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What Is Business for? Not Just Profits Anymore, Corporate Chiefs Declare

“Society gives each of us a license to operate. It’s a question of whether society trusts you or not. We need society to accept what it is that we do,” IBM CEO Ginni Rometty told Fortune for its September cover story. It was a notable statement of humility for a Fortune 500 chief—and it marks a turning point in the stated mission of Corporate America. For nearly a half century, big business has operated with a singular focus on delivering profits to its shareholders, with the rest of society taking a back seat. The result has been an era of massive profit growth, soaring CEO compensation, merger mania—and growing income inequality. But in a groundbreaking declaration published this week, the Business Roundtable, an association representing 200 CEOs of America’s biggest corporations, issued a new declaration of purpose that turned the old rule on its head. In a 300-word statement, the business leaders said they will embrace a new accountability to the larger community of stakeholders, pledging that they will deliver value to their customers, invest in their employees, deal fairly with their suppliers, and support the communities in which they work. Generating long-term value for shareholders was relegated to the last bullet point on the new agenda. While drafting the new declaration, “there were times I felt like Thomas Jefferson,” Alex Gorsky, CEO of Johnson & Johnson, who heads the group’s governance committee, told the New York Times. (The principles outlined by the CEOs happen to be the primary focus of From Day One, which was launched last year.) JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, the Roundtable’s chairman, said the statement “is an acknowledgment that business can do more to help the average American.” The new statement of purpose was driven by forces that have been building to a crescendo in recent times. “Capitalism, at least the kind practiced by large global corporations, was under assault from all sides, and CEOs were getting the message loud and clear,” Fortune chief Alan Murray wrote in the publication’s cover story, which broke the news of the Business Roundtable’s new code. The September cover of Fortune magazine, which was the first to report on the new CEO manifesto Why is this happening—and why now? The reckless financial engineering that sparked the Great Recession, the rise of socially disruptive tech platforms like Facebook and Uber, the scandals involving once-revered institutions ranging from Boeing to Wells Fargo—all contributed to a populist backlash against big-business-as-usual. It helped fuel the candidacies of not only President Trump but also his challengers from the left, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who’ve proposed a dramatic increase in government oversight of business. CEOs don’t need a weatherman to know which way sentiment is gusting. Meanwhile, young people have professed a growing interest in the virtues of socialism, suggesting that this is not a short-term fad, but generational. “And here we are. Americans mistrust companies to such an extent that the very idea of capitalism is now being debated on the political stage,” observed Times columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin. Yet as much as corporations are mistrusted, trust in government is even worse, thanks to the era’s painfully polarized politics. By default, people are looking to business to get the job done. In the 2019 Edelman Trust Barometer, a global survey, 75% of respondents said they trust “my employer” to do what’s right, a significantly higher show of faith than in other institutions or business in general. In part, business is feeling compelled to have a social conscience because their employees and customers demand it. “We are in a transformational moment,” Seth Green, executive lecturer at Loyola University Chicago’s Quinlan School of Business, told From Day One. “Trust in government to solve major social issues is declining rapidly. Increasingly, people expect and seek to work for companies that are committed to delivering social impact alongside shareholder value,”  said Green, founding director of the Baumhart Center on Social Enterprise and Responsibility. Ironically, what the corporate chieftains are now proposing looks like a U-turn back to values espoused by big business before the shareholders-first religion took over. Corporations of the mid 20th century, as Sorkin observes, “for the most part, were run for all stakeholders. It was a time defined by organized labor, corporate pension programs, gold-watch retirements and charitable gifts from companies that invested heavily in their communities and the kind of research that promised future growth.” Even in the emerging Silicon Valley culture of that era, the pioneering tech company Hewlett-Packard espoused “the HP Way,” which codified a deep commitment to employees and society at large. All that changed in the go-go, deal-focused business era of the 1970s and 1980s. As often cited this week, the guiding manifesto was a 1970 essay in the New York Times by the influential free-market economist Milton Friedman, who argued that corporations should focus purely on delivering value to shareholders. “What does it mean to say that ‘business’ has responsibilities? Businessmen who talk this way are unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society these past decades,” he wrote. However, after several decades during which shareholders and corporate chieftains thrived while workers fell behind, some forward-looking business leaders started sounding alarms that the system of shareholders-above-all was not sustainable. More than a decade ago, at the 2008 World Economic Forum in Davos, Bill Gates called for a new “creative capitalism” that would have “a twin mission: making profits and also improving lives for those who don’t fully benefit from market forces.” In his Fortune piece, Murray ticks off a progression of business leaders calling for a new system, from Whole Foods cofounder John Mackey propounding “conscious capitalism” to Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff writing a book on “compassionate capitalism.” More recently, Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest money-management firm (to the tune of almost $7 trillion), has been issuing annual letters imploring CEOs to put purpose on the same footing as profits. “Purpose unifies management, employees, and communities. It drives ethical behavior and creates an essential check on actions that go against the best interests of stakeholders,” he wrote in his 2019 letter. Well before the new approach was itemized in this week’s declaration, many CEOs have been acting as if guided by a new code. CEOs have spoken out on issues ranging from discrimination to gun safety to immigration. Corporations including Google and Microsoft have made major financial commitments to respond to housing shortages in their home regions. “In the past few years, it has become clear to met that something fundamental and profound has changed in the way they approach their jobs,” observed Murray. To be sure, the Roundtable’s new statement of purpose met plenty of skepticism from many camps, who variously found it appallingly late in arriving, or frustratingly vague, or a transparent attempt to pre-empt the politics of reformers like Sanders and Warren. “They’re responding to something in the zeitgeist,” Nancy Koehn, a historian at Harvard Business School, told the Times. “It’s an open question whether any of these companies will change the way they do business.” Sanders and Warren adopted a show-me attitude. “I don’t believe what they’re saying for a moment, said Sanders. “If they were sincere, they would talk about raising the minimum wage in this country to a living wage.” Said Warren in a statement: “Without real action, it’s meaningless.” For journalists reporting on the Roundtable statement, the go-to skeptic was Anand Giridharadas, author of the bestselling Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World. In his view, all the corporate do-gooding is just for show unless companies (and elected officials) take stock of the real impact of their businesses on society. For example, when companies lobby the government on behalf of practices that promote economic inequality or pollute the environment, it may be “overruling the good effect you’re having on the world, maybe by the factor of a thousand,” Giridharadas said in June at a From Day One conference in Brooklyn, observing the increasingly contrite CEO class. Also scoffing loudly at the Roundtable’s declaration, but from another angle, was the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, which saw the new code as an abandonment of shareholders. The CEOs “know they are political targets,” the editors wrote. “The CEOs no doubt want to get out in front of this by showing what splendid corporate citizens they are. Yet these CEOs are fooling themselves if they think this new rhetoric will buy off Ms. Warren and the socialist left. It may even embolden them…” All of which seems likely to bring the role of big business into the thick of the political debate in the coming election year. Wrote Sorkin: “The fight for corporate identity is just beginning.” Steve Koepp is a co-founder of From Day One. Previously, he was editorial director of Time Inc. Books, executive editor of Fortune and deputy managing editor of Time

Stephen Koepp | August 20, 2019

Can Employees Actually Be Too Engaged in Their Work?

“Employee engagement” has become a mantra in Corporate America, for the most part signaling a healthy desire for their employees to feel fulfilled in their work—and thus productive too. But is there a point where this virtue becomes a vice? New academic research suggests that employees who become too devoted to the job can start to exhibit negative qualities. Among them: having unrealistic expectations of their co-workers, showing a disregard for rules and regulations, and having problems in their personal lives, reports journalist Alina Dizik in the Wall Street Journal. “Deeply engaged employees who become more difficult to manage can be overly demanding of superiors and become suspicious of their intentions, says Stuart Bunderson, professor of organizational ethics and governance at Washington University in St. Louis,” writes Dizik. “When Prof. Bunderson first started looking at how zookeepers derived meaning from their work, for example, he learned that many tend to look at their job as a calling. That, in turn, made them tougher to manage than less-engaged employees. They also expected more from those above them. The zookeepers objected to placing a carousel at the zoo, for instance, because they saw it as trivializing the zoo’s mission, until it was repositioned to promote conservation, Prof. Bunderson found.” The issue is relevant at a time when employee burnout has been recognized as a rising problem and hustle culture, particularly among millennial workers in the tech industry, has come under attack as unsustainable. The issue: at what point does having a moral purpose on the job go too far, to the point of workers losing perspective? “There’s no such thing as acceptable compromises or good enough when things are framed in moral terms,” said Prof. Bunderson. What can companies do to foster moderation? Some of the proposed solutions from researchers may raise eyebrows among human-resources executives.  Companies have come to believe that corporate social responsibility (CSR) and volunteerism are valuable tools for employee recruiting and retention, but some researchers on employee engagement think companies should lighten up on such programs. Instead, businesses should focus on the less-engaged employees rather than pushing programs across the board, Tomas Chamorro, chief talent scientist at staffing agency ManpowerGroup, told the Journal. “We still want them to be engaged, but moderately engaged,” he said. “A certain degree of dissatisfaction is very positive.”

fromdayone | August 16, 2019

After a Year of Setbacks, the Ranks of Women CEOs Are Growing Again

In Corporate America, the glass ceiling is cracking a bit more this year. The number of Fortune 500 companies with female CEOs had been steadily rising over two decades, until slipping backward last year, to just 24. But now a new record has been set, thanks to the appointment of Heyward Donigan as CEO of Pennsylvania-based Rite Aid, the third-largest U.S. drugstore chain. That brings the total to 36, says Fortune. Donigan, 58, had been CEO of Sapphire Digital, a platform for analyzing the differences in health-care plans. She joins several other women ascending to the top job in recent months. AutoNation, the Florida-based car retailer, last month named Cheryl Miller, 47, as its first-ever female CEO, a promotion from her previous role as CFO. In April, Minnesota-based Best Buy named Corie Barry, 44, to the top spot at the giant retailer; she too had previously served as CFO. However, Donigan’s new gig at Rite Aid “isn’t all popping champagne corks. Indeed, there’s plenty about it that screams ‘glass cliff!,’” wrote Fortune’s Kristen Bellstrom in the publication’s Broad Sheet newsletter, referring to the perception that women are often appointed to leadership roles when the situation is dire and the risk of failure is high. Marissa Mayer’s tenure at Yahoo comes to mind. Heyward Donigan, the new CEO of Rite Aid (Photo courtesy of Rite Aid) “Rite Aid has struggled mightily in recent years, as this Wall Street Journal story details,” wrote Bellstrom. “The company sold roughly half its stores to competitor Walgreens after regulators blocked a 2017 merger between the two. Then a deal to merge with grocery chain Albertsons fell apart, prompting the announcement that [Donigan’s predecessor John Standley] would step down and that the company would cut 400 corporate jobs. Since then, Rite Aid has seen its market share erode and its shares crater—the stock is down more than 50% this year.” But Donigan is undaunted. “I recognized the opportunity to really revitalize Rite Aid,” she told the Wall Street Journal. “It’s not just taking a hammer to the business. I have a strong point of view that pharmacies will continue to be physical,” suggesting that reports of the death of brick-and-mortar stores has been greatly exaggerated.  

