Episode 17: Leading with Equity: Howard Ross on the Future of DEI, Bias, and Business Value

In this episode of Inside CVC, we sit down with Howard Ross—author, consultant, and one of the nation’s preeminent thought leaders on unconscious bias and organizational change. Howard brings a candid, historical, and forward-looking perspective on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) at a time when the topic is both urgent and contested.

Listeners will hear:

• Why DEI has always followed a “three steps forward, two steps back” cycle—and what makes this moment unique.
• How unconscious bias quietly shapes hiring, investing, and innovation decisions—and ways leaders can address it without fueling backlash.
• The intersection of DEI with AI, future of work, and disability inclusion—and how corporate leaders can build equity into both culture and shareholder value.

 The CVC Open Innovation Summit Europe takes place November 25–26 in Berlin, during AsiaBerlin Innovation Week. Positioned as a bridge between Europe, the U.S., and Asia’s fast-growing ecosystems, the summit is a curated, invitation-only forum for senior leaders to tackle the issues shaping innovation: AI, geopolitics, energy resilience, health, sustainability, and more. Listeners are invited to request an invitation at cvc-summit.com → E

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Transcript

Steve: 0:04

Welcome to Inside CVC, the podcast that brings together leaders in innovation and capital investment to explore the trend shaping the business of corporate venture capital. I'm your host, Steve Schmidt, and together with Philip Willigman, we're speaking with corporate investors, entrepreneurs, and ecosystem builders driving the future of innovation. InsideCVC is brought to you by UPath Advisors, helping corporations and startups unlock sustainable growth through strategic partnerships. To learn more, visit uPath.com. That's the letter UH-Path.com. And to catch up on all of our episodes of Inside CBC, visit your favorite podcast platform or visit uPath.com forward slash podcast. Today's conversation is with Howard Ross, author, consultant, and one of the nation's leading experts on unconscious bias, diversity, and organizational change. At a time when DEI is both a source of opportunity and a point of contention, Howard shares how bias shapes decisions in hiring, investing, and innovation, what leaders can do to create equitable organizations, and how emerging technologies like AI will influence the future of inclusion. Here's our conversation with Howard Ross. Howard, thank you for joining us on Inside CVC today. How are you?

Howard: 1:28

I'm great, man. It's good to be with both of you.

Steve: 1:30

Absolutely. Really excited about today's conversation, not only in terms of your deep perspective, but I think it's such an interesting time to have a conversation around DEI. So why don't we talk about or why don't we start today's conversation from that vantage point? When you think about DEI, where do things stand right now, especially when you think about all of the energy, all of the debate around DEI in the US and the per in the current political climate?

Howard: 2:02

Well, I think it's an interest, first of all, thanks so much for having me. There's uh what is it? Somebody said that uh there was a, I think it was the uh an old Chinese thing where somebody would say, I wish you interesting times. I think that this is a quote, interesting time for sure. I mean, look, first of all, let's put this all in perspective. We know that things become political touchstones for certain reasons. They become symbolic. And this is certainly an example of that. We've seen things like this in the past, whether it was a particular scandal that happened or a particular issue that was a hot button that people separated on. We've seen abortion become an issue. We've seen, you know, all these different things become issues. And and as with and as with any other political issue, there's the actual issue itself, and then there's the question of what that issue is being used for. And I think that what we have here is a situation where a body of work that's been evolving for about 40 years or more, maybe, which has demonstrably proven effective in producing particular results in organizations over time, is seen as threatening to a larger conversation, which is the kind of who has power in our society. And this is a conversation, of course, that we've been engaged in in American society since the forming of the very country itself. We go back to the compromises in the Constitution, the slavery, pro-slavery, anti-slavery compromises, the three-fifths compromise, civil war ends, reconstruction comes in, reconstruction ends, the old system pretty much comes back in the South under different names. So this, like three steps forward, two steps back is not unusual. I think when this particular case, clearly it's part of a movement to push back against liberal reforms that have been going on in the United States for about 80 years. And most of those are around issues relating to identity or people's or people's equality, whether that's been African-Americans or later immigrant rights or LGBTQ rights or whatever. So I think first of all, it's important for us to put it in that context. And I say this, by the way, to people in the DENI space that this may be the worst, but it's not the first attack on DEI. It's always been a three-steps forward, two steps back kind of a thing. That being said, I think the challenge is that it's one thing when people don't have the opportunity to have access, they don't have the opportunity to be successful in organizations. And they've never had that opportunity. If we think back to the 1950s, say, when people have never had that opportunity and you begin a movement to try to establish those rights for people, it's one thing. When people have had those rights and now you're trying to take them away, it's something else entirely. So it'll be interesting to see how it plays out. Right now, obviously, it's part of a larger kind of political movement on the part of one side of the political spectrum to take over control of the societal structure. But ultimately, those people aren't going to weigh, aren't going to go away, and the attitudes aren't going to going away. So I think this is a long, this is a longer conversation than people think it is.

Philipp: 4:57

Just on this topic, of course, we want to talk about business and how inclusion DI creates value when it comes to innovation and business strategy. But just keep perspective from Europe, a lot of like political change over here as well. Just uh last week, uh the German government made a statement that they will not put the pride flag on the on the German government buildings during Pride months. And a lot of voices here are like, well, maybe we move too far. Uh, should this all be part of a political agenda? People should be free, but it doesn't really dominate the political agenda of the day-to-day. Any thoughts on this from your perspective?

Howard: 5:36

It's a real challenge. Anytime we talk about change management, whether we're talking about political change, societal change, or change in an organization. I mean, you see this all the time with your work in organizations, both of you. On one hand, you could say that certain issues have to change. And it's like asking people to wait for that change to happen when they're the ones suffering at the effect of the current circumstance has has certain is problematic. It's fine for us, the three of us as men to say to women, well, change will come, just be patient. But when you're a woman who doesn't have equality, you know, that patient change is not happening fast enough. So that is a challenge. On the other hand, an old teacher of mine used to say, when you go fishing, you bait the hook with what the fish likes to eat and not what you like to eat. So as you're suggesting, Philip, if you push too hard and too fast, the system gags. It's like even if people are starving to death, shoving food down their throats, not the answer. So so it's always, and this is one of the challenges that I've had, frankly, with a lot of the conversation within the diversity, equity, and inclusion space, which is are we thinking as social justice advocates, which is more of an energy like go make it happen right now, right now, right now, right now, because we can't wait. It has to happen. Or are we thinking as change agents when, as I said, the work that you folks have done, the work that I've done, changing organizational cultures as an example, we know that you push it a little bit farther than comfortable and you let people adjust, and then you push it a little bit farther than comfortable and let people adjust. And so I think one of the things that's happened that's contributed to this is after George Floyd was murdered in 2020, there was a huge, uh visceral emotional reaction on the part of a lot of people who just said, enough is enough. We're tired of patty kicking and walking on eggshells with people. This has got to change. People are dying all around us. You remember that was George Floyd was one of a run of about a dozen, but it was also a run of about a dozen African Americans who had been killed by police. And people were saying, enough of this, like saying we're going to get there one day. This has got to stop. And of course, basic Newtonian physics is every action has an equal and opposite reaction. So, of course, we saw this not only caused some reactions of people's part, but it also gave, it also created an opportunity for people who had more nefarious intentions about how to use these attacks on DENI to cripple the movement of African Americans and other people in our society, it gave them fodder to work with because you could say, look, see how crazy there are. They've seen you have to do this and say have to do that. So the unfortunate thing is this pendulum swings and it swings back. The thing that's interesting about this is that when you look at polls, the most recent poll I saw, which I think was from May, said that at this point, 52% of the American people still approve of DEI efforts, and only something like 37% are actually hardcore against them. So we've got a radical minority on this opinion who are driving all this, and they're driving it through threats and lawsuits and government funding, withdrawals, and all this kind of stuff. But it's not, so it's changing people's external behavior because a lot of companies have to do that for fear of losing millions of dollars of government control, or billions in some cases. But it doesn't mean that psychologically they're still not supportive of it and they're still not trying to do other things to try to get to the end result.

