Loida Nicolas Lewis
Lawyer, Author, Business Woman
Loida Nicolas Lewis is a Filipina who does alot. She’s a mother, an author, a lawyer, a publisher and the chairman of a multinational company. Wow!
A Filipina American who has been featured in the U.S. publications of Working Woman and Filipinas magazine, Loida has two daughters and was the recipient of an “Outstanding Mother Award“ in 1998 and was recently cited in Filipinas Magazine’s 1999 achievement award for corporate leadership.
Loida was born in Sorsogon, Philippines and comes from a family of entrepreneurs--- her father started one of the largest furniture manufacturing companies in the Philippines. She graduated cum laude from St. Theresa’s College and studied at the University of the Philippines College of Law. She then went on to become the first Asian woman who did not study law in the U.S. to have passed the New York state bar exam.
She published a Fil-American community magazine and wrote several books including the bestseller How to Get a Green Card.
She filed and won a discrimination case(based on race, sex and national origin) and won it against the Immigration and Naturalization Service(INS) in 1979 and then went on to become INS’s general attorney up to 1990!
Loida is the CEO of TLC Beatrice International Holdings, Inc., a multinational company whose sales reached over $2 billion in 1996. TLC Beatrice manufactures and markets food products in Europe and around the world and presently ranks as the 68th largest privately owned company in the United States.
Loida became the head of TLC in 1994, one year after TLC's first CEO and chairman, her husband Reginald F. Lewis, passed on. Reginald Lewis was one of U.S.’s top African-American entrepreneurs having acquired Beatrice International in 1987. He was also a great contributor to the African-American community such as the Urban League and NAACP, and the author of Why Should White Guys Get all the Fun? his bio. Loida continues much of her husbands work as she speaks to audiences around the world promoting her husbands bio and his other book How Reginald Lewis Created a Billion Dollar Business Empire. She also serves on the board of the Dance Theater of Harlem and the Black Patriots Foundation. She and Reginald had two daughters together.
A Filipina in the Western Corporate Scene.
Loida has her own style of business leadership, a definite combination of the best of her Filipino upbringing and her Western business knowledge and experiences. Taking over TLC she showed business savvy when she cut costs, sold non-performing assets, reduced debt and restructured the corporate staff. At the same time she holds her own as a Filipina woman in the world of Western high finance and competition: she greets visitors with not just a handshake but a hug and she starts corporate meetings with a prayer! (It makes me smile to think of this and remember what it was like in catholic school back in the Philippines)
She says in Filipinas Magazine “Keeping the “hands-off” policy and employing strict controls have been my way of dealing with our managers.” and “I’ve often felt, in a manner of speaking, that I run the company like a household---with fairness and clear expectations.”
Loida speaks 4 to 5 languages, and is one of the founders of the Asian-American Legal Defense and Education Fund, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, also serves on the board of the national Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship and is proactive in the Filipino-American community.
This Filipina takes our breath away with what she has done and is doing. An inspiration to us all.
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