Eula Bruce
June 11, 2007Principal at Thibodaux High named
June 13, 2007
Inspirational-speaker Anthony E. Jones has driven a long and winding road to arrive in Port Huron, Mich., from an impoverished boyhood in Lafourche Parish, but he is now on the road driving back to Louisiana to give several talks to local groups.
The 36-year-old graduate of Thibodaux High School, Fisk University, and Vanderbilt University, and owner of the motivational-speaking company Results by Design, is viewing his native Houma-Thibodaux area as a burgeoning place to ply his trade in the near future.
Jones was the keynote speaker at the Boys to Men Mentoring Conference Saturday at Nicholls State University. He has tentative talking engagements tomorrow, June 14, at the Mechanicville Gym (Senator Street in Houma) at 9:30 a.m., and at 6 p.m. at the Bayou Towers auditorium (7491 Park Ave. in Houma). On Friday, June 15, he is scheduled to speak at the Houma-Terrebonne Housing Authority monthly staff meeting at 8:15 a.m. (Call 985-876-4755 about the general public attending the meeting.)
Jones recently authored the semi-autobiographical book, and workbook, “Success by Design: Becoming the Person You Were Destined to Be.”
“Leadership development, team building, and diversity training is my bailiwick,” he said.
Currently, Jones is conducting a seminar called Midday Impact as part of his overall Results by Design program. The technology-rich seminar is aimed at inspiring high school and college students to “figure out what’s out there for them” in the working world, he said, and helps to answer questions like “What do I do to prepare myself?” and “Once I get in, how do I stay?”
Jones’ story began at St. Joseph Elementary School in Thibodaux. Except for the years he spent as an undergraduate, he said religion has consistently occupied a large part of his life.
“I was always talkative growing up,” he said. “I would rely on that as an icebreaker, but it could come off as distractive. I was often disciplined.”
“I don’t know if my story is that much different” from others, he said. “Today, I think, teachers would diagnose me as having ADD. I was tested, and found to be slow in reading.”
“I began to live up to the lower expectations,” Jones said. “As a kid, not having the emotional ability to live through that, it sparked a disinterest in school. By the fourth grade, I began going to the principal’s office.”
Involvement with the Calvary United Methodist Church in Thibodaux helped to give Jones confidence during this time.
Even though, in school, his performance dragged, at Calvary he was viewed as being exemplary.
Jones spoke, and assisted, at church services, and attended Sunday school.
“It helped to serve as an equalizer in esteem,” he said. “I’ll be forever grateful to them.”
His parents decided to remove him from St. Joseph, and enroll him in Thibodaux Elementary School, where he flourished in an atypical class taught by dual instructors.
“My ascent was great” at Thibodaux Elementary, he said. “The teachers were amenable. They knew how to reach me.”
By the time he attended East Thibodaux Junior High School, Jones was feeling confidence in his leadership abilities.
“I found my niche in leadership,” he said. “Once I got there, the itch never left.”
In high school, Jones was voted Mr. Thibodaux High School, and Louisiana Boys State governor.
He said, “When I left Thibodaux in 1990 to go to Fisk University (a historically black university in Nashville, Tenn.), I was primed.”
Jones was unable to remember the man’s first name, but he said “a prominent gentleman in my community named Mr. Bell” ultimately motivated him to apply to Fisk.
Bell told him to attend Morehouse College (a historically black college in Atlanta which is the alma mater of Martin Luther King, Jr.), to study law.
“Even though I didn’t go to Morehouse, his interest in me was remarkable,” Jones said. “It was a tremendous motivation for me to be serious about looking at schools. I needed that attention in my academic progress.”
Also, a couple of Fisk alumni lived in Thibodaux at the time. Jones was the only member of his class to attend the university.
At Fisk, Jones met his future wife, Tonya, who was voted Ms. Fisk University, and who is now a dentist. The couple has a seven-year-old boy, and a five-year-old girl.
Though he said he was happy while attending the university, Jones had stopped practicing religion.
“As teens, my brother and I began to ask tough questions about God, but I did well until I got to college,” he said. “I had a ruined relationship with God. It was not until my girlfriend/fiancée started to draw closer to God that I had to get serious about God. My life improved tremendously.”
Jones graduated summa cum laude, and Phi Beta Kappa, from Fisk in 1994 with a degree in political science.
His success at Fisk may have influenced four high school students from Thibodaux to attend the university. All four have used their Fisk education profitably.
Jones said, “One young man works for a bank in Cincinnati, another did master’s work at Nicholls State, another is pursuing the master’s, and another went to Florida to become a journalist.”
Jones worked as an admissions counselor at Fisk while enrolled in the graduate education program at crosstown Vanderbilt University. He later became director of admissions.
