All things DEI with Vijay and Tara

What do we mean when we say DEI? Are the companies rolling back their DEI programs making substantive changes? And what is DEI going to look like under the new administration?

In this episode of Toot or Boot, we welcome back guests Vijay Pendakur and Tara Turk-Haynes for an in-depth discussion on DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) in the workplace. We discuss three  articles, including Vijay's own HBR piece on reframing diversity's value proposition, as we explore how DEI initiatives are evolving in today's climate.

The episode tackles current DEI discourse through three main articles:
1. "Reframe the Value Proposition of Diversity" from HBR, written by guest Vijay Pendakur, which explores new ways to understand and communicate diversity's impact on organizations
2. "Change Is Here: 5 Hard Truths & A Blueprint for Your DEI Plan in 2025," which presents a possibly controversial perspective on the future of corporate DEI initiatives
3. "What Trump's Second Term Could Mean for DEI" from HBR, which outlines strategic models for organizations to maintain inclusive practices in potentially challenging political environments

Join us as we examine the broader implications for the future of workplace DEI initiatives.

Connect with Vijay Pendakur
Dr. Vijay Pendakur is the author of the highly anticipated book, “The Alchemy of Talent: Leading Teams to Peak Performance.” A true multi-sector organizational leader, Vijay has held senior roles at four companies: Zynga, VMware, Dropbox and Salesforce. He has also served as the Dean of Students at Cornell University. In his time at Cornell, he was named Presidential Advisor for Diversity and Equity, as part of a new approach to campus-wide transformation at the largest Ivy League institution. A widely recognized thought leader, Dr. Pendakur’s writing has been featured in Fast Company, Harvard Business Review, Forbes,  and Time. Vijay is a board advisor with Ezra Coaching, Enterprise Ireland, and Wisq. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife, Katie, a psychotherapist and yoga teacher, and his two young daughters, Mira and Savi.

Find Vijay here: www.vijaypendakur.com
More about his bestselling new book: https://a.co/d/bSb1lxh
For Fractional DEI Advising: https://www.vijaypendakur.com/fractional-dei-advising
Or sign up for his newsletter: Quick tips for leading high performance teams.

Connect with Tara Turk-Haynes
Tara is a first generation college graduate, corporate worker, and the first of her immediate family to reach an executive level.  She is a Talent, Engagement, DEIB, Internal Comms operator and strategist. She has worked in house and as a consultant, helping other businesses develop and grow with equity embedded so they have a higher chance of having a strong, sustainable operations for the future.
Find Tara at Equity Activations.
You can also connect with Tara on LinkedIn
Or sign up for her newsletter: https://equityact.beehiiv.com/subscribe


Read the articles:
Reframe the Value Proposition of Diversity
Change Is Here: 5 Hard Truths & A Blueprint For Your DEI Plan In 2025
What Trump’s Second Term Could Mean for DEI

Transcript

Stacey Nordwall (00:00):

Welcome to Toot or Boot, where each week we talk about news related to HR and the world of work. We toot the news we like and we boot the news we don't like. I'm your host, Stacey Nordwall, a serial joiner of early stage tech companies as their first in or only HR person. And joining us today we have two returning guests, Vijay Pendakur and Tara Turk-Haynes. Vijay, welcome back. For those who haven't met you yet, please tell us a little bit about yourself.

Vijay Pendakur (00:30):

Sure thing. Well, I'm a native mid-Westerner, grew up in Chicago, but I live in Austin, Texas with my family now. And I spent the first 18 years of my career working in higher education and then I spent a number of years working in tech companies on employee experience at the executive level, and now I run Vijay Pendakur Consulting, which is just fancy language for I run the business of me and I work with clients on rebooting culture, aligning team performance to new opportunities in the business. I'm an executive coach and I also do fractional advising work, really particularly in the DEI space.

Stacey Nordwall (01:15):

Fabulous. And Tara, welcome back to you as well. For those who have not met you yet, tell us a bit about yourself.

Tara Turk-Haynes (01:24):

I am T Tara Turk-Haynes and I have been in the talent acquisition DEI employee engagement space for over 17 years. I'm a first generation corporate worker, first generation college graduate. I grew up in the Midwest as well. I grew up in Detroit. I lived in New York for a good portion of my adult years and now I live in Los Angeles with my husband and my three dogs. We are safely out of the fires situation. We've been mitigating a little bit of that, but luckier than most. But right now I am the founder of equity activations and we are a consulting company that helps businesses embed equity into their operations across the board, whether that be employee engagement talent or even just their DEI space as well. But I do feel like that's a longer term solution to help businesses be strong in the future. So that is our mission and I am so happy to be here.

