Practical Ways to Build a More Diverse and Inclusive Organization

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When it comes to our profession, how can we go beyond diversity and find non-obvious ways to build a more inclusive world? Hi everyone, I'm business coach Steve Sandusky for Barron's Advisor, and welcome to Actionable Intelligence. My guest today is Rohit Bhargava. Rohit helps leaders and professionals learn to see what others miss. And he's the founder of two companies, The Non-Obvious Company and Idea Press Publishing. He previously spent 15 years as a marketing strategist for Ogilvy and Leo Burnett, and he's the number one Wall Street Journal bestselling author of 7 business books. In today's conversation, we discuss practical ways to build a more diverse and inclusive organization, how to host and participate in events that exemplify diversity and inclusion, and we share some resources that you can access for free to learn more about how you can go beyond diversity and be a real changemaker. So let's get started with Rohit Bhargava. You've got a new book that just came out, a very, very important book. And where I'd like to start here is with a quote from your book. And you quote Verna Myers, who is the vice president of inclusion strategy at Netflix. And she said, quote, Diversity is being invited to the party. Inclusion is being asked to dance, end quote. And then you went on to say in your book that her words are often shared by those who advocate for diversity. But then you said for you and your co-author, they actually inspired a question. And the question was, what if everyone was not only invited to the party and asked to dance, but also left with a mixtape filled with music they would love but never had the chance to hear before. And I think that led to something in January of 2021. So tell me a little bit about what that led to.

Yeah, it did. So in January of 2021, we hosted a virtual event that we called the Non-Obvious Beyond Diversity Summit. And it started off as this idea to bring 10 or 12 really smart speakers together to talk about what it would take to create a more inclusive world. And as we started planning this thing and brought more people into it, it sort of exploded in terms of the size and scale and ambition of it. And eventually what it turned into was a 5-day summit with 50 sessions and more than 200 speakers. And we talked about diversity from lots of different angles. So, you know, we talked about Hollywood casting, we talked about public health, there was a session on fitness, There was a session on people with disabilities at work and leaders with disabilities. We had so many different dimensions at this summit. And it really did turn into that where people could learn from different perspectives and from one another. And we recorded all these videos and then we offered them up to people on YouTube for free. So it wasn't like a paid session where you only had access if you paid whatever the amount was. This was free for everybody. And what we learned from that was that there was a beauty in bringing all these different perspectives together. And that's what eventually inspired us to, turn it into a book.

Now you titled it Non-Obvious, and I know you have written a series of books that start with non-obvious and it's about trends and spotting trends. So tell me a little bit about the title of the book. So non-obvious and then beyond diversity. So what does that mean to you and your co-author, Jennifer?

Yeah. So non-obvious is a promise to the world that I often make in my books. And what it says is you are going to read something or hear something that you haven't heard before. You're going to get a new insight out of this. And for most of the time when I was writing the Non-Obvious Trends series, I wrote about two things. One was, here's all the trends that are changing our world, and that's kind of what was the sexy thing, right? I mean, at the beginning of the year, or probably throughout the year, everybody wants to know what the trends are. And so looking at someone's research to say, this is what you should pay attention to and these are what the trends are, is highly valuable whether you're trying to sell a product or figure out where to invest. But taking that theory of non-obvious, the other part of the book was always, how do I teach people to be non-obvious thinkers? Which is someone who sees what no one else sees, who appreciates other perspectives that are different from their own, who doesn't think that their way or their perception is the only right way. And that speaks to diversity and kind of lessening bias also. Because the people who are able to appreciate different points of view and have more empathy, they're less biased by their nature. And when we started collaborating, when Jennifer and I started collaborating on this book, it was really informed by some of that work, but it took a deep dive into this idea of creating a more diverse and inclusive world. And that's kind of where it came from and what the link was to non-obvious.

So you hold this diversity summit, you have all these different speakers. Was there maybe an aha moment for you, or was there like, oh my gosh, I didn't realize that during the conference? Was there anything that happened like that to you either during the actual event or maybe even in the buildup as you were researching this and talking to all the different people?

