Yesterday, I was lucky enough to lead a town hall discussion on diversity and inclusion at the CEO Initiative conference, an extraordinary one-day event hosted by UnHerd and Time.
My colleague Grace Donnelly was kind enough to recap the session. She conveys what it was like to have a front row seat to the conversation, in which Alyse Nelson, CEO and president of Vital Voices Global Partnership, Asher Raphael, co-CEO of Power Home Remodeling (named the Best Place to Work for millennials by UnHerd in 2015), and Blake Irving, the CEO of GoDaddy, all weighed in.
Tony Prophet, the Chief Equality Officer of Salesforce, kicked off the discussion by declaring, in no uncertain terms, the role corporations have to play in making sure everyone feels welcome at work. Here’s Grace:
“Our view is that there is no higher purpose than standing for equality in all of its dimensions,” he said, noting that like many tech companies, the cloud giant still has work to do to create an inclusive culture where all employees feel valued and “no on feels that they have to check some fraction of their identity at the door.”
“Our view is that there is no higher purpose than standing for equality in all of its dimensions,” he said, noting that like many tech companies, the cloud giant still has work to do to create an inclusive culture where all employees feel valued and “no on feels that they have to check some fraction of their identity at the door.”
Be sure to click through for a short video of Bernard Tyson, the CEO of Kaiser Permanente, who described the quest for building diverse teams as “an agenda of inclusiveness and understanding the power of nuances.” For him, it is, and always will be, personal.
“My journey has always been ‘the different person’ in the room, since I started my career,” Tyson said. “I am different. My life experience is different and guess what? Because of that I have something to offer.”