Survive and Advance: Success, Resilience, and the Game of Life

In the face of difficulty, an inspirational leader will overcome.

Survive and Advance shares an intimate family portrait and professional journey, elevating readers and showing them how to imagine themselves into a new future with optimism, conviction, and confidence.

Grind and single parenthood on one side of his family, mental health and addiction issues on the other, Derek Lewis’s childhood role was to protect himself and his younger brothers from hardship and abuse. Growing up in Washington, DC, in the 1970s, it was enough just to survive.

But Lewis demanded a different future for himself and his family. Growing his 1988 just-out-of-college Pepsi sales management trainee route into multiple C-suite roles, he overcame early adversity to achieve the highest levels of corporate success. Not content with delivering record-breaking financial results, Lewis leveraged his reputation and relationships into building gender and racial equity and justice inside and outside the company.

In this personal growth memoir, Lewis shares his path to Black excellence from Chocolate City to HBCUs to the Divine Nine to Pepsi’s Team Elite to national catalyst for social change.

Derek Lewis is a strategic thought leader with extensive experience leading large-scale operations, driving sustainable growth, spearheading transformation, developing people, and inspiring change within communities. He’s also a kid who grew up in Washington DC in the 1970s, protecting his younger brothers from hardship and abuse, and learning how to survive and advance in life.