Equality Summit: Authentic Leadership | Salesforce

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Amy Weaver, president, legal and General counsel, Salesforce. So, good morning and welcome to our third annual Equality Summit at Dreamforce. So over the last three years, we have brought some incredible leaders to Dreamforce through this series. But I have to tell you, I am particularly excited about the panel we have coming up. We have Janet Fauti, the CEO of Deloitte, Bose St John from Uber, and Elle Vest's Sally Krawchak. And they're all going to be discussing authentic leadership and how we can be genuine in our work. Now at Salesforce, equality is a core value. And part of supporting equality is making certain that our employees feel like they can bring their whole selves to work. Their genuine selves, their authentic selves. And we've taken a number of steps to help support this. Most recently, we've instituted self id so employees, if they choose, can go into our systems and self identify by gender identity, sexual orientation, and even choose their preferred pronouns. Is that right? And thank you to Tony Profit for helping lead this and getting us there on that. We also have 10 employee resource groups. We call these ohana groups and these are employee led groups that bring together employees and allies of underrepresented groups at the company. We have the Salesforce Women's Network, Boldforce, Vetforce and many others. And these are fun, they're supportive and they are our most enthusiastic part of Salesforce. Now, leading with authenticity is something I have always felt passionately about and perhaps like many of you in the room, I remember receiving a lot of advice early on that was really aimed at shaping me into a more traditional view of a leader. I was told I needed to be louder, I needed to be more aggressive, and I was cautioned many, many times not to be too nice. Now, this was all well intended, but it really assumed that there was only one way to lead and it overlooked that there can be a power in the softest voice in the room and that leading with kindness is a strength, not a weakness. And I was reminded of this recently. I was unpacking a box of much neglected box of books at my house and I came across an advice book that I had purchased when I was just starting out in the workplace. The name of the book is Play Like a Man, Win Like a what Men Know about Success in the Workplace that Women need to Learn. Now, as you can imagine from the title, the book is stock full of advice about how to fit in by changing your style and adjusting your behavior to fit in with what's worked in the past. So a couple of the chapter titles, one is tooting your own horn. Another was don't expect to make friends, and third, incredibly, was be an imposter. Now, in defense of this book, 15, 20 years ago, the author wrote it because she felt that they were unwritten workplace rules that women needed to understand but also needed to adapt to. And I'll tell you, I laughed up every sentence in the book. But in 2017, the discussion is around authentic leadership and recognizing different styles. And it can no longer be the case that we are telling women that in order to succeed, they need to play like a man, or that we're telling any woman or any man that there is one path to leadership. So with that in mind, I would love to invite our panel out here. We have an incredible moderator today from Fortune magazine, Michal Lev? Rem. Please join me in welcoming them. Thank you.

Hi, everyone. So, hello, everybody. I want to quickly introduce our panelists. So Janet Fauti is the CEO of Deloitte Consulting. Bo St. John is the Chief Brand Officer at Uber. And Sally Krawchek is the CEO of Ellevist. Thank you guys for being here. So I actually, I have, like, your bios here, including their Twitter handles, and I just thought it was funny because. So mine is incredibly boring. It's just Lavram. I didn't even spell out my name. Yours is Janet Foudy. Yours is Allykrawchek and Bose Adassbos.

That pretty much says it all, doesn't it?

Yeah.

So first question. Tell us about that and how you picked your Twitter handle.

Well, because I am. I thought the world should know.

What were the alternate options?

Oh, girl, you don't want to know. That was the safest of the choices. Yes, but. Yes, definitely. I mean, I want to make strong statements, even in my Twitter handle. Absolutely.

Has any employer ever asked you about that?

They shouldn't.

Yeah. All right.

Okay.

So let's talk more broadly. Authentic leadership. Can each of you just very quickly or in depth tell us what that means to you? Janet, I'll start with you.

