I get to talk to so many incredible women on this show, but Carla Vernon is a straight-up unicorn, an Afro-Latina who spent 22 years in corporate America.

She went from being the last person in her General Mills cohort to be promoted

to president of the company's $1.5 billion snack portfolio.

Carla just stepped away from all that, so we're taking a look at her rise to the top,

the value of being coachable, and the advice good and bad that shaped her along the way.

Carla, I love that we were both up at midnight emailing and prepping for this.

That says so much.

Yes.

That's the story behind the story.

You just announced that you're leaving General Mills after 22 years.

Right now, the go-to practice, buzzy thing in career advancement is zigzagging,

changing jobs every two to four years.

Your career is sort of a case study in the opposite, taking the long road to the C-suite.

How were you compelled to stay for so long? I'm probably kind of an old-fashioned

person, and I was very intentional in picking the first company that I would join out of business

school. Before business school, I was not very familiar with careers in corporate America.

My parents were both educators,

and we didn't really have any business people in our family, largely probably because my family is black and Afro-Latina, Afro-Latino for my dad. And so segregation really prevented us from being

able to have a path through corporate America. So when I got to business school, I had so much

to learn about how does one even navigate and find a company and find a career path.

When I realized that my skills were really well suited for marketing and

strategy, then I went about making it my business to figure out, well, where are the best

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