She left Indiana Bell for Washington and Bell Atlantic when that company was barely a year old. She was hired as staff supervisor for Bell Atlantic Network Services. Seven telephone companies were merging into one. As the new kid on the block, Johns told her staff, she couldn't do her job without their help.

"I worked as hard as I could, learned as much as I could, contributed as much as I could," she says. She also had a great mentor, Dee Screws, one of the first African-American women to hold a senior position in the telephone company.

Screws persuaded her protégé to set her sights higher. Before long, Johns moved through leadership positions in C&P Telephone and Bell Atlantic. She was named president and CEO of Bell Atlantic in 1998 and served as president of Verizon-Washington, DC, until February 2004.

It was another season of change. "The industry was going bananas," Johns says. Verizon had to refashion itself to be successful as both a wholesale and a retail business, with long-distance as well as local services.

Johns succeeded in moving Verizon from a slow-moving monopoly to a nimbler, customer-focused competitor with nearly $700 million in operations.

If Dee Screws helped guide Johns to the top, it was another mentor, Delano Lewis, who showed her what to do when she got there. Johns worked for Lewis when he headed C&P. "He believed that it is not enough to do a good job for your company," Johns says. "You have to serve the community in other ways."

Johns pushed for a Verizon-cosponsored program to train city youth for jobs in information technology. As a trustee of Howard University, she is helping to create a math-and-science charter middle school on the Howard campus. The first students will start next fall.

Johns co-chaired a capital campaign for the Girl Scouts and welcomes opportunities to talk to girls about their futures. "I tell them to go for it. There is no shortage of great examples of women in business and entrepreneurship – but we need more."

Life is not a sprint, Johns tells the girls – it is a marathon. The highs and the lows are often the easy parts.

"The successful person finds joy and energy in the mundane," she says.