So in the intro, Amy Talked about in 2017, talking about authentic leadership. And I will tell you that it's not something that I thought a lot about over the course of my career. And when I was asked to take the role as the CEO of Deloitte Consulting just about two years ago, actually, maybe even today, two years ago, I got lots of notes from my partners and my clients and my colleagues, 98% of which were incredibly positive and gracious, and I stuck them in my nice things file to read when I was having a terrible day. But of course, like many women, you obsess over the ones that might be not quite so gracious and nice, and you worry about those and you obsess about them. I got one from one of my partners and it said, janet, congratulations. I'm really looking forward to your leadership and I'm really impressed that you did it your way. And I have to say that really took me aback. And I thought, well, what does he mean by your way? And by this isn't someone I knew very well at all. What does your way mean? And I really ruminated over what he was trying to tell me about that. And what I came to appreciate was that he was trying to tell me that I hadn't done it in sort of in carrying myself in a normal, traditional 42 long manner and was comfortable and confident in who I was. So that was really an inflection point for me on what authentic leadership meant. And then I started thinking about, okay, how do we make sure that in every time you and I are having a conversation or we're having a conversation, or am I having a discussion with my 45,000 people that it comes across as my way and authentic and genuine. And to me, it's about confidence and courage and not absolutely, absolutely not compromising to be something that you're not.

Okay, great. Bose, have you always been badass beaus or was this an evolution?

It's been cultivated over time and there's still some mileage to go. I will be badasser in future years, by the way. But no, I think authentic leadership is very much that, which is that I'm showing up like this every day and that I'm not trying to map myself to anything that has already existed because I have not existed in these spaces before. And therefore, there's no reason why I should map myself to something that doesn't look like me, behave like me, talk like me at all, because then I won't be able to show up as me. And I'm very, very conscious about what the future looks like also and what we want it to be. And so if I'm not wholly myself in that space when I talk to the people at the office or I'm in front of audiences like this, if I don't show up as myself, then how will others who are similar to me be able to do that? And so I do take it very seriously to make sure that authenticity is a part of how I live and behave every day on Twitter and in the office.

And I thank goodness you found company and companies that will allow you to do that. I grew up on Wall street where for many years diversity went to die. And there were not that many women or people of color there. There still or not. And our behavior was pretty prescribed that there was a certain way to act. This is despite the research. And by the way, I'm a recovering research analyst, so I keep going back to it. But this is despite the research, much of which comes out of the Wall street firm's own research departments that says that greater diversity leads to higher returns on equity, lower risk, greater client engagement, greater employee engagement, greater innovation. That the power of diversity is so great that diverse leadership teams outperform smarter and more capable leadership teams. The power of diversity, though, is in fact that diversity is in fact allowing people to bring their authentic selves. It is not bringing in a bunch of individuals of difference and then telling them all to act like middle aged white guys, right? And you would think this lesson would be learned, but it's so ingrained for us. It's the way we've been socialized when we grew up. One little story. When I was at one of the big companies, there was an article that was done on the business I was running about how well it was doing. And the article featured me. I was not interviewed for it. I refused to be interviewed for it, but it was a pretty sizable piece. And my CEO took me out to dinner and screamed at me about it, about how I shouldn't be in the press, how it was taking away from others. And I'm like, well, dude, this is actually a good article at a time when we don't have a lot of good articles. And he said, you need to get your profile down. And I said, well, that's going to be hard. I'm one of the few senior women on Wall Street. It's hard to get my profile down. I wasn't even interviewed for it. And he said, well, this is your problem. Take care of it. The head of HR came the next day to make sure I'd heard the message. And I remember being so humiliated by it, feeling like such a kid who'd been fussed at. And then I found the research that says that traditionally men who are seen to be looking for power or attention, boys being boys, but women who've been seen to be looking for power or attention evoke feelings of discomfort and even disgust. And so we as leaders have to overcome some of the way we were socialized to allow people to be their authentic selves. And as Opposed to falling back into the way we were brought up and the way we traditionally have seen the genders.

And Sally, I mean, you brought up growing up on Wall street, which sounds like a really great, nurturing childhood.

It was amazing.

So has it been an evolution for you? I mean, today you're running your own startup, you work for some of the largest firms on Wall street for years and years. And so can you talk a little bit about how you kind of came into owning it?

Well, and, you know, you didn't mention it, but I. And it hurts my feelings a little bit because I hold a world record, which I do. I'm the only woman to be fired on the front page of the Wall Street Journal twice.

So.

I know, I know, I know. And some of that came from being, as we're saying, my authentic self. I was the only senior executive who returned client money during the downturn that we had miss, sold products to our clients. And I was the only woman on the leadership team. I went to my boss and said, we gotta do something here.

No.

