S8E3: Darren Walker on Finding Clarity and Purpose

0:09Welcome to View From The Top, the podcast. I'm Kailash Sundaram, an MBA student of the class of 2025. And I'm Michael McDowell, a producer at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Kailash, talk about the conversation we're going to hear today. We're going to be hearing from Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation. Darren's story is just absolutely incredible. Darren grew up with a single mother in Texas, and he rose to become president of one of the largest philanthropic foundations in the world. I think Darren's story really resonated with our students living the American dream, switching careers from being a lawyer and investment banker to going into the world of philanthropy and finding purpose and impact in his life.

0:52It's going to be a real treat to listen to. I really like that. And just to preview one thing he said was America wants you to succeed. Yeah. I thought that was so powerful because I think often you worry that that mobility escalator is gone. America's forgotten about the poor, about those who are being left behind. And to hear the president of Ford Foundation that does this work every day of trying to lift up people, of trying to fight inequality, say this country was behind you, that was powerful. And to hear that from someone who had lived the American dream themselves, it made me feel like it's still possible here.

1:28Absolutely. What's a moment in this conversation you're particularly excited for our audience to hear? I think I'm excited for the audience to hear about the advice that he got as a little kid, because that piece of advice really carried with him throughout his life. And you can tell that it set him on the path that he's on now. The second thing that I want everyone to hear is I asked Darren, what's one thing that would surprise us that most people don't know about you? That was a great question. And Darren shares a really poignant part of himself with us. And it was a really vulnerable, tender moment spoke to a lot of people in the audience who've experienced this.

2:10And I hope you certainly get to hear that and carry that with you through your life. That's great. Kyla, should we play the tape? Let's play the tape. Darren, thank you so much for being here today. Welcome to Stanford. I'm delighted to be in Palo Alto at Stanford and not in Manhattan today. I can only tell you as a New Yorker, we often, when people abandon us and come out here, we lament that and say, how could they leave New York, the most exciting, interesting place in the world to live, and then you come here. And you completely get it. You completely get it. This place is magical. Well, we have so much to talk about today, from your incredible life story to your time in leadership, but I want to start with where your story begins.

3:05Tell us about your upbringing and how it shaped you. Well, I grew up in a country that believed that poor little boys who lived in shotgun and houses on dirt roads in rural places like Ames, Texas, could dream. I had permission to dream, and so I had dreams. Some of those dreams took me away because I was in the first class of Head Start, and my love of words and language began then, And I would dream because there were occasions when my grandmother, who was a maid for a wealthy family in Houston, we would go in to the city and I'd go to their house and help her with her work. but I would always in their mudroom find shelter magazines and books and programs from the Houston Ballet and the Alley Theater and I would pilfer them away because they were throwing them away and bring them home with me and I would sit and just just go through the pages of these places and spaces that were so far away from that little dirt road in Ames, Texas but it allowed my imagination to expand and to be taken out of the situation I was in which would be probably called challenge.

4:44I always felt even though most people when they look at the material circumstances of my childhood would use the word poverty or or deprived in some economic way, I always felt that my country was cheering me on. I always felt that America wanted me to succeed. And I always knew I was going to be a success. I didn't know that I was going to be president of the Ford Foundation because I didn't know what a foundation was. But I had enough support from my mother, who was a single mother of four kids. I never knew my father. And although she couldn't discern, well, you should go to this college or major in that discipline, she encouraged me and she knew that I was a different boy.

5:58She knew that I was not like most of the other boys. And she completely embraced that. So I never, my lovely, wonderful, departed partner of 26 years always spoke about how difficult it was to not feel that who you were as a child could be fully embraced and the burden of that as an adult I had the opposite my mother knew that I was a strange child and yet she completely allowed me to flourish and and that helped and then along the way I just had people who were my champions I had I never the thought of the cost of an education being a barrier for me was never a question I was lucky to have scholarships and but I never thought about oh my goodness this I'll have too much debt to go to that school.

7:14And I went to public schools. I'm proud to say I have never had a day of private education in my life. And I think in a democracy, that's a good thing, when you have leaders who can say that. And so I've been a very lucky man. I've been very blessed. I was born at a time when I could dream. And the thing and the reason I'm so singularly focused on inequality today is because I want little boys and girls, wherever they are, if they're living in housing projects in the Bronx and they're black or brown or they're living in rural towns that have been ravaged by opioids, I want them to be able to dream and to feel, as I did, that America wants you to succeed.

