Chief Change Officer - Greg Morley: Creating Bonds in a Workforce Costing $8.9 Trillion in Disengagement

Episode Date: September 18, 2024

Gallup’s “State of the Global Workplace” estimates that low employee engagement costs the global economy a staggering $8.9 trillion. That’s 9% of global GDP—basically, the price of fixing ou...r collective mood. So, how do we boost engagement? Greg Morley says it’s all about fostering a sense of belonging and inclusion. Greg, one of our early guests in Season One (Episode Ten), has been a long-standing leader in HR and DEI at powerhouses like Moet Hennessy, Disney, and Hasbro. Now, with his debut book “Bond: Belonging and the Keys to Inclusion and Connection,” he shares his battle-tested insights on building engaged, thriving teams and cultures in multicultural organizations. Episode Breakdown: 2:25—From Season One to Season Three: Is Greg Aging Like Fine Wine or Just Getting More Engaging? 5:35—Belonging in the Workplace: Why It’s Easier to Find a Unicorn Than Foster Connection These Days "Individuals are more and more isolated because of social media. Social media has this double edged way of impacting people; it makes us much more connected, but much less connected." "Many people don't have safe places outside of work, and it's a responsibility of employers to create a place that's a safe place to work." 13:02—The Domino Effect of Disconnection: How Losing Belonging Hurts Everyone (Even Your Coffee Breaks) 19:07—Greg’s Take on DEI: Leading Like a Maestro in the Symphony of Work "It's a matter of appreciating the differences in the workforce. Trying to get the best out of the people so that they feel included." 23:00—Ideas Are Cool, But Leadership Involvement Is Where the Magic Happens 32:50—DEI in the Age of “Woke”: Navigating the Cultural Rollercoaster 36:41—East vs. West in DEI: Same Symphony, Different Instruments "What I found in Asia is, it is a more collective environment with a collective culture. We really do need to start with the stories of people in the organization rather than starting with the KPI that we want to achieve." "If it's Hong Kong culture, or it's Japanese culture, then build out from that versus saying, we're gonna have 50 percent target on gender. And then we cascade that to the whole organization, which is more of a Western way of approaching something." Connect with us: Host: Vince Chan | Guest: Greg Morley Chief Change Officer: Make Change Ambitiously. A Modernist Community for Growth Progressives World's Number One Career Podcast Top 1: US, CA, MX, IE, HU, AT, CH, FI Top 10: GB, FR, SE, DE, TR, IT, ES Top 10: IN, JP, SG, AU  1.3 Million+ Streams 50+ Countries

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Hi, everyone. Welcome to our show, Chief Change Officer. I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host. Our show is a modernist community for change progressives in organizational and human transformation. Today, I'm talking to an old friend and early supporter of our show, Greg Molle. He was one of my first guests on the show in Season 1, Episode 10. He shared his career journey insights as a change leader, as a people leader from his time working at various international firms, including Disley and Monat Hennessy. Today, Greg is joining us with a new perspective, this time as to champion DEI diversity, equity, and inclusion in a corporation. Greg, let's start with you giving us a bit of an introduction to this book, as well as a brief background on yourself for those who might be tuning in for the first time. This will help the listeners understand where you're coming from before we get into the book's content, the lessons, and the teachings you want to share. Thank you for having me back.
Starting point is 00:02:32 Really pleased that you and I met each other more than a year ago. And I, at some point in my life, will be able to say I knew Vinch Chan when. Now that your podcast is beaming across 50 countries and headed towards a million views and listens. I think that is super exciting and I'm just really proud of you and the work you're doing and what you're bringing to the conversation about humanity. So thank you for that. Today, what we're going to talk about is this book that I've written called Bond, Inclusion and the Keys to Belonging and Connection. A little bit about me. So I've spent most of my life in HR as an HR business leader and a good part of the latter part of my career in inclusion and belonging and diversity. I did write this new book, which I hope is a guide to inclusion and belonging in the workplace. I've had the experience
Starting point is 00:03:27 and great good fortune of leading diversity initiatives in the U.S., Europe, and Asia at major multinationals such as General Electric, Disney, Hasbro, and most recently my experience with LVMH Moet Hennessy. And I wrote the book to share what I believe are really life-changing lessons I've learned for how leaders and teams can be more inclusive and embrace company diversity to be even more successful in the companies in which they're working. First things first. Greg, how did you get into the people side of business? You've had a long career across different firms, countries, and cultures.
