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Harnessing the Power of Diversity of Thought at Uncle Nearest

Nathan “Nearest” Green, known to many as Uncle Nearest, was an enslaved man living in Lynchburg, Tennessee, in the 1850s. He made whiskey using a special charcoal-filtering technique he learned when cleaning water back home in West Africa. His method of filtering whiskey through charcoal made from sugar maple trees became known as the famous Lincoln method, named for the Tennessee county where the technique proliferated. The method is still used today.¹

One person Green taught the Lincoln method to was a young Jasper Daniel, a natural entrepreneur who saw genius in Green’s method and product. Daniel so believed in this whiskey that he started selling it as far and wide as he could. When the Civil War ended, Daniel bought a distillery and named it after himself, subbing in the first name Jack.

Jack Daniel’s first master distiller was Green, Uncle Nearest, now a free man and a mentor and close friend of Daniel’s. Green worked at the distillery for many years until he retired, but his story, and the credit for one of the most recognizable brands in the United States, evaporated and was lost for decades.

Lynchburg locals remembered Uncle Nearest, but the rest of the country didn’t until Clay Risen highlighted Green’s legacy in a 2016 New York Times article, “Jack Daniel’s Embraces a Hidden Ingredient: Help from a Slave.”² Risen’s article was revelatory to most, but he also thought it was incomplete. He shared the challenges of getting the true, detailed story with so little archival material. Having cobbled the narrative together mostly from oral history, Risen believed there was still more to the story to uncover.³

An Undaunted Spirit

Fawn Weaver was inspired by the story and wanted to uncover more. “For me, as an African American, it was mind-boggling,” she said in a podcast interview. “We know that African Americans have been involved in so many brands over the centuries, but we’ve never been able to point to one and say: this person actually had a name and this person had a significant role.”⁴ Weaver planned a trip to Lynchburg to interview as many people as she could about the story, with plans to write a book and movie to honor Nearest Green’s legacy.

In interviews with Weaver, Green’s family told her the one thing that would truly honor their ancestor was to give him his own bottle of whiskey. Weaver was so inspired she invested $1 million of her own money in 2017 to found a distillery. In a few short years, Uncle Nearest has become the fastest-growing whiskey brand in the country.⁵ In the company’s first four years, Weaver raised $60 million, and today, Uncle Nearest is the bestselling African American–owned and African American–founded spirit brand of all time, from a company that employs fewer than a hundred. Available in all fifty US states, twelve countries, and more than twenty-five thousand restaurants, stores, and bars, the brand has seen 100 percent growth each quarter to date.⁶ Its three ultra-premium whiskeys have garnered more than 150 awards. Uncle Nearest has earned 25 Best in Class honors, and more than 370 awards, including being named one of the top five whiskeys in the world by Cigar & Spirits magazine.⁷

In the $70 billion wine and spirits industry, where less than 1 percent of wineries and distilleries are Black-owned and where there is a lack of BIPOC leadership, Weaver knew that as a Black woman, she would be fighting an uphill battle from the start.⁸ But Weaver was undaunted. She sought not only to make history as an inclusive brand breaking barriers as the first spirit to commemorate an African American and the first to have a Black master distiller on record but also to create a top-performing organization. Her strategy for making it happen was to embrace diversity in all forms, including diversity of thought.

The Tricky Topic of Diversity of Thought

As a researcher and consultant, I’m wary of the term diversity of thought. In principle, it’s good. Having many ideas from many people who think in many ways will improve performance.

However, the concept is often used as a weak substitute for doing the work. It’s a way to avoid difficult DEI conversations around race, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, and so on. I have heard countless leaders suggest that since they have diversity of thought on their teams, they don’t need to be focused on demographic inequity or changes to the makeup of teams. Even if their leadership teams comprise mostly men, mostly White, from mostly from the same colleges and socioeconomic backgrounds, these leaders use diversity of thought as their excuse not to work on those other necessary DEI tasks.

True, DEI progress requires both demographic and attitudinal diversity, and diversity of thought isn’t always found where you’d expect it to be. “People often focus on demographic diversity like race and gender, but the reality is, that is not the totality of diversity to me,” Weaver said, noting that you can’t project how people will think simply from their demographics. She shared one of her favorite examples of this observation:

My husband’s parents moved to Nashville from California, and they had a neighbor who, if you saw him in a movie, you would automatically paint him as a [White, uneducated, poor person]. Big, jacked-up truck and the White guy with the long beard and the tattoos and the bald head. I saw him outside one day, and my mother-in-law said, “He doesn’t like Black people.” I asked if he told her that, and she said, “No, just whenever we are out there, he never says hello. He never even bothers looking at us.” Pop chimed in. “Oh, yeah, he doesn’t like Black people.”

So the next morning, I see him outside washing his truck. I go out the back door, and I start walking over there just to say hello, to test out whether this assumption was their projection onto him or if this was accurate. As I’m walking over, I got about halfway down the yard, and I started hearing “No diggity, no doubt, play on player,” from the hip-hop song [“No Diggity,” by Blackstreet]. I walk over, and when I tell you, I talked to this man for about fifteen minutes, his whole play-list was Black old school, 90s R&B music. Talk about a person who had a hard exterior! Yet the moment I said hello with a smile, it was like pouring water on a desert.

