2024 Georgia Trustees: Dr. Louis Sullivan and Carol Tomé

Nearly 300 years ago, England’s King George II charged the first Georgia Trustees with establishing the new colony of Georgia. Their motives for serving were to be strictly humanitarian, with the motto, “Not for self, but for others.”

Servant Leaders: Carol Tomé and Dr. Louis Sullivan are named this year’s Trustees, the highest honor the state of Georgia confers, photo Daemon Baizan.

The Georgia Historical Society and the governor’s office reestablished the Trustees in 2008 – appointing two people annually whose accomplishments reflect that motto. To be named a Trustee is now the highest honor the state can confer.

This year’s Georgia Trustees are Dr. Louis Sullivan, 17th U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services and founding Dean of the Morehouse School of Medicine, and Carol Tomé, CEO of UPS. The two will formally accept the state’s highest honor on April 27 at the Trustees Gala in Savannah.

Like the Trustees of the past 15 years, Tomé and Sullivan’s accomplishments reflect the ideals of those original Trustees. Both share a strong work ethic and an enthusiasm for serving others, and both acknowledge family members who came before them, whose humble roots helped them stay grounded even as they reached for the stars.

Read more about these remarkable leaders and all that they have done to make Georgia – and the world – a better place. – Kathleen Conway

The Model of a Morehouse Man

Dr. Louis Sullivan has been a trailblazer his entire life. But he never forgot those who helped guide his steps along the way.

Academic, intellectual and professional success – that’s a given. But there’s more to being a Morehouse Man than that. As the school says of its graduates, “they seek to continuously improve themselves and their communities.” If that sounds similar to the Georgia Trustees’ motto – “Not for self, but for others” – well, by either definition, Dr. Louis Sullivan is the role model.

Photo Daemon Baizan.

Sullivan, an Atlanta native (born at Grady Hospital in 1933) who graduated from Morehouse College, was accustomed to being a pioneer: the first Morehouse College graduate and only Black student in his Boston University School of Medicine class, the first Black intern at New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center, the founding president and dean of the Morehouse School of Medicine, and secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) from 1989-1993.

He recalls a series of role models who influenced his life’s path, from his parents to his professors to a particular doctor in rural, segregated Southwest Georgia. Sullivan’s father owned the Black funeral home in Blakely, in Early County, and was “considered a troublemaker,” Sullivan says, because he spoke out against the “white primary” that prevented Black citizens from voting. “He also formed a chapter of the NAACP in Blakely,” Sullivan says. “And he started an annual Emancipation Day celebration to celebrate the Emancipation Proclamation.” In retaliation, he says Early County wouldn’t hire his mother, a schoolteacher with a master’s degree in education, forcing her to teach in schools in the surrounding area.

Promoting Goodwill: Sullivan visiting Brown Hospital in El Paso, Texas in 1990 when he was secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, photo contributed.

Sullivan experienced the discrimination that segregated schools and Jim Crow laws fostered. “The white high school had a library where the Black school didn’t,” he says. “When the white school got new textbooks, we would get the old textbooks.” And he witnessed it in healthcare, too. Black residents in Blakely who needed a doctor’s care preferred to travel some 40 miles to Bainbridge, the closest town with a Black physician, Dr. Joseph Griffin. Sullivan’s father, who split his time as an undertaker and ambulance driver, was the one to take them there, and Sullivan sometimes accompanied them.

“In those years of segregation, if you were African American you waited in the separate waiting room in the white doctor’s office, usually having to go around to the side or back of the building and waiting until the doctor had seen all his white patients. And then he would see you,” Sullivan says. “And of course, I noted that Blacks were never addressed as Mr. or Mrs. It was always John or Mary… Whereas when they went to see Dr. Griffin, they would be Mrs. Jones or Mr. Johnson. So their experience with Dr. Griffin was quite different.”

Sullivan also noticed that Griffin was respected and knew how to help people, which led him to decide at age 5 that he wanted to be a doctor, too. He remembers his mother immediately encouraging him, saying, “That’s great, Louis – you’ll be a great doctor.”