8:14Your country is enabling you to be a success and to get on the mobility escalator. And so that mobility escalator that propelled me forward has stopped for far too many Americans. And I think the fact that it has impacted our politics. And it has profound, I would say, existential implications and consequences for our democracy. It is so powerful to hear you talk about the power of the American dream and the support that you had around you that helped you thrive and excel. But I also want to acknowledge that you've spoken about your experiences with racism and discrimination early in your childhood and into your career.

9:19How and if you're open to sharing, how did you deal with and make sense of those experiences? Well, I think anyone who is different in whatever context where you are a minority can relate to what it feels like to be excluded or to be marginalized based on some marker. For me, racism was real because in the 1960s, growing up in a small town in Texas, it was just a way of life. And I think for a lot of people, and it's so interesting because when I look at my mother's generation, it was an accepted cultural norm that you find in other parts of the world that, well, this is the way it is. And so for my generation, the belief is a more hopeful one in this regard.

10:36I think hate is a scourge that many people feel is necessary. I mean, I say this as a historic, the kind of arc of history, whether it's anti-Semitism or racism or classism. And I reject that idea. And I think those of us who do reject it have to be willing to speak up to reject it. And for me, I never let race or racism, and I say this often to young people and people today, you know, throw me off my game. I think one of the things that people who are racist, just focusing on race, hope to do is to throw you off your game. and you really have to have clarity about your North Star and not be so consumed by that the moment right so so when I was a when when I was a boy in this little town I was in the third or fourth grade and this guy friend, whatever, called me a sissy.

12:11I slugged him. We were on the floor fighting and Mrs. Majors came and she pulled me off and she said go into my classroom now. And I go into her classroom and I'm crying, I am a mess, and she says, Darren you have to understand. Now again, Mrs. Majors would be probably fired today, but she wasn't great. She said, little Negro boys who cannot control themselves, bad things happen to them. Now, today, in this context, she was exhibiting love and care for me. because she was helping me understand that in order for me to be a success, I had to control my anger and my rage. Mrs. Majors is on my shoulders every day.

13:16And so when you ask how I, over the years, have coped with, have thought about this, and when you talk to other successful people of color, certainly I can talk other successful blacks, that ability to cope with the moment in which you experience a racist interaction with someone, and the ability to not go there, because it's so easy to, because for many it happens so often, that's key to your success because it's Mrs. Majors was right. The little Negro boys who simply might act out were put into the special education class. They were more likely to not graduate. And when you look at the prisons across this country today, those little boys are the primary occupants.

14:28And so Mrs. Majors did me a great favor. She really loved me, and I owe her. In the face of adversity, you thrived, becoming a corporate lawyer and then an investment banker. But not necessarily something you'd expect from someone who would go into philanthropy. What drove those early career choices? Well, one of the things that happens when you grow up poor is as an adult, you pledge to never be poor again. And so I was envious of my friends in law school who said, oh, I'm going to go and do this public interest law fellowship. And I'm going to go to the ACLU. I was very clear I was going to make money and clarity and purpose is so critical in life but when you have goals that are short medium long term so I knew that I would have responsibilities that many of my classmates did not And so for me, going to Wall Street was a platform to create some wealth.

15:55That's all. And the psychic satisfaction that I did not experience was in some ways satiated during bonus season.

16:18And I reached a point where I said, I'm done. I mean, I did 10 years. And a lot of things converged. It was the early 90s. I started, I mean, I had a life downtown in Manhattan. But if those of you who know New York in the 90s, I mean, I was really drawn to Harlem. Most people in New York in the 80s and 90s were not drawn to Harlem, which is hard to say, hard today to imagine that there was a time when people did not want to live in Harlem. But when I moved to New York, a lot of people did not want to live in Harlem. And so I met this amazing minister at the Abyssinian Baptist Church, Calvin Butts, and everything sort of converged.

17:10And I said, oh, great, I'm just going to come volunteer and hang out with you. And that's what I did. And the vision, which was a real regeneration of particularly central Harlem, although there were half a million people in Harlem, there was no supermarket. It was a food desert. In terms of health care, I mean, you could just go down the indicators of community well-being. And so we set about addressing that. and I spent eight years there and it was amazing. He did over a thousand units of housing, the first supermarket in Harlem in 50 years. I mean, there were so many things that I got to be a part of and it was great and that transition allowed me, again, clarity and purpose.