Yes. No. Yes. Went to the board. When you ever. And just, you know, pro tip, you take your boss onto the board level, whether you win or lose, you're fired. And we got the money returned and I was fired. And while you might say, well, is that for being a woman, there is research that indicates that we women tend to be highly relationship oriented, have more of a long term perspective. Right. And really go with our ethics. And so I don't know that I was fired because I was a woman, but I was certainly fired because I was my authentic self. And at that point I said, you know what? I think I'm going to start my own company. Right. And I think this company is going to be about closing the gender investing gap, which cost women hundreds of thousands, some women millions of dollars over the course of their lives. And we're going to build a company that today has a engineering and product team that's 50% female, that as a company is 30% people of color, that we're going to take that diversity and make it key and core to what we do. And I don't think it's a complete coincidence that we believe we're one of the fastest out of the chute of any of the digital investment platforms ever.

Awesome.

Great, man. Can you all talk also about times when it's been difficult, any recent memory, anything that comes up when it's been difficult to be your authentic self. And I'm sure there are ample opportunities for that, especially in the current Political climate. There are so many issues that are coming up in the workplace. Anything come to mind for you, Janet?

Yeah. So I, you know, I grew up in it. I think it's really important to talk about family in these conversations, and I talk a lot about my children, but I also, you know, I grew up in a. A very. A family where being anything but your authentic self would be unacceptable. So my mom was an artist. My father was a scientist, half Catholic, half Jewish. So lots of guilt. We had sort of the whole thing going on.

Right.

So it was transparent, it was direct, and lots of guilt. And it struck me over the early course of my career, I was kind of oblivious to trying to fit into any mold. I was actually a consultant on Wall street, but working primarily on the back, where that directness and clarity actually was really celebrated. And it was actually created a great path for me. So it's so interesting to sort of compare and contrast our stories. Probably the moment that's the most imprinted in my brain ties into how you bring your full self to work at the end of the day. I was two roles ago. I was offered a really important and visible role in leading the technology business for Deloitte. I was not a technologist by background, so it was a somewhat controversial move for the firm. And on that day, I was offered that role. I received a breast cancer diagnosis. And so I called the person who offered me the role and said, well, I'm thrilled to take the role, but I think you should know that I have this diagnosis. It means I can't travel for many months, and I'm going to have to sort of navigate my way through this. And he was incredibly, incredibly, incredibly supportive. I still want you to take the job. We'll work through it. We'll create the space for you to do it. He goes, but, you know, you really shouldn't tell anybody. And I, being the sort of good girl, followed the rules type that I was, said, okay, that's fine. And so I was incredibly low profile. Now people are probably wondering, like, where the heck is she? And she's supposed to be leading this business and taking us forward. And I was in my office in Chicago, zipping to radiation every morning and doing my thing. And I didn't think anything of it. It was sort of the natural course of things.

And.

And I flash forward, probably three years later, I had a young woman in my office who was ill. And we began this conversation. I said, oh, well, I've sort of been through this. And it struck me in that moment what terrible Advice that was terrible. Advice. That was. And how important it was to talk about that experience set. So I talk about it very broadly in terms of the humanity and the challenges that we all live with. And it might be easy to look at each of us and say, how could anything possibly have gone awry in your life? And that there's big, complicated things that happen. I'll let my colleagues talk a little bit about the political dynamic, but if we have more time, I'd love to come back to that as well.

Oh, absolutely.

We could talk about politics all day long, no problem.

Anything come to mind for you?

Yeah, I mean, listen, I've always been a black woman. Like, I've never been anything else. Yeah. Period. That's just it. No, I'm kidding. No, I mean, I just have. And so I don't know that there's been any time where I haven't faced, like, an issue where, you know, it's like, you have to show up as yourself. Even in the places where.

How many other black women on the Uber executive team? No, I'm just kidding, right?

Is that a trick question? I don't know. No. But honestly, there's just not a lot of space. Space. And in terms of talking about showing up and having advice that sometimes is meant or is intentioned to be good but is not, can hurt you. It can make you hide in ways in which you don't even recognize it until later, quite frankly, I haven't been in the position where I've been able to hide ever, you know, ever. And so I haven't faced a situation yet in which I didn't know how to be in the room and be holy myself because I haven't had the luxury of being able to hide. And so even as I sit here now, yeah, I'm wearing a colorful ass suit because why not? You know, I'm going to be seen anyway, so I might as well shine.

By the way, I was about to wear that outfit, so I'm so glad. Yeah. I mean, I came from all the.

Empowerment, but I would have dragged you, girl, because I'm the only one wearing this suit.

