Why Not Win?: Reflections on a Fifty-Year Journey from the Segregated South to Americas board rooms and what it can teach us all [Hardcover]

LARRY D. THORNTON has spent his life being the first African American to do many things –– the first to own a McDonald’s franchise in Birmingham, to serve on the board of directors of one of the country’s largest Coca-Cola bottling companies, to serve First Commercial Bank’s board, and the first to be named president for the legendary The Club. He has forged a path toward greatness while many times being the only person in the room who looks like him. He is an expert on overcoming adversity while maintaining dignity. Thornton grew up in the modest Madison Park community of Montgomery, Alabama, where being black and poor were synonymous. At age 12, he was among the black students who integrated one of the city’s white middle schools, thrusting him onto the front line of incessant racial attacks. That experience nearly hardened Thornton, but upon meeting his twelfth grade English teacher, Miss Nichols, that all changed. She saw something special in him and helped him see it, too. Thornton went on to college at Alabama State University and from there to forge a path toward ground-breaking achievements. Along the way, he developed a personal strategy for resiliency and success that he now shares with others who want a better, more fulfilling life.Aspiring business owners and executives seeking to climb to the next rung, young to mid-career professionals seeking tools for life achievement, and general readers interested in biographies of successful people will like Larry Thornton’s Why Not Win?. The book is a front-row seat to how one man altered his thinking to transform his life. The book begins with his growing up with brown skin in the 1960s in segregated Montgomery, Alabama. A desegregation school pioneer, Thornton was a classroom failure until a perceptive English teacher showed him he had value and encouraged him to go to college. Like the educator who changed his life, Thornton became a classroom teachel3*