Stacey Nordwall (02:28):

Fabulous. I am really excited to have you both back. I'm excited for today's show because we are going to dig in on all things DEI and I think this is a good discussion that's going to shed light on a lot of the discourse I've seen lately. If I think about what I've seen on LinkedIn and even elsewhere about DEI over the last few months, I think it generally falls into four buckets that I'm seeing, one is people are talking about asking what DEI actually is and I think there is a heavy focus in the discussions on race and gender as if that's all that DEI is. But I think we'll get into that today. That's not all that DEI is. The second thing, I see a lot of folks talking about the name, the acronym or if they want to call it something else. So SHRM dropping the E from DEI companies wanting to call it inclusion or belonging instead. I've seen that as a big topic of conversation. I've seen a lot of conversation about the DEI rollbacks and whether or not those are really substantive, whether those are broad reaching or if those are just being done by companies who maybe were only doing performative things to begin with.

(03:51):

And then the last very large topic is what is DEI going to look like under the Trump administration? And that's a huge thing that I've seen people pondering. So I think we're going to, as usual, we're going to talk about, we're going to discuss three articles as we normally would, but these articles are kind of a tool to have these broader discussions that people have been talking about and that we've been seeing. So that is a very long intro. Let's get into it. We're actually starting off with a Toot or Boot first, which is that we have the actual author of the actual article on the show. And just so listeners know, this is not a surprise. We are not gotcha-ing anybody, Vijay 100% knew and has said he's happy for us toot or boot this and really get into it. So there are no surprises there and I'm very excited because this is the first time that I get to actually ask the questions that I've had from the person himself.

Vijay Pendakur (05:01):

Excellent. Yeah.

Stacey Nordwall (05:02):

Alright, we're going to do it. Okay, fabulous. This is Vijay's article. It's reframed the value proposition of diversity. It was published in HBR and the recap that I have for this is it's really about trying to cut through the noise of some of the common cases that are made for the value proposition of diversity, including diversity helps us sell more, diversity repairs harm and diverse leadership teams are more successful. So we're going to cut through the noise of those cases to get to the signal of what the real value propositions are. And the reframe of diversity starts with this narrowing in on the signal, which is defining diversity as a mix of inherent and acquired characteristics and reframing this in terms of complexity and that it's complexity that delivers high performance through more viewpoints, more productive friction and more innovation. I feel all of a sudden just realized I was recapping an article to the author. I hope that I did a good job of that recap.

Vijay Pendakur (06:11):

You did a great job. You did a great job.

Tara Turk-Haynes (06:14):

You did a good job. This is great.

Vijay Pendakur (06:16):

As someone who has their bio read frequently, I frequently speak and my bio gets read and so it was nearly as awkward as having your bio read, but you nailed it. Totally nailed it. I love it. I mean, I wish I would've brought you in as a co-author because it clearly we're aligned.

Stacey Nordwall (06:34):

Oh my gosh. Great. Okay, so now that we have gotten past that, I kind of want to go first, but also I feel like I shouldn't because I've been talking too much. Tara, what did you think?

Tara Turk-Haynes (06:49):

My initial impression really is that I understand this logic completely, right? Because what we're trying to do is make the work that we're doing palatable for people who understand, my husband says this all the time, power is not given, it's taken. And the hard part for a lot of people who have been primarily in the workplace that has been white male dominated is that there are a lot of white males who feel very threatened by this work because they feel like it is going to take something away from them. As a practitioner of DEI, I understand that we've had DEI since the beginning, right? I always use the Colonial America as the best case of what diversity really is. And I think that means we have a bunch of different people in one place, but they are not all having the same experience. So when we use the word diversity, we are not using the word diversity as the solve for anything.

(07:51):

Diversity is just the context in which what we're talking about. So if you're an enslaved person, you are somebody who is on the Mayflower, you are in one place, but you are not having the same experience that is the workplace. So then that's how we get into the problem of removing equity from a SHRM standpoint and all of these other things. I do feel like even if we go back to the 1960s with the Civil Rights Act, we've had diversity, equity inclusion for a long time. The names have changed so many times. I think that at the end of the day, the problem that we're having though is that the noise is the problem. People do not want to give up power. So we can change the name, we can make the value proposition other different things, but if you are someone who does not believe in equitable experiences for all people, you are only thinking about your one homogenous group.

(08:50):

It really doesn't matter what you're calling it. That's why we keep kind of, I think, changing names and I think I'm not married to any name. Listen, it's totally fine with me if we go to a different direction at all whatsoever, we can call it whatever. The work still continues. But I think that continuously trying to make this business case, which I think is the value proposition and trying to cut through noise, is not going to solve for the Robbie Starbucks in the world. They don't really care what it's called. All they care about is that they feel like something is being taken away from them. And they would rather go back to a time where diversity wasn't the case and equity is not something that they have to think about. They don't want to deal with the fact that you can't pull yourselves up by your bootstraps that we are not having.

(09:37):

We have systemic racism in workplaces. So I think changing the name kind of doesn't help what we're trying to achieve, but the work will still continue. So there was a couple of things in there that I definitely agreed with, but like racial quotas and all of these other different things. But at the end of the day, there are also people who are having real problems in the workplace and they are either have a specific racial background, specific gender background, very specific neurodiversity, veterans, age. We can't replace those things. And they are complexities, but they're still social identities. We have multiple social identities that show up that people either want to solve for, but I think the work that we do is about making sure everybody has an equitable experience in the workplace, not just a few people.

