When Allison Lawrence, MBA’13, started her career at BLACK+DECKER™ in 2003, her job responsibilities included walking up and down ladders stocking products in stores and cleaning tools.

“I remember showing up with my branded truck in front of big box retail stores at 5 a.m. to catch the contractor,” she said.

Now, 20 years later, Lawrence is the president of global e-commerce for Stanley Black & Decker (Stanley Works merged with BLACK+DECKER™ in 2010). She became the first African American to hold a senior leadership position with the BLACK+DECKER™ and eCommerce divisions during her time with the company.

Because of her outstanding professional achievements, Lawrence received a Distinguished Alumni Award at the 2023 UT Dallas Awards Gala at the Davidson-Gundy Alumni Center on March 25.

She credits her tenure with Stanley Black & Decker to the people she worked alongside and the opportunities she was provided early in her career. Lawrence said that having that entry-level experience face-to-face with the customer and spending time in multiple areas across the company in her first years helped her become a better leader.

“Understanding what customers needed, how they made decisions, how we could meet their needs — all of that happened in my first couple of years with the company, in those store roles,” she said.

While climbing the corporate ladder, Lawrence said she still had the goal of returning to school and getting her MBA. In 2013, she was working in a sales leadership role in Dallas, TX, where she traveled three days a week, which drew her to the Executive MBA Program at the Naveen Jindal School of Management.

“It was perfect for where I was at that point in my life and my career,” she said. “My program structure was so beneficial because I could plan around my schedule. That was one of the reasons I just loved the program.”

UT Dallas was instrumental in my leadership journey and helped me evolve as a leader and professional. To come back and get this recognition is icing on what’s been a really wonderful experience.

Lawrence said she still utilizes the critical thinking and problem-solving skills she sharpened during her time in the EMBA Program in her day-to-day role.

“I love the case study method that we went through of looking through cases and thinking critically about the decisions that business leaders had to make across the globe in different scenarios,” she said. “I haven’t experienced every single one of those scenarios, but I have run up against some different versions of that in solving global business problems.”

Learning to work with people and flexing to different personalities through group projects was another key point of the EMBA experience, she said.

“It was a great crash course on how to move a group towards a common goal in terms of our academic success,” Lawrence said. “You work in teams at work, but to do it at that level really sharpened me for experiences that would be ahead of me in my career.”

Lawrence said she was honored and humbled to return to The University of Texas at Dallas campus as a Distinguished Alumna. The award is now displayed in her home office.