His parents – his earliest role models – helped make that possible by sending him and his brother to Atlanta to go to school, when he was in the fifth grade. “My parents were very strongly committed to the two of us getting the best education we could,” Sullivan says. They both graduated from Booker T. Washington High School, the only Black public high school in the city at the time. Living in Atlanta was a formative experience for the aspiring physician. “Being in Atlanta exposed my brother and me to a community of Blacks who had achieved, who were doctors, lawyers, businessmen – [with Black-owned] companies like Atlanta Life Insurance Company, Yates and Milton Drug Store, both on Auburn Avenue… Pascal’s restaurant and a whole range of Black businesses as well as the Atlanta University Center,” Sullivan recalls. “With that environment and the fact that we were both quite curious individuals, we were taking full advantage of being in Atlanta with the many role models that existed.”

At Morehouse as a pre-med undergrad, Sullivan encountered another role model in Benjamin Mays, the renowned president of the college and father of the Civil Rights Movement. “He spoke about living a life with strong purpose, with service and commitment to others, to roll back the restrictions from segregation,” Sullivan says. Mays challenged students to excel in their field of work – whether medicine, business, engineering or the arts – so that they could never be turned down for a position because they weren’t qualified. “He would often use the phrase, ‘Chance favors the prepared mind,’” Sullivan says. “He was telling us, ‘Always be prepared.’”

Beyond academics, Morehouse taught Sullivan “to have a life of purpose, or service to others, to make the community better and to live our lives with integrity and honesty,” he says. “I’m convinced the relative success of graduates of Morehouse College is not only the academic experience, but the cultural enrichment and the personal challenge and stimulus to lead a life of service that has influenced students there.”

Presidential Advisor: Sullivan and other cabinet members attended President George H.W. Bush’s first cabinet meeting on January 20, 1989, photo George Bush Presidential Library and Museum.

A Second Chance to Serve

Sullivan graduated in 1954 – the year the U.S. Supreme Court declared school segregation unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education – and started medical school in Boston. It was his first time living in a non-segregated environment, and he wasn’t sure exactly what would happen. “I was well accepted,” he says. “I was quite surprised. My classmates accepted me… The faculty was also open and very receptive.” At the end of that first year, he was elected class president.

After completing medical school in 1958, he was accepted as the first Black intern at New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center. “I was more relaxed because I’d had four years of very positive interactions at Boston University,” Sullivan says. “But I was aware of the fact that there had not been an African American intern there before.” The chair of medicine – a Southerner from Vanderbilt University – assured Sullivan that he would do everything to help him have a good experience. He was as good as his word. Only once did Sullivan encounter a patient who refused to be treated by a Black doctor, and the chair of medicine had the patient discharged from the hospital as a result.

By 1973, Sullivan was firmly ensconced in the Northeast, both professionally as co-director of hematology at Boston University Medical Center and founder of the Boston University Hematology Service at Boston City Hospital, and personally, with a family. “I was quite pleased and happy with the career I had,” he says. “My wife was from Massachusetts; my three children were all born in Boston. They grew up ice skating and skiing, and we would go down to Cape Cod for the summers. So I had really pretty much become a New Englander.”

“I’m grateful for this recognition and also see this as a sign that we are making progress as a society.” Dr. Sullivan

Then Morehouse called. Sullivan’s alma mater was creating a new medical school – the first predominately Black medical school to be established in the 20th century. It was another chance to make history, but that wasn’t what drew Sullivan home in 1975. He recalled his original plan when he went to medical school – to provide healthcare to Georgians who needed it, with dignity and respect.

Johannesburg Trip: Sullivan visits former South African President Nelson Mandela in 1999, while chairman of the board of Medical Education for South African Blacks, photo contributed.