A lot of times, we project our views onto other people based on what we think they will think about us, and it can be a missed opportunity for true diversity of thought.

Simply having demographic diversity doesn’t ensure diversity of thought, and Weaver was going to be sure that Uncle Nearest had both.

Intentionality as a Virtue

A common mistaken assumption of people I encounter in my work is that minority-owned businesses don’t need to put as much effort into DEI. After all, they have more diverse leadership out of the gate, which seems like sort of a head start.

This assumption couldn’t be faultier, for many reasons. First, DEI goes beyond representation alone. Every organization, no matter its demographic makeup, must be intentional about the equitable nature of its systemic structures such as hiring and promotion, in addition to focusing on making the culture diverse, equitable, and inclusive.

Further, many organizations intent on DEI get so caught up in the demographic numbers they forget about focusing on the larger organizational mission. When I ask clients, “How does your DEI strategy connect with your vision?” they often struggle to make the connection.

So while Weaver is a Black woman, she knew that she would need to intentionally tie her DEI efforts to her very clear mission: to put the Uncle Nearest brand on par with the best-known whiskey brands in the world. It started with hiring a team, from an industry with a deep lack of demographic diversity. One way she could have approached this challenge would have been to prioritize hiring minorities to start her company. There is a popular cultural notion of Black excellence—a way for Black communities to be self-reliant and prosper in spite of the systemic inequalities they have faced.⁹ Psychologists have demonstrated the underpinnings of this idea. It is an identity protection mechanism that emerges in historically marginalized groups and is manifest in people’s desire to cluster within their own demographic groups to buffer against discriminatory experiences such as racism and to affirm their identity.¹⁰ This is why historically Black colleges and institutions such as my alma mater, Spelman College, have been places where Black students have a stable and nurturing environment and, later in life, are more likely to report they are thriving than their Black peers who graduated from predominately White institutions.¹¹ Yet, if we are seeking diversity in the workplace, we need to recognize the downsides of demographic clustering. Homophily, or the tendency of individuals to associate with similar others, is well documented in workplace research as people tend to find themselves socializing and networking with others who are like them.¹² Further, research has shown that many people fall victim to the similar-to-me cognitive bias during hiring and promotion processes that can lead to disparate impacts for underrepresented groups.¹³

So, it would not be surprising for an entrepreneur like Weaver, from an underrepresented background, to aim to hire other underrepresented employees when given the opportunity. It would be a mechanism to provide opportunities that are not readily available for them. Indeed, Black employers are more likely than White employers to hire Black employees.¹⁴

Yet Weaver wasn’t thinking that way. She was adamant that minority-owned businesses that seek to grow to the highest levels of success must prioritize diversity in hiring, even when their counterparts do not, and that the notion of Black-only excellence, for example, would ultimately be a disservice to the business and the communities that would benefit from the business.

“I think you have to look at what a business’s motivation is,” she said. “If your motivation is making a whole lot of money, we as African Americans as a whole, we spend a much greater amount than is our percentage of the population. If you’re just trying to make money, then do that, all day long, and you’ll be fine.” Because African Americans spend disproportionately, she was saying, then a product “by Black people and for Black people” would do well if the goal was purely to make money.¹⁵ But as she explained, Weaver had bigger ambitions:

Money was not my motivation. That is the difference. I am looking at who I want to position Uncle Nearest with, which is Jim Beam, Jack Daniel’s, and Johnnie Walker, brands that have [been] sustained for 150 years. You cannot do that by limiting your diversity. So, I’m going to ask the reverse question: If Black excellence is good enough for us, why is it not good enough for everybody? The idea that we have to just take a sliver of the pie, and take our Black excellence, and only showcase it to those like us, it’s like preaching to the choir. There is no diversity in that. Why would we do that? We are creating a product that is excellent. We are bringing together a team that is excellent. And we are going to make sure that everybody knows it.

To be clear, Weaver would seek demographic diversity on her team; she was not forgoing that part of her DEI journey. She was only saying that she was not interested in demographic issues alone. Diversity of thought, which would come from multiple types of people—and, often, unexpected people—would make Uncle Nearest a brand beyond its diverse roots, competing with august incumbents.

The Four DEI Pitfalls of Startups

The first stage of the DEI maturity model, awareness, describes organizations that are just beginning to understand the necessity of intentional DEI efforts. While you might wonder how any company today could be just coming to this conclusion, I have seen, before and after the events of 2020, countless organizations that are just entering the awareness stage and are standing at the very beginning of their journey.