Stacey Nordwall (10:32):

Vijay, do you want to say, do you want to respond to any of that or do you want me to? Okay, yeah,

Vijay Pendakur (10:38):

I'll hop in. So I think I'm of two minds or maybe even one heart and one mind. So Tara, my heart is fully aligned with the core of what you're saying, which to me, and I hope I'm capturing this correctly, really speaks to DEI as one, as a centuries long movement that is tied to the core American project of becoming an inclusive multicultural democracy. We haven't gotten there. We haven't been there, and there has been a unending march incrementally towards being less terrible than things were and minorly more dignified over time.

(11:22):

And that view of DEI is historically sound. It's rooted in social justice movements. It's rooted in civil rights politics, particularly after the 1950s before that in just labor politics in a variety of other movements. For me, the project of DEI when it comes to how it plays out in our society, I'm a hundred percent with you, a hundred percent with you. We need to have our foot on the gas and our finger on the scale of equity because the board is uneven and unfair, full stop. And unless we work to fix it, then expecting people to achieve meritocratic outcomes is bullshit and offensive and exploitative

(12:07):

Full stop. Where that Harvard Business Review piece comes out of is me really rethinking what I think DEI can is and should be in a for-profit corporation. So here's the hot take. Here's the spicy I think in a for-profit corporation in American capitalism. So those are some context, right? That whole social restoration mission of social DEI honestly has no place because capitalist organizations in America are incentivized to do one thing, which is to make money,

Tara Turk-Haynes (12:45):

Right

Vijay Pendakur (12:46):

And the only forms of DEI that will survive any kind of cyclical downturns pushbacks, whether it's Robbie Starbuck or macroeconomic downturn, are the ones that are provable to a very narrow profitability, ROI. And so the article is not actually meant to be about semantics. What I'm saying is there's actually a very, very narrow provable use case for diversity in organizations, and it is in this complexity argument where more complex teams produce more innovative outcomes when properly supported. And there's 30 years of empirical data to support that. What there isn't good empirical data to support. Are any of the social justice altruistic claims about what DEI does in companies? It doesn't bear out well in the literature. There are individual examples of companies that are diverse and have made money, but the metadata does not support the DEI as a causative driver of profitability outside of very narrow specific instances.

(13:54):

It's actually sort of a critique of capitalism and a critique of the limits of how much we can fix about our society in corporations. I think the addressing inequality is a society's obligation and there are many organizations that need to have a foot in that race. I think relying on corporations to do it is putting our chips in a very, very shaky basket of organizations that'll be fleeting in their investment at best. So this is actually me being very harsh on corporations and being like, look, y'all aren't going to stick it out in any kind of robust form of DE&I, but what we can do is find narrower applications of these things. So there are applications, and I know this is a long answer, I'll shut up in a second. There are applications of diversity that I think are very defensible in a for-profit, and that's one that I put forward in that Harvard Business Review case.

(14:47):

There's applications of inclusion that are very defensible in a for-profit. Inclusive teams retain top talent, unlock creativity, and there's plenty of evidence for this, right? So inclusion is a driver of team performance very defensible through the most Koch brothers of capitalist harshness. And then finally, equity as fairness. So using data to remove bias and noise and break down unfairness is I think very defensible as long as it is applied in every space and not only tied to demographics, but any kind of unfairness should be obliterated through equitable principles of using data in rigorous ways. And I think those are three very solid grounds that we can land a DEI plane on. Even if you're working in a company that has no social purpose, your C-suite and your board are like, no, we're out of all of that. There are still some places to have an investment. And so that's what I was searching for with that HBR piece. Tara, what do you think about that?

Tara Turk-Haynes (15:48):

Well, I think that I hear what you're saying, but I think one of the things is we can't divorce the social justice piece from the for-profit corporations because people are the ones who are in those companies. So we can't divorce people's perceptions and their biases when they come to work. You can't compartmentalize yourself at work at this point. We don't even have examples of diverse leadership because 1.6 of all the Fortune 500 CEOs are black. Or if we even get down to, I think the closest we get to is Asian American. So we've never even achieved diverse leadership because 85 to 90% of Fortune 500 CEOs are white. So we don't have the data to support whether diverse leadership works or not. What we're saying is if your company doesn't reflect just the census alone, because that's still inequitable, we still have systemic reasons why people can't make their way through these organizations.

(16:53):

So I understand what you're saying when we talk about complexities. At the end of the day, I think the people who are fighting against DEI will still use the word complexity as DEI and they're still not going to go for it. So even if you have the 30 years of what complexity means when you're talking about peer reviewed research, which is what was in your article, I think a person like a Robbie Starbrook or even if we're talking about macroeconomics, the idea is that we still have white supremacist beliefs ingrained in systemic racism that doesn't separate itself from communities, society, or the workplace. So how do we figure out how to at least have our workplace reflect the world that we live in instead of trying to compartmentalize them? So I don't know how other people feel about that, but that was my initial reaction is just I get it. But we also don't have any studies on diverse leadership. Stacey, what do you think?

