The Power of Diversity and Inclusion: Perspectives, Challenges, and Opportunities (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: So here's what happens when you give someone cause, right? You look for all the ways to bring that cause to life and you need the diversity and inclusion to see opportunity or see breaks that are gaps because we all have different perspectives and different upbringings, not better or worse, different. Yeah. Different, right? It's like, even let's just draw the line on like racial lines or like, you know, rich people are happier than poor people. Are they? You know, it's like, I know some people who came from meager means, who they understand teamwork, they understand resilience, they understand loving your mother, they understand gratitude, they understand hard work better than anybody and they are good. Yeah. And I know some people who came from very wealthy means that never learned the skills of adaptability, that never learned the skills of coping because everything came easy and they struggle through life. So it's how you approach it. It's not the circumstances. This is Viktor Frankl stuff. If you can't change your circumstances, you change yourself. You know, this is Viktor Frankl 101. We cannot control the world around us. What we control is our attitude. And so what diversity and inclusion is all about is about perspective. And so when you give people cause, they will look for ways to bring the cause to life through their perspective. So we have a cause in these United States, our founding fathers wrote down for us in the Declaration of Independence, all men are created equal. This is an idealized state that we will never get to, but we will die trying. And different people who have different perspectives, you can see trying to bring that cause to life. The abolition of slavery, women's suffrage, civil rights, gay rights. Somebody with diverse opinions and diverse upbringing said, hold on, I'm still not included in that. And so, you know, we start a new effort and all of those imperfect and ongoing in their own rights. So when we have a vision, when I say inspired, safe, and fulfilled, I only have my own perspective and I have unconscious bias and I have blinders. But if I have lots of people on my team, we all have our own unconscious biases and we all have our own blinders, but together we have a broad view. Yeah. And I need people from different religions, different races, different sexuality, different job experiences. I need people who have experience in something we've done before. And I love hiring people who have no idea about this job because they'll bring a new perspective. I love putting people in jobs they don't know how to do. Just like I'd like taking people who are different than me and saying, how would you solve this problem? And that's the thing we forget, which as you said, it's a program based on numbers and based on color or sexuality. It's none of those things. But I love that we have different perspectives and different people have different perspectives and different upbringings and different perspectives and all the infinite number of perspectives that exist in the world because of all the combinations and permutations. Yeah. And the best companies are diverse because they have diverse thinking. Right. Diverse ideas. We make jokes constantly about boards or companies that are made up of old white men. That's the perspective. That's the joke. The joke is it's one perspective. Yeah. And so the counter to that is if it's not just old white men, but it's a diverse group of people with diverse experiences, magic happens. If there's a shared set of values and a shared vision. Without the shared values and the shared vision, then all of that diversity will subdivide into their little tribes and they'll go and eat at the lunch tables all completely separately and then you need your diversity and inclusion program because you never understood it in the first place.