Steve: 8:50

So, as a corporate leader, how do you navigate that, right? Because I think hearing what you're describing, it is sort of like a battle of a human being and what's the right thing to do and being good to other people, to your point of providing opportunities for people who may not have those opportunities in this space, as well as being a corporate leader in terms of the shareholder value that comes from adopting these policies, making it part of your core DNA, with the sort of risk of the political, maybe even in some respects, consumer backlash that you might, that you might have as a corporate leader by being very vocal and doubling down on diversity, equity, and inclusion. How do you navigate that? As a corporate leader, how do you articulate the true culture of those efforts to not only instill that within the DNA, the culture of the company, but also be very clear and I guess steadfast in the shareholder value that it returns?

Howard: 9:57

Yeah, look, that's, I think, Steve, you're you're at the heart of the deep challenge a lot of people are facing right now, because a lot of times they're being asked in order to preserve their company's, not just their company's financial success, but the jobs of people in their company. In some case, thousands and thousands of jobs, people are having to make decisions that are counter to both their personal value systems and their corporate value systems. And this is this is a real challenge. So I think what I so what I've been saying to people, first of all, I think we have to recognize that consumer backlash is an interesting thing because it goes both ways. So Target got enormous support when it declared open bathrooms back a number of years ago, but then it got backlash from people for doing the very same thing. And then when Target withdrew their DENI efforts, they got support from some people on the more conservative side, but now they're suffering a backlash and a drop in their sales from people on the on the more progressive or liberal side who are saying, okay, we'll shop somewhere else. And they're they're going back to other places. So I mean, so I think consumer backlash in this day and age is really hard to really hard to negotiate. But I think ultimately, this is what I've been saying to people in corporate life, particularly in corporate life, which is we have a tendency as human beings, and it's an interesting tendency, and we've all three seen it a million times. We set a goal for ourselves, we set a commitment. You know, so I'll give you an example from my life, a friend of mine who was a, when she was about 40, 45 years old, she decided that she had to be in better shape. She had not taken care of her health very much. Like a lot of women of her, of our generation, she didn't grow up being taught to exercise, but she was going to take it on. So she started running and she eventually became a marathon runner and ran a whole mess of marathons over a course of about 20 years. Then at some point in her mid-60s, her hip started to bother her. But dammit, she was committed to running that marathon. So she did and blew out her hip. And now she can't run at all, right? And this is what we do. We we're committed to something. We create a strategy to help us get to whatever that thing is, but then her commitment shifts to the strategy. So in this case, she stopped being committed to her well-being and started being committed to running, even when running was no longer consistent with her well-being. And I think similarly, we have to realize that people are shocked when I say this. People within the diversity, equity, inclusion space, they're shocked when I see this, which is that I've never been committed to diversity, equity, inclusion work. Even though for 40 years that's what I did, I did that work because what I'm committed to is creating organizations and a culture in our society, which everybody has a fair opportunity to be successful. People are treated with decency and respect, they have a sense of belonging, all those things that we see ultimately as the kind of culture that we want. And for me, that work has always provided one vehicle for making that happen. But what I've say to people, don't get attached. If people want to call it DEI as if it's one body of work anyway, which is absurd because you're talking about thousands different people or thousands of different people doing the work thousands of different ways, some of which is very effective, some of which is worthless, just like any other field. We all know great doctors and bad doctors, great salesmen and bad salesmen. You name it, there are good and bad at every field. So that's absurd in any case. But I I don't care what you call it. You can call it Eleanor for all I care. The question is: are we creating organizations where everybody has an opportunity? Are we creating organizations where we can get the best of all of our people, where everybody gets treated with decency and respect? Now we have to understand that there's a really insidious conversation underneath this, which is that there's some people at this stage who actually don't believe that's the kind of society they want. Um, if you look at people who come from you're you may be familiar with Curtis Yarvin's philosophy. He's in the back of some of these tech guys who he's the what he calls it, calls himself mendacious something, this guy who's who basically no longer believes in human equality. I mean, he basically believes in social Darwinism, that there's some people who are just inherently smarter and some people aren't. And what's the problem with enslaving the people who aren't? This kind of a mindset is actually behind, particularly J.B. Vance is one of his, apparently one of his advocates. So you've got some people who really would have no problem going back to the Gilded Age, where you had fabulously wealthy people and everybody else were sort of peons serving those people. And there's some people who actually see that as a preferable society. So that's that's a big issue we have right now. But for those of us who believe in what America, at least we were told, was supposed to be about, which is general equality for all, then we need to figure out, okay, we we're not gonna call it DEI, and we're not even gonna do DEI work. We're just gonna make sure that everybody who comes into our system gets treated fairly. How are we gonna do that? Well, we're going to look for, we're gonna help them understand how bias works so that they make better decisions when they're hiring people. We're gonna make sure that we're not using limited ways to find people. We're gonna broaden our ways to find people so we can get all kinds of different people into our system. I could go through a thousand different things that we could do. You could, like I said, you could call it Eleanor George or something else, you know. But I think that's the thing that corporate leaders and the and the sharpest corporate leaders, um, there are some corporate leaders who are just saying, forget it, we're gonna continue our uh the work that we've been doing because they're not necessarily quite at risk or they're willing to take the chance at that risk. But there are others who are saying, okay, fine, so we'll have to slow this down and be less visible and but less out there about it, but we still need to be sure that our folks are treated fairly.

Philipp: 16:47

When we talk about bias and you know, how we make decisions, you know, who we hire or not, or what investments we're gonna make, can you maybe give our listeners an overview how how buyers and these power dynamics quietly shape how we make decisions or, for example, what gets funded, what are we gonna build, how do we scale things when we kind of like bring the conversation a bit into the innovation corporate venture space? And really also what are the what are some of the less visible barriers to equitable innovation?