Starting point is 00:04:15 But what led you into focusing on the people function of a business? Never underestimate the power of a great mentor. When I was working for General Electric, I was working in sales, and I used to be responsible for selling light bulbs to grocery stores, which seems very far away from what I was doing in HR. But in fact, it was a people business. So you had to have the relationship with the people. You had to have good contacts to be successful in selling.
Starting point is 00:04:52 And I had a manager at the time who was really, in essence, like a second father to me. And he one time said to me during a personnel review, he said, I think you'd be good in HR. And I wasn't sure at the time if that meant I would really be good in HR because I had no idea what human resources really was, or if he was saying you're just not that good at sales. It turns out that he was full of insight and I ended up spending most of my career after that in HR. So I was really fortunate to have somebody like that in my life who knew me and knew what a good career path for me was. Wow. So that's how you got into the HR function. At that time, HR was just a lot of paperwork and standard procedures.
Starting point is 00:05:52 None of us even talked much about DEI. Or maybe at some point, for corporate marketing or branding purposes, we heard the term CSR. But D&I in particular, diversity, equity, inclusion has become more popular and widely discussed in recent years. Now your book is called Bound, Belonging and the Gapes to Inclusion and Connection. Let's break it down to understand your interpretation of each of those. Starting with belonging, what do you mean by belonging in the workplace? And why is that important? Sure, it's a great question. And let me maybe start by why I wrote the book,
Starting point is 00:06:58 what inspired me to write the book as a way of addressing sort of the belonging, inclusion, and connection turns of the book. Over the decades of experience I had, both in HR roles, but also in roles such as marketing, sales, and communications and distribution, what I saw was there is an essence of crisis of loneliness at work for some people. And there's a very important role that organizations play in fostering a culture of belonging and inclusion. And the fostering of that culture of belonging and inclusion is not just a nice thing to do and everybody feels good at work and we go and we have parties and we're happy and we have lunch together. There is data that reinforces that when an organization is diverse, inclusive, and has leaders who lead in an inclusive manner on many measurable aspects, those companies do better. terms of avoiding risk. They do much better in terms of getting profitable products to market and they do much better in terms of what would be obvious, which is keeping good people and
Starting point is 00:08:12 attracting good people. So there is a business imperative to being good at these things. And what encouraged me to write the book was I saw all of these sort of good and bad practices over my career, both within the companies I was working with and with others that I had become associated with. And that's why I got to the point of, okay, there's something to be talked about. And I think finally, what was a driving factor for me was I believe in my core that these things I just talked about are important to individuals and to businesses. And what I saw was we were in the world of diversity, equity, and inclusion getting too far away from what I believed was the important part of diversity, equity, and inclusion was diverse workforces working well together and creating great business outcomes and great outcomes for individuals. And so that's how I got to
Starting point is 00:09:12 the point of writing the book. I agree with you a hundred percent when it comes to belonging versus versus loneliness. Early in my career, I was immersed in big organizations, and it was all about work and climbing the corporate ladder. Belonging was seen as more of a soft feeling, something you didn't really think about much. You work hard, made your boss happy, and got along. Maybe you'll get promoted faster and better. Some would call it luck.