“I had not really been interested in administrative positions because at that time, [I thought] administrators were really the people who made the organization work. They were not the people developing new knowledge [in medical research],” he says. “But this was Morehouse College. This was the potential for the life of service we had been taught to seek… and fundamentally, this was a second chance [to do] what I thought I would be doing when I went to medical school. I wouldn’t be doing it directly, but we would be doing it through our graduates.”

Sullivan devoted himself to that task for the next 10 years, first as founding dean and director of the Medical Education Program at Morehouse College and eventually as the first president of the Morehouse School of Medicine (which became independent from Morehouse College in 1981).

Improving the Health of the Nation

With a notable exception, Sullivan served as MSM’s president for two decades. That exception came in 1989, when Sullivan accepted the job of HHS secretary. But it started – where else? – at Morehouse, where Sullivan initially met then-Vice President Bush who spoke at the dedication of the first medical school building.

Sullivan accompanied Bush on a trip to Africa in 1982, where he met Barbara Bush and invited her to join MSM’s board of trustees. “When Bush decided to run for president in 1988, I’d gotten to know them very well,” Sullivan says. When Bush asked him to become HHS secretary, Sullivan told him that if he accepted, he would “be doing everything I could to increase the number and percentage of Blacks in medicine and other health fields.” When Bush said he supported that work, Sullivan said yes.

High Honor: Gov. Sonny Perdue presents Sullivan with the 2005 Leadership Award from the Georgia Civil Rights Commission, photo Office of the Governor of Georgia.

During his tenure as secretary, Sullivan had a major impact on increasing diversity at the highest levels of healthcare, overseeing the creation of the Office of Minority Health, now the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities. He also oversaw the appointment of the first Hispanic and female surgeon general and the first female chief of staff at HHS.

In 1993 he returned to Morehouse, becoming president emeritus after his retirement in 2002. But he remains committed to improving minority health and has kept working to increase diversity in the healthcare field and address health disparities – something he sees as essential to American strength. “So many people don’t realize that a healthy population is tied in with being a strong and productive nation,” Sullivan says. “When we fall short, we have an impact not only on individual citizens but on the nation as a whole.”

Ever the Morehouse Man, Sullivan sees his selection as a Georgia Trustee as an honor but also a responsibility, “to improve the lives of Georgians as I go along. If I can do that, and build upon what people like Dr. Griffin did, and the doctors I met here in Atlanta as I came along [did], then I will feel gratified,” he says. “I’m grateful for this recognition, and also see this as a sign that we are making progress as a society. I see this as a challenge for all Georgians, for us to work together to improve the lives of all our citizens. Because if that happens, we all benefit.”

Delivering Leadership

When Carol Tomé started at UPS, one of the selling points was that she’d be helping hundreds of thousands of people. That willingness to serve others is a key reason she was selected to be a Georgia Trustee.

Before taking the reins at UPS and becoming one of just 29 women CEOs of Fortune Global 500 companies, Carol Tomé was retired. Like living-at-the-farm-in-Walker-County retired.

She was 62 and had just decided to end her 24-year career at The Home Depot, more than 18 of them as CFO. She had been a candidate to become CEO in 2014, but the job went to Craig Menear; Tomé stayed at the company and continued to serve as CFO until she retired August 31, 2019. She joined the boards of Verizon Communications and Cisco (she was already a member of the UPS board) and created a family foundation with her husband Ramon as she planned to settle into a less-hectic routine. Life, she says, was good.

But UPS was prepping for some life changes, too – namely CEO succession planning. CEO David Abney was himself planning to retire, and the company knew what it was looking for in its next leader, defining a persona with specific skills and attributes. No one at Big Brown quite fit the description, so the search committee decided to look outside the company. And discovered the right fit was not that far away.

Driving Progress: Tomé with former UPS CEO David Abney, photo UPS.