fromdayone | August 15, 2019

The Disability Equality Index: How Companies Are Using It to Foster Diversity

When companies work to build diversity into their work teams, they tend to focus on gender, race, and sexual orientation, but there’s an identity category that’s often left out of crucial conversations about an inclusive workforce: disability. When disability is mentioned in the same breath as other kinds of diversity, it often comes as a surprise. But that could be changing. New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli—who’s also the sole trustee of the $213.2 billion New York State Common Retirement Fund, the third largest public pension fund in the U.S.—made waves earlier this year when he called on 49 major corporations to participate in the Disability Equality Index (DEI) as a barometer of their disability inclusion practices and policies.  The DEI, piloted in 2014, is a comprehensive disability-inclusion benchmarking tool that serves 180 companies and counting. Participating companies self-report disability policies and practices, which are then scored on a scale of 0 to 100—the top number representing the most inclusive score. The index is a joint project between a national nonprofit, Disability:IN, and the American Association of People with Disabilities (AAPD).  In his letter to top executives at such companies as 21st Century Fox, Nike, Apple and McDonald’s, DiNapoli wrote, “Studies have shown that businesses that commit to disability inclusion outperform their peers. Companies should seize the opportunity to join the growing number of corporations that recognize the benefits of disability inclusion and are reporting their efforts.” He urged companies to adopt the DEI as a barometer of their success thus far in terms of enabling and empowering their existing and future disabled employees.  Like DiNapoli, Disability:IN CEO Jill Houghton emphasizes that there’s not just an ethical case for disability inclusion, there’s also a business case. A recent report from Accenture, in partnership with Disability:IN and the AAPD, suggests that adopting more inclusive practices when it comes to disability in the workforce could improve a company’s bottom line.  The 45 companies in the study that were identified as highly engaged in best practices in terms of disability employment, inclusion and retention had “28% higher revenue, double the net income, and 30% higher economic profit margins than their peers” on average over the report’s four years of data. Moreover, “The Accenture research demonstrated that companies that participated in the Disability Equality Index and improved their score over time were four times more likely to have total shareholder returns that outperformed their peers,” said Houghton.   The report also found that there are stark disparities still at work when it comes to disabled applicants. Only about 29% of working-age individuals in the U.S. with disabilities participate in the workforce, compared with 75% of the nondisabled working-age population. This large swath of unemployed disabled individuals represents a diverse, untapped resource that companies can draw from to reach their goals.  What’s more: Disabled people make up about a fifth of the U.S. population, so it’s very likely that your work team already has multiple disabled members. “Seventy percent of us have disabilities that you can’t see, including myself. I have a learning disability,” said Houghton. This means that disability inclusion at work isn’t just about achieving greater accessibility or recruiting more employees with disabilities, but about creating workplaces where employees feel free to live authentically, she said.  “As we work with our partners, we see countless stories where people come out and say, hey, I’m a senior leader and I’ve led a large team for years, and I have multiple sclerosis,” Houghton said. “People have sometimes been afraid to speak their truth, but as they see their companies dig into disability inclusion, they start to tell their stories.”  To address those types of issues, the tool extends far beyond physical accessibility in the workplace, into areas like company culture, leadership, and community engagement, to create a holistic picture of what a truly welcoming workplace for people with disabilities might look like.  Backers of the DEI hope it will help integrate consideration of disability into the varied development programs within companies addressing retention, mentorship, and advancement policies. Those programs often specifically mention identity categories like race, gender, and sexual orientation, but fail to mention disability. Many businesses are already making significant moves towards greater disability inclusion. Companies already scoring 100% on the DEI include AT&T, Bank of America, Microsoft, and Walgreens, among many others. Houghton emphasizes that the index is not meant to be used as a tool for judgment but for empowerment. “It’s really there to help businesses celebrate their accomplishments and identify opportunities for improvement when it comes to disability inclusion,” she explained. So, how can companies become more welcoming to disabled applicants and existing employees today? Houghton suggests that companies start by making it clear that accommodations are available for those with disabilities. “In the Disability Equality Index, only 44% of the companies who responded made applicants aware that they could request accommodations during the application process,” she said.  Accessible tools and language that includes disability are also key components to add to  a company’s disability-inclusion playbook. “Utilize accessible tools. If you’re attracting your talent online and you’re not using accessible tools, you’re missing us. In your company diversity-and- inclusion statement, include disability alongside other identities. It’s often left out.” Feedback from businesses using the DEI has been primarily positive, says Houghton. In fact, many teams have started to come together around shared experiences of disability in ways they never expected.  “We hear time and time again that the Disability Equality Index created an opportunity for businesses to pull together across cross-functional teams to look at disability across the enterprise. This is not just a recruitment issue,” she said. “When talent with disability is included and welcomed, productivity increases, teams excel, and you’re ultimately going to develop more innovative and accessible products and services.” Laura Dorwart is a writer with bylines at HuffPost, VICE, Forbes, The New York Times, The Guardian, SELF, The Week, BuzzFeed, and others. She has a Ph.D. from UCSD, an MFA from Antioch University, and a B.A. from Barnard College. Follow her work at www.lauradorwart.com or on Twitter at @laurawritesit.

lauradorwart | August 14, 2019

She Leads: How Women Can Overcome Stubborn Obstacles in Business

At the center of She Leads, a panel discussion on fresh ways to support women in business, is a paradox. Women have essentially achieved parity with men in joining the workforce, representing 48% of employees in entry-level jobs, yet only about one in five C-suite leaders is a woman—and only one in 25 is a woman of color, according to the benchmark McKinsey study, Women in the Workplace. Despite all the progress, the impediments to advancement persist. “We’re here on a panel talking about our experiences as women, while men get to go on panels talking about what they do for a living, which is really good for their careers,” says Alexandra Cavoulacos, co-founder and president of The Muse, a platform to help next-gen workers research corporations and careers. Cavoulacos likens the issue to those faced by people of color, who typically are expected to talk about their experiences as minorities when it comes to diversity in the workplace, when they might have benefitted more from an opportunity to talk about their actual work performance. The opposite of this identity-focused discourse holds true as well. Hearing phrasings such as “things will be better when there are more women-led companies,” does sound well-natured and hopeful, but it carries its own issues. “It means that women are inherently responsible for fixing problems,” says Jenny Chiu, vice president of marketing for Maven, a digital clinic dedicated to women’s health. “Telling women, ‘Once you have the power, you can make this better,’ is completely crazy in an upside-down way and it removes any responsibility from non-women.” The stubborn disparities in how men and women are treated in business, and how to push back and work around them, was the focus of the panel at the From Day One conference in Brooklyn last month, moderated by journalist Sage Lazzaro. Among the takeaways: Make a Leap of Faith It never hurts to be a little bolder than one’s regular baseline, whether it means applying for a job or starting a business. Cavoulacos recalls wanting to start her own business, but being quite hesitant to leave out of loyalty to her boss. “Go do it and if it fails, call me, but go,” her boss responded, and Cavoulacos heeded their advice. In interviews, female candidates are often asked about what they have already accomplished, said Cavoulacos, “versus what is the vision” Similarly, Susan McPherson of McPherson Strategies, a consultancy focused on corporate responsibility, claims that she owes her success to her lack of fear. It all goes back, she said, to when she was young and her father told her, “Nothing is a prison sentence, except for a real prison sentence.” Assertiveness also comes in handy when dealing with senior figures. “No matter how senior someone you’re on the phone with is, they’re just another human being, so there’s no need to feel and act differently,” said Stacey Olive, vice president of talent acquisition for the New York Times. “Just speak fearlessly.” (Try) to Vanquish Unconscious Bias When it comes to job hunting, many women will see a job description with a laundry list of required skills and focus on the ones they don’t have, while men do the opposite, said Cavoulacos. “Every time you’re adding a bullet point to the [required] qualifications, you’re narrowing your pool of women,” she said, observing that men have no problem applying to a job if they meet five out of ten of the criteria, while women tend to do that when they have at least an 80% match in requirements. While women applicants may be overly humble, interviewers often judge them that way as well, barely getting past their first names. “What we do in in our team is to black out the names when we’re looking at CVs and resumes, so that we don’t go into any pre-conceived notions,” says McPherson. Made it to the interview rounds? Unfortunately, women are typically evaluated on prior experiences, while men are evaluated based on their potential. “Our questions are often about the past, about what we have accomplished and how we can replicate that, versus what is the vision,” says Cavoulacos. “Thing is, we would be excited to talk about the vision.” Cavoulacos suggests changing the performance-review scale, in which managers tend to pick out superstars, who wind up typically being men. “On a scale of 1-10, men are much more likely to get 10s than women. On a scale of 1-6, the gap lessens. By narrowing that, you’re actually giving other people a chance to be seen.” Child Care Is Teamwork Forty-three percent of women drop out of the workforce or significantly reduce their workload when they start a family, so when Chiu and her husband were planning for a baby, she noticed that the conversation focused a lot on the implications for her job, rather than his. “When are you telling your boss that you’re pregnant?,” he asked. “Why is the conversation always about me?” she retorted. “When are you going to tell your boss?” Don’t take your childcare provider for granted, advised Olive. When she was pregnant with her first child, she was really anxious: could she do both? Her boss told her, “What you can do, if you want to make this work, is find amazing childcare and treat that childcare provider really, really, really well,” Olive recalled. “I’ve had the same babysitter for 14 years. We’re thinking of transitioning out, but she’s part of the family. If you’re thinking of having a child, whether you’re the father or the mother, treat your childcare really, really well. Don’t be an ass---- to them.” Sometimes, The Effort Can Be Clumsy Good intentions do not always breed good results. At one of Chiu’s old jobs, there was once an eager push for diversity and inclusion, and her team was gathered in a room to help tackle the matter. “They had us go through our LinkedIn networks and submit contacts that we had that we thought could fit the ‘diversity inclusion’ role,” she recalls “When I was sitting in the room going through my contacts, I felt that it was so awkward. It was almost like racial profiling. How am I supposed to know if they’re experienced on the topic?” How to voice criticism to genuine effort, though? “Every company has to tackle their inclusion effort in a way that they feel sort of works for them,” says McPherson. “There’s no wrong or right answer, but the leadership of an organization needs to be held to account for what they are or are not doing. Don’t shy away from criticizing your directors, executive, or CEO for a lack of progress.” “Involve employees in decision-making progress,” is Olive’s advice, which comes from working at the Times, known for their activist employee base. However, it needs to be a targeted effort. Added Cavoulacos: “Ask better questions: What is the progress? When will we get the next update?” Angelica Frey is a writer and a translator based in Milan and Brooklyn