“I got paid to go around the country to talk about the school I love,” he said.
At the time, Jones was the youngest director of admissions at any liberal arts college in Tennessee. He said he increased freshman enrollment at Fisk by 45 percent during his tenure at the university.
He implemented recruiting strategies at Fisk which garnered him a mention in U.S. News & World Report, according to his web site. He has also appeared on the Fox Television Network, and has been quoted in the Los Angeles Times.
While he was in the admissions office at Fisk, Jones targeted baby boomer parents who had attended post-Civil Rights integrated colleges in the U.S.
“There’s nothing wrong with predominantly white schools, but they were poor experiences socially (for African-Americans),” Jones said. “Parents did not want their children to repeat their social experience.”
He also focused on assisting parents who earned too much income for their kids to qualify for tuition aid, but didn’t earn enough to pay tuition costs on their own.
Jones recruited heavily in California. The passage of the anti-affirmative action Proposition 209 in 1996 in California made the state ripe for picking off minority students to attend Fisk.
In 2000, Jones moved his family to Cincinnati after he was made the recruitment director for INROADS, the St. Louis-based company that provides training and places minority students in management positions in business and industry. He said he stabilized a situation at INROADS in Cincinnati in which numerous recruitment directors had come and gone. His clients included Proctor & Gamble, Pfizer Pharmaceuticals, Johnson & Johnson, and IBM.
Jones later became director of global diversity for the Cincinnati-based business process outsourcing firm, Convergys Corporation. The company provides billing services, handles telephone calls, and manages human resources for other businesses, and employs over 70,000 people in 48 different countries. He was the “primary spokesperson on diversity matters” for Convergys, according to his web site.
During his years at INROADS and Convergys, Jones was also running Results by Design, which he established in 2000. He began operating the company full-time in 2006.
More prophetically in 2006, Jones and his wife met Veter Nicholls, the renowned pastor of the 80-year-old non-denominational ministry New Covenant Life in Port Huron. The encounter with Nicholls proved to be profound for Jones. The ministry was going through a difficult period.
“We felt that her take on God was the stance we believed in,” he said. “The ministry needed help to ground itself.
Jones moved his family to Michigan. His wife relocated her dentistry practice to Port Huron.
He said, “We made the decision to make the move. We’ve been blessed.”
Through his work with Fisk, INROADS, Convergys, and Results by Design, Jones has had to confront two sensitive topics: race and religion.
“I mix business pursuits with religious pursuits,” he said. “I found early that discussion of religion has a certain baggage. I try to keep my seminars along the objectives of the company I’m working for. Some companies ask me to banish (talk of religion). I don’t necessarily bring religion to work initially, but I will manage it if it comes about.”
Jones discussed one incident where religion and race combined to produce a potentially combustible situation, and another in which he had to confront race stereotyping directly.
While he was in Salt Lake City conducting a Results by Design session, Jones said that a white Mormon business recruiter told an African-American group, “You play basketball really well. We need you in Utah.”
“Until around 1977, Mormons believed the father of blacks was Satan,” he said. “This guy, the majority of people he managed were people of color. The guy didn’t do a good job. Where did this come from? It came from his orientation as a Mormon. He needed to be challenged.”
In the other incident, while conducting a seminar in Indiana, Jones told a white audience, “I love deer meat. I love to shoot my rifle, and drive my four-wheeler.”
“These guys saw an African-American guy, and they were surprised,” he said. “I broadened people’s ideas. I caused them to be more critical thinkers. I use my cultural knowledge to grow people’s awareness of one another, to get the job done. There are more things alike than different in people.”
Religion has aided Jones not only in overcoming obstacles imposed by race, but in many aspects of his work and life.
“When we walk separately from our creator, what’s ugly in us comes to the forefront,” he said. “When I began to let in the light of God, my attitude became much nicer, more clearheaded. I became a better employee, and a better business owner. It’s not popular, not something that’s talked about, but the media, and the political climate, are getting better.”
In Success by Design, Jones said he wrote, “I lived a life of success because of a divine plan. I do the human capital thing. Even though there is a divine plan, there are things we do which can mess up the divine plan. Is being out of line hindering me?”
He said that people have told him his workshop has changed them.
Meanwhile, Jones is concentrating on the financial side of his inspirational-seminar business.
“There’s exciting stuff happening in Louisiana,” he said. “The demographics are changing. There’s a diversification of talent. In Houma, there’s been the expansion of Martin Luther King Blvd.”
“There are a number of organizations in the area that want to know how to get 100 percent utilization out of their talent,” he said. “My company helps to do that. I would love to do that even more (in Houma-Thibodaux) because it’s where I’m from. I know the nuances of the area. I’ve always been interested in getting into Houma-Terrebonne.”