Stacey Nordwall (17:58):

Well, I'm just enjoying this conversation so far. I'm like, okay, let me exit the episode and just listen.

Tara Turk-Haynes (18:06):

No, such luck.

Stacey Nordwall (18:08):

I'm back. I'm in it. I think. Yeah. So kind of going back to some of what you were both saying, I've had to make the business case before. So when reading the article when you were outlining some of, here are the business cases that people usually present, here's why that hasn't really worked. That part resonated with me. I thought, yes, I have tried to present them and I have seen them not work for some of the things that you're outlining. So that for me, I was like, okay, I'm feeling a toot for this. But then there was kind of the part where when we were you were talking about diversity as complexity and things like this, what started bubbling up for me was something else I had experienced in talking about these business, trying to make these business case where I would say something to leadership and they would basically bring up this idea of like, oh, but we have diversity of thought.

(19:12):

We all look very similar, but we have diversity of thought and even though all of our leadership is white men. And so that was the thing where I was starting to question the article and it started, I was like, maybe there is also a boot on the backend of this because is talking about it in terms of complexity, kind of a way to just flatten everything out and almost like dismiss some of these concerns in favor of, oh, but we have diversity, diversity of thought. So I think that was for me the kind of lingering, I just don't know, and I understand you've explained I think more within this episode of this is kind of within the context of capitalism and that I think adds more of a layer to it than what I got just from reading the article. But even then still it is, I have that lingering. Is this just kind of making the status quo continue to be the status quo? I guess. So that was my thoughts from it.

Vijay Pendakur (20:30):

Yeah, I think it's a fair call out. I actually think it's accurate. I think that if the research on complexity and how inherent and acquired traits ladder up to a aggregate difference in perspective and how this difference in perspective is the friction that unlocks productive and innovative outcomes on teams that can easily be malappropriated or reappropriated into what started probably eight, nine years ago of viewpoint diversity, well, we're just going to go for viewpoint diversity. We're not going to pay attention to any of this other stuff. So Stacey, I definitely hear the boot that is probably coming here and I think that the challenge for me is that I have been in the role of having to defend the business of DEI in public corporations. I've been the chief diversity officer of multiple

(21:26):

Multi-billion dollar public corporations and nobody is hearing the social justice arguments about, well, we have to think about a demographic lens on diversity and the demographics we're going to count are the ones that are oppressed because that's the opposite. That's really what you're saying is look, once we slide into viewpoint diversity, it ignores the fact that really what we're trying to do is fix oppression. And part of what I'm saying here that I think is maybe the most salient thing is that I just don't think corporations are going to fix oppression. I don't think for-profit companies are going to fix oppression. I think there's a huge social mission that our government and nonprofits and social organizations have to undertake and have in different points in time from the New Deal to the war on poverty to every single major moment where you actually see major uplift in people's quality of life doesn't really come from corporate work. It comes from social movements that resulted in legislative changes and policy systems and environments that created pathways to education, pathways to housing, pathways to food security for communities. That didn't happen inside corporations.

Tara Turk-Haynes (22:40):

I think it did. If you think about IBM, if you think about the history of CEOs saying, and I think connected to capitalism, a lot of times, and I say this a lot, your candidates and your employees are also your consumers. They're not separate. They're the same group of people. If you think about, I'll give Walmart as an example. Walmart just came out, they said they're rolling back their DEI initiatives. It happened right before Christmas, and then my very favorite group of people Love Jones Nia Long and Larenz Tate do a commercial for Walmart. And you know what happened? The black community was like, I'm sorry, who was in the room when this happened? Right? Why do you think I'm going to go to Walmart if you just said you don't have any kind of guardrails so that I am able to succeed in this corporation as an employee and you don't care about me as a consumer or as a supplier, but then you're going evoke a cultural reference for a very specific group of people that you want us to go in and shop for.

(23:52):

And the question that I always hear, and my favorite Torin Ellis who I think is the king of all kings, his favorite question is "who's not in the room that should be?" And I don't think of it as DEI efforts from a corporation where they're just, I'm going to do the right thing because we haven't defined what the right thing is. We also haven't really defined diversity, equity or inclusion as a shared language across the board. We're all not using the same definition. So sometimes I feel like using, we're speaking different languages when we say this, but I do feel like corporations understand economics and if those groups of communities feel like they're not seen in that organization and you don't have anyone on your about us page for example, from a career standpoint, I as a black woman am going to be very hesitant to apply for jobs.

(24:45):

When I see one group of people on the leadership page, I do not feel welcome. I feel like I might have a tough time there. Do I want to take on that? I still feel like I'm part of the 92% who feel super exhausted after this last election, so I want to go someplace where I feel included in. So I don't necessarily think the argument is about social justice. I think it's about how strong is your business going to be as the world changes, as the census changes, as these groups of people get larger. Are you speaking to those groups, those group of people? I tell companies all the time that I work with and I was in-house as well and had to make that same argument, but I was like, what's wrong with this ad campaign that you just did? This language is offensive, this language or this person, I don't see any person that looks like me, so I don't feel like I'm connected to the product that you're trying to sell at all.