Angelica Frey | July 31, 2019

Facebook Will Pay a $5 Billion Fine, While Big Tech Gets Antitrust Scrutiny

At $5 billion, it’s the largest fine in U.S. history for a privacy violation—and it comes with an increased burden of government scrutiny for the next two decades. In the settlement between the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Facebook, announced Wednesday after 16 months of investigation, the agency delivered a “stunning rebuke” to the social network as a repeat offender, as the Washington Post described it. “Despite repeated promises to its billions of users worldwide that they could control how their personal information is shared, Facebook undermined consumers’ choices,” FTC chairman Joe Simons said in a statement. Facebook’s general counsel, Colin Stretch, said the settlement would “mark a sharper turn toward privacy, on a different scale than anything we’ve done in the past.” In going after Facebook, the FTC accused the company of violating a consent decree it had struck with the agency in 2011, when Facebook promised to improve its privacy protections. After several more recent mishaps, most notably when the political consultancy Cambridge Analytica obtained personal data on 87 million Facebook users, the FTC renewed its pursuit of tougher consumer safeguards. Even with this new agreement, however, critics of the deal feel that Facebook got off lightly. The company didn’t have to admit guilt, its founder Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t singled out for rebuke in the settlement, and the deal doesn’t really challenge Facebook’s business model for monetizing its users’ information, critics said. The two Democrats on the FTC panel both voted to reject the deal, with member Rebecca Kelly Slaughter arguing that the FTC should have gone to court to pursue tougher fines and conditions, rather than settling. The decision comes at a time when America’s dominant tech platforms—in particular Amazon, Facebook and Google—have gone from being revered as economic superstars to serving as popular political targets. “Only Big Tech could bring together [Attorney General] Bill Barr and Elizabeth Warren,” declared CNBC. The companies are “politically caught in the crosshairs,” Brian Yacktman, founder of YCG Investments, told the network. “What’s bipartisan is that people are concerned about companies having too much power and too much control over data so they want regulation.” In a Presidential campaign season, the debate is broadly over how to curb that power, whether it’s by regulating the companies through new legislation, or by pursuing antitrust action to limit their powers. On the same day the FTC announced its Facebook action, Barr’s Justice Department opened a major antitrust investigation of the big tech companies to find out “whether their online platforms have hurt competition, suppressed innovation or otherwise harmed consumers,” the Associated Press reported. “Without the discipline of meaningful market-based competition, digital platforms may act in ways that are not responsible to consumer demands,” the department’s chief antitrust officer, Makan Delrahim, said in a statement. The backlash against corporate invasion of privacy is happening not only at the federal level, but locally as well. The New York City Council, for example, is considering a bill to ban the sale of cellphone-location data. “The bill, which was introduced on Tuesday, would make it illegal for cellphone companies and mobile app developers to share location data gathered while a customer’s mobile device is within the five boroughs,” the New York Times reported. “Cellphone companies and mobile apps collect detailed geolocation data of their users and then sell that information to legitimate companies such as digital marketers, roadside emergency assistance services, retail advertisers, hedge funds or—in the case of a class-action lawsuit filed against AT&T—bounty hunters.” New York would be the first city to impose such a ban.

fromdayone | July 25, 2019

Facial Recognition: for Business and Society, What Is the Promise and Peril?

Facial recognition: those two words can conjure up extremes in our imagination. One is a future where your specific smile will effortlessly open doors and devices for you. The other is where your every movement is tracked by cameras, with the data routed to unknown companies—and authorities. In an increasingly connected world, facial-recognition software could potentially supercharge the rise of surveillance capitalism, in which our words and actions are harvested to feed the algorithms of advertising and marketing. As a result, it represents one of the next great debates about technology and privacy. In other words: now that iPhones can open by scanning your face, imagine what comes next. Corporations have clearly taken notice of the opportunities, charging full steam ahead with software that will monitor and influence our everyday interactions, both as citizens and consumers. So how can this technology be used in smart and strategic ways, with benefits to individuals and society? And what are the insidious risks? Those questions were up for debate Wednesday in a panel discussion at NYU’s Center for Urban Science and Progress, organized by the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership. The most visible manifestations of the facial-recognition revolution are the security cameras bristling from our buildings and lamp posts. New York City reportedly has more than 18,000 cameras watching the city’s 8.5 million residents and tens of millions of visitors. Imagery from those cameras help the New York City Police Department (NYPD) track down alleged criminals in an “investigative-driven” format, said Assistant Chief Jason Wilcox, who works in the department’s Detective Bureau. If photographs are taken by the victim, or by a surveillance camera—say during an assault on the subway— the department will try to match the facial features with photos already in the NYPD’s massive database from prior arrests. “When they [run] the technology, and get a match, and it comes back to a person that has been arrested,” he explained, it’s a lead to be used in building a case, but not yet probably cause for arrest. “So we give it back to the investigator we got it from, and now we say, ‘Okay, now you have to go do your work, and make a proper identification, and make an arrest.’” Speakers at the panel discussion in Brooklyn, moderated by Tyler Woods, at far right (Photo courtesy of Downtown Brooklyn Partnership) Wilcox asserted that the department does not use cameras en masse, a la Minority Report, to pinpoint who is wanted on the streets of New York City. A reason to investigate must first be in place, before the department activates the software. (Research has found that the technology has allowed for detectives to make at least 2,900 arrests in over five years of usage.) In terms of pro-and-con impacts, “The bottom-line pro, the way we apply it, is to make New York City safer. And we do it fairly, and responsibly,” Wilcox said. “The cons, the concerns, are the things that we steer away from: the mass viewing, the people walking down the street, trying to identify, profiling, or anything like that. That is not what we use it for." With this in mind, Noah Levenson, an artist and technologist in residence at the Mozilla Foundation, said the software has dramatic implications for the future of marketing. “Smart ads” have already popped up in Europe, he said. People passing a billboard in Oslo, Norway, were scanned to identify their gender; women were shown a salad, while men were shown a sausage pizza. But it goes beyond merely identification: emotion recognition, he said, is the next frontier for researchers, and companies. “So is this person happy? Are they angry? Are they drunk? Are they on illegal drugs? Are they mentally ill? Will we eventually be able to learn something about the human face such that we can predict when someone's about to commit a crime, without knowing anything else about them?” he asked. “These are some of the things that are coming next. And I mostly look at how this stuff is going to wind up in consumer products, and household applications.” Levenson cited Snapchat as an example. In 2018, the social-media platform’s patent was approved by the U.S. government to use facial recognition software in detecting mood at certain places. What does that mean for users? That out of the bazillions of selfies taken per day, Snapchat will soon be able to match your expression to your geolocation, thereby understanding how you feel at a particular place and time. “Then they're going to sell that data to the organizers of public events, concert promoters, or organizers of political rallies, talks, meetups,” he said. “And whoever else, we don't know.” And this software can be used on the backend of capitalism, too, Levenson said. Major companies like Unilever and Goldman Sachs have begun to incorporate facial recognition software into employee recruitment. By analyzing features like body language, tone, and key words that the company can enter into the system, AI can help do the work of finding the “ideal candidate,” goes the thinking. But, of course, all this potential is not without peril, according to those who worry about the technology overstepping its bounds. Jonathan Stribling-Uss, a technologist fellow at the New York City chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), flagged particular worries that his organization had with the dragnet capabilities of the NYPD and other government agencies. He mentioned a recent story about how the police put a photo of Woody Harrelson through its software to track a suspected beer thief, after the fuzzy security-camera photo came up with no match, but to human eyes the suspect looked a lot like the actor. (Wilcox contended that this was not standard protocol.) In the future, would the faces of an audience like the one at Wednesday’s panel discussion be scanned to find out names, addresses—and emotions? (Photo courtesy of Downtown Brooklyn Partnership) “I think it's important for people to understand that this is something that's happening right now,” Stribling-Uss said. He then asked the audience to raise their hand if they were taught not to give out their name to strangers when they were children. “Unfortunately that's what facial recognition dragnets do: they give out name and address by default ... and this is what we're seeing happening with law enforcement.” This concern, he said, has led to bans of facial recognition software in such cities as Oakland, Calif., and Somerville, Mass. Stribling-Uss said the scenarios that keeps privacy advocates up at night is something akin to the social-credit system arising in China, where citizens are tracked and punished with bans on travel or other activities based on social taboos they have committed, like not paying their debts. “I think we're coming closer to that,” he argued. Prospectively, “people can be tracked and banned on the basis of characteristics they can't change.” Facial recognition is also not without its vulnerabilities. While machine learning is constantly improving, it’s important to be cognizant of its limitations, said Nasir Memon, a professor of computer science at NYU Tandon School of Engineering. Sure, you might be able to have your front door open for you one day, or have a coffee bought at your local cafe without pulling out your wallet, but things can go wrong. Memon outlined four ways that pattern recognition—which is what the software ultimately is, he said—can be hacked: through a mask, or spoofed appearance; through understanding the model’s loopholes; through a picture; or through a “master face,” like the universal key that has been used to fool fingerprint-scanning software, he said. “So what has to counter all of these possibilities? And they'll always be there: security is a cat-and-mouse game,” he explained. “But the danger, I think, is to anonymity.” A citizen should have the right to stay anonymous, if they choose to, said Memon, whether it’s Snapchat scanning our selfies for marketing purposes, or governments using cameras for surveillance purposes. Without that ability, dissent can be discouraged, he added, which harms the health of one’s freedom and society overall. “It's how we evolve our society,” he said. “And if everybody is recognized everywhere all the time, you have a problem.” John Surico is a freelance journalist and researcher, based in New York City. His reporting has appeared in the New York Times, VICE, and a number of other local and national publications    