Tomé wasn’t expecting the call, and one of her first questions was whether she was too old. “They said, ‘No, we don’t think you’re too old. We’d really like you to consider this,” she remembers. So, as the company continued its search – Tomé makes it clear that she had to go through a formal process and interviews – Tomé considered several questions and one by one, started checking off boxes. “Why would I want to do this? Why would I come out of retirement and go back in, especially in a CEO job? I landed on a few reasons,” she says. One was that UPS’ values aligned with her own, “integrity being on the top of the list.” Check. Second, she says, she “loves to develop people [and] I have a pretty good track record of that. UPS [has] hundreds of thousands of people…that would be a lot of fun.” Check. She would also have the opportunity to create value, given that the company’s stock price had been flat for a while, and that was another thing she loved to do. Check.

And she asked Ramon. “I said, ‘What do you think about me going back to work?’ He’s like, ‘Would you please go back to work? You’re driving me crazy,’” she says with a laugh. “So I was checking off all the boxes.”

A Change of Plans

As Tomé went through the selection process, she thought carefully about how she wanted to shape the job, spend her time and choose areas to focus on. She planned to travel globally to meet customers and employees, and to get on the ground and walk through UPS facilities. Her selection as the next CEO was announced March 12, 2020; she would have a few months’ overlap with Abney, who would retire June 1 – all in all, a well-planned transition for a company that was moving about 6% of U.S. GDP each day.

A week later, all that planning went out the window as COVID-19 shut down the country and the world, and the task of UPS’s leadership was suddenly to make sure the company kept operating, period – and that employees stayed safe. “None of us had protective gear… We didn’t have masks or gloves or hand sanitizers,” Tomé says. “We had to scurry around the world to get all that.”

Then there was the revenue whiplash. For a brief time, business dropped off – and then jumped up, as people who were sheltering in place started ordering essentials – and more – to be delivered. “We had to hurry to change our operating procedures and get permissions from various government authorities so we could continue to fly into China,” Tomé recalls. As the company navigated the pandemic, “what I planned to do, I didn’t do,” she says. “But I really got to understand UPS culture in a way I hadn’t known as a board member.”

Tomé describes that culture using an old tagline, “United Problem Solvers.” Her longer version: “This can-do, I’ll-do-anything-that-comes-my-way, we’ll-handle-it culture.” It was, she says, an amazing thing to witness.

And while it wasn’t the first year she had planned for, being grounded gave her time to think about the future and what UPS’s business model should look like. “I’m sure I was much more thoughtful than I would have been had I been traveling the world,” Tomé says.

“If you take care of your people, they take care of the customers and everything else takes care of itself.” Carol Tomé

It wasn’t the first time Tomé had to change plans in a big way. Growing up in Jackson, Wyoming, Tomé’s early role models were the women in her family – her mother and grandmothers, who, in addition to telling her over and over that she could do anything and be anything she wanted, also taught her how to hunt, fish, garden and cook. “I can live off the land,” she says. That knowledge has come in handy throughout her career. “I’m like, all right, I’m going to face this challenge. I’m going to have courage. And if it doesn’t work out for me and I get fired, I’m OK. I know how to live,” she says.

Training Ground: Tomé applied some leadership ideas from her former employer The Home Depot, when she took the reins at UPS, photo contributed.

She faced one of her those challenges when she learned, in her final year of grad school, that her father was divorcing her mother and selling the bank he owned – the one Tomé was planning to take over one day. Instead, she joined United Bank of Denver (now Wells Fargo) as a commercial lender, and then became director of banking for one of her clients, Johns-Mansville Corporation, where she gained international experience. That led, in turn, to a job as vice president and treasurer with Riverwood International Corporation, an international packaging company, and a move to Atlanta in 1992.

When she arrived (with Ramon temporarily remaining in Colorado), she would drive around to get to know her new city. That’s how she happened upon a store with a big orange awning and a packed parking lot.

“I walked into my first Home Depot and thought, wow, this place is way cool,” she says. “It was full of merchandise and people were having fun, and there was just a really positive vibe in the store.” When she got home, she called Ramon and told him they should buy Home Depot stock. After he joined her in Atlanta and they bought a house, they became regular shoppers as well as shareholders.