Howard: 17:21

So let's first of all look at how we respond to the word itself, because I think one of the challenges we've had in working with bias is that and and I completely own, by the way, that a lot of this comes from the more liberal progressive side, which is bias is bad. People who have bias are bad, and and they also are more times than not intentional in that badness. In other words, I'm not hiring you because you're a woman, because I don't like women. That's the mindset that people think people have. But you know, we've been studying this down, this field for a long, long time, and particularly with a lot of intention for the last 25, 30 years in in all kinds of domains. And what we realize is at the core that human beings are not rational. We're rationalizing. And this is work that not doesn't come out of the DENI space. This is work that comes out of the work of people like Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, people who won the Nobel Prize for decision-making in financial systems. And anybody, let's take it out of any of these big concepts and threatening concepts. And let's look at it in a very simple way. You touch a stove and you get burned. And the next time you go up to the stove, you notice that you're careful about how you touch it. You're a little bit more cautious how you touch it, because in your memory system, you now have the signal, watch out for hot stove. Hot stoves can burn you. And so for a long time, and for some people, forever, a lot of it depending upon how serious the burn was, how painful it was, and that sort of a thing. I say to myself, I'm staying away from stoves. At some point, if I get burned a couple of times, you do the stove. I'm not going to do the stove, right? This is a natural protective mechanism that human beings have. You had somebody, you know, you're in eighth grade. When I was in eighth grade in what's now called middle school, we used to have what we call sock hops because we dance on the mind, you know, I'm 74 years old. So we the polyurethane on the gym floor wasn't as good. So we would dance in our socks on the floor. And in those days, of course, everything was assumed to be heterosexual. So the boys would line up on one side, the girls on the other side. And if you were one of the boys, it was your job to ask the girls to dance. So you walked all across the gym floor in front of all of your friends, you asked this girl to dance. And if she said no, you then turned back and had to do the walk of shame. And the whole time, what are you saying to yourself? I never doing that again. Right. So we learn these rules about how to operate in life. Now, why do we do this? Two major reasons. First of all, the most predominant reason that drives human behavior is to stay safe, keeps us safe. I don't want to be hurt again. I don't want to be hurt emotionally by that girl rejecting me. I don't want to be hurt physically by that stove burning me. Whatever it is, I either want to avoid pain or seek pleasure or satisfaction or success. Those are those are my prime motivators. And so that's the first one. And the second is just the ease and speed of moving through life. Imagine if we had to reevaluate every circumstance as if we'd never seen it before. If you got to a street and you didn't know what happened when cars hit people because it wasn't in your memory system, you know, how many people would walk out and say, so we've got this memory system that's designed to say, okay, I've learned all this stuff. We come up to a circumstance and say, okay, what do I know about this circumstance? We run back, in essence, run back to the hippocampus, the memory center of the brain. It's like going through the file cabinet. What does this remind me of? Oh, I did things like that before and they were fun. I want to do that. I've done things like that before and they were dangerous. I better stay away from that. And so that's the basic mechanism. Now let's put this in the context of human beings. Okay. If you're a corporate leader and you've got to make decisions about who's, for example, the best person to lead a team, you go back to your memory system, but not only about this person, about people like this person. Now that begins to shift the more you know the person for who they are. Well, I like to say the more we know people for who they are, the less we treat them like what we are. So, Philip, you're German. I'm Jewish, right? We might come into a relationship with each other, kind of that now. In my case, it's not true for me as a Jew because I've had a lot of very, very dear and intimate friends in my life, including you who are German. So for me, I no longer relate to Germans like I might have when I was 13 years old and I didn't know any Germans, right? But let's say we meet for the first time and I haven't had that experience. You're sitting there as a German saying, gee, I wonder how he's gonna feel, you might be saying this. I wonder how he's gonna feel about me, given our history, our collective histories, not our personal histories, but our collective histories. I might come in and say, All right, I'm a little bit cautious. Put the same dynamic between a black man, a black woman, and a white man, right? All of our histories are present in this moment. Now, to the degree that we're aware of that, we can talk about that. We can observe it in ourselves. We have some opportunity for choice. We could say, well, I noticed that I'm a little uncomfortable with the fact that Philip's German, but if I have awareness, I could say, but Philip is, he wasn't even born then. And I know Philip, and I know he's a decent guy, and I know that he would think that's just as horrible as I thought it was. And so I can sort of, it's not that I'm talking myself out of it, but I'm bringing awareness to it. I'm bringing a greater sense of awareness to it. To the degree that that remains in the unconscious, as Carl Jung once said, but until we make the unconscious conscious, it will rule our lives and we will call it fake. So if I haven't looked at any of that, then I put myself into a corporate situation. Let's say I'm interviewing a black woman for a leadership position. I'm not even aware that I've seen years of stereotypes of black black women and that that undermine them. That I've seen very few black women in leadership positions as role models who I could look at and say, maybe she'll be like her. I could go through this list. I've had people. And so I ask you the, or even cultural style, I asked the first question and the vernacular that she uses, or the particular way she talks, or maybe she's not as comfortable because if you and I were doing the interview as two white guys, we might get into a flow with each other a little bit faster because we don't have all that stuff behind us. So all of these things might be factors in this dynamic without me ever looking myself in the mirror and saying, I don't like black women. In fact, I might even tell you on a surface level, on a more superficial level, that I think it would be great to get more black women in to our organization. It's just that she doesn't have the executive presence I'm looking for. You see what I'm saying? So one of the things that I've tried to say to people is we have to stop demonizing people for their bias. We have to stop assuming that just because somebody has bias, that it means that they're a bad person because they may be completely unconscious about it. And when we attack them for something that they don't even know they have, people get very defensive and even more dug in. In fact, in psychology, they call it the backlash phenomenon. And that is that when you have a controversial belief and people try to force you to change that belief, you actually dig in even more, no matter how much information they give you. And so this is the cycle we see right now, I think, happening. Is that we and from the standpoint of the sort of uh anti-u-diversity, equity, and inclusion space, it's like we're tired of being made wrong, we're tired of being told we're bad, we're great, leave us alone. There's third of that energy. And from unfortunately, from the people who are who have been on the more extreme side of the pro diversity, inclusion, and equity space, it's been stuff like white men are bad, which is completely not helpful. It's not at all helpful because as James Baldwin, you guys can see, our audience can see, but I have him sitting over my shoulder here. James Baldwin famously said, you can only teach people you love. And so we found, for example, that we show compassion to what it is to be raised with a mindset as a white man, for example, that you are the top of the pyramid, that that has stuff associated with it too. It's not like people chose that role either. They were sort of culturally put in that role as well. So the more we bring cult awareness, the more we help people understand where the decision making is coming from, what we find in the studies, particularly there's one great study about this at Arizona State and Lehigh University medical schools, that the more people become aware of why they're making decisions, how they're making decisions, and what biases are influencing them, they naturally become more egalitarian. We don't have to tell them what to do. We just have to keep helping them look, okay, where did that decision come from? What might have been influencing that decision? And this is where I think a lot of folks in the diversity, inclusion, and equity space have sometimes missed the mark, which is that instead of helping people understand themselves, we've wagged a finger in their face and saying you're bad and need to be fixed. Nobody wants it to be fixed. Nobody wants to have somebody trying to fix them.