johnsurico | July 25, 2019

With a Community of 50,000 Women, This Founder Is Taking on Sexism in Tech

Welcome to She Leads, a series digging into the good, the bad, and the ugly of being a woman in business. In each piece, we’ll chat with a different founder about her experiences, the issues women face in business, and how they’re powering through in the face of adversity. When Allison Esposito Medina gathered 20 women working in tech to chat about their experiences in the industry, she had no idea the group would quickly grow to 100, then 1,000, then in just three years 50,000. Revelations from that first meeting make clear why it did.  “I started to realize that the same things I was experiencing were happening to all of them, too,” she told From Day One. “And that was really validating and really useful, so we naturally just kept growing out of that meet up.” It turned out they’d all experienced workplace sexism, harassment, gendered microaggressions, and the like. They’d all wondered, “Am I making this up?” And working in a male-dominated industry, they’d all been without a place to turn for support, guidance, and camaraderie.  Esposito Medina eventually stopped working for tech companies to start her own — one dedicated to supporting women (trans and non-binary included) in the industry and making the infamously male-dominated field not just more diverse, but more inclusive as well. In 2016, she officially launched Tech Ladies, which operates both as a global community for women in tech and a job board matching some of the world’s biggest tech companies to diverse hires. Members have landed jobs at Samsung, PayPal, Slack, Square, Adobe, Trello, and Etsy, among others. They have access to Tech Ladies resources and events, like webinars and workshops co-hosted with companies like BuzzFeed. And on the daily, Tech Ladies provides women a community platform for discussing issues, asking for advice, celebrating achievements, and navigating their careers for success.   We chatted with Esposito Medina to learn more about Tech Ladies, community building, and how companies can be more inclusive: What experiences did you find were common among those first women you met up with that inspired you to grow this community? Everything from the big issues you hear about (like being paid less than men) to workplace microaggressions—everyone was struggling with the same things. It became clear that gathering everybody together is one way of solving these issues. Being able to read about what other people are going through and having that sense of camaraderie is a huge step.  "You can hire in a very diverse way, fill up a room, and just expect it to take care of itself, but it will not. You have to make sure that people are protected and that their contributions are taken seriously," Esposito Medina said. What’s an example of how Tech Ladies members swap information and support? One thing we do is our anonymous #HELPASISTEROUT hashtag, which invites people to email us so we can anonymize their question and share it with the group. That’s been really great because if you’re having issues with your boss, for example, you’d never want to put it out publicly.  The comments on those threads contain so much wisdom and help from everybody that it’s been really surprising to me to see how willing strangers are to give their time and expertise. It really gives you faith in humanity. People write us back saying, ‘Reading the responses gave me the strength and skills I needed to ask for more money at work and I got it.’ Or in a really toxic situation, ‘I realized it wasn’t just me. It was toxic, and I left and I found a new job.’ It’s actually having an impact on people’s lives. And why do women need a community like this? What we hear so often is ‘I’m the only woman,’ ‘I’m the only person of color,’ or ‘I’m the only non-binary person,” either on a team or at an entire company. It’s just really nice to have a place where you’re not the only one. A place where you can bounce questions and ideas off people who come across the same issues you do. Just having that kind of connection is really powerful. It’s been really cool to see it grow because the more people who join, the more voices and perspectives we have. Some people say that women-only groups and environments are counterproductive to inclusion. What are your thoughts on that? I think that’s one of those things where I hope it will be true someday. And it will be true when things are more equal. But the reason I don’t think it’s true now is because the reality is that we see so many people who don’t have any camaraderie because they’re the only woman at work — especially at tech companies and in engineering roles.  I think you also need a network with men in it, too. But I feel it’s easier for that to happen naturally, because most of the people you’re going to work with and forge relationships with—your bosses,  mentors, and mentees—are probably going to be men in this industry anyways. I have tons of men in my circle who help me with so much. But I also think it’s nice to have a space for women and non-binary people because it can feel a little bit safer, especially around in-person events and networking. Or if you’re going to be vulnerable in an online community and post, you might feel more comfortable doing that with people who understand where you’re coming from. That’s why I think it’s still really valuable.  What steps can companies take to create work environments that are not just more diverse, but also more inclusive?  That’s such a good question because you can hire in a very diverse way, fill up a room, and just expect it to take care of itself, but it will not. You have to make sure that people are protected and that their contributions are taken seriously. You need to look at whether you’re structuring meetings so that everybody’s voice is heard. You need to truly take action to make pay and raises fair. You need to be transparent about your growth, so people don’t feel like they’re the outliers and the only one for too long. Do you have a great maternity and paternity policy? Do you have policies that help people who are trans? Even if you’ve never had a trans person on your team, start thinking about it. If you don’t have a pregnant person on your team yet, what happens when you do? It’s very easy for companies to just wait until these issues pop up and then try to figure them out, but that’s where a lot of people get into trouble. Figure it out as early as you can.  The one thing we tell companies that seems so common sense to us, but always seems to blow their minds, is to just sit down and have one meeting to talk about ways to be inclusive. I’m not talking about having one meeting and never implementing any of it, but there are so many simple things. Make the bathroom for all genders. Hire an HR person, even freelance if you’re not making much money yet. There are online tools for anonymous feedback. Every company can do that for free. Just set yourself up to be receptive to change in small ways, build up a culture of inclusion, and stay committed to it.  This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Sage Lazzaro is a NYC-based journalist covering diversity, inclusion, and social justice across tech, business, and politics. Her work has appeared in Refinery29, VICE, Medium, The New York Observer, and more. Follow her on Twitter here.

sagelazzaro | July 22, 2019

Airbnb Open Homes: A Tourism Platform Becomes a Disaster-relief Network

When a 7.1-magnitude earthquake bucked through the Mexican states of Puebla and Morelos on Sept. 19, 2017, it caused the walls and foundations of schools, apartments and offices a hundred miles away in Mexico City to tremble and, in some cases, topple. Residents watched the buildings teeter and knew they needed to leave immediately. Thousands of miles away, alerts flickered on in the security-response offices of Airbnb, which now operates three hubs—Annapolis, Md; Capetown, South Africa; and Singapore—to monitor intelligence reports of global disasters. As news reports of the Puebla earthquake rolled in, the disaster-response team deployed a process they call “hitting the button,” activating the Airbnb Open Homes network. The home-sharing tourism company, usually aimed at helping visitors enjoy a weekend away, had converted its infrastructure into an evacuee-housing network. Across Mexico City, Airbnb hosts received the Open Homes alert, letting them know they were near the disaster zone and asking them if they’d like to volunteer to shelter evacuees from the earthquake. About14,500 hosts and guests received the notification, enabling communication for those trying to find temporary housing outside the rubble of the catastrophe zone. It was the first time the Open Homes network had been activated in Mexico. Eighty one hosts signed up to house evacuees. Kellie Bentz, head of Airbnb's disaster-relief efforts. Kellie Bentz pilots these relief efforts for Airbnb, using the platform’s infrastructure to connect hosts who want to help people in need. “In a disaster, there is a 72-hour window when media is super high and people are trying to take action,” Bentz told From Day One. “This falls into the bucket of donating in kind, which is volunteering your time and space.” To date, Airbnb Open Homes has helped people from 61 countries and housed nearly 25,000 people. The seeds of the Open Homes program were planted in the wake of Hurricane Sandy in 2012, when Brooklyn-based Michelle (“Shell”) Martinez invited neighbors from flood-damaged New York City neighborhoods including Dumbo, the Rockaways,and the Lower East Side, to camp out in her 6,000-sq.-ft. loft on higher ground. Airbnb sent out an urgent notification about the offer to its network in Brooklyn, and soon it was Martinez’s email inbox that flooded. “Half of it was other hosts saying, ‘How do we do this? My house is empty too,’” recalls Shell (who has since used the Airbnb platform in controversial ways). As wave after wave of storm refugees navigated dark streets to arrive at Martinez’s apartment, Airbnb engineers in San Francisco worked around the clock to recode the platform for something it had never done before: make apartments available for free to those in need. The impromptu program that lodged 20 storm refugees and FEMA workers on day beds in Martinez’s apartment has since grown into Airbnb’s multi-country disaster-response network, Open Homes, which Bentz sees as a natural pivot for social good. Bentz cut her teeth on disaster response after Hurricane Katrina, when she founded a relief program called Hands On New Orleans, and later as the leader of global-crisis management at Target. In her role at Airbnb, she expected to focus on the escalating intensity and number of climate-change-related disasters. But she has been surprised to see that the program has a part to play in other kinds of emergencies, including mass-casualty events. Her most powerful memory is of the Pulse Nightclub shooting in 2016 in Orlando. Working with JetBlue, Uber and the Florida Department of Emergency Management, Airbnb set up at the airport in Miami as friends and family of victims, mostly from the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, flew in to visit loved ones in the hospital or to recover remains. “Most people who showed up at the airport that day didn’t think about where they were going to stay. They just got on a plane,” recalls Bentz. “It’s much more than providing that roof; it’s in a moment that they need something and they don’t have to think about it.” Bentz works with other shared-economy companies like Lyft and Uber to understand how they can use their own platforms to connect people who want to help with those in need. She coaches them to make sure tech companies understand the issue before creating a solution. “The key for businesses to think about is not, ‘What is the solution I think the community needs?’ It’s what do you have to offer and where are you meeting a local need, versus trying to fit a square peg in a round hole just to do something good,” she says. The Open Homes platform has since extended beyond disaster relief to include refugees from mass- migration movements and medical stays, so families and patients can easily access hospitals that aren’t close to home. “I think it’s wonderful and amazing and I get chills,” Martinez says of how big the program has grown. “But I’m also not surprised. This is who people are: always looking for ways to contribute and ways to help each other out. If you make it available and you make it easy, then we want to do our part.” Emily Ludolph is a senior editor at 99U and an alum of TED Conferences and Vassar College. She has published in the New York Times, the Atlantic, Narratively, Artsy, 99U, Quartz, and Design Observer

emilyludolph | July 18, 2019

Equal Pay Gets Its Due on a World Stage. Is Change Any Closer?

Not since NFL players took a knee during the national anthem has a social issue got such a boost from a sporting event. When the U.S. Women’s Nation Team (USWNT) won its record fourth World Cup soccer championship on Sunday, jubilant spectators chanted not only “U-S-A” but also “Equal pay!” The U.S. team’s victory, its second consecutive World Cup, backed up their campaign for equal pay with their male counterparts by presenting another dramatic example of the pay gap having nothing to do with performance. The U.S. men’s team, in contrast, failed even to qualify for the 2018 World Cup tournament and on Sunday lost to its rival Mexico in a regional championship. In March, 28 members of the women’s team filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Soccer Federation for alleged discrimination “for substantially equal work and by denying them at least equal playing, training, and travel conditions; equal promotion of their games; equal support and development for their games; and other terms and conditions of employment equal to the [Men’s National Team].” “Critics of women’s sports have long argued that poor performance and general lack of interest are valid reasons to not pay female athletes the same as their male counterparts, but do those arguments hold up?,” asks writer Lydia Dishman in Fast Company. Not hardly, she reports. The victories speak for themselves. “As for lack of interest, according to the Wall Street Journal, U.S. women’s soccer games have generated more revenue for the USSF than U.S. men’s games over the past three years. And according to FIFA, television ratings for the women’s final shattered records both here and abroad, with 28.1 million viewers worldwide and 6.1 million in the U.S.—despite not being on during prime time.” “U.S. Soccer has welcomed the team’s success,” reported the New York Times, “even as it has challenged the players’ math, arguing that the situation is complicated by a compensation structure negotiated by each team that pays the men and women differently.” Yet the women’s team could credibly argue that they have moved the ball, not only on the playing field and in court, but also in the realm of public opinion. “I think we’re done with: Are we worth it? Should we have equal pay? Is the market the same? Yada yada,” the American midfielder Megan Rapinoe said, adding: “We—all players, every player at this World Cup—put on the most incredible show that you could ever ask for. We can’t do anything more, to impress more, to be better ambassadors, to take on more, to play better, to do anything. It’s time to move that conversation forward to the next step.” Following the World Cup victory, U.S. Soccer and the women’s team are expected to go into mediation for the lawsuit, Dishman reported. “With their win at the World Cup, the [women’s team] is hot right now, and a prompt mediation may be more beneficial for both parties than lengthy legal proceedings,” said Kathleen McLeod Caminiti, an attorney with the Pay Equity Practice Group of Fisher Phillips, a national labor and employment law firm that represents employers, in a statement. The notorious gender-pay gap, of course, isn’t confined to sports. It persists across a wide array of industries and has proven a stubborn problem to fix. “Retaining women and minorities, resolving pay gaps in compensation and increasing equity in the workplace take an unrelenting focus on structural obstacles, unconventional approaches to human resources and an uncompromising commitment to fostering a place where people want to stick around,” observed the Washington Post last month.

fromdayone | July 09, 2019

Trust: How Can Companies Earn It—and Keep It?