So she was primed to be interested when the home improvement giant called in 1995 with a job opportunity. “I had my first interview and I thought, you know what? I don’t think it’s going to challenge me enough. Because I was used to being outside the United States, doing all these deals,” she says. That’s when the search firm suggested she “go talk to Arthur.”

How High Is Up

That conversation with The Home Depot co-founder Arthur Blank changed her life. Tomé remembers him telling her, in that first meeting, “Carol, we don’t know how high is up for you. That’s for you to show us, but we’ll give you every opportunity to reach your highest potential.” She joined the company as vice president and treasurer. “On the ground floor, really first woman officer, first one hired from the outside – it was a spectacular opportunity for me. And man, what a good time I had there,” she says. “I learned from the best.”

They are lessons she’s carried with her to UPS – one being, most prominently, the inverted pyramid management structure which places customers at the top, followed by customer-facing staff, and the CEO at the bottom. “If you’re at the bottom of the pyramid, you bear the weight for the actions you take and the decisions you make,” Tomé says. “If you take care of your people, they take care of the customers and everything else takes care of itself.”

Tomé also believes in experiencing the front line in person. At The Home Depot, she put on an apron and worked in the store. At UPS, she helped deliver packages during the pandemic. “I’ve done the night sort, I’ve unloaded a trailer, I’ve loaded a trailer,” she says. And she quickly learned how important the truck drivers are to Big Brown’s brand. “Our drivers create personal relationships with the customers they serve,” she says. “I know it, but I saw it firsthand.”

Personal Relationships: Tomé working with a UPS driver at the company’s Roswell hub, photo contributed.

That experience also helped her devise some changes, both to the business and the vaunted culture. All packages in the U.S. now have RFID tags that eliminate manual scans for employees and reduce the chance items will be loaded onto the wrong truck. “Our misload has improved from one in 400 to one in 2,500,” says Tomé. “That’s more than Six Sigma perfection.”

When Tomé could tour UPS facilities, she made changes there, too, implementing standards and upgrading everything from lighting to breakrooms to restrooms. She reshaped company culture to encourage UPS’s commitment to “look like the customers we serve,” eliminating restrictions on natural hair, facial hair and tattoos. “Our tattoo policy was more restrictive than the U.S. Army,” she says.

Last summer, Tomé managed to avert what could have been a devastating strike by reaching a contract with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. More than 86% of UPS union members who voted supported the new five-year agreement, which includes safety measures, like air-conditioned trucks, and institutes raises across UPS’s workforce. Tomé called it a “win-win-win.”

UPS has “aspirational” goals for diversity, equity and inclusion, and Tomé is proud of the work that’s been done while acknowledging there’s more to do. “We want 40% of our U.S. management team to be minority, and we’re at 37%. We want 30% of our management team around the world to be female, and we’re at 27%,” she says. As the company’s first woman CEO, she feels an obligation to pay it forward. “I had an opportunity to remake our board, with people retiring or leaving, so now I have six women on my board. I have three African American men, so there’s more diversity on my board [than] white men,” she says.

That obligation illustrates one of the ways Tomé aims to live by her personal statement: Lead to inspire, serve to create, give to remain. “Lead to inspire is why I get up every day, to inspire this group of 540,000 UPSers around the world for them to reach their highest potential and to take care of our customers,” she says. Serving to create involves creating opportunities for people and communities. “What I’ve learned is that I’m not CEO of a company,” she says. “I’m CEO of a community.” And she and Ramon “give to remain” through the Tomé Foundation, which provides scholarships for women and minorities in STEAM, and the Carol and Ramon Tomé Family Fund, which supports organizations that work in the areas of economic empowerment, the arts and the environment.

It’s a guiding principle that echoes the “not for self but for others” motto of the Georgia Trustees. “I’m really, incredibly grateful for the opportunity to give back in a way that allows us to remain,” Tomé says.

Training Ground: Tomé applied some leadership ideas from her former employer The Home Depot, when she took the reins at UPS.