18:02When I left Wall Street, there were no regrets. I did what I sought and started out to do and when I was able to transition to running a nonprofit in Harlem I actually thought that I would want to do that kind of work I mean that specific work I thought well you know I wanted to work in a black neighborhood I was drawn to Harlem because the Harlem Renaissance and I loved Sorin Arston and James Baldwin and all these sort of sons and daughters of Harlem and so I had this romanticized idea of, of course, when I moved to Harlem in the 1990s. I mean, you know, there was not a lot of romanticism in the rats running around in my apartment and all that.

18:49It was a very different time than it is today. I mean, of course, when you go to Harlem now and, I mean, where do you start? The H &M? To Ralph Lauren? I mean, where do you start? I mean with what populates you know 125th Street as opposed to when I lived there and and just to get a quart of milk you had to go to this bodega and hope that it hadn't expired. Well it's a really interesting decision you made to leave the corporate world, give away bonus season and Wall Street because I think for a lot of us business school students we sometimes have the perspective I'm going to go into a field like invest in banking, make a boatload of money, and then give it all away.

19:33What do you say to those of us with that perspective? Good for you. I mean, my, I say,

19:45for just have clarity about what it is, and I didn't know when I started where I would end up, and I still don't know where I will end up because I'll be leaving Ford at the end of the year. But if you want, if literally you really want to make money, if you want to pay off your student loans, if you, like, that's a goal. Set that goal. And the challenge is, and this is what I found in friends who later on in their careers would call me after really the sort of golden handcuffs are tightly around your wrists to say oh I don't like being a partner at the law firm oh I'm tired of IPOs and chasing clients or all right well you're you're 45 50 years old I mean you spent 20 years you can't just pivot and say well because now I think I I want to be like you.

20:55I think I want to go and be in a foundation. Well, you can't pivot. You've been at Goldman for 20 years doing this kind of work. And you're not a billionaire. I mean, so it's not like, you know, you're just going to sit and not work and give away money. I mean, if you're that, I mean, this is the more normal thing where you people just have become accustomed to a lifestyle. I mean, in a place like New York, it is a place where you can have a household income of a million dollars and not feel particularly rich. I mean, if you have a nice apartment, you want a house in the Hamptons, I mean, like a million dollars a year is not going to get you that in New York.

21:45and so people get the handcuffs and the lifestyle and then you've got kids and then you've got private school education and then you've got and all of a sudden and you're really not happy doing that work anymore but you're locked into a lifestyle and so I think figuring out earlier because the longer you stay in that example the harder it is to extricate yourself into, you know, and pivot. Now, if you're an investor and you want to go and do impact investing, sure, that's not. But the kinds of big pivots, certainly that I did, are possible because I think I got out at the right time. I think that's a great call for us to each find our clarity and what we'd like to do.

22:46So you take that clarity, a passion for social impact, and you go to Rockefeller, where you spend quite a bit of time before you move on to the Ford Foundation. And three years in, you're asked to lead the organization. What did that mean to you? Well, I think I've never been foundation material, or certainly not. No, I mean, when I interviewed at Rockefeller, I remember I went back for so many interviews. And I would remember I'd take the A-train back to Harlem and think, well, what just happened? Are they going to hire me or not? And I just kept getting called back, but never an offer. And then I got an offer.

23:30And a few months in, a person who was a director, one of the directors, I was hired as director of the U.S. program, but the director of the Africa program. We were talking and he said, you know, a lot of people during the interview process liked you, but they just didn't think you were Rockefeller material. And the reason for that was because I'm an Ed Rockefeller at the time. I wasn't an academic. I'd never published anything in a journal. I didn't go to private school. I mean, they were right. I mean, by that criteria, I was not. I didn't, you know, the other four directors all had PhDs. One was a Rhodes Scholar.