That would have been awkward. You guys had both shown up in the same shiny suit.

Yeah. So, you know, I would put out there is today a very powerful op ed in the New York Times that talks about women being angry and how we have not been allowed to be angry. And so I would say for probably every woman in this room, we have internalized that. We've culturally internalized that. And I'm sure we can all think of an instance when we were angry and we pretended like we weren't and that we really. The research tells us that people don't like an angry woman. I mean, think about it is the op ed said, I mean, Hillary Clinton went through that election last year with this amazing level of calm. And yet because everybody remembers her losing her temper X number of years ago, she was cast as the angry woman. Michelle Obama, who was the epitome of graciousness and class and oh, I miss you, Michelle. You know, yesterday, remember when.

Yeah.

Like, did you cry when she came out? Because I was crying when she just walked out. And for a period of time, because of the way her eyebrows were arched, she was the angry black woman. Right. And they changed her eyebrows. And so I think all of us have, I have, I have an instance where when I was raising money for Ellevest, was going, you know, on Sand Hill Road and I had one well known venture capitalist, you know, mansplaining to me about social media. I'm like, alright, I got more than 2 million followers, but thanks for the advice, you know, and the mansplained to me about the cost of acquisition. You know, I was talking about that. I'm like, all right, cool. You know, at Ellevest we're, you know, well below the industry cost of acquisition. Thanks for that. And then it was the moment when he began, we talked about hiring financial advisors and he began to tell me how difficult they are, how much it will change the business and give me advice on hiring financial advisors. By the way, I ran Smith Barney and Merrill lynch, okay. So I have managed more financial advisors than anybody on the effing planet. So what did I do? What did I do? Did I storm out? Did I say, dude, you're making me angry? No, of course I thanked him. So insightful. Amazing. So I don't feel like I was as authentic then as I probably could have been.

How did that make you feel? Well, okay, so.

Oh my God.

Going back to the political question without delving too deeply into politics, if that's possible. But you know, I think everybody struggles with this today, regardless of where you are on the political spectrum. A lot of employees have this challenge of, you know, what do you speak out about and how do you do it at work and how do you do you separate your Twitter self, your social media self from your work self? And we've seen this come up in some very high profile cases. Jamel Hill. And we've seen, I mean, this wasn't at work, but the woman who was writing her bike and gave President Trump the finger, and she got fired. So how. What advice would you give for people who are struggling with this?

Sure.

I'll jump in with a little bit of how I've been thinking about this. So, you know, and some of my colleagues are here in the room, and, you know, let's just say my phone was buzzing very, very actively a year ago tonight, actually. And I've been thinking a lot about how to construct this conversation in a very diverse workforce with lots of people from lots of backgrounds. And so what I've tried to do is to remind our people of the issues that we have always remained dear to, and actually, frankly, inform them more than they probably were about our legislative efforts in and around. In and around equal pay and women and the LGBT community and immigration, which are the four issues that have been the most important historically for us in our workforce, is to remind them really actively of the work that we've been doing and would continue to do. And then I've really worked to find my voice in writing in terms of the things that are true to me that I believe can transcend the political conversation, but that are near and dear to my heart in terms of my own personal values. So my team will tell you I blog and write a lot to them, and I've found a much stronger voice in the last year in the things that I've written to my team in and around the world, events that are happening now. I read them and I reread them, and I reread them because I'm sensitive to the variety of opinions and perspectives. But I think, in my own tiny little way that it's helped people understand who I am as a leader and what I stand for from an organizational perspective.

Has there been an instance, though, of where you've taken a stand through your writing and there's been some kind of backlash to it?

Well, I count the number of. We're among friends here, right? I count the number of reports I get to the employee ethics hotline. And, you know, if it's under double digits, I figure I didn't piss off that many people. To that end, if it starts to go over, I just. I think about what kind of message and conversation I'm sending, but there's been nothing sort of formal. But I do obviously track both responses, by the way, people who have the courage to write back directly to me, but also who share their perspectives back anonymously.

Okay, Boaz, any advice?