Yes to both. I mean, I learned so much from listening to the speakers and their experiences. I learned about why it's important at the beginning of events to have something that's called a land acknowledgement, which some of your listeners might might be familiar with already, but it's essentially an acknowledgement that says that this event that we are all here for, gathered here for, is taking place on Native American soil. And it offers an acknowledgement of that and gratitude. And that's not something that's typically part of the business events that I go to, but it's certainly a part of most diversity-oriented or DEI, as the acronym goes, diversity, equity, and inclusion. It's part of most DEI events. And so that was something that was relatively new for a lot of people. And that was just one small example of all of these things that I kind of learned about different perspectives, different ways of thinking, of talking. I mean, I talk about the future all the time. And one of the things I never realized that I did, but I do all the time, is I talk about building a better future for our children. And when I started using the same language that I typically use, I realized that there's a whole huge number of people who have either chosen or have not had children. And so this language of our children can be alienating for some people who are not building a better future for their children because they don't have children or they chose not to have children, but they're still caring about building a better future. Those were the sorts of things where you think about, is that really a big deal? Did I offend a lot of people by saying that? Maybe not. It's not the most offensive thing I could say, but it did paint a picture for me that I certainly have blind spots where I see the world in a certain way because of my background, because of my family situation, and there are other people who see it completely differently. Really valuable for me to remember.

Well, you bring up a good point there in terms of a blind spot and in the language that you chose to use. So how did you and Jennifer go about deciding the language that you would use in this book?

It was tough. I mean, you're really spotlighting something that we wrestled with quite a lot. And I think we dealt with it in two ways. One was by really trying to incorporate the best practice of the time. And so, you know, here's a perfect example. Current journalism standards dictate that when you talk about someone who is Black, you capitalize the letter B in Black, and when you talk about someone who's white, you don't capitalize the W. And when we talked about it, we thought, well, that doesn't feel equal, you know. I mean, if you're going to capitalize one person's identity, you should capitalize the other one too. We chose to capitalize both and we explained. One way was to forge our path and say, look, what feels equitable here and what feels like the right choice? Let's just talk about it and be transparent about why we chose it and demonstrate that we thought about it. Because a lot of things that people are offended by are because we do something thoughtlessly, not because we choose the wrong path, but because we didn't appreciate the gravity of how much people care about it. The first thing was we demonstrated we cared. And we really spent the time to do that. The second was that we made sure it wasn't just Jennifer's perspective and it wasn't just my perspective. So in addition to the two of us, on the COVID of the book we have six other contributors who all spent time on the book, working on the book and contributing their thoughts and their perspectives. And we also, as part of the editorial process, we brought in 12 sensitivity readers. And the sensitivity reader is someone who you can hire to read something that you've written. And it doesn't have to be a book, by the way. It could be a white paper, it could be a proposal, it could be whatever. But you hire them usually on like a per word or hourly basis. They read what you've written and they tell you what language you're using that might be considered offensive to some people. And so if you do have a blind spot and if your team kind of looks like you or comes from the same background as you, and you're afraid that you might have some of those blind spots, you should hire a sensitivity reader who are widely available. I mean, if you just Google it, you can find sensitivity readers out there., and you can hire them to read your document, and they will spotlight for you places where you are revealing your bias that you might not have thought about, and then you can help you fix it. And by us employing not one of them, but 12 of them, plus our 6 contributors, plus our perspectives, we really made sure that this book was reflecting many different points of view and not just ours.

So if someone says, hey, I want to have these kinds of conversations with people, and I don't want to make the mistake of maybe using a wrong pronoun or saying a word that might be offensive to someone, and I do, not on purpose, how do we respond to that?

Well, it happens all the time. And I think that what I have found, and I can just speak from my experience, because I've messed up before, and in fact, I tell the story in the book of a moment when I did mess up. And in my case, my mess up was agreeing to be a keynote speaker at an event without really paying attention to who else they had selected to put on stage. And eventually, when that event started getting promoted publicly, it was clear that every speaker they brought in was male. And that was a problem because they were not inclusive and they weren't including females on stage. And it would have been easy for me in that situation to say, well, it's not like I organized it, right? I just said yes to speaking. It's not me who made the problem. It's not me who made the mistake. But one of the things we encourage people to do in the book is see themselves as more than a bystander. And if you're more than a bystander, it means that you don't look at a situation that's clearly wrong and say, that's someone else's fault. You look at a situation that's wrong and you say, what can I do to make it better? And so in that case, what I did to make it better is I went and converted my session into a panel, and I invited two female futurists who I knew to be on the panel with me and insisted they also be listed as keynote speakers. That was within my control to do. I can't change their entire event. I can't change everything about it, but I can control the session that I was planning to do. I can choose to bring someone else on stage and share the stage with them. I use that as an example in the book, not because I wanted people to say, "Wow, you're such a good guy. Can you imagine what you did?" No. What I'm trying to show them is that there's always an impact that you personally can have, even if you're not the boss, even if you're not in charge, because you can choose to stand up and say something and do something. That's really what this book is about. It's about choosing to do something instead of just having a conversation. I mean, the title Beyond Diversity was really inspired by this idea that during the summit, we wanted to go beyond conversation. There's been lots of conversation. We wanted to actually create a way for people to do something.

