The US executive who hired workers no one else would and why Australia needs to take notice
Randy Lewis redefined what it means to be a valued worker in the US and now he wants Australian businesses to follow his lead. It’s all thanks to the love and lessons from one very special son.
Austin Lewis was born on “Black Friday”, May 13, 1988. That night over his home in the Midwestern region of North America there was a full moon.
His mother, Kay, will never forget wondering that day why her only son did not cry when he came out of the womb. In the two years that followed, Austin would often put himself to sleep.
But Kay and husband Randy thought nothing of it. Until other family members became worried.
They saw Austin was different to his older sisters, Sarah and Alison, and wanted to know why. When Austin was three years old, Kay and Randy had him tested.
Kay knew something was amiss at the appointment to review the results when she joked that she’d likely given her son too much sugar. The specialist didn’t smile back.
After running through the “bad” set of symptoms, he diagnosed Austin as having pervasive developmental delay or PDD – a precursor to autism – and said “he might get worse”.
Deep down, Randy knew the reality as he walked his tearful wife back to their car.
At one point she looked up at the stunning bright blue sky and angrily exclaimed: “Why can this sun be shining on a day like this? How could God let this happen?”
Austin did not speak his first word until he was 10 years old.
“Your world stops when something like that happens. When you have kids, you’re always thinking of all these things you are going to do together. That world crashed,” Lewis tells me from his home at Barrington, a picturesque, historic suburb about 64km northwest of Chicago.
History shows that Randy Lewis became one of the most influential executives in corporate America.
He was the head of supply chain and logistics at Walgreens for 17 years until his retirement in 2013, growing America’s second largest pharmaceutical chain from 1500 to 8000 stores with the most advanced logistics network in its industry.
But, after seeing the world through his son’s eyes, at Walgreens Lewis also bet his career on the belief that he could create an inclusive workplace where people with disabilities could thrive.
He wanted to make his business a better place for everyone, including those with disabilities, and transformed the firm’s employment practices.
He will never forget the day he told 5000 store managers that they would open the most efficient distribution centre of its kind in the world with one-third of the workforce comprised of people with disabilities, many of whom had never had a job.
These people with autism, cognitive delays, cerebral palsy, epilepsy, spinal cord injuries and missing limbs would also be paid the same as the rest of the staff.
After retiring from Walgreens, Lewis founded what he called the NOGWOG Disability Initiative – a not for profit organisation dedicated to the expansion by Fortune 500 companies of hiring disabled people.
The Initiative is funded by speaker fees and royalties from his best-selling book released in 2014 titled No Greatness Without Goodness.
Lewis is the keynote speaker at The Australian Disability Network’s “Impact 2024” annual conference in Melbourne on May 9, a forum designed to help drive change in how businesses approach access and inclusion.
While he was brought up in a fundamentalist church and these days calls himself a “Zen Christian”, Lewis never believed the Bible was to be taken literally.
There was no, as he puts it, “sky daddy above manipulating things down here”.
It gave him solace more than 30 years ago as he consoled his wife in the car park – and has done since in his most difficult moments with Austin.
“God didn’t do this. Some people think that or think that God will intervene. We didn’t go down that road,” the now 74 year old says.
“The love in the universe is so incredible. Living, dying and struggle is part of it.”
His religion has simply given Lewis and his family an abiding belief that whatever their struggles, things will be OK.
“When I was a kid, we had boy scouts and one of our regular jokes asked why old people read the Bible so much? The cute answer was that they are studying for finals. But I have now noticed that those people are generally happy,” he says.
“I think Jesus changes the world, if only we could only pay attention to it. Our beliefs have taken away a lot of our concern about what will happen to Austin when we are gone.”
Breaking down the barriers
Lewis had a difficult relationship with his own father, a World War II veteran.
His mother started working when Lewis was just four years old, leaving him and his older brother the run of their home. Their aunt lived a block away, their grandmother six.
His mother, who battled with her own mental health issues, was always wanting to hold his hand.
But his father was distant. Only occasionally would he give his son a mere handshake, but never a hug.
It took Lewis 22 years to hear from his father for the first time the words “I love you”. They came the night before he was leaving for Peru to become a US government Peace Corps volunteer. He continues to be one to this day.
“It has made me even more expressive with my kids,” he says of his childhood.
“I am forever telling Austin and my daughters ‘I love you forever and ever, no matter what you do’.”
Yet his father and mother grew to have a special relationship with their grandson.
