Simon Sinek in his video “What Diversity & Inclusion is REALLY About” says that when you give someone a “Cause”, they will look for all the ways to bring that “Cause” to life and you need diversity and inclusion to see opportunity or gaps because we all have different perspectives and different upbringings. You can not just draw the razor line like rich people are happier than poor people. There are some people who come from meager means but they understand teamwork, they understand resilience, they understand loving their mother, they understand gratitude, they understand hard work better than anybody and they are good. Similarly, there are some people who come from very wealthy means who never learned the skills of adaptability, who never learned the skills of coping because everything came easy and they struggle throughout their life. So, it's how you approach, it's not the circumstances. As Victor Frankl also said, “If you can't change your circumstances, you change yourself”. We cannot control the world around us but what we control is our attitude, and diversity and inclusion are all about perspective. When you give people “Cause”, they will look for ways to bring the cause to life through their perspective. For example, in the United States, there is a “Cause” that is written in the declaration of independence that “All men are created equal”, this is an idealized state that we will never get to, but we will die trying. Different people have different perspectives to bring that “Cause” to life by the abolition of slavery, women's suffrage, civil rights, gay rights, etc.
When I have a vision and when I say “Inspired, safe, and fulfilled”, I only have my own perspective, I have unconscious bias and I have blinders but if I have lots of people on my team, we all have our own unconscious biases and we all have our own blinders but together we have a broad view. Therefore, I need people from different religions, different races, different sexuality, different job experiences, who have experience in something we've done before and I also love hiring people who have no idea about this job because they'll bring a new perspective. I love putting people in jobs they don’t know how to do and that's the thing we forget. You say that it's a program based on numbers, based on color or sexuality but it's none of those things, it's about perspectives. Different people have different perspectives and different upbringings. The best companies are diverse because they have diverse thinking and diverse ideas. We constantly make jokes about boards or companies that are made up of old white men because there's one perspective. The joke is that there is one perspective, the counter to that is if it’s not just old white men but it's a diverse group of people with diverse experiences, then magic happens. But the precursor is that there has to be a shared set of values and a shared vision, without the shared values and the shared vision all of that diversity will subdivide into their little tribes. They'll go and eat at the lunch tables all completely separately and then you need your diversity and inclusion program because you never understood it in the first place.