(25:39):

How are we having these kind of conversations if we are not acknowledging the fact that those people can't succeed in the organization as it stands? I think that's the bigger question that comes out for me is when we talk about a lot of these making the business case, the business case is you want better business and those communities pay attention to people who look like them in those businesses, and if they don't see themselves, then they're already off board. I'm done with you. I don't think the Walmart birken bag is going to bring a lot of people back after that, after the whole, the DEI fiasco, that's a one and done product. I bought a bootleg Birkin bag and now I'm done. I'm not going to go back there for eggs or anything else because they've already said what their commitment is. They feel like they don't necessarily need me to be their consumer or their candidate.

Vijay Pendakur (26:30):

Tara, do you think that at the next investor call that we will see a drop in Walmart's bottom line because of the choices they made?

Tara Turk-Haynes (26:38):

It depends, and one of the things that, and Stacey knows this, I don't love social media, but I'm on social media because I remember, like I said at the early part of this call, I'm a first generation corporate worker. My family did not work in an office and my dad worked on the line at Ford for 40 years before he passed away and my mom did clerical work and that was it. So a lot of the times when we're talking about these kinds of conversations, I'm approaching it from the people that I grew up with and I stay on social media because those people are still on social media and they're not talking to each other in circles like we do sometimes as people who are addicted to the people trends and HR trends. One of the things that I don't think people on social media who have buying power understand is that you are able to voice your opinion through investor emails.

(27:33):

I think they do a boycott and then they basically don't have collective organization, social organization. But nonetheless, I don't know if it's going to be this next quarter, will it be the quarter after that? But collectively, community organizing is one of the challenges I think we have a problem with. Also social media is where people have gone to do some of that community organizing, but it's quite possible. I just looked at Walmart yesterday. I do own one stock because one day I was like, Hey, let me see, and it is down. I don't know if that's because we were like, we bought your broke down BIRKEN bag and then we're not going back for cereal, but it is down over what it was before. The other point I think we're going to see, and I think we also need to talk about trends. I think we're also going to have a problem with, and I think we're leading to this upcoming Trump administration and how companies are going to navigate it because we just had McDonald's happen where the Axios reports that McDonald's rolls it back then they release a thousand page document in that thousand pages somewhere they're talking about we didn't roll it back, we evolved and here's what we did.

(28:44):

So they're doing this tango of things and I think a lot of companies do not want to have a target on their back, so they're not going to talk about any of this stuff I think if they don't have to because they don't want activists going after them. I know this was so many different parts of your answering your question, but it was a lot of things I think that I've been thinking about that are super connected and I think that's a challenge for me too is everything is connected and to talk about it in silos is very challenging.

Stacey Nordwall (29:13):

Yeah, I think this is actually a very good segue into the next article, which is Change is here Five Hard Truths and a Blueprint for your DEI Plan in 2025.

(29:27):

The recap here, the author says that based on the current political and legal landscape, DEI, particularly identity-based DEI will face scrutiny and legal challenges and that corporations are responding in a way to manage corporate reputation. He also said corporations aren't "advocates in a culture war" and that "the reality is that many DEI departments were created to protect companies from litigation and claims made against them not to grow representation." He lays out what he calls the five hard truths along with the blueprint. Those five points are first conservative activists are working to dismantle DEI and they are backed by American voters. Second visible diversity efforts will recede in favor of silent, invisible programs and policies, which is what Tara just mentioned. Third, internationally race and sexual orientation are not metrics included in DEI or ESG work, and so the US system should follow suit. Fourth, you should empower your chief diversity officers or basically move them to another role or exit them and last decentralized and embed inclusive leadership by using gen AI and or leadership training via outside experts. This article I messaged Tara yesterday, it kind of exploded my brain a little bit, so I am really excited to talk about it with you all. Vijay, would you like to kick us off

Vijay Pendakur (31:03):

Round two of Vijay and Tara disagreeing about something? I love this article. I agree wholeheartedly with Doug's analysis. I think it's extremely pragmatic and I can tell that it lands like a flaming turd on everyone else's sensibilities on this call. Flaming turd is one of my favorite phrases, by the way. I didn't save that for just special occasions. I bring that one out every day. But I think that whether we like it or not, I think Doug's looking around corners is pretty accurate. I think that there's a lot in this piece and you covered a lot, so we may want to dig into one thing or another, but I do. I mean my experience running global DEI operations, the European sensibilities around this are very different often than the American sensibilities. The additional regulations that have driven the S part of the ESG in the EU have really focused on things like socioeconomic uplift, pay equity, pay transparency, these other areas of emphasis and way less emphasis on broadly what we call sort of demographic DEI. We can argue about whether that's right or wrong, but I do think that that's probably what is going to be safer ground or more stable ground as Chris Ruffo and Robbie Starbuck and Steven Miller and the whole cabal of evil warlocks continue to use. I mean we've got our third article, which is about litigation, but the litigation is going to be highly successful whether it sticks or not because of the chilling effect.