“Being trustworthy is about doing trustworthy things,” said Howard Sherman, CEO of Good360, an organization that has distributed about $9 billion in surplus products to people in need. Sherman’s point—that trust comes from keeping promises—may seem like something we all learned in kindergarten, but lately the leaders of several major corporations seem to have forgot the lesson. Sherman was among the speakers at the From Day One conference in Brooklyn on June 19 on a panel focused on “Building (and Rebuilding) Trust in Your Company,” at a time when trust in big organizations is on shaky ground. On the one hand, people tend to trust companies when they work with them at close range. In the 2019 Edelman Trust Barometer, a global survey, 75% of respondents said they trust “my employer” to do what is right, a higher rate than for business in general. On the other hand, trust-breaching actions by companies ranging from Boeing to Facebook to Wells Fargo have prompted rising scrutiny of corporate behavior. And Democratic Presidential candidates have seized the opportunity to turn up the heat. Building trust needs to be a core value, since “trust is incumbent to buying,” noted the panel’s moderator, Damian Slattery, vice president of marketing at Fast Company. Slattery asked the panelists what it takes to create that trust among consumers, and the speakers tended to agree that it starts within the company, with employees trusting in their own organization. Katherine Hand, global head of strategic communications on sustainability and social innovation at HP Inc. (formerly known as Hewlett-Packard), said that at a time when other technology companies have become notorious for mottos like “move fast and break things,” her company has made a virtue out of longer-term thinking. “HP is Silicon Valley’s ‘designated driver,’” Hand said. “We may not be the coolest, but we do things the right way.” “We may not be the coolest, but we do things the right way,” said HP’s Hand In HP’s case, the right way is a deliberate and coordinated effort to appeal to the side of employees and customers that wants consistency and continuity, Hand said. HP puts an abiding emphasis on diversity and inclusion, an area where Silicon Valley companies often struggle to make progress. HP is actively tackling the issue of plastic waste, including the growing concern around ocean plastic. On the day of the conference HP was issuing a Sustainable Impact Report, noting that they've upcycled about 700,000 lbs. of ocean-bound plastic in the last two and a half years. Colleen Devery, vice president of strategy for NAF, said her organization runs on trust because it relies on cooperation among leaders in education, business and communities to help high-school students—particularly from disadvantaged backgrounds—to be ready for the workplaces of the future. Devery said that their students need to develop a bond of trust with NAF employees, who operate academies within traditional high schools, before they can be expected to trust their mentors at the paid internships the company finds for them. “Kids make mistakes all the time,” Devery noted. Her organization teaches them to “own up to their mistakes and be transparent” about why things happened the way they did. The point is to teach young people accountability, and have them expect it in others, including the big organizations they will encounter in life.. Sherman, whose organization assists in the redistribution of excess goods from companies including Amazon and Walmart to non-profits, took the idea of trust a step further in suggesting that the most beneficial dynamic is what he called mutualism. In that kind of situation, “everybody in the stakeholder ecosystem benefits,” Sherman said, which “works better than altruism,” in which a participant’s motivation for doing good might not be as clear. What happens when there’s a breach of trust that tarnishes a company’s image? Hand said that it is important for companies and organizations to show that they are taking action to correct a mistake not just because they “got caught,” but because they hold a collective belief within the company that it is the right thing to do. Sherman added that difficult situations for companies can actually be good opportunities for them to build stronger relationships with their ecosystem. “The thing that makes you stand out is doing trustworthy things during challenging times. That’s the best opportunity to build trust,” he said. Devery said her organization teaches young people to “own up to their mistakes and be transparent” Some companies have succeeded in fostering trust by allying with social-media influencers. “Institutions tend to disappoint us,” Sherman observed. “Influencers are an extension of the peer-to-peer relationship, and we trust peers more than we trust institutions.” But there is risk involved. Influencers can fail when they are inauthentic or too opportunistic. A similar risk presents itself when companies take a stand on such political hot-button issues as LGBTQ rights, gun ownership and abortion. Should a company take a stand one way or the other? Will that stand cost them customers? Will it bring more in? Should it matter? “For us it’s critical to think about how it is authentic to our business,” Hand said. She advocated that companies can take a stance on a divisive issue if their stance accurately reflects past company behavior and stated goals. If the stance runs counter to that, they can risk the backlash of being viewed as opportunistic and insincere. Sherman concurred, citing the example of Dick’s Sporting Goods CEO Ed Stack, who after the Parkland high-school shootings in Florida had his stores remove all assault-style weapons from their inventory and mandated a 21-year minimum age for purchase of any firearms. The decision was controversial, but Stack maintained that the position was consistent with the company’s advocacy in favor of gun-safety measures. After all the talk of trust-building, Slattery concluded the discussion by stating that he had never met any of the participants before the panel, but now was inclined to trust them with “my children, my dog and my career.” A moment of levity, no doubt, but their candid and transparent answers to his questions must have had an influence. In fireside chats and breakout sessions following the panel, Hiren Shukla of EY talked about unlocking the talent of today through neurodiversity; Katie Coupe of BetterUp spoke about the human side of business transformation; Héber Manual Delgado-Medrano and Jenic Mantashian of BVA Nudge Unit USA conducted a workshop on simple behavioral nudges that turn intention into action; and Zac Stein of Lattice spoke about the uncomfortable art of giving feedback. Patrick Smith has written for NBC.com, the New York Daily News, and TheUptowner.org. He was a producer for the 2016 Olympics coverage at NBC Sports and a field producer for New York 1 News. He’s a graduate of Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism and has an MA in international relations from Johns Hopkins

patricksmith | July 02, 2019

What It Takes for Inclusion to Be More Than a Buzzword

At this point in the evolution of Corporate America, almost nobody questions the importance of diversity and inclusion. Studies have repeatedly shown that companies that rank in the upper quartile for gender and racial diversity are more likely to see greater returns than the industry average. Not only that, but companies with greater inclusion are linked with higher degrees of productivity and innovation. But inclusion isn’t necessarily easy to achieve. Unlike diversity, which can be measured in numbers, inclusion is less tangible. It’s partly a feeling of belonging, of one’s voice being heard. “We very much view it as everyone has an opportunity to be a valuable player of the team. But we also want to make sure that once you're on that team, you have equal access and opportunity to advance the game,” said Lauren Lopez, using a sports metaphor perhaps inspired by her role as global senior director of human resources for the National Basketball Association. Lopez was among the speakers on a panel entitled “New Frontiers of Inclusion” at the From Day One conference June 19 in Brooklyn, where the panelists explored aspects of inclusion ranging from the wage gap to technology. Among the highlights: Artificial intelligence is among the tech tools that help build a diverse workforce, said the NBA’s Lopez Inclusive Leadership Marisa Grimes, the director of inclusion and diversity at Mastercard, said that inclusion starts with leadership. Employees who step into leadership roles must see inclusion as yet another skill set to craft, just like building business acumen and executive presence. “When we talk about what an inclusive leader looks like, we think about it in terms of someone who can build and maintain diverse teams,” Grimes said. “That's something that all of our leaders need to be able to do.” To foster that growth, Grimes said her team has begun embedding inclusion in the leadership-development program. It has also trickled down into hiring practices. “We look for things like people who are intellectually curious; people who have an open mindset; people who demonstrate that they have self-awareness.” IQ and EQ, she said, are as important as “DQ,” or a “decency quotient.” “Again, we see this as a muscle that needs to be exercised. It needs to be developed, and it needs to be maintained,” she added. Jazmine Boatman, the general manager of New York operations at DDI, a leadership consulting firm, said that inclusion means “a leader who brings out the best in people.” That, she explained, is someone who creates a work environment where perspectives and feedback are welcome. With that in mind, her firm, which specializes in talent management, focuses on interpersonal and communication skills. In hiring, leaders need to beware of “Mini-Me syndrome,” she said, in which recruiters look for people who went to the same school, for example, or have the same work experience. “When we think about, from a business perspective, what we're competing against,” she said, “we're going to need more variety of perspectives in order to understand our customers, who ideally are getting more and more diverse.” Equal Access to Benefits For Tammy Sun, the co-founder of Carrot, a startup which helps companies develop fertility plans for employees, the service itself—accessing fertility care—informs her idea of inclusion. “For us, we think about ‘What does the modern workplace mean?’ and ‘What does the future of work mean when we think about families and how we define families?’” That has inspired training in health care and fertility care for transgender clients, Sun said, and thinking about how different countries can perceive fertility care. “We think about inclusion from the perspective of equal access for everyone for fertility care,” she said. “In our world, we built a platform and program to try to offer that access.” Emma Hinchliffe, an associate editor at Fortune who moderated the panel, asked Sun about her perspective as a company founder. “What are the challenges of working on inclusion at a smaller company versus a large global company?” she asked. Carrot was launched with an inclusive nature, Sun said. More than half of the employees are female, and her co-founders are both male and female, from different work backgrounds. With a smaller size, the company is nimble in identifying issues—and trying to fix them. “Because of the way we operate the business and the leadership styles that are brought to the table, we have seen our company grow in a very diverse and interesting way across every single sector: age, sexual orientation, gender,” she said. In hiring, Mastercard looks for “people who are intellectually curious; people who have an open mindset,” said Grimes Tech for Inclusion Increasingly, new tech tools have emerged to help companies foster more inclusion in their workplaces. At the NBA, artificial intelligence has made strides in the recruitment space, with better systems to eliminate hiring biases by covering up last names on applications, and singling out skill sets and experiences needed to do a specific job. “I'm really supportive of that, not only as someone who has recruited for years, but also a Latina female, who has had similar struggles in terms of getting interviews, or applying to roles and not hearing back,” she said. “It's important [for recruiters] to be able to stick to what you need to know.” Lopez said that when her job was focused on recruiting talent, she placed less emphasis on formal education, and more on life experience. Utilizing AI to foster that approach, she said, is a huge help. At DDI, Boatman said her team is exploring virtual reality as a way to expose employees to situations they may not be familiar with. “You can put yourself in the experience of someone who is excluded from a meeting, where you're not being heard, people keep talking over you, and there's verbal and non-verbal cues,” she said. “You're actually at the table as that person, and see that experience.” The reactions afterward, she said, have been “really powerful.” They help break down barriers for people who may have trouble understanding inclusion as an abstract concept. “Everyone had a similar experience, so we can talk about how that made you feel,” she said. The Wage Gap Hinchliffe asked the panelists how the gender wage gap intersects with inclusion. Sun said that a benefit like fertility care becomes part of the wage gap, “when you think about who has access and who doesn't,” she said. “If you don't have that access at work as a fundamental part of your health-care coverage, that means that you are paying for it somewhere else.” Sun said she had to pay $40,000 herself to freeze her eggs—an experience that inspired her to start Carrot. The NBA’s Lopez said she hopes that going forward, employers focus more on the entire life cycle of an employee. If companies want their employees to be more worldly and a valuable team asset, she said, they have to think about student loan debt that may be preventing employees from traveling. Or paying for quality day care, she added, so employees can show up “with a clear mind day-to-day to do your job.” “Those are the things that I think are extremely important for inclusion,” she concluded. When companies leave them out of the picture, “they lead to the inequality we see in work.” In a following session, Ellie Bertani, senior director of learning strategy and innovation for Walmart, talked with Rachel Carlson, CEO of Guild Education, about how companies like Walmart are combating the student-debt crisis with new education programs. John Surico is a freelance journalist and researcher, based in New York City. His reporting has appeared in the New York Times, VICE, and a number of other local and national publications