I'm glad you brought up that example because that is an issue in the financial services industry. I think it's getting better, but every time we think it's getting better, we see another example of all-male panels and very male-heavy events. So I think you gave some good examples there of what we can do, but would you also encourage people to think about, if you're invited to be on a panel and you see that it's just all men, that you go back to the panel organizer and say, look, I'm happy to participate, but we need to have some more diversity here, whether it's by gender or by ethnicity. We can't just have all white males on this panel. I mean, that I think you're saying. That's definitely one way that we could just stand up and make a difference here.

Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I mean, I really shifted my perspective multiple times on this front because yes to what you're saying. I mean, if you see yourself as part of that, that panel and you are a male, white or not, and you see that there's no females or there's no person reflecting a certain perspective, you could certainly go back and use your voice and try and stand up for the people who weren't invited. The other thing is that we have to create an environment that is more welcoming for people of color or women to say yes. One of the most fascinating things I heard from an event planner was something I'd never thought about. Event planners want a more diverse stage. It makes them look better. People look at that and they are now coming to expect it, and they avoid a potential backlash if they don't have a diverse stage. One of the things one of the event planners I was speaking to said, which really opened my eyes, is she said, we put out asks to 20 different speakers. And only 5 of them were white males. The rest were maybe male, but people of color. The ones who got back to us first with everything that we needed were the white males. They responded right away. They gave us all of the stuff that they needed. They had all their bios ready to go. They had their headshots ready to go. They cleared their schedules and they came back first. And half of the people that we reached out to, we never heard back from. And when I talk to some of my friends who are people of color and ask them about those sorts of situations, sometimes what they say is, "Well, we didn't feel like that event was a right fit. We looked at the program and we didn't want to be the token minority on the calendar, and we know that's why they were reaching out to us," or, "I didn't feel prepared for that audience. I didn't feel like I was ready." And there's a lot of social science that indicates that when people self-censor themselves and choose not to put themselves up for an opportunity they miss out. And partially it comes down to opportunity creation, and partially it's coming down to feeling the personal confidence to be able to go for that. So I think there's dual messages here, right? One is if you are invited into that session where there's no diversity, you have to work harder to not just say to the event organizers, you need to get diverse speakers, because they might be trying and they might be failing. It's up to us to build our network so that we can bring those people in and make them feel— the more diverse speakers in— and make them feel like they belong as well. So I think the The reason why that example I shared of my situation worked is because I knew who to bring in and I personally invited them in. And so they had an opportunity to say yes. And I think we have to create more of those as well. So in addition to thinking about what can you do, think about your network. Do you have diverse professionals in your network who you would recommend? Because if you don't, you need to actively go out and try and find them.

