The market for self-help books is overflowing with inspirational memoirs from corporate success stories. Derek Lewis’s Survive and Advance: Lessons on Living a Life Without Compromise distinguishes itself by connecting personal advancement to collective transformation, particularly in addressing racial inequity in corporate America.

Lewis, who grew up in 1970s Washington D.C., emerged from a difficult childhood marked by family dysfunction and trauma to become one of the highest-ranking executives in PepsiCo’s history. He builds his memoir around pivotal experiences that shaped his journey: the loss of his younger brother Butch to addiction and violence, which strengthened his resolve to create a different future for his own family; finding direction and fellowship through Hampton University’s Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity; climbing the corporate ladder at Pepsi and ultimately spearheading racial equality initiatives.

The book is meticulously crafted and told with compelling vulnerability and raw honesty, including passages about his anguished failure to save his brother and finding himself “sitting on the floor in the corner of the terminal crying” while awaiting news of his Butch’s fate.

His emotional transparency extends to professional vulnerabilities, such as admitting to early failures at Pepsi headquarters, where as a new marketing executive he prepared for a presentation to the CEO by relying on his team’s existing deck of slides rather than creating new content, earning the rebuke, “This looks like last year’s version with a new cover page.” Such forthright admissions of fallibility from a high-ranking corporate executive make his narrative particularly powerful and relatable.

Throughout, Lewis links his personal journey to broader themes of collective social progress. His account of developing Pepsi’s Racial Equality Journey in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, for instance, demonstrates how institutional power can be leveraged to drive social change.

Inspiring and insightful, Survive and Advance shows how individual success can create ripple effects of positive change across communities and institutions.

Also available as an ebook.