johnsurico | June 27, 2019

These Are the Best Places for Women to Work in 2019

This story originally appeared on Fairygodboss and is used with permission. Today, we’re having more impactful conversations than ever about how to make workplaces truly gender equal. In the midst of those conversations, though, it’s important to take a moment to highlight which companies are currently doing right by their female talent. And who better to identify those best-in-class workplaces than the women who work there? For our 2019 Best Companies for Women rankings, released annually by Fairygodboss, companies’ scores were based entirely on women’s employee review data. In order to qualify for the rankings, companies first needed to have received more than 30 reviews on Fairygodboss. Scores were then determined by averaging women’s responses to three standard review questions addressing overall job satisfaction, equal treatment at work, and whether the reviewer would recommend the company to other women. In determining our Best Companies Where CEOs Support Gender Diversity ranking, women’s responses to the review question — “Do you think your CEO supports gender diversity?” — were averaged to determine the companies’ scores. “From our research at Fairygodboss, we know that women's job satisfaction is directly related to the amount of gender equality she experiences at work,” our Fairygodboss Co-founder and CEO, Georgene Huang, said. “We’re excited to showcase these top companies and CEOs as leaders in the movement for gender equality in the workplace and they should be proud that their female employees feel so strongly that they’re great places for women to work.” Outside of the overall Best Companies for Women ranking, additional categories include: Best Technology Companies for Women; Best Finance Companies for Women; Best Companies Where CEOs Support Gender Diversity; and a brand-new category, Best Consulting Companies for Women. See the full list of 2019 winners below: The Best Companies for Women In 2019: Pariveda Solutions Ultimate Software Protiviti ZS Boston Scientific ADP Continental Quicken Loans, Inc. Boston Consulting Group CDW Corporation Hilton E&J Gallo Capital One Financial Corporation Capital Group AppNexus Thomson Reuters United Technologies Terex The Hartford Facebook IBM Johnson & Johnson PepsiCo Southern California Edison Dell Charles Schwab Cisco General Electric Starbucks Corporation Salesforce PwC Best Technology Companies for Women in 2019: Ultimate Software CDW Corporation AppNexus Facebook IBM Dell Cisco Salesforce Intuit Ericsson Apple LinkedIn Seagate Technology Microsoft Google Cognizant Intel Corporation Hewlett Packard Enterprise HP Inc. SAP Oracle Corporation Best Finance Companies for Women in 2019: Quicken Loans Inc. Capital One Financial Corporation Capital Group Charles Schwab Fidelity Investments Vanguard Group American Express Company PNC Financial Services Group, Inc. Goldman Sachs JPMorgan Chase & Co. Best Companies Where CEOs Support Gender Diversity in 2019: Ultimate Software NCC Media Pariveda Solutions Deloitte AppNexus Cisco IBM Protiviti ADP ZS Thomson Reuters Boston Consulting Group PepsiCo Hilton PwC CDW Corporation Boston Scientific Best Consulting Companies for Women in 2019: Pariveda Solutions Protiviti ZS Boston Consulting Group PwC Accenture Deloitte McKinsey & Company EY KPMG Fairygodboss is devoted to improving the workplace for women by increasing transparency — and these lists are designed to support that mission. By highlighting employers who are leading by example, we hope to raise the bar and improve gender equality across all industries.  

fromdayone | June 26, 2019

Wayfair, the Home-furnishings Giant, Is Hit by a Worker Protest

In a profile of the online home-goods giant Wayfair in this year’s Fortune 500 issue, writer Jeff O’Brien describes having lunch with co-founder Niraj Shah in the Boston-based company’s cafeteria “in the midst of a near monoculture of twentysomethings.” Turns out the young rank-and-file workers have minds of their own. More than 500 employees have signed a letter to the company’s leadership protesting Wayfair’s sale of $200,000 worth of bedroom furniture to a government contractor that operates shelters for migrant children on the southwestern border. The workers called for Wayfair to halt all business with the nonprofit contractor, BCFS, and to create a code of ethics for dealing with business-to-business customers. Because the company refused to change course, dissident employees plan to walk out of the company’s headquarters this afternoon. Their protest has drawn national attention as well as support from Democratic lawmakers, including U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, who tweeted: “This is what solidarity looks like—a reminder that everyday people have real power, as long as we’re brave enough to use it.” While a business is not a democracy, workers have been making their voices heard lately in high-profile actions to protest company policies. At Google, employees walked out last year to object to the company’s handling of sexual-harassment complaints. At Microsoft, workers protested the company’s $480 million contract to sell its Hololens augmented-reality technology to the U.S. Army, saying the company had “crossed the line” into weapons development. The Wayfair protest comes at a time of increased scrutiny of the treatment of migrant children in overcrowded shelters along the U.S.-Mexico border. The publication of a disturbing photo of the bodies of a father and 23-month-old daughter who drowned crossing the Rio Grande heightened the sense of tragedy. “Knowing what’s going on at the southern border and knowing that Wayfair has the potential to profit from it is pretty scary,” Elizabeth Good, a Wayfair manager and one of the walkout’s organizers, told the New York Times. “I want to work at a company where the standards we hold ourselves to are the same standards that we hold our customers and our partners to.” Wayfair executives met with about 500 employees Tuesday afternoon in a town-hall meeting that “was heated at times,” according to a Boston Globe report. Company co-founder Steve Conine told workers he objected to the detention centers but that blocking a lawful customer’s purchase would be heading down a “slippery slope,” he said, according to a recording provided to the Globe. “The level of your citizenship as citizens is really the appropriate channel to try and attack an issue like this. To pull a business into it—we’re not a political entity. We’re not trying to take a political side,” Conine told employees. He did agree, however, to establish a code of ethics for corporate clients. The tech-driven Wayfair has been growing rapidly, entering the Fortune 500 this year at No. 446, with $6.8 billion in revenues and more than 12,000 employees. However, “there’s a black mark on the company. It’s deep in the red,” Fortune reported, with losses of $504 million last year. Fortune quoted a marketing professor who said the company is spending too much, about $88, to bring in every new customer. What remains to be seen is whether a high-profile protest will make it even harder to bring in those new sofa buyers.

fromdayone | June 26, 2019

Is Elite Generosity Just a Cover for a Rigged Game?

As a journalist and iconoclast, Anand Giridharadas has been stirring up the status quo lately by confronting one of the great economic disparities of the 21st Century. “The extraordinary elite helpfulness of our time is how we maintain the extraordinary elite hoarding of our time,” he says, summing up a central theme of his bestselling book, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World. Giridharadas, who spoke at the From Day One conference in Brooklyn last week, raises provocative questions about esteemed individuals and organizations: the billionaires, philanthropies and Fortune 500 companies that claim to be making the world a better place. But are they fighting for equality and justice, he asks, or just trying to make the best of a system that’s rigged against the same people the benefactors purport to help? Or worse: to obscure their own role in the system? Giridharadas, a Time editor-at-large interviewed at the conference by fellow Time editor Lucas Wittmann,  sees our current state of society and business as one marked by drastic extremes. “We live in a time of extraordinary generosity,” he acknowledges, embodied by a prevalent commitment by billionaires toward giving, as well as major new philanthropies and businesses that devote enormous budgets to corporate social responsibility (CSR) and often mobilize their workforces toward community service. At the same time we witness this display of largesse, however, we live in a state of rampant wealth and income inequality. Winners Take All points out that Americans born in 1984 have been siphoned into two groups: those from the top of the family-income ladder, with a 70% chance of doing better than their parents, and those close to the bottom, who are pushing against a 35% chance of exceeding their parents’ economic status. That split is extraordinary, says Giridharadas, given the technological revolutions of the last three decades, including the internet, wireless, genomics and artificial intelligence. “It takes a tremendous amount of rigging and walling off for that much innovation to fail to translate into progress for that many people,” he says. In fact, after much research, Giridharadas now sees those two trends—extreme generosity and drastic inequality—as two sides of the same coin. According to this theory, the rise of billionaire foundations, CSR departments and CEOs on the boards of nonprofits are ways for the winners of the capitalist economy to subtly keep their hands on the tiller of social  change to make sure it doesn’t upset fundamental power equations. Giridharadas was interviewed at the event by his fellow Time editor Lucas Wittmann The alternative would be political change, via legislation to provide more concrete benefits to the have-nots. Example: while more and more companies offer paid family leave, the U.S. is the only industrialized country in the world that doesn’t guarantee it by law. Instead of real, across-the-board programs that would address economic inequality, the so-called winners “have managed to defang change, to push these facsimiles of change that have managed to change very little,” Giridharadas said. There’s a lot to be learned from history here, he said. America has come a long way from the days of John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie. When those prototypes of one-percenters first attempted philanthropy, America was wary. At the start of the 20th century, when Rockefeller tried to create the first foundation, Congress raised obstacles, Giridharadas said. Political leaders were wary over the exertion of power through giving, as well as the prospect of reputation-laundering through philanthropy. The skepticism wore away over time, allowing philanthropy to grow to a $400 billion industry in the U.S. But times are a-changing. “There is a reckoning happening, in which we are starting to reclaim a bit of that intelligent skepticism from a hundred years ago,” Giridharadas said. Fair enough, but what should people do if their work in Corporate America involves the very thing he’s questioning? Think beyond your pay grade, he suggests, as some tech workers have notably done lately. The first thing to do, Giridharadas recommends, is get up to speed on what your company’s footprint in Washington looks like. Companies spend many millions a year on government lobbying. Those D.C. colleagues, said Giridharadas, may be “overruling the good effect you’re having on the world, maybe by the factor of a thousand.” A company may be “virtue signaling” about one thing and creating a mess somewhere else. Employees should push for their right to know what issues are being lobbied and seek an annual report how much is being spent to do it. Meanwhile, billionaire spending doesn’t need to stop cold turkey. There’s a space for philanthropy in places like foreign aid—like the Gates Foundation’s work on malaria—and experimentation and innovation, where government typically moves slowly. While the present power imbalance feels daunting, even for those on the inside, Giridharadas sees evidence that society can change when he looks at historical reform movements like women’s suffrage, social security, and child-labor laws. The question he asks is: “Do we have what it takes to do what is next, which is to usher in the age of reform? “ Emily Ludolph is a senior editor at 99U and an alum of TED Conferences and Vassar College. She has published in the New York Times, the Atlantic, Narratively, Artsy, 99U, Quartz, and Design Observer  