Yeah, and such a great point there. And what I'm also seeing in my industry is, as I mentioned, I think we're starting to see more diversity at the events and the speakers, but we do see a lot of the same people too. And so I think it's also important that we continue to broaden the variety of people that we're bringing into these events and not just the same people every time, because we've got to continue to expand everybody's opportunity here to get up on that stage. So I think that's a key thing as well. And your other point there is so well taken about we're inviting these people, but sometimes they may not feel comfortable. Well, that's as much on us, you know, because we've got to make them feel like, yes, this is a welcoming environment for you and you are up to the challenge here. And we wouldn't be asking you if we didn't think you were up for the challenge. And the other thing that you said too about the token diverse person on the panel, obviously we can't think that way. There are very talented people everywhere from every form of diversity. And so, you know, we just have to look and find those people. And we can't think of these people as just putting the token person up there because that's just not how it works. So, you know, so much of the onus is on these event organizers to make sure that they're reaching out, creating the environment where these people are feeling comfortable. And searching around and finding those folks out there because they're there. There's talented folks everywhere. We just gotta give 'em that shot to, to get up in front of the group. Another thing that I think can also happen since we're talking about panels here is whether people get paid or not. And this is a situation that came up here recently as well. And I'm curious what your experience has been when someone is on a panel, if let's say it's an industry type event Do people typically not get paid for those? And in those situations where people do get paid, have you ever run into a situation where one person on a panel might get paid at this rate and someone else on the panel either does it for free because they didn't know that people were getting paid, or maybe they took half the rate of someone else? Have you seen that happen? And if you have seen that happen, do you have any thoughts on whether if you're sitting on a panel that either we're all free or we're all getting paid the same amount or any thoughts on that?

I have certainly seen that. It happens more often than it should. Personally, I'm not usually on panels. I'm usually brought in as a solo speaker. And most of the time I do get paid. And I'm not sure what other speakers get paid most of the time. There are different scales for different speakers. I mean, I am— and to some degree there should be be. Because I mean, for example, I'm going to do a keynote early next year. And I am the secondary keynote speaker, and the primary keynote speaker is Jay Leno. Now, I don't expect to get paid what Jay Leno would get paid. And it's not because I'm a person of color. It's because I'm not Jay Leno. So to some degree, we have to appreciate that people are worth different amounts based on what they're bringing to an event. You know, I'm not bringing the same thing Jay Leno is bringing. I think I'll have more useful content to share, but I'm not Jay Leno, right? So I think we do have to have a little bit of realism with this. But when it comes to panels and when it comes to looking at whether people get paid or not, I think that an event has to pay much more attention to pay equity, which is if people are being brought into the same panel, it's not fair to pay one person and not the others. And that's a responsibility of the event because a lot of times people don't— I mean, there's generally a human reluctance to talk about how much we make. And so a lot of times people won't just volunteer that or share it until something happens. But for an event, for anyone who is controlling the budgets, that is a super important thing to choose to provide equity on yourself. And the reason why they don't is often because it costs more money. Because if you're going to provide pay equity, you have to pay everyone the same as the person who's charging them, right? As opposed to getting a deal on some of the others and paying the one person that wants more money, more money. And so, I mean, we've faced this problem many times. I mean, I mentioned the sensitivity readers that we used. They each were reading portions of the book, relatively equal portions of the book, and they each had different rates because they had different rates for how they were doing things. And they're also based in different countries. And so monetarily, conversion rates and all that stuff means that their rates were different. We chose, the publisher chose to fix everyone's rate so that they all made the same amount. And in 80% of the cases, that meant that someone was getting higher than what they'd asked for. But doing a book like this, that's just what we felt like was the right thing to do, and so we did it. So I think it's under the control of who's controlling the budget to choose to provide pay equity in the right situations. I mean, in that case, they were all doing equivalent work, they had equivalent experience, and they provided an equivalent sort of value. So paying them on the same level was the fair thing to do. If it's a situation with Jay Leno and me, I'd love to get paid what he's getting paid, but I don't think that would be equitable, and I don't expect that either.

As you organize the book, you have these 12 different themes, and I want to talk about 2 or 3 of them here. One of them was identity, and I think this is another really big area. In the book, You talked about how oftentimes the conversations about diversity don't reflect the reality of our intersecting identities. And you say, we exist through intersections, but our conversations about diversity regularly push us to pick one dimension of ourselves at the expense of others. So I'd like for you to define what intersectionality means, and then how should we be thinking about identities as it relates to our diversity conversations?

I do think that there are a lot of unnecessary lines drawn between different identities for different people. If you are in an LGBTQ group, then you're not in the Hispanic group. If you're in the Hispanic group, you're not in the parent group. If you're in the parent group, you're not in the, you know, the disabled group. And the reality is that someone can be Hispanic and disabled and queer at the same time because people are people. The idea of intersectionality essentially says that you are not one thing, you are many things because you're human. And anyone who puts you into a single category, or if you put yourself into a single category, you are minimizing your identity and you're not able to live as your best self. And if you are able to embrace those intersections that make you who you are and truthfully portray those to the world without hiding something,, then you feel like you belong. And it increases your sense of belonging, which increases your happiness and allows you to live a fulfilled life. And that relationship between intersectionality and belonging is so important because when we feel like we are attacked for being who we are, when we feel like we're being attacked for our identity, there's a study we mentioned in the book that essentially found that the same part of our brain reacts as if we were being physically attacked. So if our identity is attacked or if we're not appreciated in that way for the different things that we are, we feel like someone's coming at us, like physically coming at us, and it's not a good feeling. So it's so important that we create an environment in the workplace and also just in our culture that allows people to be who they already are.

