Yvonne Marie Webb is a career financial executive and the former vice president of human resources compliance and enterprise risk management for Kaiser Permanente. A gifted student, Ms. Webb’s business aspirations were inspired by her father, a foreman for General Motors and a professional musician who she remembers “was always working two jobs.” His versatility and work ethic made an impression on the young Ms. Webb, who began working in the finance department of General Motors during her summer vacations as an accounting student at Bowling Green State University. She completed her Bachelor of Science in accounting in 1976 and continued her education at the University of Michigan, where she earned a Master of Business Administration in 1978. Ms. Webb began working for Deloitte as a tax planner the same year, and became a certified public accountant in 1979.
In 1981, Ms. Webb left Deloitte to work for the Mead Corporation, where she continued to develop a reputation as a savvy manager with a precise and intuitive approach to finance. She was named finance manager of Silicon Graphics, Inc., in 1988 and rose to become the controller and chief financial officer at San Francisco’s Seaboard Paper Company from 1989 until 1991. Ms. Webb continued to flourish in the highest levels of corporate finance throughout the 1990s, accepting chief financial officer positions with JC Paper in 1991 and Consolidation Publications in 1994. After briefly serving as controller and director for staffing services franchises at Manpower, Ms. Webb joined A4C Financial Consulting as a lead consultant in 1999.
Ms. Webb began her career with Kaiser Permanente four years later as the company’s director of fraud prevention and financial governance, rising to controller of procurement and supply in 2004. After demonstrating her mastery of the corporation’s financial operations, she attended Kaiser Permanente’s advanced leadership program through the University of North Carolina and transitioned into human resources compliance and enterprise risk management in 2008. Until her retirement from the corporation in 2018, Ms. Webb was responsible for managing more than 200,000 employee accounts and creating sustainable and proactive solutions for risk management with over $80 billion in annual revenue. In recognition of her groundbreaking work for Kaiser Permanente, she was named the company’s 2012 Women in Technology Role Model and Mentor, following previous accolades including a 2010 Sarbanes Oxley Outstanding Leader Award.
Currently, Ms. Webb is focused on her role as a member of the board of the San Mateo County Health Foundation, where she continues her lifelong commitment to creating equity in health care accessibility. She is the co-chair and former president of the San Mateo County Commission on the Status of Women and a former member of the board of directors of the San Mateo County Center for Domestic Violence Prevention, serving from 1995 until 2002. Ms. Webb considers becoming a CPA and breaking through to the highest tiers of executive leadership as a young woman of color to be among her proudest accomplishments, and she underscores the importance of remaining focused, driven, and never becoming complacent.
Ms. Webb credits her success to fearlessness, not allowing herself to be too focused on income, and always prioritizing projects that seemed interesting or offered learning opportunities, no matter how daunting they seemed. In the coming years, she hopes to lend her skills to the executive boards of two to three more area nonprofits and further direct her attention to community advocacy and outreach. Ms. Webbs is a member of the American Institute of CPAs, the National Association of Black Accountants, and the San Francisco Peninsula chapter of Delta Sigma Theta.