Advice? I mean, I'm pretty open in terms of my political Views, social views. I'm very active on social media, as we've been talking about. And so I myself practice a very loud approach to things that I want to put, you know, shine a spotlight on or to voice. And I really do think it's important. You know, so much has changed in the way that executives behave and how present they are, that, you know, a couple of decades ago, you would have executives who sat behind sort of the veneer of the company, you know, and then things would happen and the company would make statements and the company, and the company and the company, and. And now we are much more sensitive to who is making the decisions behind those companies. And therefore it's even more important for us to understand not just their views about operations and how they're running the businesses, but also what do they believe in the world, you know, and do I want to support you based on what you believe? Because I want to support whoever is trying to do things in the way that I think is going to make our world better. And I think we should all do that, that, you know, there's not a right or wrong way to do it. But I just think that we should understand there should be transparency with how our leadership feels. And I try to embody that every day.

I think it's important that we use our platform to call out some of these issues. And I think for other individuals, as you become more senior, it becomes your responsibility. And as you are more junior, I think realistically you have to look at the company around you, recognizing you want to keep your job. Right. But sort of take that cue and feel what can work for you. And if you don't have much elbow room, you want to think about finding yourself another company.

Right.

But I do want to be realistic that you can't, you know, it probably doesn't work to come into a company on the first day and start, you know, with some really loud different perspectives. A lesson I've learned recently is that I need to do a better job of equipping the men around me to have some of these conversations that we women are having. And so I wrote recently in one of the LMS newsletters, as everyone was talking about when they've been sexually harassed, an incident that happened to me when I was more junior in my career. I was hosting a big name government financier guy. I mean, a big name guy at a conference we were having at my old company. And I went up to thank him afterwards and I said, thank you, great speech. And he said, you're welcome. Would you like, to come up to my hotel room and I want to get this right.

Whoa.

Yeah. I don't know. I was like, does that ever work? Out of curiosity? And obviously, I said, no, thank you.

You were so polite.

Well, actually, what actually happened, first of all, I was really deeply embarrassed because it happened in front of my colleagues. So what actually happened is then, you know, we walked away a few steps and sort of laughed, but fake laughed, because I was sort of embarrassed. P.S. the second part of the story is that years later, he was being offered a job when I was the CFO of Citigroup, and it was a multimillion dollar position that required very little work. And I went into the CEO's office and said to him, if you hire, please don't hire him. Here's the story. And the CEO said, you know, I got it, but I think it'll be fine. I said, okay, let's be perfectly clear. If you hire him, because he'll be a predator here. There's no doubt. There's no doubt. He's got this reputation. If you hire him, I will quit and I will tell everybody why. And so the guy did not get the job, and I cost him what's probably tens of millions of dollars. The lesson, however, the lesson is that after I put that in the newsletter, I went home and was having dinner with my husband and my young adult son, and they said, wtf? This happened to you? I'm like, yeah, this happened to me. Why didn't you ever tell us? And I said, because who wants to bring that home? And they said to me, my son said to me, but, mom, you know, you're not equipping us, right? If you're not talking to us and personalizing this for us. You know, I had no idea how often it went home. So you're not telling me what I need to know to go into the workforce to fight for my female peers. And I thought it was a really key lesson for me.

Awesome.

This is probably a good time to actually ask all of you. The MeToo movement has been just. I don't even know what adjective to use anymore. But it is, I guess, not surprising, but appalling still at just how pervasive this is across different industries and how much has been kept secret. What do you think people in the audience, all of us, can do to change these cultures? And I know that's a huge question, but it just seems like it's going to be an incredibly slow process. I don't think that many of the predators we've heard about are going to be taken through the legal process in the ways that maybe they should. So.

But that. You know what, this is amazing. And I actually think this is a direct reaction to the election last year where women marched. And then we all looked at each other and said, where's Gloria Steinem? Our Gloria Steinem? And then she didn't show up. And so women, in a way, you know, five and 10 years ago, what could you do? You could sue the person, right? You could go and hope that the New York Times maybe would write an article about it, but you were isolated. What is so fascinating and interesting and exciting is that these women are going to social media, are going to the proliferation of media, are telling their stories in a way they couldn't before, and women and our advocates are amplifying and reinforcing and encouraging women. And so we don't, you know, let's hope Harvey Weinstein goes to jail. But what has happened on social media couldn't have happened a few years ago. And so, you know, for years I've gone around, well, what needs to change is the CEOs need to decide. And then they need to go from slates and they gotta, you know, really promote people and they gotta overcome the middle managers who maybe don't get it. Da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. But this, you know, is happening here, right, with a speed and with an energy that I don't think any of us expected. Now, it doesn't mean we'll get women into the boardroom as quickly, perhaps, but, boy, I didn't think we'd see this.