emilyludolph | June 26, 2019

How Employees Thrive on Recognition—and Frank Feedback

What usually persuades us to accept a job offer? The paycheck and the benefit package, for starters. What, however, makes one want to stay at a certain company? It goes beyond cold, hard cash and, say, a gym-membership reimbursement. Worker satisfaction upticks when employees feel like they contribute in a way that makes them more than cogs in a machine. Often it comes down to a moment of recognition. When Alex Seiler, senior director and HR global business partner at WeWork, was in a previous job, the company had just lost its director of diversity. Since Seiler had told his supervisors that he had worked in personal-inclusion initiatives in the past, a couple of months later he was offered the open position. “I thought that was one conversation—and that nobody was listening,” he told the audience at the From Day One conference in Brooklyn last week on a panel called “What Really Matters in Employee Satisfaction. “So I felt super heard and appreciated.” For Toby Hervey, the co-founder and CEO of Bravely, which connects employees with professional coaches, the “feeling heard” moment happened when he was 23. Hervey was mainly doing clerical work, and tirelessly nudged higher-ups to hand him the presentation decks that he needed to format for an offsite meeting. After the presentation was over, the president emailed him, thanking him for the work he did, and handed him a bonus. The money was a welcome surprise, but not the main point. “People were paying attention to to the work I was doing,” Hervey said. Moderated by journalist Lydia Dishman of Fast Company, the panel on “What Really Matters in Employee Satisfaction” included Martha Delehanty, senior vice president of HR for Verizon; Christopher Rotolo, vice president of global talent management and organization for PepsiCo; and Alyssa Schaefer, chief marketing officer for Laurel Road, a student-loan refinancing platform.  Among the main takeaways: recognition is crucial, but so is constructive feedback, which needs to be done frankly yet thoughtfully. HR panelists Seiler, left, and Rotolo Lose the Sandwich When you use the “sandwich technique” for negative feedback, meaning starting with something nice, then saying something critical, only to conclude with a pleasantry, people get confused. “We trained our managers and leaders not to do the sandwich,” said Rotolo. “What happens is, your mind is waiting for the shoe to drop.” In fact, as Delehanty put it, “nothing that comes after the ‘but’ is good.  Best thing is just to get to it.” Added Seiler: “You can be honest and direct but still compassionate. It doesn’t mean you have to lose your sense of humanity.” Find Fairness in the Facts “The real problem,” said Hervey, “is how to say the hard things.” Calling out people in a healthy way requires a careful strategy. Ideally, you provide context explaining where you’re coming from; you can make it more observational, focusing on things you witness instead of feelings. Managers can practice the conversation with some role-playing and imagining likely scenarios. “People are challenged with the how: What are the literal words that are going to come out of my mouth?” Stop Thinking Vertically Why should feedback be confined to a top-to-bottom scheme? “Feedback comes from anyone who works with you,” said Seiler, who recalls once making a rushed hire, which his co-workers were not happy with. “I recognize that peer-to-peer feedback is very difficult, but it’s something that people need to get better at doing.” Schaefer said teams can benefit from the natural tendency to name informal leaders among peers.  When it comes to feedback, “People tend to go to them and trust them,” she said. “Giving peer-to-peer feedback can be uncomfortable, but when there’s an informal leader in the team, sometimes it can work even better,” she said. Use Slack Wisely Willie Jackson of ReadySet led a workshop on new ways to foster critical conversations about difference and equality Just to clarify, Slack in this context refers to the workplace-friendly collaboration tool, not the act of avoiding work. Slack has enabled a dynamic based on rapid response, as well as a level of conversation we didn’t have before: Would you have dared reply to your boss with an emoji? Tread carefully, though. “There is a big risk, with tech, that something will be misinterpreted and assumed,” said Schaefer. “Assuming positive intent is really important.” What’s more, be concise. Slack is great for its immediacy, but, the panelists concurred, people have started expressing themselves on the platform as if they were writing novels. “Don’t share sensitive info through Slack,” Seiler warns. Make “The Middle” Feel Heard A disproportionate amount of management attention goes to the stars at the top of the rating scale and the poor performers at the bottom. People in the middle tend to get overlooked, especially if managers are consistently relying on electronic communications or drive-by recognitions. “There’s the big middle where actually all the work gets done,” said Delehanty. “You have to be willing, though, to have folks from the big middle shine.” Added Hervey: “Equalize access. Then you can help them advance when they really want to, especially when you think of the bias that goes into selection processes. There’s a lot of overlooked talent because they might not talk or socialize like you.” In a session following the panel talk, Willie Jackson, a diversity, equity and inclusion facilitator for ReadySet, led an ally-skills workshop to help position people of color and their allies to foster critical conversations and healthy workplaces. Angelica Frey is a writer and a translator based in Milan and Brooklyn

Angelica Frey | June 24, 2019

Your Chocolate Bar Is Probably the Result of Child Labor

The guilty pleasure of having a candy bar just got a little guiltier. “The odds are substantial that a chocolate bar bought in the U.S. is the product of child labor,” the Washington Post reports, based on an 11-day reporting tour through the Ivory Coast’s cocoa farms by a reporter and photographer. The journalists interviewed 12 boys who gave their ages ranging from 13 to 18. “The boys were working on farms harvesting cocoa, clearing brush with machetes and doing other work associated with cocoa production,” their account said. This has been going on awhile, but the big chocolate makers including Mars, Nestlé and Hershey pledged nearly two decades ago to stop using cocoa harvested by children. Yet it continues. In the Ivory Coast, “hundreds of thousands of small farms have been carved out of the forest,” the Post reports, “the setting for an epidemic of child labor.” About two-thirds of the world’s cocoa supply comes from the region, where more than 2 million children are employed in the industry, according to a 2015 U.S. Labor Department report. The big chocolate makers have missed several deadlines for halting the practice. One reason is the murkiness of the supply chain. Chocolate companies can’t identify where much of their cocoa comes from, “let alone whether child labor was used in producing it,” the Post said. If that gives you second thoughts about your chocolate craving, don’t seek refuge in your favorite hazelnut spread. That crop carries a similar taint. Syrian refugees have been toiling on Turkey’s hazelnut farms with little to show for it, according to the New York Times. Turkey produces about 70% of the world’s hazelnut crop on about 600,000 small farms. The harvest supplies the key ingredient for products like Nutella spread made by Ferrero, as well as candy bars from Nestlé and Godiva. “Few consumers know that behind each of these treats is a crop that has long been notorious for its hazards and hardships, as well as the prevalence of child labor,” the Times reported. “Now, a growing number of seasonal hazelnut workers are Syrian refugees, a cohort with a unique set of vulnerabilities. Few have work permits, meaning they lack legal protections.” “In six years of monitoring, we have never found a single hazelnut farm in Turkey in which all decent work principle standards are met,” said Richa Mittal, the director of innovation and research for the Fair Labor Association, which has done fieldwork on Turkey’s hazelnut crop. “Across the board. Not one.” According to the Times, “No buyer is bigger or more secretive than Ferrero. It won’t name a single farm that its suppliers buy from, although simple arithmetic suggests that the answer is ‘most of them.’” While child labor in agriculture is common in the developing world, the U.S. is no exception. “More than half of work-related deaths among children in the U.S. occur in agriculture, according to a new US government report,” Human Rights Watch reported. “This happens despite the fact that farms employ less than 6% of child workers, highlighting the devastating consequences of weak laws and regulations that don’t properly protect child farmworkers.”

fromdayone | June 06, 2019

How a Giant Consulting Firm Opened Its Eyes about Gender Diversity

McKinsey & Co., the prestigious management-consulting firm, takes pride in giving advice to the world’s largest corporations about the smartest business practices. But a few years ago, McKinsey discovered it had a blind spot in its own workplace. At a time when companies are valuing diversity more than ever, the firm had a notable gender imbalance: far too few female hires and promotions. McKinsey resolved not only to bring its own practices up to date, but also to become a leading authority on the issue. Since 2015, working with LeanIn.Org, the firm has published Women in the Workplace, a benchmark study. (For the 2018 report, 279 companies and 64,000 employees were surveyed.) A champion of McKinsey’s crusade for gender diversity happens to be a male executive, Kausik Rajgopal, the managing partner for the western U.S., whose office leads the firm’s work on the issue. He spoke with From Day One about the firm’s progress on the issue and the life experiences that made him an advocate. Excerpts: Kausik Rajgopal is the Managing Partner for McKinsey & Company’s Western U.S. Region; his office leads the the firm's work on gender diversity FD1: When did the firm’s recent path to gender diversity begin? Rajgopal:  We were having conversations about how do we grow the representation of women in the partnership.  And I remember many years before that, one of my mentees was a woman who came to me and told me that she was leaving the firm.  And she said something that stuck with me because she was about to become a mother.  She said, “Management consulting and motherhood are mutually exclusive.” I just remember being shocked by that. And that led me and several others to think about how we can build a profession, and certainly an institution, that not just attracts women but retains them at greater rates. But then you fast forward to 2012-13, that’s when we started looking at the questions of representation systematically. And we said—quite logically, right?—if you want greater representation, you need to have it in our incoming recruiting classes. And we found that it was actually quite a bit below where we needed to be.  So that conversation on recruiting classes was probably the catalyst for a lot of the work that we’ve done on this. Once you realized the situation, what were the next steps toward action?   I think three big ones. One was to get our recruiting teams to be aware and make this a priority  reach out to women more systematically. So, for example, at Stanford, instead of just doing a single information session, which we had done historically, we said, “Why don’t we go do an event as well with the with the [dual-degree] women engineers?” So you reach out in a much more intimate, narrowcast way, as opposed to, “Here is a big company and show up to a single session and apply,” which has more of a factory feel to it.  And so that was one: using multiple venues to reach out to women who might be interested. The second thing was to understand our own unconscious biases in recruiting. As an example, after interviewing candidates, we have a decision meeting where the partners who conduct interviews discuss all the candidates together. We began designating one of the partners in the room as the “debiasing advocate.” So everybody else in the room then expected them to push back on the questions. If somebody said, “Well, I found Jane to be very sharp and her resume’s impressive, but I’m not sure about her presence,” the debiasing advocate would then say, “Are you saying that because she’s a woman?” And that led to a much more overt discussion, putting the bias on the table and being able to do that without judgment because we all have unconscious biases about lots of things. It doesn’t mean that we’re bad people.  But having the awareness and giving someone else the permission to name it and tease it out, and then have a discussion about what that means for what we’re trying to accomplish, was very powerful.  It was a real unlock for us. The third factor was in reflecting on the face we present in recruiting, like who shows up from the firm to recruit. Getting that to be much more gender-balanced was a key part of that.  Do you look like a firm that welcomes gender diversity?  So we encouraged women to be ambassadors, to be more visible in the cultivation of candidates. When did you start to see tangible results, to feel like, “Okay, we’re getting traction”?  I would say it took a couple of years for all three of these pieces to come together. But once it did, the power of all three of these integrating created a multiplier effect, a sort of virtuous cycle. This year, the incoming class has reached virtual gender parity. Along the way to that milestone, did your clients help push you in that direction? Quite early on.  I would say culturally we are a very client-centric firm. We kind of wake up in the morning with benefits for them on our minds. I think culturally it’s very anticipant and appropriate, whenever we’re starting out to do something new and different, to get our clients’ advice and feedback. And for many of our clients, better diversity was already a priority. So we were already starting to get feedback like, “In your team rooms, we’d like to see more women, like in the teams that you bring to serve us.” So our clients are typically not shy about giving out that feedback and when we posited the idea of doing the research with them, their advice to us was, “If you’re going to do it, just make sure that you are also institutionally committed to this as a priority and making that [representative] of your own commitments.”  How did you decide to go about making this report—and making it a definitive one? Three quick thoughts on that.  One is we quickly said we can’t do this on our own.  So we do this in partnership with LeanIn.Org and the Wall Street Journal. And Lean In, independently, obviously, had been thinking about this and advocating for gender diversity and parity in the workplace. So that was a natural notion. The second thing we said was that we need to make this a multiyear commitment. This can’t be a one-and-done. So we expect it will be an indefinite commitment, really, which was our clients’ early feedback to us.  And then the third piece was we wanted to make sure that it was grounded in real data and not in anecdote.  So the methodology of the report is very much empirical.  We go out, we now survey more than 300 companies in Corporate America. We get data from them at every level, on everything from recruiting to performance evaluation to promotions, representation at different levels. It’s a pretty exhaustive look. We’re very thoughtful about privacy of personal information, but on our blinded database we actually get a pretty detailed and rich dataset that we can then look at for patterns and trends year over year. And over time, as we build that methodology and approach, we’ve also overlaid on it specific questions in areas of interest. For example, the most recent report goes quite deep into women of color and their experience in the workplace, the particular challenges they face.  And in each report. I think we’ll do something like that, where we go deep on a particular question. What trends have you found over several years now? Longitudinally we see very little movement in the percentage of women who rise to the top. So when we look at representation of women in the C-suite, that number doesn’t really raise significantly over time.  The other thing that’s quite striking is there is, I think, a loose cultural assumption that some of the lack of representation is actually a choice by women.  That women, for example, after they have children, become less ambitious. Or they don’t want to make it to the top.  And we found quite recently in our research that that is not true. That they want to progress, they want to make it to the top. So those were striking assumptions. The most recent report shows that the first promotion is actually quite significant. Women are falling behind early, because first promotions are most inequitable. Women are 21% less likely than men to be promoted to manager. Black women are particularly disadvantaged, as they are 40% less likely than men to be promoted to manager. Then you can imagine how it compounds from there. What other kinds of connections that you were able to make? One of the critical things that the report validated is the importance of sponsorship. And we often talk about the distinction between a mentor and a sponsor. A mentor is somebody who may occasionally give you advice, who sort of cares about you. A sponsor is somebody who really creates opportunity for you and is committed to your career and to your success. We saw quite frequently in the research that women who had been successful in rising to the top had a much greater and more consistent preponderance of sponsors—and not just mentors.  As somebody said to me, advice is cheap.  Consistent support is what matters. The other really striking observation, which is a little sad, is that a stunningly large percentage of men believe that this is not a problem.  In a company where only one in ten senior leaders is a woman, nearly 45% of men think women are well represented in the leadership. Even more stunningly, a significant percentage of women, 28%, agree. To us, that suggests a little bit about the anchoring bias and the visibility bias, when you look at a leadership team and say, “Oh, there’s ten people there and there’s two women on there, so clearly women can make it.” So that was kind of an eye opener for us. The mindset was much more pervasive than we expected. One other one: We’re doing a fair amount of research on what I call the “only” phenomenon, which is often in a room, or a team at any level, there’s only one woman in the mix. And that can be a lonely experience. So far, a lot of what we’ve talked about [in Corporate America] is diversity. The more powerful and more important bit over time is inclusion. And this dynamic where we’re going to have one woman at every level can actually a quite isolating experience for the woman. Have experiences in your life inspired you to feel strongly about this issue? It’s very personal for me. I’m the only child of an Indian mother who has a college degree.  She graduated from college in 1962 and she’s one of the smartest, most thoughtful, most proactive people I know. And for cultural reasons she stayed home to take care of me and raise me. It would be a mistake to say she never worked—she worked a lot—but she never worked in the workforce. And I always thought that that was a stunning waste of human capital for the world. My wife, I’d say, is another role model for me.  She’s a software engineer, has worked in Silicon Valley for most of her career. And I remember when I shared with her some of the insights we had on unconscious bias, kind of in the early days of the journey that I was describing to you, she said to me, “It’s great that you are now admiring the problem. Are you actually going to solve it?” I think both of those are quite personal motivations for me. So I’ve personally been a pretty active sponsor and supporter of women. Another part of your job is co-leading the firm’s global efforts in financial technology. What patterns do you see regarding the role of women in technology? Around the world, there’s a stunning lack of adequate female representation in the workplace. In my travels globally, yeah, there are cultural differences, some nuance. But in general the patterns that I describe, which are based on research in an American context—I think they’re all true. This is a global issue. Steve Koepp is a co-founder of From Day One. Previously, he was editorial director of Time Inc. Books, executive editor of Fortune and deputy managing editor of Time