Starting point is 00:10:00 Others would call it politics. That's just a normal corporate life. But when you talk about belonging in the workplace, especially now that you absorbed it and you've been involved in different cultures, I'm curious, why is it so difficult to develop a true and sustainable sense of belonging for employees? And how can we nurture that sense given all the complexities of corporate life? There are many aspects to this, but let me focus on a couple of them. The first is that the world is changing in terms of the work, and especially since COVID. And I just read an article this morning which highlighted this. The arrangement or the agreement that
Starting point is 00:10:59 employees and employers have has flipped. It's a buyer's market in a way now for employees to go and work places where they believe they're going to be recognized, they're going to be rewarded, they're going to be heard, and they're going to feel like they belong. Now, that's happening in a time when individuals are more and more isolated
Starting point is 00:11:21 because of things like social media. And social media has this double edged way of impacting people, which is it makes us much more connected, but much less connected. And when we talk about belonging in the workforce, what we're talking about is an individual coming to work and feeling like they can do their best work there, that they're going to be recognized for what they do, that the workplace is a safe place. Many people don't have safe places outside of work, and it's a responsibility of employers to create a place that's a safe place to work. And why is all of this important? It's important because we want
Starting point is 00:12:07 people on our teams and ourselves to do the incremental effort. We all get hired and we get a job description and it says all the things that have to happen. The reality of jobs is, you know, people do some things on the job description and some things off the job description. And many times a career like the one you were talking about, Vince, where you work hard, you put in a lot of effort and you get ahead and you get promoted, comes from the fact that somebody is somebody has with their role, with their company, with their boss, with their peers, which allows them to feel encouraged to do the incremental effort. And that's how companies win, when employees are fully engaged and doing the incremental effort. As you were sharing, it reminded me of an incident from about 20 years ago when I worked at an international financial institution. At that time, I was a store employee. I received a lot of positive feedback from clients. I was sent to the headquarters for special training, first of its kind, and my boss rewarded incredibly hard, 12 to 14 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Starting point is 00:13:51 I genuinely enjoyed the work. In your terms, I felt a strong sense of belonging to the role, to the company, and to my clients. The pay wasn't anything special, even under industry standards. But I was so motivated and invested in the work. Then something changed. My boss left, and her replacement had a completely different style and approach.
Starting point is 00:14:39 I wouldn't place blame entirely on this new person, but we didn't get along the way I had with my previous boss. The entire culture and team dynamics shifted. The vibe, the chemistry, the sentiment, everything fell off. That's when I lost my sense of belonging. I kept working hard and professionally to serve my clients. But there was an internal conflict with my new supervisor. This eroded the connection I had felt to my work. The result? I quit the job and it came as a surprise to everyone. Clients, colleagues, even those at headquarters. They couldn't understand it
Starting point is 00:15:28 because I had been such a hard-knocker, talented analyst. For them, it was a real loss. For me, the damage was deeper. That's when I experienced my first episode of mental illness, what we would call now burnout. And that burnout spiraled into depression. I'm sharing this now because it ties back to what you said about the sense of belonging or the lack of it. When that sense is lost, especially in a role where I had thrived and found purpose, the consequences were severe for both my career and my health. It was a perfect example of how critical belonging really is. It's a perfect example.
Starting point is 00:16:29 It's a case study which makes the point of the lessons of the book. And I think it's important. I want to recognize you for sharing that story because many people go through those kinds of episodes and oftentimes the loneliness occurs because we don't believe other people have had that experience or are going through those things either in the past or people that we work with. So it's very powerful that you share a story like that that's personal and that can give encouragement to others. There are, you made this mention about you were working hard and you were loving what you were doing and you were getting recognized, but you weren't necessarily feeling like you were being well paid. terms of satisfaction, encouragement, self-worth, and the longer-term development in your career far outpaced what you believe maybe you should have been earning. And there are two critical people in the organization. It's us and our manager. And one of the reasons that I believe it's often difficult for managers to create a sense of belonging. And you experienced it with a manager who knew you, knew how to motivate you, knew what
Starting point is 00:17:53 was important to you, knew how to encourage you. And then you changed to a manager who didn't know you as well, didn't know how to encourage you, didn't know how to recognize you. And ultimately you left the organization and it probably quite fragile state was that second manager. My guess is didn't spend the time to get to know you and understand what was important to you and make you feel that regardless of who you were working for, you were still important and you were still valuable, even at your low salary that you felt. So I think that part is maybe the advice I would give coming out of your very heartfelt sharing is that managers need to get to know the people that work for them. And in a way that you can understand what's important to them, what's important to them in