Steve: 25:59

Howard, as I hear you sort of describe this and talk about this, I'm actually reflecting on a situation that a colleague of mine was in last week. And if you don't mind, I'd I'd appreciate some in-the-moment advice on how you might handle this.

Howard: 26:15

Sure, I may even have some.

Steve: 26:18

So thank you. So I work with an individual. I work uh for for a car dealership doing marketing strategy, et cetera, in an automotive group. And I work with a young individual, mid-30s. Her name is is Sam. And we were on a conversation with a particular, a potential new strategic partner, a new vendor, new supplier. And uh we, there were, there were two of us on our side, Sam and myself, and there was the potential partner uh on the other side, the potential client. And afterwards, we get an email that says, Steve, thank you for the time, et cetera, et cetera. Sam is not even mentioned, right? And I get a I get a text from Sam. I was like, well, that that makes me feel good. It should not even mention, not even referenced, et cetera, et cetera. And I sort of struggle and continue to think about this with the point of view, should I, as an individual, go back to those folks and say, hey, a little bit of feedback, unconscious bias, maybe, that you omitted this individual. And it's not only important to her, it's important to me that we create this dynamic, this relationship where we don't do that ever again. How would you approach that advice? How would you approach that situation?

Howard: 27:32

Yeah. That's a good look. It's a great example. I've seen that happen, God only knows how many times, Steve. And it's happened to me so many times, particularly because when I was running my company, you know, I had a company that I sold back in 2018, we had 50 consultants in it at some point, or 50 uh overall employees in it at some point. And I would often go out as the president and CEO of that company or the founder of that company with another consultant. And often that other consultant was somebody of a different identity, usually a woman of color, because as a white man, that's the way we often matched up because it was really good to have a mixed team in front given what we were teaching, and had that happen countless times. So I think, first of all, I it starts with taking a look at yourself, uh, it like your reaction. I I I always like to start with the assumption this person probably did not know what they were doing. And I think that's a really important distinction because often people start with the assumption of intention when in fact there was no intention. And I think that starting with the notion that people were well-meaning and were not intending to commit harm is is is a good place to start from. Then you say, okay, if somebody wasn't intending something to commit harm, and in fact, if as is often the case, if when you bring it to their attention, they're embarrassed and ashamed that they that they did what they did because they didn't realize they were doing it in some cases. And and that's not helpful. We sometimes think that shame or guilt is helpful in these circumstances, but in actuality, what happens when people feel shameful and guilty is that they contract, they pull back within. And so you want to invite people into the conversation. Now, there are a couple of ways you could do that. The first way you could do it is just by a more subtle way, which is to drop hins by responding and saying, Sam and I really appreciate that, or even include Sam in it and and have and invite Sam to say, Steve and I really appreciate that. And you can then say, Sam, you can kind of amplify Sam by saying, as Sam was saying, if you remember, or if they say, Steve, thanks for that idea, and she was actually, you could say, Oh, actually, thanks for the acknowledgement, but but Sam was actually the one who came up with that deal. So thanks, Sam. You sort of redirect in that way. And some people will pick it up often in that case, because of course, there'll be sort of that moment. If that doesn't happen, then how you approach the person might be, hey, look, I noticed something, and I'm sure there was no intention on your part, but I just want to be sure that you understand because I noticed that Sam and I met with you, and then you came back to me. I want you to be really, I just want to be sure that we're I can't do this without her. And so we're both in this together. And I just didn't want you to think that if you needed something from us, that you could only come to me. So you could do it like you're assisting them in knowing that. Now, if at some people, if at some point people get to the point, and I've seen this happen rarely, but sometimes, where it's clear it's like they know all that. They just don't want to deal with a woman. They want to deal with you, you know. Then you may have to have a sterner conversation. I'll share an example with you. I was working with a uh a newspaper a number of years ago. This goes back to 20 years, and this publisher of the newspaper was a guy who had really taken on trying to create, because newspapers historically were not particularly equitable systems. Most of the big name people were white men, the reporters were white men, um, the salespeople were white men. But it's like they were dominated historically by that for many, many years. It's changed a lot, obviously, in the last generation or two. And in this particular case, what had happened was this guy had put in a meritocracy, a merit system of how salespeople were going to get the bigger clients. And historically, it had been who do you know and the friends pass it to friends. He said, No, we're going to, he said, what we're going to do now is we're going to actually give people who are producing the best the opportunity for the biggest clients if those opportunities come available. And sure enough, their biggest client, which was a car dealership, had been working with them for years. Guy retired, Charlie. Well, let's say his name was Charlie, I forget, but let's say the guy, Charlie, retired. And the person who was the next person. Person sales-wise was a woman of color. She was an African-American woman. Right. So they is following his procedure, he assigned the client to this African American woman. She goes out to meet with the client, she comes back, and the client calls. And he said, the advertiser calls and he says, Well, what happened to Charlie? And they said, he said, Well, Charlie retired and we have this system. And this woman, you're going to love her. She's produced such and such, or such and such. And they said, Well, uh, we like somebody more like Charlie. And it became, and he went through this conversation with the guy for a little while, and he finally, finally realized this guy's basically saying I want another white guy, right? So he said, he realized at that moment, this is what the publisher said to me. He said, at that moment, I realized that this was a choice point for me. Was I really going to take this organization in a new direction, or were we going to fall back because of money? So where we were. And I realized that if we if I didn't make the right move here, the whole organization would think I was bullshit. So that's a technical term, by the way. Don't mean to say that.

Steve: 32:24

Absolutely. We use it awful on the show.

Howard: 32:27

Look, I'm sorry you feel that way, but I really am committed to this system. I know you'll be will be provided with better service, so that this is our system. So the guy in a hub said, Well, then you're not going to get our advertising anymore. And the the the publisher said, We'll miss you. Now, he did the advertiser did pull about a month later, he came back because it's it's a relatively small newspaper, small smaller city, not a tiny city, but big city, and there was not really an option. So to be fair, this guy had a little bit more leverage than a lot of people might have. But I but my point is I think that's the kind of thing that can happen is that ultimately we have to look for how this plays out and be able to distinguish when we really see racism, sexism, homophobia, or something, where we really see it blatantly there. And those might be the times where we take a stand like that versus the overwhelming majority of times. Some people think it's like, in fact, there's some social scientists and neuroscientists who believe that that everything we do, that everything we do is driven by unconscious bias at some level. Even when it eventually becomes very, very uh conscious, it nonetheless starts as unconscious bias. Look at homophobia, for example. Most kids don't know that gay is bad until mom says, don't play with dolls. You're not you're a boy. You shouldn't be playing with dolls. Or and then eventually, then you go to church and the priest says something or the minister says something. And then you get at some point you've got these overt attitudes, but they didn't start that way. They were built on these building blocks of the subtle comments and things that you experience.