And from a workplace standpoint, what would that look like if we're an employer How do we embrace this idea of intersectionality? How does that actually manifest itself in the workplace?

The first thing I would do in a workplace, and the first thing that great employers do, is they ask. They ask questions. You know, what's missing? What do we need to do better? And in some cases, it will lead you to very, very obvious things. There may be a certain part of the office that lacks a ramp, and you have an employee who has a wheelchair, and they can't get to that part of the office. Without a ramp. And that may seem perfectly obvious to anyone who was externally looking at it, but in a workplace you may not have thought about it until you ask. And so you may have had an employee who's been working at your office for a year who never went to a certain part of the office because they couldn't reach it. They couldn't get there. And you think, oh, well, they have an elevator so they can get into the office and they're coming into work every day, so it's all good. And yet there's a part of the office where maybe people hang out, maybe it's the coffee break area, and it's off limits for that person until you ask them, hey, is there anything we could do to make this workplace better for you? There are many examples like that where people don't feel at ease in the workplace. And it's not because people are trying to be discriminatory or mean. It's just because they don't think about it. I mean, I moved to Australia and I lived there 5 years. And one of the experiences I had, which was quite foreign to me until I moved to a different country, was that there were sports conversations that were driving the culture of my workplace for a sport I didn't understand and I didn't care about. In the US, when I was going to work, people would talk about NFL or football, and I liked those sports and I watched them, so I didn't feel excluded. I felt like I belonged. When I went to Australia and they were talking about Australian rules football or rugby or cricket, these were sports I never really played. I understand the rules of cricket, because of my Indian background and my dad, but the other sports, they have funny rules and I don't get it and I don't know who the teams are and I don't really care. So having that experience of being in a workplace where the whole conversation was about that, I understood what it felt like to be alienated because I had nothing to contribute and they were just sitting there talking for hours about something I didn't care about. So that gave me empathy, I think, for that type of situation, which I'm sure other people run into in the workplace here in the US where people are talking about baseball or football or whatever. They either don't know anything about those sports or they don't care about the sport, and so they feel excluded.

[Speaker:BRIAN_SMITH] You also mentioned in the book here, you said, "The business of identity has started to intersect with the desire for authenticity. Companies that once focused on selling products and services by making us feel like less have now started to profit by making us feel like we can belong exactly as we are. So any comments here on this intersection here between identity, authenticity, and how corporations are maybe starting to maybe flip the script here a little bit and move toward authenticity as actually that's good for business?

Yeah, there's, I mean, just if you just look at the world of retail, there's a ton of examples, whether you think about ungendered fashion lines or you think about makeup lines for men, that have started coming out, or you think about products that were once marketed just to one gender, like Barbie dolls, that are now being marketed to both genders, or Legos, um, vice versa, or retail stores removing gendered toy aisles. I mean, there's so many examples of the shift that's taking place now towards more inclusion. And I think what it means for our culture is that people are realizing that the products and services that we consume, or the things that we wear, don't need to put us into one category or another quite so linearly. And what that allows anyone to do who feels like they don't fit into that straight line and they fit somewhere else on the continuum is to help them appreciate that that's okay. They don't have to be just this or just that. They can be something else and it can change over time, and they don't have to feel like they are minimized because of it.

So we're talking here about corporations and we're talking about diversity and equity and inclusion. So we can look at this from, it's just the right thing to do. But then I think you've also looked at it from the corporation's profit objective here. And I think you've seen research, maybe you've done research that says this is actually in a corporation's best interest to be an organization like this, because it's actually going to improve the bottom line.