Yeah, I mean, I agree. I think we have to get it out of the shadows. You know, that's really the challenge, which is that to the point about if someone, you know, is going through something, because this is not. This is not surprising, right? We all know that this occurs, but the shame, the embarrassment, the, you know, I don't want to get fired conversation that you have with yourself is what keeps you back. But if there is a community and folks who are talking about it and being loud about it, then you feel more comfortable, right? And so to me, that's what I really loved about the MeToo movement, which was that it was not. It was no longer secret, you know, that your neighbor could say it and the woman at work could say it, you know, and we could all share these experiences. And then those that needed to elevate weren't coming from the ground up. They were coming from a higher place because we had all then piled on, right? And so therefore, you weren't starting at zero. And to me, that was the power of bringing these conversations out of the shadows. I think it's extraordinarily important, you know, for us to be transparent about these issues. And when things happen that we need to talk about it, we need to address it, and then we need to applaud when there are advancements made, because as loud as we are about the wrongs, we also need to be loud when we are seeing the right.

So I would just add on, Sally, I love the story about your husband and son because I think about my own experiences as well as my colleagues who have I helped through this. And to be honest with you, you never even think about talking about it. It was just sort of the way the world worked. And I was reflecting in this whole me too conversation about. We started our Women's Initiative in Deloitte back in 1993, and we had this program called Men and Women as Colleagues. We used to jokingly call it Men and Women as Colleagues, and all the women had to go through 12 times because there weren't enough women. But it was all about how do we communicate and collaborate better. It had nothing to do with. It had nothing to do with this broader conversation. And the word that stuck with me all these years later was collusion. And the instructor led a conversation that said, if you see something that is inappropriate, however you define inappropriate in the conversation and you let it continue to happen, then collusion is essentially as bad as if you were the person who had set up the situation in whatever form or fashion it was. And so I've been thinking a lot about collusion in this conversation and this sort of bright light and transparency and how we can go back to conversations that back in the 90s that we look at now and we say, oh, we'd never let that happen today. And this, which is a much more personal and significant issue, the idea of bringing this idea that we're all accountable for raising our voices in the conversation, I think is incredibly important. So collusion is the thing I've been thinking about, how to break that cycle of the silence to that end.

The other thing I'm thinking about a lot is money. You know, Susan Fowler was able to say what she had to say about Uber because she left the job, she had another job. So she had a position of financial security. Whereas, you know, back when I started in the late 80s at Solomon Brothers, I received pictures of Xerox copies of male genitalia on my desk every day. Clearly a hostile environment. But There was nothing I could do because I needed a paycheck, right? And you think of so many of our sisters and people of difference who are in positions that do not pay them well, who are going paycheck to paycheck, who don't feel like they can have their voice. And so the issues of closing the gender pay gaps, getting more women into stem, where there's, you know, where the gender pay gap closes. Even what we're doing at Ellevest, which is working to close the gender investing gap, not to be crass, because society has told us talking about money is crass as females, but if we can really think about closing these gender money gaps for these individuals, then they have the power where they can take this job and shove it, right? If you have a three month emergency fund socked away, you can quit a job if you need to because you're being harassed. Whereas if you're living paycheck to paycheck, it's an incredibly difficult ask.

You know, really one of the things that I've been thinking about a lot lately is, you know, this idea about having to quit, you know, I just, I just can't stand it, you know, I just can't. I am. And it's part of the reason why I'm sitting in this seat at Uber now, you know, which is that I refuse to run. You know, if an environment is not conducive to me being black and being a woman, then I want to change that environment. I don't want to have to quit, you know, And I think that at this point we have to be. We have to have a zero tolerance policy on that idea, you know, which is that I want to change these environments so that we don't have to go, you know, because why should we? We should be able to experience the environments. We should be able to advance our careers, to be able to feel like we're productive and appreciated in these jobs without having to fear that we're going to be without one because someone comes after us. And it's also the point of allies, you know, I'm now thinking of the ways in which. And this goes back to the actually collusion also, but in a positive way, which is that how can we better surround those who are having issues? Or if it happens to us, how do we gather people around us who can then stand with us? Because sometimes that's what it takes too. You don't have to be brave all by yourself. It's like, can I get a group of people? It's much easier it's like the playground. It's much easier to go after the bully if you've got three of your homegirls with you. You know what I mean? And you're like, yeah, come at all of us, you know? But if you're standing there by yourself, it's a lot scarier, you know? So how do we build up allies that are going to empower us to be able to stand firmly so we don't have to run?