Steve: 34:01

Yeah, absolutely. Howard, I could, we could take this conversation in in so many different ways. Um, everything from what you had touched upon earlier in terms of mindset and experiences. Part of me, if we have time, I'd like to talk about. I think young people today are forgetting about the things that were more prevalent in your world, in Philip's world, and my world growing up, right? Some of those atrocities, some of those very bad things and the memory. I think I believe part of that is as young individuals start to grow up, they don't go, they don't have those mindsets because they just simply don't know, right? They've not been experiencing those things. There are so many different ways that we could take with this conversation. Let me try to bring it back to mindset and corporate, however, right? In the example, the advice you gave me, by the way, thank you. Very good advice. I appreciate it. It is not only changing the mindset of that vendor. I think part of it is a changing the mindset of my colleague that she has the permission to be right, the to be vocal and pushing back. How, in your point of view, are corporate leaders changing mindset on this topic within their organizations? But I think more importantly, as industry lines blur and value is coming from multiple different brands in different sectors working together to create innovation, to scale innovation. How do you create change mindset within your organization, follow up in a broader ecosystem of companies working together in harmony? And what are the kinds of investments you think are needed to scale and to really move forward that sort of mindset shift?

Howard: 35:49

Boyd, that's a very rich question. Well, let's start by saying I think that one of the things that happened over the course of time in the diversity, equity, inclusion space is that we began to think that a lot of people began to think, and again, this is something that for years I was frustrated with, even within my own industry, is that we forgot that we had to sell the business case. Um, in other words, people be in the early days of this work, when I started doing the work in the mid and 1980s. So this was before we even had the Hudson Institute study, which came out in 1987, which was the one that really showed the demographic changes that were going to happen in the labor force and all this kind of stuff. I'm sure you guys ran into that over the years. Um, in those days, we had to really establish the business case. And so we had to look at, okay, what's workforce, workplace, and marketplace issues? Who where's the talent coming from, for example? So we know in some fields, especially like nursing and medicine in general, something like 40% of doctors in the United States right now were born outside of the country or come from different ethnicities. Something like 50% of nurses, right? If you're running a hospital and you're not paying attention to cultural differences and biases that people have, you're asking for trouble. You're in the case of healthcare, you're actually asking you're actually asking for miscommunication to cause people's death. That actually does happen on a regular basis. People miscommunicate. Sometimes it's amusing. Like I was because I've done a lot of work in healthcare. I did, I had a partnership with the Association of American Medical Colleges for many years that we taught. I taught people at Harvard Medical School and Stanford Medical School and Rush and all these big medical schools around the Hopkins, all these medical schools around the country and around the world, even outside of the U.S. And heard this great example of the way miscommunication can happen. This one was somewhat funny, and that is there's a a Chinese-born doctor who's about to perform who's going to perform surgery, and the nurse goes in to check, the pre-op nurse goes in to check with the patient, and the patient is really nervous. So the doctor asks the pre-op nurse, how's the patient doing? The pre-op nurse says, Well, frankly, he's having cold feet about the surgery. And the doctor says, Well, we should check his circulation then, because he didn't get the idiom. Well, now, like I said, that's amusing, right? That's funny, except it's not always funny when that miscommunication leads to faulty treatment or not taking care of a patient or misunderstanding what a family member meant or any of these other kinds of things. Now, that's just one industry, but the same is true when we look at all the industries that are now selling to a marketplace that is increasingly diverse. We now know that most demographers suggest that by no later than 2040, America will be less than 50% white for the first time. We know that the market share of people who are LGBTQ and out about it is larger than it's ever been. We know that that you know that that people are looking for more products and services that represent their cultures. That is, we have more, as we have more people coming from different ethnicities, grocery stores are beginning to offer foods. We see it happening all around us because it just makes sense. You want to buy this, I can sell this, I can make money, you can get your product, it's a good deal, right? It works, it works well for both of us. So I think that I think that it starts with corporations understanding how this actually has a real material effect on them, getting the best people, having the healthiest culture, and and getting the largest market share. Now, that's going to be different for certain organizations than others. And the organizations that can make that case more boldly need to do it. Now, I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I think the business of business is business. And it's not necessarily the responsibility of every business to protect the social order. I'd love it if every business had, you know, what we call the triple bottom line, wanting what was right for the company financially, for your employees, and for the marketplace, and sometimes even the quadruple bottom line for society. So corporate society. Society, yeah. Exactly, all that stuff. The environmental, of course, we would love that. But I also recognize that not every organization is going to take that on as their mission. But if if if at least people are somewhat benign, then the people who do want to do good things in the world can can be successful as well. So I think the co that corporate leaders have got to understand how this connects to their business, be able to look at why that's important, and then be able to do it from more of a systemic than an events basis. So if we say, for example, if we were to say that we know we had a basic East Coast business, let's say you take a company like, well, the famous one like Stu Leonard's, which is a very famous grocery store, I think it's up in New Hampshire, that everybody talked about because Waterman and Peterson Waterman years ago wrote about it in their book about the best companies in the world. And so Stu Leonard operates on the East Coast or in the Northeast. And let's say somebody says to Stu Leonard, you know, there's a huge market for the kind of stuff we do in California. Why don't we, why don't we figure out how we can get some of that California market share? Everybody would say, man, that's really smart. Dude, that's a great way to expand your business. If you do it well, you could really go from this to that. You could really expand. But for some reason, when somebody says, Well, we've we're doing well really well among white people in our marketplace, but we're not getting very many Asians, we're not getting very many Latinos, we're not very getting very many African Americans to come into our store. Maybe if we do a couple of things differently, we can expand the market share of all those people and we could almost double our business, right? For some reason, when that happens, we call that DEI work or to or being woke. Now, I've never understood exactly well, I do understand really, but but on any rational level, that makes no sense. The only way that makes level is it uh any sense is if somehow you see those people as inferior and therefore you had no interest in them. Otherwise, it just makes any sense from a business standpoint.

Steve: 41:39

Yeah, yeah. Well, it goes back to what you were saying earlier relative to certain individuals having a point of view that humans are different level, right? And and it's it's very animalistic in brandy, right? The the strong of the heart, etc.

Howard: 41:55

Yeah, exactly. And you can hear it, you can hear it, Steve, also in in even the questions people come from. So you say to people, and this this happens a lot. You you I'm sure you guys have heard somebody says, I'd really like to see us have more diversity in hiring. And the response by somebody is, as long as we don't lower our standards. Now, let's look at that for a second. Why would that be the response? Right? If I again, if I were to say to you, everybody in our company's from the East Coast, we really need to hire some West Coast folks, we would never respond, or unlikely we respond as long as we lower our standards. We would just say that makes sense, right? But for some reason, when we do it relative to race, let's say, that's the question. And the only reason that can possibly happen is because inherently that person, either consciously or unconsciously, thinks those people are less qualified. Therefore, when you talk about hiring more of them, the first thing that comes up is, uh oh, does that mean we're going to lower our standards? And so that's it, but but they may not even realize that. See, they may not see it that way. And so that's why I said before, you can't then poke a finger in their face if you want to be successful. And anyway, poking a finger in their face and say, that was racist. But on the other hand, it might be valuable to say, that's an interesting response. Why would you think we would lower our standards for them?

