Every Wisdom Bank profile at GatheringPoint comes with a companion song, because some careers have a soundtrack whether they know it or not. Joyce Leveston’s was never in doubt.
Before she ran the Javits Center, before Washington and San Diego, she was a kid in a 105-voice Cincinnati church choir called FIC, directed by a young doctoral student named Donald Lawrence, years before the world learned his name. So her song had to be gospel.
It’s called “Seen,” and once you know her story, you’ll know why. In the early nineties, Joyce was a telephone operator at the San Diego Convention Center, a young woman who had just been told by the head of sales that she had no future in the business. The new CEO, Carol Wallace, looked at that same telephone operator and saw what nobody else in the building could. She created a job for her, groomed her without ever calling it grooming, and gave her one standing instruction that became the chorus of this song: you don’t sit on the side. You sit at the table.
The full profile of the woman it celebrates, from a kitchen table in Cincinnati to the corner office above the Hudson, is coming this week in the Wisdom Bank.
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