(32:48):

The companies I've worked with for or been close to have received inquiry letters and backed away from work they were doing simply because they're like, this isn't worth us getting into, right? So the directionality of travel right now is in DEI continuing and continuing to shrink and to become safer and more conservative. And that's largely what I got out of Doug's piece is these are the places that you can put some chips when the total addressable market on this work is diminishing rapidly. So largely I'll say I like it, I think it's pragmatic. I want to turn it over for all of the hot sauce that is about to happen and lemme see if there's anything that I can jump back in on after you all share your perspectives.

Stacey Nordwall (33:40):

I mean, I think that you might be accurate in your assessment, but I actually did not talk to Tara about what she thought about the article. So Tara, go ahead.

Tara Turk-Haynes (33:48):

I know I just had the worst poker face in the world, so that's literally just why to be frank. Actually, there's some parts of Doug's article that I toot. I do believe the chief diversity officer situation absolutely, because a lot of, and I'm going to go back to again truth number one, most of the United States electorate I don't think did vote for this. If we look at the numbers of the election, they're not equal equal. So I think that we might be doing ourselves a disservice by assuming that, but again, it goes back to the fact that we have not properly defined what diversity, equity and inclusion is collectively. So again, when we're talking about what this work means, I don't think we're speaking the same language. So that part of it for me is a boot because I think what we need to do is go back to the core of what are we talking about when we actually say some of this stuff?

(34:50):

Because I think then there'll be a lot of people who are working class will say like, wait a minute, I'm neurodiverse. Wait a minute, I'm a caregiver. Wait a minute, I'm over 50 and looking for a job and people are judging me from my Hotmail account and I can't get an interview. So I want to kind of ground it in real life, not sort of larger kind of conversations. I think one of the things that I think is really challenging it, and I'm going to go back to it, the European sensibility makes sense and I do see that I have done global DEI as well. There are always going to be geographic differences. We are not going to have a one size fits all when we're talking about trying to create equitable workplaces for people around the world because geographically we're having different experiences. America is an idea, America is the only one of its kind.

(35:46):

If we think about it, young colonialism, enslavement, we have not dealt with a lot of why people are here as opposed to thinking about we haven't even dealt with how do we fix how people are here? We haven't done with indigenous peoples. We are a collection of people specifically having this problem that we will not have in the UK or we will not have in other places because of that very specific of how we got here, what kind of country are we? So we're not having that kind of conversation and the more we curate education, I don't think we're going to have that conversation. We're almost like, I don't want to talk about it. I don't want to talk about it. It's sort of like that cultural sort of like if you don't talk about it then the problem doesn't exist. But I think if we think about how movements have happened in the past and you mentioned that before, people want to still talk about them.

(36:41):

There are a large percentage of people who still want to talk about them and it bubbles over into work. So I think the ESG part of it, I don't think we can follow suit because we don't have the same setup. That's not how we're wired to deal with problems. And our government system is also very different. We don't have universal healthcare people right now. The best healthcare you can get is tied to your job. There are other ways to get healthcare, but it's not as good as the one if you have a job and how are people going to get jobs. So boiling it down to basically that piece of it I think is what also struck me. I'm trying to think of what else. Stacey, you jump in because I think there was another point I have, but I can't remember because I'm going through the article myself again. 

Stacey Nordwall (37:27):

I mean, yeah, I think that was something that I found particularly interesting and this is not my area of expertise, so you two know much better than I do, but I did have this thought of, I understand his point in saying, Hey, maybe we're focusing too much on these certain demographics, and I think that's a broader problem within the conversation of DEI where it is just so focused on race and gender and people forget that it actually involves so many other things when you're thinking about trying to create an equitable experience. But it did also, to your point, Tara, make me think of, okay, but things are very different in Europe. You have very different demographics, very different history, a very different role that the government plays and the expectations that people have about the social safety network and all of these kinds of things. So for me, I felt like that I understand the core idea of it, but to me it didn't feel super practical because it is still so different.

(38:28):

I think the other thing that stood out just and I have to mention it because people are talking so much about AI and hr, I don't know exactly how you think gen ai, which was not created by a diverse group of people with diverse resources, you're just going to throw that into an organization and that that's going to create inclusive leadership. I did not understand how that was meant to happen at all that one, but I feel like everybody's just trying to put AI in their articles. So I was like, cool, I'll give you that fifth hard truth. Sure.