Steve: 43:09

It's so interesting, particularly with the Latino community. We at the Auto Group are taking a very uh deliberate approach in terms of engaging the Hispanic Latino community here in St. Louis, making investments of that, going so far as to ensure that when somebody of that cohort arrives at the dealership, there is somebody that reflects that culture, can literally speak their language, meeting them to carry on not only the cultural connection, but the customer experience. And we believe that if you if you make hiring and make these decisions from a consumer perspective to meet them at this intersection of how we sell another vehicle and doing so with somebody that they literally identify with across multiple spectrums, that's a good investment for us, right? And I think it's it's very important, particularly when I listen to things like on CNBC recently, a report coming out relative to the growth of the Latino community as a consumer in the United States over the next five, seven years. And to me, it becomes sort of interesting. You have this debate of saying it's if I'm a consumer brand and the benefits of connecting with a consumer audience like that from a from a diversity of cultural perspective, and you balance that against a lot of this backlash we're hearing. I don't know if there's a question there. It just becomes really interesting to me as you talk about race that that you you find this sort of intersection between those biases, those unconscious, those unconscious bias, maybe bias. Um, I will give people the the benefit of the doubt to your to your coaching here. But it just, I I again, I don't know if there's a question here. It just becomes highly, highly interesting to me to how you navigate that.

Howard: 44:58

Yeah. Well, actually, your example is a great one, Steve. When you talk about selling cars, right? That's pretty basic. You sell more cars, you make more money, right? This is the way, this is the way the system works. If you're, let's say you've got a car dealership in South Central Los Angeles. I think what we're seeing here is a clash between practicality, like I said before, human beings are not rational. We're rationalizing. In fact, one of my favorite quotes is from John Kenneth Galbraith, the great economist. At least it was attributed to him years and years ago. Somebody told me this, that he said this. But it's a great quote anyway. Most human beings give it a strongly held point of view and evidence to the contrary, we'll quickly go about refuting the evidence. We will throw out all kinds of stuff. You've seen it happen in your home. You know, you see it happen in your relationships, no matter what evidence, you know. And so so let's say you've got a car dealership at South Central Los Angeles, and you say, well, I really believe that this should be English should be our national language. If you come to this country, you should speak the language. The only problem is that let's I'm making a number up. Let's say 30% of the population in that area speaks Spanish predominantly and only speaks English enough to get along. If you've got a car salesman or saleswoman who can talk to them in their native language, in their home language, the chances of them making a sale are dramatically greater. So you have a choice then as a car dealership. You can stand on your ideology and say, we're not putting any Spanish signage up. We're not going to hire people based on their language. We're just going to hire people who we think look like the best salesmen, which guess what that looks like, right? And then the place next door to you gets those other people coming in to buy the cars. And so that's what I was talking about about making a better business case. We've got to move away from the morality piece of this. I'm not saying the morality isn't important. Of course it's important, and many of us will spend our lives working for it for those reasons. But putting that aside for a second, I could just as easily argue the practical business benefits of doing this for an organization like you're talking about. And if we see that then, then we say, okay, this is our market share. Like I said before, you bait the hook with what the fish likes to eat, not what you like to eat. And that's, I think, a mindset that, especially right now, given what's going on, is the one that we should really focus on, which is how do we provide what's actually needed out there beyond the political nonsense that can come from both directions.

Philipp: 47:19

Howard, thank you so much for this super insightful conversation. A couple of episodes ago, we had Richard Zacher and Peter from Salesforce on the show. And we talked about in the future, we'll actually not manage humans anymore. We'll all manage AI, AI agents. And wanted to ask you from a DNI perspective, and and spending a lot of time around DNA for a little bit here. How do you see AI and the development around AI and the product design which is coming with it? How is that evolving and how do we bring DEI into this? Ensuring that there is no lack of inclusion? And is there is there is there actually risk that we can create real harm for society by just creating chatbots which may be influenced by you you alluded to the the tech crew earlier, but yeah, is there how can we make AI ethical good, if you if you will? I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.

Howard: 48:26

Obviously, this is something that it's emerged in the last three years, really, as a as a huge common thing because it's been accelerating so dramatically, as we of course know. And it's something that we're really interested in. In fact, my son Jake, who is working in AI now, and he is helping me do a third edition of my book, Everyday Bias. And we're actually doing active research right now on AI and bias. That's what we're digging up right now, all of this new research on AI and bias. So it's it's really fascinating. And um it's just really emerging, of course, because it's such a new thing, but there are a number of things that we know. I mean, I think, first of all, one of the things that we know, as with most any emerging technology, there are the benefits that we see which are driving it, um, which are usually driving the development of it. And then there's the usually the other side of the hand, which is the shadow side of it, the negative impact of it. And we know that that's true, for example, we see with social media the benefits of it are we can stay connected with people all over the world on a regular basis. We can reconnect with people who we met in our who were earlier in our lives. I've reconnected with high school friends, all this kind of. We can get our voices out, democratization of people's points, all that wonderful stuff. But we also know that social that social media has created huge opportunity for bullying and exclusions of people. We know that social media, the algorithms tend to focus us in particular directions, all that kind of stuff. So so similarly, AI, we saw recently with this whole thing that happened with Grok and the what is it, uh not Meta Hitler, what was it? I forget what the language was, but that this kind of weird shit that happened, that excuse me. Weird stuff.

Steve: 50:06

Technical term.

Howard: 50:06

Oh, yeah, another technical term. That happened with Grok was an extreme, obviously. But if you, for example, Jake and I were doing some experiments in a couple of the AI sites, and we do things like say, show us some pictures of doctors. And out of the eight pictures that come up of doctors, one of them is a woman. Again, subtle. It's not like a huge thing. So for years we said about computer technology, gaigo, garbage in, garbage out. And I think that there's no question that that AI might have the same kind of influences. If you've got a society that's rampant in bias towards some groups versus others, and dominant groups positively more towards dominant groups and negative towards others, and all of those people are interacting with the system and helping to educate the system, then the notion that none of that could be baked into the system is kind of fanciful. I mean, how could we keep it all out of the system? Now, that being said, the system has the potential, if people really take this on, to be self-correcting in that regard, in that the system could also have safeguards in it, which could identify when bias is a factor. So if somebody says, makes these decisions, here's the criteria, here's the decision I made, that the it's conceivable at some point that the AI could come back and say, your decision really doesn't seem consistent with the facts. Could there be other influencing factors emotionally that are that are leading you to that decision and could help us become more aware? And I think that I am seeing indications of some people doing that kind of stuff. And I think that that's really potentially helpful. So so I think like anything else, we go into this with the more awareness that we go into the working with this, the more awareness it would bring to developing it. And the more awareness we have of the potential pitfalls and the potential traps, the more likely we are to create a system that is in that polarity between good and bad, higher on the good side and overwhelmingly higher on the good side. But I don't think we can ever relax about it. I think it's something that has to be part and parcel of our working with that system in order to be sure that it moves in that direction. And if it does, it could be transformational because it could help us see patterns. You know, so for example, I don't mean to go on and on, but this is such a rich field. For example, I've seen times when people have had patterns of hiring where they've hired 14 times in a row, they've hired one group versus another group. And yet when you ask them about it, they have no idea what the pattern was. They only saw this higher and this higher and this higher and this higher. And then we come back and say, Did you notice that? And they're like, oh my God, I had no idea. And so things like that could be built into our decision-making process in a way that could be profoundly helpful in terms of being aware of some of those patterns. But it requires, it requires us being really thoughtful about it. And the concern is that in a rush to get this stuff out there, we may step over that thoughtfulness.