Ian Formigle: There's a growing amount of research talking about that. If you want to talk about the bottom line, there's a couple of things. One is corporations that are able to get out of their old mindset can open up huge new markets for themselves. If you look at what's been happening with motorcycle brands, Harley-Davidson, Ducati, Triumph, they're all marketing their motorcycles now to women, which was never done probably a decade, maybe two decades ago. Women were not the target audience for motorcycles. Nobody thought women would ride a motorcycle. And now it's the fastest growing market in terms of growth for a lot of those brands because they opened up and they hit a brand new target. So there's a real ROI of being more diverse about how you think about your target audience and your consumer. There's also a huge value in being able to see opportunities and threats when they're coming because you're able to anticipate, you know, with more forecasting, So you can't anticipate disruption if everyone on your team has been in the same industry for 25 years and thinks the same way and doesn't see something coming around the corner. I mean, imagine the person who's been selling mattresses the same way for decades, expecting a consumer to walk into a store, lie on a couple of mattresses, take their recommendation, get that mattress, strap it to their roof, and drive it home. Now you have all of these retailers, all of these manufacturers who are making the mattress that is made out of foam, it's shrink-wrapped in a bag, it wraps up into into a box, it's much easier to transport. You don't even have to transport it, you just order it and it arrives at home. You're not going to see that disruption coming if you're all thinking the same way and you're all from the same industry. There's an innovation message here around diversity, which is when you have a more diverse and inclusive team, you anticipate those disruptions much more quickly, and you're able to create something that is more valuable for lots of different consumers without getting disrupted in the process.

When companies are hiring people, you often hear them say that, well, we want to hire people that are a cultural fit. And I think over time, that idea of cultural fit has basically come to mean people that look like me, that sound like me, that come from where I came from and are going to fit in here. And as we have more understanding of DEI here, I think it's become clear that instead of talking about cultural fit, we should be talking about cultural complement or cultural add. So do you have any thoughts on that, on how we need to be thinking about just the word culture in an organization? Because we all agree that the culture of your organization is a huge driver of the performance of the organization. So how should we be thinking about culture and maybe the, the words that we use around that as we're communicating with people?

I'll give everybody who's listening a great resource that they can use. There's a platform called Textio, T-E-X-T-I-O, and it was specifically created to help you write a more inclusive job ad. Because I think a lot of times the problem is that when we write these ads for the opening that we have at our organization, the language we use ends up signaling to certain people that they are not what we're looking for. And so they never even apply. And so oftentimes you'll hear the excuse that, well, you know, we put out a new job and we had 20 applicants, but they all kind of looked the same. And like, what do you want us to do? We had to pick one of the 20 and they were qualified and they were good. And so it has to start with getting more diverse applicants in the first place and making an opportunity seem welcoming for them. The second piece of it is that once you hire someone who is more diverse, who does come from a different background, you can't check that box off and say you're done. Because having one person represent that becomes a token person, and they'll end up leaving because they'll be minimized in some way, or they'll feel like they don't belong in the conversation, and they won't stick around. So that has to just be the beginning. You have to actually do more than that. And I think the other piece of it for a lot of organizations to try and bring in that outside perspective is to question some of the assumptions that we make before we bring someone in. For example, do they really need to have X number of years of experience in your industry in order to be a valuable employee? What if someone worked in retail for 10 years and wanted to switch to the financial services industry? Could their skills translate? You know, it's a question to ask, right? Because a lot of times what we say is we want X people with X number of years in the industry that we're working in. And what that ends up signaling is we want someone who thinks exactly the same as all of us, who's not going to bring any innovative thinking at all. Now, you would never write that in a job description, but basically that's what you're saying by requiring someone to have X number of years of experience in your industry. And instead of doing that, what if you could open it up more broadly and say, we're willing to consider people who want to switch careers from one place to another, we're willing to consider people who need a more flexible work schedule, who aren't going to be able to come to the office more than maybe once every 2 weeks because they're taking care of their kids at home, and so they're needing to work at a different schedule. When you create an opportunity for those people to become part of the team, that's how you start to open it up and get more diverse voices.