Starting point is 00:18:47 their life, what they need to be successful in their jobs. And those are the conversations that oftentimes we're not training managers to have, but they're just human conversations. They're just born out of curiosity. And I think that those things are much more important than we give time for. We've touched upon belonging. Let's move forward to talk a bit about inclusion. How would you define D-E-I? Or what does D-E-I mean to you? So when we define D-E-I or diversity, equity, and inclusion, most people think of diversity, equity, and inclusion as relating to things like gender
Starting point is 00:19:38 and skin color, perhaps because they're the most visible forms of diversity. And what I would say is also critically important, and I've seen this in my experience, is it's just as important to understand what experience, both life and career experience, somebody brings to their job. You know, what generation they come from, what languages they speak or understand understand. Who do they have any disabilities? Do they have any exceptional abilities? Those are all things that are important in determining how you build a diverse workforce. The reality is most of the diverse elements that we bring to work are unseen. Now, who I'm married to is unseen. Do I have children or not is unseen. Do I have a cognitive ability or disability
Starting point is 00:20:33 is unseen in most places. So this is why we have to get to know the people that work for us. And when we talk about, then why is the word inclusion important or the concept inclusion is. To me, I always imagined the image of an orchestra. So in an orchestra, there are many different instruments
Starting point is 00:20:56 and they all have their own role. And at some point they come together in a piece to create a beautiful piece of music and experience a feeling. And it's the job of the manager, the leader, to understand which pieces they need to bring to different projects, different work streams, different situations to create a beautiful piece of music which can only be done in an orchestra by an incredibly diverse field of instruments which is also what we see at work outcomes at work are better from an innovation perspective from a profitability perspective from a risk and compliance perspective when you have diverse teams and going back to this diversity of all the different elements which are seen and unseen.
Starting point is 00:21:50 So the manager is the conductor? Yes. So the manager is the conductor, but also think about the conductor as a rotating role. If you're project managing, then you could be the conductor. If you're running a business or employee resource group, you could be the conductor. It's just a matter of appreciating the differences in the workforce, trying to get the best out of the people so that they feel included. And then what does included mean? It means that when i'm at work and i'm doing work
Starting point is 00:22:27 i feel like my voice is heard i feel like i'm respected i feel like i am in a safe place i feel like i'm recognized for the work that i do and all of those things get back that point about incremental effort which is when those things get back that point about incremental effort, which is when those things happen, then people will do more work harder and feel a real connection to the organization and ultimately a responsibility for the success of the organization and for the person's colleagues. All these ideas sound great, but when it comes to implementation, things get much harder. Like many great concepts, as and when they are put into action within big corporations or even small teams, it is the execution that often derails the original intention.
Starting point is 00:23:28 From my experience, how can those listening, whether they are managers, CEOs, or others in leadership roles, effectively implement good ideas? I know this might be a big question, but I'd love to hear more about your perspective from an execution standpoint. the stage for success so that when they delegate the tasks to others, the implementation stays true to the original vision? Yeah, great question. And my belief is that it's easier than it seems, and it's easier than we make it out to be. If you're trying to change the culture of an organization, it takes time. And say, change your culture to organization takes three to five years, really, to change one. And that's with everybody working in alignment and understanding. To change the culture of a team, like you experienced, can happen almost overnight, for better or for worse, depending on the leader. In the book, in my book, Bond, I identified five different keys to inclusion, which we called them.
Starting point is 00:24:57 And I'll just highlight a couple of them because you talk about example CEOs. So there are a couple of things that I picked out from my own experience and in the interviews I did with others, which I think are critical. The first one is that leadership matters. So inclusion starts with the CEO or the most senior person in the organization or a manager. Assume that your own team is a company. The manager is the CEO. Inclusion is not a matter for HR. Inclusion is a matter for the organization. And when employees see leaders practicing inclusive behaviors, calling on people in meetings, making sure that people have a voice, recognizing good work, sharing their own stories as you've shared your own story. These are all the things that make a difference. And just the physical presence of a senior leader in moments that are important to the organization as it relates to inclusion are important.