Tara Turk-Haynes (39:05):

That was my other point too, Stacey, because I don't know if you all saw Karen Attiah's article about META'S AI interface and the experience that she had, and also if you look at the charter research about AI in the workplace, the two groups of people who are super resistant and hesitant about AI are black and brown people and people over the age of 50 because they don't understand how this is going to work in the workplace to replace them. Now, I think a lot of that research shows that people already feel vulnerable in the workplace, and those are very specific demographics of people that we can't ignore. So companies haven't done, to your point, a great job of understanding what this big gen AI is going to do. I think people get super excited. I also think leaders could not, some leaders are not going to be able to articulate it for you because they don't know either they like the what's new and trendy and how they can introduce it into the organization.

(40:03):

Us too, which is what exactly happened with DEI at the murder of George Floyd. US too we're doing DEI as well. US too, US too, US too is not a sustainable business strategy. So thinking about understanding how you're going to use gen AI to create inclusive environments when the AI itself, if you read Karen's article in the Washington Post opinion section, it is going to blow your mind because the bot is essentially a black woman talking to or biracial bot talking to Karen and literally just coming clean and saying, no, there's no one who's black who put this together and giving such misinformation about and all this tropes and the stereotypes that happen when it comes from black culture as well, we're going to see more of that. We all know AI has been around for many years, so it's just put its foot on the gas like Vijay talked about in general in the past couple of years because I think our digital transformation is really accelerating, but we're not stopping to think about who we're leaving behind. And so when we suggest things like that, to me it sounds like we haven't really thought it through in terms of how it's going to actually impact the workplace.

Vijay Pendakur (41:18):

Yeah. I also thought it was a bit odd that the article was over and this gen AI piece was tacked on at the end, and it wasn't sort of tactical or specific. There was some hyperlinks to existing companies, and I'm like, are these sponsored referral links? What's happening here?

Tara Turk-Haynes (41:36):

Money's on the board. By the way. He did say, I'm an investor in one of these, so this,

Vijay Pendakur (41:41):

So look, actually I really like Doug. I don't know him personally, but we've been in the same spaces, and so this is not meant to be an ad hominem critique or an attack, but yeah, I thought that piece of article was pretty shaky because if you are going to make an argument about the utility or futility of using gen AI to advance inclusion, that actually is the whole article. It's the book, it's the life's work. And so to take something so messy, so complicated and so fraught and just be like, boop, I'm going to put this here. It actually really, I mean the call in from a place of love is it just under serves the issues, right? It doesn't advance good understanding. It's polarizing as we can see in this call. So one of the areas, and this is, I have no idea if this is what Doug's talking about or not.

(42:25):

So this is really less about the article and more about my wondering in the applications of generative AI that I've seen that I think may have some potential in being helpful are not necessarily the mega large language models that are built agnostically primarily by scraping and stealing IP from everybody else and then are applied really broadly. The broader the corpus and the broader the application, the higher the chance of either hallucination or just bad garbage in garbage out, like classic. But there are actually many constructed generative AI tools that are narrowly built off very, very tightly bound corpus that was assembled in service of the generative AI tool being used against a very narrow use case. And you see way lower amounts of hallucination or bad outputs in those spaces. And in the l and d space, I have seen some pretty amazing demos of generative AI tools that solve for something that we need to solve, which is synchronous point in time learning is very expensive and is a smart investment, but then you need the follow on practice repetitions to affect behavioral change.

(43:43):

That is true for learning anything. It's really wonderful to bring people together to introduce concepts, to practice things, to give people their homework, and then they need the recursive iterative laboratory of learning and failure in order to, that's how neuroplasticity actually works. That's how skill development actually works. Anybody who has taught anyone anything or learned anything knows this. We don't even need all the fancy science. We just nailed this, right? But it's really difficult to scale that if all you have are people. And so where gen AI automation or technology may be massively helpful is in creating the one-on-one coaching relationship with a generative AI tool that gives you the practice laboratory

(44:22):

If it's tightly scripted and designed for that use case of learning. And so take all of that and apply it to inclusion based learning. I think there is possibility. Are we there now? Probably not. But I think there's a huge unlock here in terms of skill development because of the limitations of budgets and human capacity to actually affect reskilling and upskilling in any kind of broad way for a larger workforce. And any l and d team of three serving a company of 5,000 employees knows this reality where you're like, we can do couple trainings and then we're exhausted, and then people are like, it was amazing. And then the behavior change doesn't happen. So there's a very potentially exciting possibility for gen AI around behavior change. 

Tara Turk-Haynes (45:08):

I think Doug needed you for that last piece and probably should have called and picked up the phone. I think you made a really compelling use case for it. And I also want to bring it to the climate change part of it too. Right? In LA we're talking about water, the use, the AI usage of water, and do we have that resource to be able to sustain what we think it actually can accomplish? When we're talking about inclusion and we're talking about solving workplace problems is also a huge question for me as well, because we could have used some of that water over the past few days here in Los Angeles, right?

