MANAGING DIVERSITY: Grappling With Change in the Work Force. A SPECIAL REPORT : His Career Blocked, Black Executive Hurdles Prejudice

When a racist boss tried to block his progress at Xerox years ago, A. Barry Rand was ready to abandon his career. Instead, Rand plotted a path around the supervisor.

Now, 20 years after he signed on with the office machine company as a salesman, the bigoted boss is history and Rand is president of Xerox’s largest operating unit, responsible for $4 billion in annual sales and 30,000 employees.

“You don’t spend time and undue energy discussing ‘woe is me,’ ” said the 43-year-old Rand, who was raised in a middle-class family in Washington and started college at American University in 1964, the year the Civil Rights Act outlawed racial discrimination in employment.

“The reality of it is that biasedness, racism, sexism--all cultural differences--exist and you have to accept them as hurdles on the track,” said Rand, who heads Xerox’s U.S. sales and service division. “It does cause you to run faster and jump higher.”

Rand went to work at Xerox because of its enlightened stance on racial issues. The company had been active in healing the damage from the riots that rocked Rochester, N.Y., its headquarters city, in 1964, and top executives long had committed Xerox to an intensive program of recruiting and training minorities.

“I grew up thinking you are supposed to be successful, supposed to work hard and to be dedicated,” Rand said. “And I thought Xerox was an environment where, if I did those three things, it would pay off--notwithstanding that I knew I was in an alien environment.”

Established Networks

Rand credits his success in the corporation first to David T. Kearns, Xerox chairman and chief executive. Kearns “really decided to give opportunities to people who heretofore had been excluded from equal opportunity,” Rand said.

The company, moreover, had established internal networks through which minority managers could help one another navigate the corporate seas.

Finally, Rand says he got ahead on account of his individual performance. “But those issues of performance,” he noted, “don’t get a chance to be exhibited unless the first two items”--enlightened management and self-help programs--”are also in place.”

Heterogeneity is a fact of American society and Rand considers it a strength. According to Rand, former Japanese Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone missed the mark when he said America’s large population of blacks and Latinos had retarded the nation’s economic progress.

“American industry only has about 1% black executives,” Rand said, “so I don’t think 1% of your executive population would cause the competitive problems we have today.”

He chuckled. “One might look,” Rand said, “to the other 99%.”