more likeable to Latinos by preparing a multi-pronged plan addressing every area of the company. A monumental task? Not for Garza Fernandez. She provided a complex roadmap in just four months. With that mission accomplished, Garza Fernandez was promoted to GM’s College Recruiting Group, where she was responsible for hiring 500 engineers—and was designated to train GM recruiters to show them how it was done. Later she was deployed to the Advanced Engineering Division, where she imposed a systematic program of decision and risk analysis so the company could see the likely benefits, dangers and potential return on investment beHISPANIC ENTERPRISE G Garza Fernandez worked for a time at Hughes Aircraft, now named Raytheon Corp., a contractor for Homeland Security. fore spending mega-money on research and development. Her amazing business acuity and phenomenal management successes began to catch the attention of other Fortune 500 companies, which began knocking at her door. Anheuser-Busch won her over with a job offer as director of corporate relations for their Asian, Hispanic and Native American markets. In her five years with the brewing company she played leading roles in handling government affairs, corporate image and community relations. At one point, Anheuser sent Fernandez to the Harvard Executive Development Program. When the company was ready to buy into Mexico’s giant Modelo brewery, Garza Fernandez was ready to lead the acquisition team that brought home a 19-percent share. Garza Fernandez never faced a more colossal conundrum, however, than the one at Hughes Aircraft (now Raytheon), which lured her away from Anheuser. An environmental lawsuit had just cost the missile-maker $84.5 million for allegedly polluting the water table on Tucson’s south side with hazardous waste. Now the company faced another suit that, if successful, would have shut down the plant and put its 10,000 employees out of work. The first day she showed up for work to deal with the crisis, all of the top brass 47 December/January 2008
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.