In the “Leveling Up” episode of High-Tech Sunday, Rick Piña, chief technology advisor (CTA) for the public sector at World Wide Technology (WWT), talks about the importance of acquiring experiences, accessing spaces, and having mentors and role models. Read the full article here.
In his current role at WWT, a technology services provider that employs about 7,000 people, Piña and his team engage customers on transformation. Piña also leads Rick & Isabella Piña Ministries (RIP Ministries), a nonprofit that he co-founded with his wife, Isabella. RIP Ministries is dedicated to serving, with a particular emphasis on the Caribbean.
“The two big things in my life are technology and faith in God,” Piña said. “From the perspective of sowing a seed, I would say my mother.”
Piña’s mother grew up in La Vega in the Dominican Republic. One of nine children, she had an eighth-grade education, more than all her siblings. The family had no running water and no electricity. People would laugh when Piña’s mother would say that she was going to New York City. She finally made the trip in 1970.
Rick was born a couple of years after his mother arrived in America, the first in his family to speak English. In addition, the values instilled at the heart of their family were his mother’s belief in making the most of opportunities.
“Knowing English doesn’t mean much to most Americans, but in the apartment building I grew up, I was the only kid that knew English,” Piña explained. “People would stop by, knock on the door, and say to my mother, ‘Hey, I got this mail. Can your son read the mail?’ I had to read people’s mail, tell them what the government was telling them to do. ‘You must show up here or there.’ And because I knew English, my family would say, ‘Dude, you know English. Do something with your life.'”
On his mother’s recommendation, Piña got his first job operating a cash register in a bodega. Starting at age 13, he worked six days a week, 12 hours a day over the summer, for $150 a week. Though his mother wanted more for him beyond a steady job in a corner store or driving a cab, the deck often seemed stacked against young Rick.
While in elementary school, at P.S. 149 (The Danny Kaye Elementary School), Piña recalls some teachers coming to
his classroom one day armed with dire statistics: That x percentage of Black and Brown males in East New York, Brooklyn would be dead or in jail by the time they turn 18.
“I was in the third or fourth grade, and that impacted me in a significant way,” Piña said. “I remember many times, on a Saturday morning, getting up early, sitting on the stoop, waiting for my friends to play tag or football, and thinking about what those teachers said. I don’t know why anyone would say that to a child.”
In the fifth grade, Piña got a chance to attend a school for the gifted. But he had to take New York City buses to get to downtown Brooklyn. Initially, Piña felt real excitement going to his new school. He was just as proud of his blue and white suede Adidas, which his mother had bought him that school year. However, on the first Thursday, Piña got robbed of his shoes on a public bus by a group of teenage boys who threatened him with a gun. Shaken by the experience, Piña made it home safely, but his mother decided the local school was a safer bet. Although Piña was later accepted into every high school in the city, he chose one located about two blocks from his tiny apartment in a block of row houses.
“As bad as it was, it was in my neighborhood,” he said. After a brief move to the Dominican Republic during high school, where the medium of instruction was Spanish, Piña came back to New York to ensure he graduated high school in the U.S. “I had an academic scholarship to get to college, but I would have to take the train,” Piña said. “To take to the train for four years was like playing Russian roulette with your life back in the ‘70s and ‘80s.”
Inspired by a cousin who was in the military academy in the Dominican Republic, Piña opted to join the United
States Army as a telecommunications voice communications recruit. On his 18th birthday, he recalls crying with relief.
Finally, he had made it out of a poor neighborhood riddled with violent crime and drug addiction. Finally, he had a
chance at life. Piña would spend 25 years in the U.S. military, eventually retiring as the chief technology officer in the Army and working at the highest level of the Pentagon.
“I got to explain to (industry) what the Army was doing and what we needed from technology in Silicon Valley, Boston, and Austin,” Piña said. “Conversely, they communicated with me what they did, and I helped marry the Army gaps and opportunities with evolving or emerging technology.”
At the end of his tenure, Piña visited World Wide Technology (WWT) in St. Louis, MO, with his former boss, Lt. Gen
Robert “Bob” Ferrell. At the time, Piña said he thought he would move on to run a consultancy with his cousin. But as luck and chance would have it, he met David L. Steward, chairman and founder of World Wide Technology, who gave him a book called Doing Business by the Good Book.