Starting point is 00:26:05 And I'll give you a specific story that happened when I was in Hong Kong the last time. So I was doing a talk about the book and the lessons of the book at a pretty large organization. And I was told that the senior management don't normally come to these kinds of events. So, which is unfortunate because they, you know, they matter. Right before the talk started, the senior management team, the CEO and the senior managers all came into the room. And I took the opportunity during that talk to them and encouraged them to be there and be present. Because what I saw when they walked into the room was a room full of 100 plus people really brighten up and lighten up.
Starting point is 00:26:54 And so that's what I say when leadership matters. Just being there makes a big difference. I think there's maybe one or two other things that are particularly important. It's important that we start with ourselves. I think there's maybe one or two other things that are particularly important. It's important that we start with ourselves. So there are many things in an organization that we can and cannot change. And the more senior you are, maybe you have more impact over a larger group. And the more junior you are, your impact is narrower.
Starting point is 00:27:23 But we can all start with ourselves. So we all have stories of feeling included or excluded. And I like to, when I'm talking to groups, I like to ask people to reflect on that. What's something that they think about when they were included or when they were excluded? How did that make them feel? And I think that's a real source of power for creating a sense of inclusion for yourself and your coworkers and even your customers. So if you start with yourself, you can impact a lot. Then you have to build out from there. And I think the last thing I would say in the keys of inclusion is it's very
Starting point is 00:28:01 important to search for common ground. It may sound counterintuitive to say we build these very diverse teams and then we want to search for common ground. But in fact, we all want to rally around something. It could be the mission of the organization. It could be a project that we're working on. It could be a colleague who's stressed and we're trying to help that colleague. I had a situation with a very good friend of mine from university. And when marriage equality was being talked about in the U.S. 15 years ago, it was a very important topic to me because as a
Starting point is 00:28:40 member of the LGBTQ community and as somebody who was in a long-term relationship, access to marriage was important for us, for myself and my to-be husband. But for my friend who's straight and has four kids, and he didn't see the, he wasn't interested in marriage equality, which at first took me very much by surprise. And we had a discussion about it. And I said, why is this
Starting point is 00:29:06 important? It's important, I believe, to everyone because it has to do with people being able to love and build relationships and family and support structure with people that they love. And so we came to this point of common ground because that was important to him too. Whether we called it straight marriage or gay marriage was not the issue so i think it's critically important to search for common ground as a way to bring people together and create a sense of inclusion and belonging in the workplace yes you are absolutely right The visible involvement of leaders is crucial, especially in large organizations. That public display of support from the top sets the tone for the rest of the company. When the CEO or key decision makers visibly endorse an initiative. It creates a ripple effect.
Starting point is 00:30:11 People take cues from their leaders and if the leader is truly committed to a certain direction, it's much easier for the organization to align itself with that. Like you said, in these cases, talk is not cheap at all. It is an important tool to communicate priorities and demonstrate what matters. Execution might align with the people below the leader, but the leader's voice serves as a signal of endorsement, setting the stage for everyone else to follow suit. The power of a leader's voice goes beyond i think what we can imagine i have had many situations in my career where individuals who worked for me or with whom i worked or we worked on projects
Starting point is 00:31:18 together would mimic back to me things that i had said to them that had an impact on them either an impact on them personally or their career or the work they were doing. And those are things I don't even remember saying. And as leaders in an organization at whatever level, don't underestimate the power of your voice and your presence. And in my six years at Moet Hennessey, working on launching and working on diversity, equity, and inclusion, the number one key to success of having a great outcome or great outcomes was that for a period of time, the CEO, who's a very respected individual in Moet Hennessey and in the LVMH group, would, every time he stood in front of a group, talk about why it's important that we have a diverse and inclusive organization.
Starting point is 00:32:15 He didn't have to spend 15 minutes. He could spend two minutes talking about why that was important to the innovation, the evolution, being an attractive company, being an attractive brand or brands to consumers, knowing consumers, all of these things. People pick up on that. Now, he probably would do that in the top of 25 or 30 minutes. He'd take a minute or two to talk about diversity and inclusion. It made a huge difference because people picked up on those cues. If it's important to the CEO, then it might be important to me.