Can you tell we like this topic? Yeah.

So, and I want to ask you, because you brought up the changes at Uber and you came into this role, it didn't exist before the Chief Brand Officer. You guys, just, just yesterday, your CEO announced a new list of company values, of corporate values. And there weren't just new values. There were also old ones that were taking out. And one of them at least was something called toe stepping, which meant. Was meant to encourage anyone, regardless of their rank in the company, to express their opinion and their idea. But as your CEO very eloquently said, sometimes was used as an excuse for just being an asshole.

So.

Is there a fine line between. I mean, you want to be. Maybe you want to bring your authentic self to work, but if your authentic self is being an asshole, how do you mitigate that?

If your authentic self is being an asshole, then, sorry, we're going to treat you like an asshole. You're not going to be there. You know what I mean? No, it's true. I mean, it's very much how I'm seeing the environment that I'm in now, which is about evolution. This is about turning an environment into something more positive, not necessarily wiping everything away because not everything was bad, but taking out the bad stuff and replacing with the good. And we were talking a little bit backstage. I said, you know, this is the bar. We're setting the bar. And so if this company at this time can correct the things that have gone wrong, then there is no excuse for anyone else. Zero excuses. I don't want to hear it. So as we continue to change the norms of the company and the values by which people work, I want those reflected elsewhere. And so what are we going to do? We've got to point the mirror back at everyone else and say, hey, what do your values look like? Because if we're able to evolve and change, then so should everyone else. Absolutely.

All right, I want to ask you guys, because we do need to wrap up soon. And I want to ask you a final question. What leaders, what authentic leaders do you admire or have had significant impact on your careers and your journeys.

So.

It'S interesting for me, the authentic leaders that I'm the most inspired by are actually some that have actually been on my team. I have a young, young, she's not that young anymore woman who was immigrated here from India. She absolutely does not look like a 42 long executive. She hugs a lot in a wonderful way. She is so different than any stereotype you would ever see of anyone in consulting through financial services. And I've learned so much from watching her grow and develop as a leader. It would not shock me one bit if she replaces me day after tomorrow and I cannot wait for that day. So for me, there's lots of people I look up to, but at the end of the day, she really sets the bar for me in terms of someone who brings it all and does amazing work and is fearless about being herself.

Great Boaz, man. Well, you started talking about your family and I was trying to think, okay, there are so many different types of leaders that I look at and sort of like Frankenstein it, right? A little bit of this one, a little bit of that one, a little bit of that to kind of create my own vision of what I aspire to be. But I'm going to give the credit to my mom. You know, my mom immigrated to the US in a very difficult time. My dad was in politics in Ghana. There was a coup d' etat and she had to leave the country without him with three young kids and pregnant with her fourth. You know, I was six and I'm the oldest, and so I was six at the time. And she was a homemaker, you know, who had to then rely on her wit and hustle, you know, in order to continue to create a stable environment. And then when we finally settled in Colorado springs, I was 12. And just at the moment when it wasn't so cute for me to be so different and I really didn't want to be, but she was insistent that I appreciate my braids and my dark skin and the language we spoke at home and the food that we ate. And it has absolutely been the foundation for why I'm able to stand so strongly now in this environment where I am so different and that I don't bow my head and I don't try to be anyone else and I don't try to act like anybody else because she told me, you, girl, you better not. And so that to me has been the most inspiring leadership.

Sally.

Okay, so not to be a total suck up, but I have been impressed with what Mark and the team have done with Salesforce. So when we were looking to, After I left that meeting with that venture capitalist, I went and thought hard about who we wanted to be our partners in funding Ellevest and came up on the top of my list with Salesforce and with Marc Benioff because of that combination of building a great, enormously successful company while having values really core and central to what the company does. I was really interested in his keynote where the equality, et cetera, the values didn't come at the end, but we're really towards the beginning. And so, you know, I really do look up to this company and what they have done. You know, Gloria Steinem was my hero from a young age that she was able to effect such change for so many, so far ahead of her time and to do it in such a compelling, quiet, sometimes, sometimes loud way. I think she just had a nice way about her that enabled people to really hear some of the tough messages she had to deliver.

That's it.

Not a bad list at all. Well, Sally Boaz and Janet, thank you so much for coming today and participating. Thank you.