24:18I mean, they were, you know. Now, two years later, I was promoted to vice president, and I was their boss. And so what happened? And so that to me is the lesson. And part of the lesson is there was a time when, and I can say this because it's true, there was a time when the smartest man in the room was presumed to be a leader. but just because he's a world scholar he's the first professor in the Department of Economics to blow or whatever he's the youngest partner at what we now know and certainly from research but anecdotally is those people are usually not leaders and they usually are not equipped I I should say they are often not equipped with what it takes to lead, inspire, energize, mobilize, manage, create followership, innovate, et cetera, et cetera, that is needed to lead in the complex world we live in.

25:45And so that's what happened to me at Rockefeller. And that's what happened at Ford. I have never been the smartest man in the room. And that has never left me feeling inadequate or not up to the task. because at every opportunity when given a chance to lead I've been able to do that and so things accrete reputation accretes your own personal brand and how people experience you you hope accretes but to lead today you have to have some sense of humility, of empathy for others, an ability to put yourself in their shoes. Now that doesn't mean that every leader today possesses that, but I do think to be the kind of leader who is respected and hopefully admired, not because of of your title, because that's the other thing about you can, there are many people with president behind their name or founder behind their name.

27:22It doesn't mean that they're respected, that they're admired, that they have a followership that comes not because of their title, but because they inspire, because people want to be in the room with them and are willing to follow them because they respect them. And so I try my best and I don't always succeed in being that kind of a leader. I want to touch on that point about humility but before I get there at the Ford Foundation you chose to make the mission about addressing one core issue, inequality. And I think we can all agree in this room how important that is to give everyone hope, to level the playing field, to make sure that everyone has a fair shot.

28:18Yet since 2020 the world's five richest men have gotten twice as wealthy, while five billion people across the world have gotten poorer. What's not working? Well first I think it's important to not demonize wealthy people. My quest to engage in questions of inequality is not about demonizing people who are successful. We need people to be innovative, to be innovators, to be entrepreneurs, to make the potential of capitalism and our economic system to generate wealth. We need that and that's I begin having said that for a democracy I'm not talking about other forms of government or other countries for this country with the history of a nation where the mobility escalator our ideas of opportunity hope are the lodestar of our cultural zeitgeist to not have an economic system and a form of capitalism that does not produce shared prosperity is a potential crisis.

30:16And so the question is not about, well, there's five people and now they're richer. The question for me is, how do we have a system where people do what we have always done in this country? and little boys like me get to grow up like work hard, have a fair level playing field, have a culture and an economic system that allows people to dream, that is a function of government and public policy choices that are made that is a function of what we prioritize in our larger collective ambition for us as a country and so for me I think we've got to question the systems and structures that are designed to generate these outcomes because if if we believe in the values of this country of opportunity of hope inequality is the enemy of hope because hope is the oxygen of democracy and when you have a society where there is hope and opportunity the air is full and when you have a society where hope where inequality is growing that hope is asphyxiated and the air becomes toxic because the citizenry believe that the systems, the institutions, the economy are all stacked against them and they become angry and anxious and resentful and all of that is bad for a democracy we'll be back after this

33:12So some people, in tackling these issues, argue that instead of philanthropy, corporations and individuals should just pay higher taxes. And you've got folks on the other side who say that, well, the private sector is a more transformative place for change. How do you respond to those who maybe don't see a place for philanthropy in society? Well, first of all, I think it's a false binary. and philanthropy can never make up for the consequences of inequality what I'm talking about the problems that we have to solve in the world today philanthropy can't make up for that and the private sector has an incredibly important role to do in solving the world's problems.

34:06And there is much to be unleashed in the private sector. It is not simply about saying to wealthier people, pay your taxes, or pay higher taxes, or let's just tax them. Actually, I do think there's a question about whether our tax system is fair. and I have lived with privilege and I have lived without privilege and there is a big difference. To live in a world of privilege, when I was an associate I just joined the law firm and you know when you join the firm and they give you orientation they give you all of your materials and there's one to open your banking and so there's a letter and a please go to a 55 Wall Street to this I'm so old it was first city National Bank and and take this so you know I'm I just go walk in and I'm standing in line and this lady sees and I said oh and she I show her this and she said oh sir you're in the wrong line and she takes me up these stairs to this place and there was a sign and it said private bank we go inside and I sit down with a banker with a person and they began to tell me the suite of opportunities and the private bank well the my mother lived on a precipice every I mean the idea of even writing a check and like at bouncing like was a reality, like that was just a cloud over our household.

