Corporate Responsibility (3): How Ceneta Lee Williams Takes Action

In our Group’s just-published Corporate Responsibility Report 2010/2011, five Bertelsmen and –women talk about how exactly they put Bertelsmann’s corporate culture into practice in their workaday life, and why and how they do so at their company – and often beyond it. We will gradually introduce these colleagues, whose portraits incidentally grace the five different covers the report was published with.

After RTL TVI presenter Sandrine Corman, this time Ceneta Lee Williams, Sales Manager, Adult Books at Random House Inc. in New York, talks about her personal experiences with promoting literacy.

“Like many of my colleagues, once a week, at lunchtime, I spend an hour reading with a second-grader in a nearby Manhattan elementary public school. In the beginning he was a bit shy. Our job is first to relax and enjoy reading without worrying about making a mistake. My child and I don’t just read – we also talk about books. After reading, I might for instance ask how my young friend would feel about changing the ending. At first glance, that would appear to be tremendously presumptuous toward the author. But in fact it simply helps to fire the children’s imagination: my reading buddy immediately used his imagination to come up with ways that the story could end.

This encourages the kids to understand that we are reading stories someone else has thought up, and that imagination is a great gift – for writers, as well as for ourselves. Over time, my little listener started asking more questions. What do you do? What is a publisher? How do you get the books? That gets me thinking sometimes: I’ve worked at Random House for 16 years, and I’m still regularly amazed at the team spirit that pervades our company, what one might call our ’corporate culture’. It includes social aspirations like the ’Everybody Wins!’ program. I worked at other publishers for several years before joining Random House. At Random House we think long-term. We don’t just have our eye on the year-end accounting, and that shows in things like this program.”