Philipp: 52:57

I've just one follow-up on that. Sorry for that. So you talk about hiring, right? Of course, I think there's a lot of opportunity where you could use AI to actually help you be more transparent. A lot of the hiring processes and recruiting processes already have a lot of systems built in. But if you talk about AI, right, and AI transforming industries, there is sort of growing anxiety in, I think in Europe and the US, people feeling like, well, we may lose our jobs, right? How is the future of work looking? And if you are in a world where there is generally more fear, there's the fear of people losing their jobs. How do you kind of like think about this? What is changing in that world when it comes to the sense of purpose, dignity, and community? And how do you know corporate leaders make sure, like Microsoft just made a decision, I think, letting go of 50,000 people and essentially saying, yeah, it's we had our best year of performance ever and we're doing better, and we don't see any anything which will stop our growth, but we just feel like we can be even more efficient. So in a world like this, how can corporate leaders make the right decisions, right? And be purposeful and take away the fear from people to say, oh, well, maybe because I'm black, right? Or I'm coming from a minority, I will be the first one losing my job. What are your thoughts on that space?

Howard: 54:23

Well, I think that first of all, that's it's very real. We all know we are going to lose jobs to AI. We are already losing jobs to AI, and we're going to learn. I mean, we saw one of the, gosh, I forgot his name now, but one of the guys who said one of the big AI firms was interviewed, and my wife and I were watching the interview, and he was saying that within 10 years, he expects that 20% of jobs will be lost to AI, and as many as 40% of entry-level jobs, right? So, so we really look historically, we can say this is somewhat akin to what happened after the Industrial Revolution when so many people were put into these situations where the only jobs that were available were these low-paying sort of meat, meatpacking factory kinds of jobs. And eventually, of course, that led to the labor movement, which which transformed our country for a while. Now we're swinging back in the other direction. And I mean, the real challenge, the real challenge is going to be as societies and as a world, what do we do when 20, 30, 40 percent of the jobs that we have are not are not available? Um, what are those people going to do? How are they going to sustain themselves? Now, as there are people who, from a um a sort of meta standpoint, looking at more societal movement, look at things like guaranteed basic income and stuff like that that could provide, but there's sort of more utopian ways to look at that the societal structure, which is that people have more time, they have more leisure time, they can engage in the arts, they can do all kinds of things. Nobody, people don't have to work so hard all the time. But that was a conversation we had back in the 70s and 80s, too, the the end of work. And we ended up moving into a time where people were expected to work harder and more intensely. So, so a lot of this, as I said, will have to do with with consciousness. And and I think that it doesn't, you don't have to be a social scientist or an economist to look and say if you get 20% of people don't have jobs, we get trouble. We get real trouble. And that's trouble not only for what them, but how does society support them, right? So, and there there are people like people from the Yarvin school who say, well, those people have to become a working class, then, basically like an enslaved workforce. They're gonna have to just be the ones who grind it out. But it's not likely that that people will go for that. And so that creates all kinds of societal, uh, societal upheaval and even a class war if we if we go too far down that road. So we're in uncharted territory here, and and anybody who thinks that they can predict the way it's going is is is fooling themselves because we we are in uncharted territory. And what we're gonna have to do is just be really thoughtful about which direction each of these decisions take us in, and to be thinking futuristically about what are the natural consequences of behaviors that we engage in. If we look at everything, the the challenge with capitalism, of course, capitalism has a lot of good qualities to it, but one of the challenges of capitalism is we convert everything into the one basic equation, which is money. And we know that that's just one of the many fundamental basic human equations. And if in search of money, we destroy people's social systems, so we destroy, we put people in poverty and family and all this kind of stuff, but we're still as an overall society producing more money, what have we really gained? Work has a purpose for people. Work provides people with something and it gives people a purpose in life and it gives something sustainable. And so if we, unless we consciously reproduce that, so you could, there are all kinds of very cool ways we could do. We could say the government will take these people and expand Teach for America, and we'll get people out of communities helping people learn. We could expand the Peace Corps, we could help people in other parts of the world get more healthy. If we have the attitude of making the world a better place, all this stuff could be really positive. If we have an attitude of how much can I get, and it's all about avariciousness and greed, then there's no positive future that ultimately can come at it.

Philipp: 58:11

But it's also like you, you, you, what you're talking about is really this is a systematic change, right? It's for some people say, oh, we just change one little piece, but because of the introduction of AI and new ways of how we can solve problems and solutions, it is really a triple effect into different systems. And it's so complex to think through this, but has to be done very, very carefully. Appreciate that, but yeah.

Howard: 58:34

But just before we leave that point, just real quickly, yeah, look, this happens with major paradigm shifts. And organizations as well as societies have to pay attention to what's actually happening. I mean, the great example I use all the time is this Encyclopedia Britannica. When we grew up, Encyclopedia Britannica was the gold standard. If you had Encyclopedia Britannica in your home, it was like you were a different social class because you had the best. Encyclopedia Britannica, after 200 and I think 260 years of being like at the top, is now virtually out of business. Why? Because they didn't realize that they weren't a book company. They were an information company. And had they realized that, we would have been going and gotten in front of it, we would have been going to Britannica instead of Wikipedia every day. But now Google or Google or whatever else. But because Britannica was a solid product, we would have trusted it. But they see the same was true with the railroads. They thought saw themselves as railroad runners rather than transportation, or they could have owned the trucking industry, you know? So I think we can learn from these examples historically and see that when parrot when great paradigm shifts happen, they happen fast, but they if it's I it's sort of oxymoronic because while the paradigm shift is happening fast, we need to slow down a little bit in terms to really understand what the paradigm shift is doing to us. So it's this juxtaposition of be of being able to bring our to slow our consciousness down in the fast in the face of fast-moving activities around us. And that's not easy for people to do.