“Dad would come up here to our place and take Austin in the car. He didn’t know the area well so Austin would know how to get him back home. Austin didn’t speak, he would just point. So Dad would drive with him everywhere,” he says.
“My parents were very accepting of Austin for everything he was. All they did was love him.
“They loved all three of our children.” They have both since died – his father was 74, his mother 68.
Lewis says Austin’s gifts to him have been many, starting with the attribute of patience.
When occasionally Lewis loses his temper and drops the F-bomb, Austin calls it “violent language” and shrinks into his shell. Days, weeks or even months later he will remind his father of the confronting emotions of that moment.
“It shames me,” Lewis says.
“So I learned to control my bad impulses. It also made me realise it had the same effect on my daughters when I would do it to them, but they had the coping skills that Austin didn’t have.
“That was a huge gift that Austin gave to me. He also taught me to be able to see people who are different as completely worthy. He’s given me a humanity that was not there. Or maybe it was there, but he sure has been able to stroke it and help build it in me.”
They are traits Lewis carried into Walgreens, which he joined in 1992 after working for Arthur Anderson Consulting Group and then making partnership at EY.
Working for Walgreens was his dream job after being a consultant to the group for many years.
In Walgreens’ distribution centres today, thanks to Lewis, an average of 35 per cent of the workforce comprises people with disabilities and the firm has set public targets to make sure one in every 10 in-store hirings is someone with a disability.
The company has adapted its HR policies, allowing any staff member to bring someone to help them fill in online interview questions, or permitting them to bring a chaperone to counselling sessions.
The model has been adopted by other Fortune 500 companies, and British retailers such as Boots, and Marks & Spencer.
On the NOGWOG internet home page there is a three-minute video of the managers in Walgreen’s distribution centre where Lewis’s initiative was launched, talking about its effect on the work culture.
“When other businesses visit and see it for themselves, it is the culture that surprises them. Not only can people with disability perform, they make everyone better,” he says – calling it the “Shazam effect”.
“What is magical about it is the difference it makes with everybody,” he says.
Lewis has changed the narrative on disabled employment in corporate America, getting executives to think about the current roles which were open that could be filled by a person with a disability, rather than simply trying to carry them for the feel-good effect, only to later let them go.
He says change needs to be driven at the executive level.
“It usually fails because an executive wants to do it and then delegates it. It needs someone high enough to drive it,” he says.
But he stresses Walgreens never lost sight of the fact that it was a business, not a charity. Employing disabled people had to make business sense.
He recalls the day the initiative was first approved by the Walgreens board. He had won over the chief executive but needed all of the directors onside.
“They only asked me one question. It wasn’t ‘Why?’. They only asked ‘What if it doesn’t work?’ I simply said ‘It will be like any initiative, we will adapt’.” Those words were enough to win them over.
In Australia people with disabilities are still significantly under-represented on boards, in politics and in other leadership roles.
Business Council of Australia chief executive Bran Black last year called for a bigger effort by corporate Australia to help move people with disabilities from entry-level jobs to more advanced and executive roles.
He claimed if Australia moved into the top eight OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries for employing people with disabilities, it could add an additional $50bn to GDP by 2050.
‘Luckiest people in the world’
Austin Lewis is now 36 years old and for the past decade has worked happily in a distribution centre on the border of Illinois and Wisconsin.
He drives himself on the 40-minute commute each day from his parents’ home and boasts a perfect attendance record.
His father muses that while Austin never wanted to be a policeman, he has an obsessive admiration for people in uniform.
“He finds policemen on the internet, goes to their house and wants to thank them for their service. I’ve told him, ‘You cannot do that unless you write them a letter first’,” he says with a smile. “He reads online papers and worries about who got shot today in Chicago.”
It is also part of Austin’s persona to be secretive. He jealously guards his privacy and doesn’t want people to know what he is doing.
His father calls himself deeply fortunate to have Austin as his son.
“The world needs more Austins than they do Randys,” he declares.
“I know, since retirement, I feel like the luckiest guy in the world because you see the wonderfulness of everything around you. You realise, ‘Gee, we got through this.’ Austin, our daughters, Kay and I are the luckiest people in the world.”
Austin will never read his father’s best-selling book, the story of how one man helped change corporate America and the world for the better. He will never know the change agent he became. But that is just how Randy Lewis wants it.
“Austin is aware of his autism, and he does not want to be autistic. He does not want to be different. He wants to stay young. He sees himself as perfect,” his father says proudly.
“And he is.”
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