By Chris Warren (Winds of Change magazine, American Indian Science and Engineering Society)
When Tobin Beal was living in China and working as the CIO for General Motors (GM), he had an extraordinarily long to-do list. Among many other tasks, Beal was charged with developing information technology strategies and sales and marketing solutions to support the automaker’s success in a vital market and with its many joint venture partnerships with Chinese companies.
Surprisingly, one of the consistent requests Beal would get from his Chinese colleagues had nothing to do with IT. “The Chinese wanted me to teach their executives how to tell stories,” says Beal, Choctaw Nation, who is this year’s winner of the Executive Excellence Award. “That’s a skill most tribes have.”
Beal certainly has it, and the story he wants to tell after winning this award is one that has little to do with his own story and everything to do with young Native students. “What I want to put forward is that I see a world that has lots of roles and jobs and futures that I want to be as available to the youth of the nations as they have been to me,” he says. To be sure, having Beal as the storyteller may matter more than he would like to admit. In addition to his role in China, Beal’s career has included time as CIO of GM’s entire Asia operation and his work today helping to lead GM’s transition to electric vehicles — a task that he knows meshes with the long legacy of Native Americans living in harmony with the natural world.
American Indian Science and Engineering Society (AISES) is a national, nonprofit organization focused on substantially increasing the representation of Native peoples in STEM studies and careers. Their magazine, Winds of Change, provides a single-minded focus on career and educational advancement for all Indigenous people in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM).
This article originally appears on the Winds of Change website.