Starting point is 00:32:47 And that's how the voice of a leader has impact on others. Speaking of using the power of leaders and voices to emphasize the importance that DEI has become a politically charged topic, especially in light of the upcoming presidential election. There has been an evolution in how DEI is perceived, with some viewing it as part of a border walk movement. How do you address the misconceptions and misunderstandings surrounding DEI in this current cultural climate? It's a great question because it's one of the reasons I wrote the book, which I saw this kind of fraying of the core of what I believed was important, which is creating inclusive environments. There's a great article, which I would encourage anyone to read.
Starting point is 00:33:56 And it was published last week by our mutual friend, Todd Sears, who's the CEO of Out and Equal. And he was addressing the issues that have arisen in recent weeks with large companies backing away from targets and commitments in diversity, equity, and inclusion. And he makes a point, makes a number of points, which I think are just absolutely spot on, which is in none of the cases where you've seen large companies back away from commitments in terms of measurement or commitments in terms of public accountability, have they backed away from initiatives that they are doing internally with their employees or even with their
Starting point is 00:34:41 marketing initiatives? So what I know about what's happening in the world is that there is a very public stance that some companies are taking. And that's, I think, to align with the views of probably the majority of their customers. Then there is a back of the house or internal discussion around these topics, which hasn't really changed. So take, for example, a company, a large company extends benefits to nursing mothers. Nowhere are people taking those benefits back because they've now become the normal. Companies are extending benefits to domestic partners or
Starting point is 00:35:26 spouses, maybe where they can't marry in different places around the world. Companies are not retracting those benefits. What companies are doing, which is to play a safer game, which is to be less high profile during this period of, I think, more intense scrutiny over diversity, equity, and inclusion. And I may be a contrarian in the field, but I would say that diversity, equity, and inclusion should be scrutinized like any other investment in the company. And unless we have a strong case, then there's a responsibility by a company to push back on it. Now, the political external view is going to be quite intense, I think, for the foreseeable future. What we have to do as practitioners and companies and as managers and companies
Starting point is 00:36:18 is go back to the core, which is we know inclusive environments have better business outcomes. We know diverse teams create better business outcomes. We know that inclusive leaders drive better business outcomes. And so that's what we need to be focused on. And if for a while companies need to be less public about that, then so be it. My next question is, you've worked extensively across different regions. You're American, but now you're based in France. You've also had experiences in Hong Kong, Singapore, and China. With that kind of global perspective, I'd like to hear your thoughts on DEI practices. Through your eyes, what are some of the key differences
Starting point is 00:37:16 between Eastern and Western approaches to DEI? Are there misconceptions or different ways to address these issues? It seems like a lot of focus, a lot of coverage on DEI tends to come from an American or Western perspective. Could you compare both sides, East and West, in terms of how they practice DEI, the challenges they face, and how they tackle these problems? great question and the insight about culture is spot on the evolution that i went on from disney to hasbro to moat hennessey was important because disney it's a basically an american multinational company it has a way of doing, which is fairly consistent around the world. Hasbro, similar. Moet Hennessy, very different. Because as you mentioned, Moet Hennessy is a conglomerate.
Starting point is 00:38:31 And it's a conglomerate within a conglomerate, which LVMH is a holding company in a conglomerate. So of the 26 different companies that exist within Moet Hennessy, and when I talk about companies, it's things like Dom Perignon or Belvedere Vodka or Hennessy Cognac or Vaux-Picot Champagne, Cloudy Bay Wine. It's very different products that come from very different places and therefore have very different cultures. What's important about the practicing of creating inclusive cultures is you have to understand the culture of the organization before you come up with a solution. And I tell this example in the book where a guy I was working with, a friend of mine from Hong Kong, he did a lot of development work
Starting point is 00:39:21 in East Africa, worked for an NGO. And one of their mantras was, don't just do something or don't just stand there, do nothing. Now, most of the time you say, don't just stand there, do something, right? If there's a fire or there's refrigerators open, don't just stand there, do something, close the door. But in development work, what their view is sometimes doing something right away is the worst thing. So we need to have positive intent about how we want to change organizations, but we also need to be observant. We need to understand the culture. We need to understand what's important to the people in the organization. And again, back to your powerful story, we need to understand the stories
Starting point is 00:40:07 that exist in the organization. So why is that relevant then when we talk about a kind of East-West approach to diversity and inclusion? So what I found in Asia, because of the more collective environment and collective culture that exists, is that we really do need to start with the stories of people in the organization rather than starting with the KPI that we want to achieve.