Steve: 59:58

Howard, before we close, I'd like to maybe turn the conversation to something that, at least in my mind, is perhaps not always at the forefront when we're talking about diversity, equity, and inclusion. I think we've actually seen what I'm going to allude to throughout this conversation in that race has been the leading tip of the spear in uh around even in this conversation. I think just humans naturally go to that. I'd like to maybe get your point of view on disabilities and as particularly as humans get older. I personally was born with a rare birth defect. I've had over 50 surgeries in my life. I still deal with this every day in my life. But as I've sort of become older and become more of an advocate of the group that of others that were born, and I have learned in my life that adult care is something that is absent for this issue, right? Philip also cares deeply about people in his life and manages people that he loves and he cares about in his life that also are suffer from disabilities. My question is when you think about DE and I, and when you think about corporate investment and what driving innovation and all of us getting older and all of this rich thing, how much does DEI and these long term investments play in the through the lens of solving for disabilities? The value that comes from the humanity and the share. Value that comes from helping people not as a result of what they look like, but you know, what they were born with that they can't help, what they were brought into this world with things that they just can't help.

Howard: 1:01:38

It's really important question, Steve. And it's also, I think, when we look at disability as a distinction, as an identity distinction, people with disabilities. And and of course, that's very broad. I'm I mean, theoretically, I'm somebody with disability. I have two knee replacements. I've got wear hearing aids my age. I have a very dear friend, a woman named Deb Daggett, who is actually a little person with brittle brittle bone disease, who is a diversity specialist on disabilities. And she says, We're all the rest of us are all temporarily able, she says, because it's only a matter of time, right? But I do think that if we look at it, it's at the heart of it, which is that sometimes people look at this and they say, Well, why do we have to have these special parking spaces and these ramps? Why do we need to pay for these ramps for people? Because it's like if you look at it from the standpoint of one more example of wokeness, this sort of mindset, it's like the social Darwinistic mindset of the survival of the fittest sort of thing. But what they're missing is the talent that organizations don't get because somebody can't get into their building. Stephen Hawkings, right? Stephen Hawking, and you don't have a ramp to get them into your building. Oh well, right? It's it makes no sense. I mean, the notion that because somebody has a disability that means that they don't have something to contribute is just ridiculous. And even now, in some cases, some of the physical activities uh that we associate with people, factory work can be done very easily by people. In fact, I I was with one organization that had people working factory who were in wheelchairs because they could operate the machine just as easily as somebody standing. Well, in fact, people would be sitting in a car versus sitting in a wheelchair. But their initial thing was, oh, this couldn't wouldn't be safe. So so I do think that there are lots of things. Technology is giving us ways for people to participate, to speak, to listen, to translate. Obviously, being able to communicate like we are today on Zoom means that people don't have to commute, which makes it easier for people with certain disabilities that to stay safe and at home. They could work from their bed, even attached to your medical devices if they need to be at some at some point. If we really look at what do people have to contribute versus what are the limitations? And if we say, okay, we need what this person has to contribute, how can we overcome these limitations? I think that's a much healthier mindset than doing it for some PC kind of reasons. And I think that that serves both needs. It serves the needs of people who don't want things to be done just for the sake of themselves. We're not going to hire somebody in a wheelchair just so we could say we hired somebody in a wheelchair. But if we have a Stephen Hawking and they're in a wheelchair, damn it, we want to get them in the building. And that that's, I think, what the difference is.

Philipp: 1:04:19

I mean, maybe one other topic I think where I think a great opportunity is with AI and also robotics. And we have a great show coming up on that. Also thinking about how can we make sure that we can use technology so that people actually do not get into the situation that they may need support or maybe disabled, right? There's a lot of like blue-collar workers who can only do their jobs for like 12, 15 months after after that they know that they will have a health issue, right? How can we use technology to make it make that better? But no question. Steve, Steve, back to you. Bring us home.

Steve: 1:04:53

One maybe final closing question. There's been a wide conversation, wide-ranging conversation. Howard, thank you. When you look ahead, are you optimistic where the future of DEENI in corporations, not only in the US, but maybe globally, are you optimistic of what how corporations are embracing DENI and sort of the value that delivers to their organization and to shareholders?

Howard: 1:05:22

I don't know that I'm I would say that I'm optimistic right now. It's obviously not a very appealing environment for the for the space. But I'm also not somebody who feels hopeless or powerless in the circumstance. I think that one of the benefits of age and seniority is perspective. And when you look at the perspective of history, and I'm a historian by training, that was what my academic training was in. When you look at history's perspective, like I said at the beginning of our conversation, it's always been a few steps forward, a couple steps back. This is clearly a retrenchment, and clearly it's part of a much larger issue that we're dealing with in terms of what's going on with the shift in society right now, politically and socially. But I also believe that the pathway to a more diverse society is inevitable just because the numbers are what they are. I mean, even if this manhunt to get rid of millions of people, push them out of our society, millions of immigrants, our society, the the reproduction numbers are still what they are. People of color are reproducing much faster than white people are in the society. And as much as nine-tenths of the growth of society is in communities of color. So, and that's without including um undocumented immigrants. So this is the future. And then so then the question becomes: are we going to go to an apartheid state like South Africa had, where less than 20% of the people dominate the other 80%? It's not likely, I think, in our culture that that's going to happen. So I think what I'm concerned about is not that this is going to be permanent, because I don't think there's any way it will remain permanent, but but I am concerned about what the backlash is going to be. In other words, we were very using South Africa as a model, the world was very fortunate. South Africa was very fortunate that Nelson Nandela was maybe the most transcendent person on the planet in our lifetimes. And he somehow came out of his experience of having 27 years in virtual solitary confinement and didn't come out with retribution and revenge and wanting to get to people who did that to them. He came out wanting to create a society that was pluralistic. But who knows where that will go? But I think when I've been saying this to this to people, I think it's it's a movement that has solidity both from a standpoint of social goodness or social benefit. And I think it also has a movement that's foundationally sound in terms of business. And so I think if the front door is locked right now, we need to keep finding the windows that are open and keep moving the conversation forward one step after another and keep working towards that society that I talked about, in which people have equity and opportunity and are treated with decency and respect and given a sense of belonging.

Steve: 1:08:04

Howard, thanks so much. What a wonderful conversation. And I and I will say an important, timely, critical conversation for where business leaders find themselves today. So I appreciate you spending some time with us and sharing your perspective.

Howard: 1:08:19

It's been a pleasure. Howard, thank you. Glad to do it again sometime. Sure. No, it's been great.

Steve: 1:08:27

That's all for today's episode of Inside CVC. A big thank you to Howard Ross for joining us and bringing such a valuable perspective on bias, inclusion, and the business case for equity. If you enjoyed this conversation, be sure to subscribe to Inside CBC on your favorite podcast platform, leave us a review, and share an episode with a colleague. You can catch up on all of our past episodes on your favorite podcast platform or upath.com forward slash podcast. I'm Steve Schmidt, and with Philip Willigman, thanks for listening. We'll see you next time on Inside CBC.