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Excerpts from Cracking the Corporate Code

Virgis Colbert pushed back at an early boss in the late 1960s, when he, too, was not satisfied with an evaluation. "I was the general manufacturing superintendent in one of Chrysler's parts plants when a new CEO took over. He wanted an assessment of the plant's managers, and the plant manager did mine. He wrote that I was a 'good' black manager who could some day run a small plant. I said, 'Why do you have to categorize me as a good black manager who could only run a small plant? It's obvious I'm black. And I could run any size plant.' Of course he said he didn't mean anything by it, and he would take it out. He took it out. At least he told me he took it out.

"To me that evaluation was an indication that I was pigeon-holed at Chrysler, that I wasn't going to be able to go very far. He had me in a different category. So the call from a headhunter recruiting for Miller Brewing came at the right time. At that time I wanted to be a plant manager, and at the end of the day I thought I could do that quicker at Miller than I could at Chrysler."

Pushing back at his boss and starting over at a new company were both risky strategies. But Colbert assessed his competition enough to know he was a more valuable commodity than most. That knowledge and his sense that his boss "didn't get it" - that even if he took the offending and irrelevant sentence out of the evaluation, his chances were limited - gave him the self-confidence to take the next step. Since Colbert is an executive vice president at Miller today, it was obviously an excellent decision.