Vijay Pendakur (45:44):

And we don't build the water usage of what it takes to make GPUs. We don't build the real cost of water into it. So companies, all the leading the mega caps, if you look at the s and p for the last 12 months, it's just, it's all the ai, it's AI gains basically, but the costs of that AI were not built into the expansion of investment. You can say this, I think the same thing about crypto. Crypto is extraordinarily energy intensive, but they're not being made to pay the real costs of that energy because we have all these energy subsidies and things like that, and you can seek out these preferential business zones. And so then you see crypto companies that have these valuations where you're like, but that's not a real valuation. It's not sitting on top of the real cost of what you took from the earth climate and our children's future in order to make this fake thing we might never have needed.

Tara Turk-Haynes (46:40):

I think that it toot, toot, toot. 

Stacey Nordwall:

I know. I'm like, that could be a whole other episode because yes, a hundred percent. I want to make sure that we get to one of the topics. That was the big topic.

Vijay Pendakur (46:53):

I'm so sorry, but I have a hard stop in four minutes too. So we have a third article and I'm going to run out time.

Stacey Nordwall (47:00):

Okay. So we're going to try to get to this as much as possible, but we're talking about DEI. The last article was despite DEI pushback, new report shows companies stay committed to DEI For the headline, the author says that corporate support for DEI is still strong, and that to accurately gauge a company's commitment to DEI, you have to look at their DEI goals, DEI talent programs and supplier diversity programs. She provides, oh, I'm sorry. I'm totally,

Vijay Pendakur (47:32):

Nope, that's not the last article. The last article is an and David Glasgow.

Stacey Nordwall (47:36):

Oh my God, yes. I scrolled too far. Okay. No, this is the last article. What

Vijay Pendakur (47:42):

Tara were you was I was like, wait a minute. I was like all of my school years when I didn't do the homework and all of a sudden I was like, I didn't do the homework.

Tara Turk-Haynes (47:52):

I read that, but not for this. 

Stacey Nordwall: 

Sorry, that is not the third article. This third article is, even as I was reading it, I was like, I don't think this is right. Okay. What Trump's second term could mean for DEI. The authors believe that the Trump administration will escalate the backlash against DEI and will continue the anti DEI lawsuits and legislation. They raise the concern that Trump may sign an executive order to eliminating DEI programs federally and may begin to institute the agenda from project 2025. They recommend that companies use three models developed for multinational orgs and countries that are hostile to LGBTQ plus rights, which they call when in Rome embassy and advocate models. And because we have two minutes, Vijay, would you like to say what you thought about their proposed ways to still work in DEI

Vijay Pendakur (48:44):

Just want to say general toot because I think David and Kenji are working their butts off to try and give reasonable guidance from a place of expert legal counsel. And when you're sitting in the fog of operational hell, these moments are very helpful. So to have this heuristic of embassy or you know what I mean, the three parts that they give, it might help you as an in-house operator. You're now a senior HRBP that's been told that you have to act like the chief diversity officer because your company riffed the whole DEI team. So you can turn and read Kenji and David's last 10 articles and get a pretty good on-ramp to understanding the current jurisprudence and the risks around the corner. And I think this is one of many in a series they've done that I find to be high utility. And I would give a general toot too.

Tara Turk-Haynes (49:34):

I'm going to add Christina's name because I'm tooting that because she's a

Vijay Pendakur (49:37):

My bad

Tara Turk-Haynes (49:37):

Also in that room. And I feel like that's very important, but I'm tooting it as well because this is a very practical, helpful toolkit across the board, no matter where you are, to see what your actual appetite is for taking some of this work on and allowing you to navigate the challenges. Do I think this's going to be challenging? I also think it's going to be a clown car shit show. So everything may happen and nothing may happen is what we need to be prepared for. 

Stacey Nordwall:

Yes. Alright.

Vijay Pendakur (50:07):

I think something, unfortunately, Tara, don't you think, I mean nothing may happen. Maybe it seems the outside chance here. I think that there's some pretty easy ways, even just using executive orders, that they can cast a wet blanket that actually has a felt effect.

Tara Turk-Haynes (50:23):

I think the only reason why I say nothing is that intent in terms of midterm elections coming in two years and this administration's ability to actually enact anything across the board because they all seem to not be able to talk to one another and they're all on different pages and we actually don't even know who the president is. We're not even sure if it is who's standing there. I don't know. And that's more about an organizational mess rather than a desire to actually kill something

Vijay Pendakur (50:50):

Yeah. Dude, I hope you're right. Oh my gosh, I have to sign off, but can I just toot Tara's prediction? Can we hope that this happens?

Tara Turk-Haynes (51:03):

Fingers crossed. I love this. This was so great. It was so great sharing the space with both of you. This was a highlight for the week

Vijay Pendakur (51:10):

For me as well.

Stacey Nordwall (51:12):

Thank you both so much for joining me today and I will make sure that people can contact you. I'm going to put all of your information in the show notes, so everyone make sure to look there so you can contact Vijay and Tara. 

Tara Turk-Haynes (51:26):

Bye Vijay it was so good sharing this space with you. I hope we get to do it again soon.

Vijay Pendakur (51:29):

Yes, this was awesome. Thank you, Stacey. Thank you Tara.

Tara Turk-Haynes (51:31):

Thank you. Bye Stacey.