[Speaker:TREY_LOCKERBIE] Yeah, great example there. There's a company in our industry called ARK Invest, and a very successful investment management firm. When they were hiring their research staff, They pretty much specifically said that we're really not looking for people with X number of years of research experience in investing because we want people who are outside of this industry who can bring new insights, new ideas, new connections, because we think the future of investing is going to look a lot different than the history of investing. And so we're looking for new thinkers, innovative thinkers, who can make connections with some of the new things that are happening in our world these days. So I think they're a great example of an organization I think has a pretty diverse group of team members, and they specifically sought that out. And they're one of the, the huge success stories in the investment world here in the past 5 to 7 years. Now let's talk about leadership for a moment, because many of the folks listening to this are founders of their firms, they're leaders in the industry, What are some specific suggestions that you would have for those folks, what they can do and the kind of impact that they can have?

I think the first thing is to choose to broaden your network as a leader, because the higher up you get in terms of experience and in terms of recognition within your industry and reputation that you've built for yourself, the more easily you can get stuck in a silo where you only communicate with certain people who you've known for a long time and your network becomes stagnant as a result. So I think that for founders, for owners, trying to intentionally get out of that comfort zone, going to events that are not tailored specifically towards you, being more proactive about going out and joining a networking group that crosses multiple industries, for example, even if it happens tends to be virtual networking, trying to support a networking group that is targeted at people who are minorities and trying to support them as an ally. These are all things that are within our control to do to try and broaden our own networks. And there's a self-motivated interest behind this because the broader network you have, I don't think I need to explain to anybody the value of that. I mean, you get more opportunities here, you get better people that you could bring in as potential hires, maybe you get new clients out of it. I mean, there's lots and lots of value. Value to be made from broadening your network.

Well, Rohit, as we wrap up here, I'd love for you to share what your ambition is or your hope or your call to action is for the book that you and Jennifer wrote.

I hope that it compels people to be more than just a bystander. I think that was one of the main objectives of the book, for you to act, to do something, to hire someone, to stand up for someone, and to give you the the ammunition to be able to do that, to be able to recognize the situation and then to be able to take action. So that's really what the book is, is meant to try and help people do. I mean, it's very visually oriented, it's visually laid out, it's got lots of different tips, do this, do that, bullet point number 1, bullet point number 2. I mean, it's a very fast read. It doesn't need to be read cover to cover if you prefer to kind of dip in and dip out. And it's got lots of practical, useful things. So if DEI or diversity or improving that perspective or any of those things seems intimidating, if it seems accusatory, right? Like people are saying, "Oh, you're not doing enough," or, "Oh, you have this perspective," or, "Oh, you're biased." This is not a book that's written as an accusation to make you feel worse about yourself. This is a book that was written to offer hope, optimism, and real tactical things you can do tomorrow to make an impact. So hopefully it'll be useful for people and it'll actually inspire them to act. That's That's kind of what we want from this book.

And in addition to the book, you have a website and I think you've got all the videos from your Non-Obvious Diversity Summit so people can watch those. And I think that's all free. So tell me more about what is the website and what can people get when they go there?

Yeah. So the website is nonobviousdiversity.com. It's just all one word, no dashes or anything. And at nonobviousdiversity.com, you can watch watch all of those 52 sessions. So it's probably about 45, 46 hours of content if you wanted to watch the whole thing. But you could just browse the different sessions and there are a lot of really entertaining sessions. I mean, we have 5 stand-up comedians talking about whether diversity is funny. We have the former Guinness World Record holder for the heaviest person to complete a marathon talking about what it's like to be fit and fat at the same time. She has a whole community called Fit Fatties. So we have lots of different perspectives there and they're pretty entertaining. I mean, we have actors shows you might recognize, like actors from 30 Rock. We have authors of children's books, a master puppeteer. I mean, there's lots and lots of stuff there. So you can watch all the videos at that website. You can also download an excerpt from the book, and you can watch some videos of Jennifer and I talking about the book as well. So all of that is available from the website also.

Excellent. All right, Rohit, well, thank you for the time today. Thank you and Jennifer for putting this book together, and all the folks that collaborated with you. It's a very important book, and the website and the resource material that you have there, I think, is absolutely top-notch. So thank you for putting all that together.

Thank you.

Thanks for the conversation. My key takeaway from my conversation with Rohit Bhargava is change starts with each of us. It doesn't matter who you are or where you are or how much influence you have. We each have the ability to make a difference to foster change, and to be an example of what a more diverse and inclusive world looks like. All right, that's all for today. Make sure that you like and share this podcast through your favorite social platforms. And for more great podcasts, visit us at barons.com/podcast.

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