“I’d never met a Christian billionaire before,” Piña noted. “I was impressed with World Wide Technology, the people
and the culture. That was six years ago.” Speaking about his current job, Piña said he gets to do the same things at WWT as he did in the Army.
“I get to talk technology to intelligence, federal, departments, and higher education in all 50 states, local governments, and municipalities,” he said. “World Wide Technology works with many tech companies in Silicon Valley; Boston; Austin; Redmond, WA; and Seattle. We can integrate technology, and we focus on customer outcomes. We work our way backward from the result to the technology.”
During the pandemic, Piña helped lead “prayer calls” with an emphasis on the spiritual and mental health of WWT
employees and family members. He also leads the Hispanic and Latin employee resource group at WWT. Currently,
Hispanic Americans make up 17 or 18 percent of the workforce, but they only make up 4 percent of company executives. That statistic is roughly equal to that of Black executives and a little lower than Asian Americans.
“I’m big on mentorship,” Piña said. “I gleaned a lot from Colin Powell’s book because he was a son of immigrant parents from Jamaica who grew up in the Bronx. I was the son of immigrant parents who grew up in Brooklyn. He was in the Army, and I was in the Army. So, I modeled things after Gen. Colin Powell. From that perspective, I would say it is important for Hispanics and other minority groups to be represented at the most senior level. Young people need to look up and see somebody who looks like them, that sounds like them. That they can connect with and resonate with in some way, and when they do, it does something on the inside that is almost intangible.”
Reflecting on his stint in Bosnia during the late 1990s, Piña said he worked closely with then two-star general, Larry Ellis, on a command handover. A few years later, Piña and his wife ran into the general at a commissary (grocery store) at Fort Hood, the United States Army post near Killeen, TX.
“My wife is a woman of color, and General Ellis is African American,” Piña explained. “My wife looks at the general, and she is amazed at the sight of a Black general.”
Fifteen years later, Piña had a similar aha moment. He ran into a general of Hispanic descent, the first Latino leader
he had ever seen: Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez. “I said, excuse me, sir, my name is Ricardo, and I start speaking to him in
Spanish, and he starts talking to me in Spanish,” Piña recalls. The conversation lasted 30 seconds or about a minute, but Piña felt just as amazed as his wife when she ran into the first Black general, she had ever seen.
“When you see somebody who looks like you, someone you can connect with on an internal level, it becomes, ‘If they can
do it, I can do it too.’”
Nonetheless, Piña notes that if you look at boardrooms and pictures and do not see anybody who looks like you or has a
similar last name, the unspoken message is that this is not your reality. Piña’s advice to minority executives
“When you get an opportunity to go into those board rooms or move up, we have a responsibility as leaders to take more of a public role,” Piña said. “I want someone who looks like me and sounds like me to see and be inspired as Gen. Sanchez did for me in the halls of the Pentagon.”
After running the most advanced surgery department in the Department of Defense, Isabella Piña now runs her own
company. “My wife, who grew up with no running water, no electricity in Dominica, reminds me that I was not lacking,” Piña said. “I thought I grew up poor because we grew up on welfare, food stamps, Medicaid and government assistance, and government cheese. But we would go to the Dominican Republic at least once a year because my mother would save up pennies in New York.
“Every time we went, we went with a suitcase full of clothes and returned with no clothes because she would give
everything away. I remember going down to the river to take a bath: no running water, no electricity. So, there was this
weird dichotomy: in the Dominican Republic, my family was like, ‘Wow, dude, you’re rich. You live in New York.’ And in
New York, we were poor, at least by the standards of this country.
“Only in America do you have the best chance to get out of poverty, get out of the conditions you are in if you do it the right way. This country is still the symbol of hope for most of the free world. My mother raised my sister and me as a single parent. No matter how bad people thought we had it in Brooklyn, it was still better than where my mother came from in the Dominican Republic.
“Where I grew up in East New York in Brooklyn, the motivation to do right was scarce, and the opportunities to do wrong were plenteous. But my mother instilled in me that the family came to this country to get a better life, and because of that, I stayed away from the many opportunities that would have taken me down the wrong path.”
“My mother taught me dignity, honor, and respect. I was taught to do what’s right because it’s right and then do it right
every time! People ask my wife and I all the time, ‘Why do you guys do so many things?’ If I am called to do something, I will do it with all my heart. If something is worth doing, it is worth doing right. And if I am not going to put my heart into it, I would rather not do it.”
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