Starting point is 00:40:36 So we know that in Asian Eastern culture, family, collective culture is much more important than it is maybe in many places in the West. So it's important to understand what are the stories of people in the organization and how do those stories get told so that the people around those people can create inclusion or create inclusive environments. Not because we're doing it because somebody gave us a KPI. We're doing it because it's part of the family. And that, I think, is an important, nuanced approach to the way we develop diversity and inclusion strategies in Asia versus the way it would be done in the U.S. or, to to some extent in Europe. So you have to start with the culture of the organization and the culture, which is the dominant culture,
Starting point is 00:41:30 in which the organization works. So if it's Hong Kong culture, it's Japanese culture, whether it's Taiwanese culture, and then build out from that versus saying we're going to have 50% target on gender and then we cascade that to the whole organization, which is much more of a Western way of approaching something. You are bringing back a lot of my own memories from the corporate world. While it may not have been related to DEI, I remember whenever there was a new policy set by the headquarters in the U.S.,
Starting point is 00:42:12 especially from the senior leadership, they would often say, let's do the and say, Asia doesn't work that way. It's often seen as a monolith. But in reality, Asia is as diverse as Europe, with many countries, cultures, and even differences within a single country. Even when they say, oh, it's just the Chinese market, they don't realize the vast differences between Chinese communities, whether from Hong Kong, Taiwan, or mainland China. And within mainland China itself, people from the North, South, East, and West all have their own unique cultural dynamics. So a one-size-fits-all DEI policy transcribed from elsewhere just doesn't work in Asia. The diversity within Asia Pacific requires a more nuanced, localized approach. And get back to why is it important.
Starting point is 00:43:34 It's important that company cultures are inclusive because we know that the outcomes are better. It's important that company cultures are diverse in the context of the diversity of the workforce and the consumer base where they operate, because we know that there are better outcomes for the business. How you get there has to be tailored by the individual location and the individual company. It's not what I would say is something we have to avoid is that diversity and inclusion
Starting point is 00:44:07 doesn't work in Asia. That is just positively wrong. It doesn't work in Asia from a Western perspective or in a Western application, but it's as or more important that in Asia or in Africa or in Europe, South America, North America, that inclusion is practiced and is part of the culture, that creates better outcomes for an organization. Last question of the day, Greg. You have so much substance in your book, stories, insights, and valuable ideas. I'm sure a lot of people will come away thinking,
Starting point is 00:44:49 this is great, but how do I actually implement it? You've shared a lot of actionable steps throughout, but sometimes people need more guidance on how to put those ideas into practice. So do you plan to publish a sequel or maybe a workbook to help your readers and more people in general really apply your concepts in a hands-on way? Thank you for preempting the next 12 to 18 months of my life. I would like to do that. And one of the keys to inclusion in my book is about listening and understanding others' perspectives and standing in the shoes of other people. You told a very powerful story earlier today, and they asked you to let me share
Starting point is 00:45:46 that story without your name. It's important that when we get to the action, that we also understand very well the perspective of others. So while my book has keys to inclusion, there is more work to be done in terms of application and detailed steps. What I wanted to do with this book is to influence the conversation and to get some conversations started. And then we'll move to the next step, which is, okay, we're ready to go. Now, what do we do? And that may be the version two or the workbook that comes from this work. But thank you for being interested in that and you'll be part of helping me to think through that in the future. Of course, you can share my story
Starting point is 00:46:33 with my name on it. Thank you so much for coming to my show again. I look forward to seeing you in person when you travel to Asia again. Thank you so much for joining us today. If you like what you heard, don't forget, subscribe to our show, leave us top-rated reviews, check out our website, and follow me on social media. I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host. Until next time, take care.

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