Stephen Koepp | June 06, 2019

Why Big Companies Are Wading Into Heated Political Issues

Coming from the CEO of the Walt Disney Co., the political statement about one state’s new law had an impact far beyond the place he was talking about. “I think if it becomes law, it will be very difficult to produce there. I rather doubt we will,” said Disney’s Bob Iger about the state of Georgia, where a stringent anti-abortion law is due to go into effect on Jan. 1, 2020. Iger gave practical reasons for the company’s position, but the issue is unavoidably divisive nonetheless. “I think many people who work for us will not want to work there. And we’ll have to heed their wishes in that regard,” he said. Disney has plenty of company in its peer group. Major corporations including Microsoft, Delta Air Lines, Starbucks and Salesforce have recently taken positions on the most polarizing of issues, including gun control and immigration. This is a major change in corporate posture. When it comes to political issues, big businesses have traditionally tried to be like Switzerland: steadfastly neutral. But as customers increasingly prefer to align themselves with companies that reflect their personal values, companies increasingly find themselves taking a stand. Surprisingly enough, it can be good for business, even if it alienates some groups. “A virtuous cycle between social and financial performance is especially strong when it helps to deepen relationships with customers, employees, investors, or other stakeholders by helping them understand the values and motivations of the company,” wrote management experts Daniel Korschun and N. Craig Smith last year in the Harvard Business Review. “It’s time to stop treating political issues as a third rail.” Georgia’s abortion law, which will prohibit abortion as soon as a fetal heartbeat can be detected, is similar to new legislation in several other states aimed at overturning the Roe v. Wade doctrine. The reason Georgia became such a high-profile target for a business boycott is that the state, which offers lucrative tax breaks for video production, now outpaces even California in its output. Filmmaking is a $9.6 billion industry in the state, creating more than 90,000 jobs last year. Netflix, AMC Networks and WarnerMedia have suggested that they too would avoid doing business in the state if the law survives court challenges and goes into effect. The prospective boycott is already drawing heat from the other side, with Lou Dobbs of the Fox Business Network calling for a counter-boycott of Disney and Netflix. Even the tactics for opposing the Georgia law is a matter of debate. Stacey Abrams, the Georgia Democrat who nearly won the state’s gubernatorial election last year, has urged Hollywood to stick around and support efforts to challenge the law, organizing a coalition under the name #StayAndFight. Just as radioactive an issue is gun control, which several companies have publicly supported, typically pointing to America’s epidemic of mass shootings as the reason. While Congress has avoided new restrictions, companies have imposed their own. Salesforce, the business-software giant, recently told its customer Camping World and other gun retailers that they should “stop selling military-style rifles, or stop using our software,” as the Washington Post reported. Earlier this year, Dick’s Sporting Goods stopped selling guns and ammunition entirely at 125 of its 720 stores; last year Walmart raised the minimum age for buying guns and ammo from 18 to 21. Can a position by a business made a difference? One notable case was Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act in 2015, which was condemned by civil-rights groups as likely to foster discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. After the law prompted a clamorous backlash from organizations ranging from Apple to the NCAA, then-Gov. Mike Pence signed a revision of the law to “make it clear that business owners will not be allowed to discriminate when providing services,” the IndyStar reported. (Photo by Stephen Koepp) One company recently made news just by trying to avoid politics altogether. An official of Dunkin’, formerly known as Dunkin’ Donuts, said in a private meeting with about 30 academics at a trade conference that the company doesn’t want to take sides, an obvious comparison to its more activist rival. “We are not Starbucks, we aren’t political—we aren’t gonna put stuff on our cups to start conversations,” said Drayton Martin, the company’s vice president of brand stewardship. “We don’t want to engage you in political conversation, we want to get you in and out of our store in seconds. It’s donuts and ice cream—just be happy,” said Martin, whose remarks were promptly tweeted by University of New Hampshire law professor Alexandra Roberts, who was in the room. The tweet quickly drew thousands of likes. “It was really surprising to me, frankly,” Roberts told the Boston Globe. “I wouldn’t have expected a message about a brand choosing to be apolitical to be perceived as so political.” Navigating the political waters is a skill that many companies are still learning, especially when it comes to social media. One notabler example emerged from Britain’s wave of milkshake protests, in which liberal activists have doused supporters of Brexit and other divisive politicians with milkshakes they have conveniently picked up at chain stores. A Burger King representative apparently decided to capitalize on the controversy, “seeming in response to the news that a McDonald’s near the site of a [Nigel] Farage rally in Edinburgh had been asked to halt sales of milkshakes and ice cream,” the Washington Post reported. Burger King mischievously tweeted, “Dear people of Scotland, we’re selling milkshakes all weekend. Have fun. Love BK #justsaying.” While the tweet drew its share of likes, others protested, saying the tweet could incite violence. Burger King quickly backed off its cheeky approach, tweeting: “We’d never endorse violence—or wasting our delicious milkshakes! So enjoy the weekend and please drink responsibly people.” Steve Koepp is a co-founder of From Day One. Previously, he was editorial director of Time Inc. Books, executive editor of Fortune and deputy managing editor of Time

Stephen Koepp | June 05, 2019

Why More CEOs Are Getting Bounced for Ethical Lapses

What gets a CEO fired? Traditionally, poor financial performance has been the leading cause of corporate boards dumping their chief executive. But last year was different: 39% of CEOs were dismissed for ethical lapses, vs. 35% for financial reasons, according to a study of the 2,500 largest global public companies by Strategy&, a consulting arm of PwC. It was the first time in the 19-year history of the study that unethical conduct doomed more CEOs than any other reason. “There’s a new call for transparency and accountability, especially with issues regarding the #MeToo movement and other indiscretions for which there is increasingly zero tolerance,” said Martha Turner, a partner with Strategy&. Has CEO behavior gotten worse? More likely, the reason behind the trend is that standards have been raised, wrote Robert Prentice, a professor of business law and ethics at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas. “Formerly, corporate boards were too often inclined to hunker down and ride out a storm of controversy over a misbehaving CEO who was, nonetheless, getting the financial results that the board desired,” notes Prentice. “Today, thanks to the #MeToo movement, that is not a viable strategy for corporate boards. The heat from the headlines is too intense.” The most notorious case in 2018, when the study counted 89 forced CEO departures, was that of CBS chief executive Leslie Moonves, who resigned over sexual-misconduct allegations and didn’t go away quietly. Other CEOs departed from Lululemon, WPP, Intel and Barnes & Noble following charges of sexual misconduct or other ethical lapses. “Boards feel they have to hold their CEOs accountable to the code of conduct in the same way they would with [other] employees,” Bill George, a senior fellow at Harvard Business School and former CEO of Medtronic, told the Washington Post. “There’s a strong feeling from boards they have to do it.” Another factor is increased pressure from employees reacting to misconduct at the top, he added. “That’s a very important factor today that didn’t exist 10 years ago.” The new climate probably will claim quite a few more CEOs, management experts predict. “The first wave of #MeToo took out some of the most high-profile figures," John Paul Rollert, a professor at the University of Chicago who studies the ethics of leadership, told NPR. "What we're beginning to see in this second and now third wave is Corporate America taking responsibility for itself," he said. "There are clearly a lot of bad actors who are still hiding in the shadows that need to be swept out." Is there something about chief executives that makes them step over the line? Well, yes, in many cases. “The population of psychopaths is still overrepresented in the C-Suite,” wrote Prentice, the University of Texas professor. “The professional success corporate CEOs have enjoyed often leads them to be particularly vulnerable to the overconfidence bias and the self-serving bias.  They will continue to tend toward having an unrealistic view of how moral they are and how important they are to their firm’s success,” he wrote, adding: “They will continue to be more likely than others to mistakenly believe that others agree with them.  And, the science shows, they will be particularly adept at rationalizing their wrongdoing.”

fromdayone | May 29, 2019