35:56And to sit with someone and to say, well, in the private bank, basically we'll let your checks bounce. I mean, you put some money in this account and we will. I just thought a bank was a bank. I didn't understand that there was another whole bank for people like me. and thus began my journey, where you come to just see that for people with privilege and money, there's just another line. There's just another whole line. And because I had been in that other line, and now I'm in the other line, and I see how different it is. And I see how, you know, just how you just invest. And we've had, if you have, have you been lucky enough to own assets, you know, in the last decade or even since 2020?

37:04If you've owned securities, if you've owned real estate in New York or the Hamptons, or just think about the things in my world or my milieu, we just had to like sit there like we didn't have to do I mean we worked and worked hard and we whatever but like you just would like just open your bank statement and your Morgan Stanley private bank account statement once a quarter and it's amazing and at the same time so many people so many people in this country feel you know like my cousin who I used to babysit for who lives in rural Louisiana and his dream has been to have a double wide manufactured home and I'm helping him finance it but the journey to get there, the journey to get him there, work hard, play by the rules, do all the things you're supposed to do.

38:07And all he wants is his double wide mobile home. And then people complain in my world that their Range Rover was delivered late and they're really mad about it. As you think about tackling this issue of fixing those two lines or bringing them together, you're faced with difficult decisions every day about where to give money. Is it fighting homelessness in America or is it tackling starvation in war-torn regions? How do you decide who deserves a grant and who doesn't? Well, you first have to start with a clear vision, mission, and strategy that allows you to have some rigor around what you invest in that correlates with some objective you have longer term.

39:09And so at the foundation, our work has significantly been around issues of social justice and inequality. and so for that reason our work has been focused on economic rights and justice issues and so an example would be I in terms of strategy and grant making I believe that a critical link to the mobility escalator is ownership we should be an ownership society we have become less of an ownership society because of the choices that have been made and so and so we make grants to organizations working on employees having ownership and equity yeah and so there are models for that from ESOP to employee stock ownership programs to a program we have with with KKR working in their domestic portfolio with ownership and many of their manufacturing portfolio companies because if people have equity they have more of a commitment they are better workers they are more productive my grandfather had a third grade education.

40:33He was a shoeshine boy, which is what they called him in the 50s, and the porter in an oil company in Texas. But every employee participated in the profit-sharing plan, even the porter. When he retired, his Social Security check and his stock in the company allowed him to live with dignity for the rest of his life. Those programs don't exist anymore. Why? Well because we made choices to do away with those programs. So we in that economic justice program make grants to organizations working on that kind of initiative. In our work on reproductive rights and justice. We are unapologetically as a foundation pro-choice and believe that a woman has a right to determine bodily autonomy and the right to an abortion.

41:39That there are many organizations who are working towards that objective. We fund those organizations. And so we make through those strategic choices then cascading down a set of choices among organizations we believe are most likely to help contribute to that progress towards those goals. As you speak to a room of young people I'm reminded of your quote that you find hope in young people. As you pass the baton, it's on our generation to take up the mantle. What is your call to action for our generation? Well, first I say I apologize because we should be passing a better world to you. And so learn from the lessons of the people whose shoulders you stand on.

42:56And when it comes to issues of injustice, of fairness, of opportunity, help correct the things that you think are wrong and need fixing, of which there is a lot. I certainly hope that each of us will take that away and figure out what we can fix and move towards that. This is your last year at the helm of the Ford Foundation. And so before we open it up to Q &A, I find it particularly fitting that a theme for the year is leaving your mark. So Mr. Darren Walker, how would you like to be remembered? Well, I would like to be remembered as someone who was less concerned about leaving a mark than impacting people.

44:00And what I mean by that is by being an example that you can certainly not be what might be presumed, that you can be a complex person, right? And your complexities and being sort of multidimensional and complicated are all seen as values and virtues towards your leadership. And so, you know, I'm not big on legacy. talk. When I was the board chair called, we did it all hands on, sort of in a room like this at the Ford Foundation and we were on stage like this and he said, we have bittersweet news. Darren has told the trustees that he's going to leave next year and he went on to say and it's going to be so hard to fill his shoes and then during the Q &A, the staff went, oh it's going to be so hard to fill your shoes and finally I just took the microphone and said, I am taking my shoes with me.