Companies at the awareness stage have generally fallen into two camps. One group is the older, successful company that has never needed to prioritize DEI. For example, I worked with a hundred-year-old family-owned business in the Midwest. It had prided itself on being run by family values, and it struggled greatly to change its culture when a new CEO who was passionate about DEI joined in the mid-2010s. During initial conversations with the executive team, the new leader found that the most common thought on DEI was along the lines of, “I am not sure why we really need this; people love working here. If there were a problem, we would know.” The organization did have an impressively low rate of attrition, which did suggest that employees valued working there. However, focus groups with employees and a cultural climate survey revealed issues the leaders never knew were present. The culture was rife with exclusionary practices, and leaders had no idea how to talk about topics such as gender and racial stereotypes that often surfaced on teams and interfered with employees’ ability to get work done. Ignorance is not bliss when it comes to DEI, and companies that have failed to openly discuss the need for DEI almost always have internal employee implications, even if the employees have been quiet about those challenges in the past.

The second type of company at the awareness stage is the startup so focused on survival that it neglects to create strong human capital practices, including DEI practices. Startup companies are often founded by a single entrepreneur or a few founders who come together to bring a business vision to life. The phrase startup culture is used to describe highly mission-oriented places where people wear many hats, have autonomy, and are encouraged to share their most creative ideas. Startup culture rejects layers of bureaucracy, rigid processes, slow decision-making, and lack of employee voice.¹⁶ And still, these companies often whiff on DEI because of a lack of role clarity, including who is responsible for the human capital work. Startup founders often think their mission is the same thing as their culture, and while the two inform each other, culture must be deliberately built in to be sustainable. I have seen many startups realize they are only at the DEI awareness stage because they did not focus on it from the beginning, even with the best intentions from founders to create a workplace where people want to be. Even companies with philanthropic and community-serving missions still have to be intentional about their internal DEI efforts (as Iora Health found out; see chapter 1).

Under Weaver’s leadership, Uncle Nearest learned from the mistakes of previous startups and largely avoided what I consider the four major DEI pitfalls that startup companies face. The whiskey maker has intentionally tried to avoid these DEI missteps by fostering diversity of thought in potential candidates, even before they start working there.

Lacking Cultural Clarity

Weaver was crystal clear on the organizational culture and values she wanted Uncle Nearest to operate by, and her determination shows. When you visit the Uncle Nearest website to inquire about job opportunities, a statement immediately grabs your attention:¹⁷

Prior to submitting your resume, however, please review our guiding principles. Every Uncle Nearest team member keeps the following as our company’s north star, and that is an expectation our founders have of every person who joins this remarkable group of individuals.

Our guiding principles are:

1. We do it with excellence or we don’t do it at all.

2. Every day, we pound the rock.

3. We accept each other’s differences.

4. All team member opinions are welcome.

5. We are creating a culture of radical candor.

6. We are building a brand to outlive us.

7. The more we know, the more we have yet to learn.

8. We do all things best when we do them with honor.

9. We speak life, we speak light.

10. Even in business, family comes first . . . and rest is extolled.

Weaver intentionally crafted this part of the company website. Notice how it encourages diversity of thought along with the more traditional view of what diversity is. “We are super clear about our company principles,” Weaver said. “A person can’t even apply to work here without seeing our ten principles, and diversity is one of those.”

Almost every organization has a list of values on its company website. What makes Uncle Nearest unique is the way these values come to life in the company culture and the expectations of all employees. Weaver is clear about the expectations; she knows that the company will not be for everyone, and that’s okay. It means that Uncle Nearest is more likely to hire someone who fits in from the start and who brings that diversity of thought that Weaver considers so crucial:

We have built a culture of confidence here. We want people who are going to challenge us, who are going to challenge our thoughts and our decision-making in the company. I don’t care if you are an executive assistant or if you’re a senior vice president: you have the same power in terms of opinion and thought and things that you’re bringing to the table. If you’re not a confident person, you won’t survive in my company. So don’t bother applying. What this means is, if you’re not comfortable being your truest self, your freest self, who you are when you’re at home and being that way when you’re around the team, then it just doesn’t work. And so, for example, we don’t have people in our company who are in the closet, because that’s counter to our culture.

Failing to Intentionally Create a Diverse Team from the Start

Most companies today, even those identified as doing the best with DEI, are playing catch-up on their diversity demographics. Weaver set out to create a team that would embody diversity of thought and reflect the world around her. Yes, this approach would help her create the internal culture she desired, but equally crucial, the team would be a significant competitive advantage in the wine and spirits marketplace, she said:

From the beginning, I insisted that the right people be in the right jobs. I’m African American; the first two people that I brought in alongside me were White. I was looking for energy, not color. That being said, understanding that as I’m looking for the energy and as I’m looking for the diversity of thought, it was imperative that my company looked like America. Today, if you look at my team, it is almost identical to the statistics of America. We are 50 percent women. If anything, we try to overindex on Black, Latinx, and LGBTQ+ populations, but the goal is to mirror America. I think one of the reasons why we’ve been so successful [is that] we’re doing something that other spirit brands haven’t figured out how to do, which is to market to everyone. And we can do that because we literally look like the people we are marketing to.

Overlooking Trade-Offs in a DEI Strategy

In 2020 I conducted DEI visioning sessions with more than three hundred global leaders across industries. Even though each organization was at a different place on its DEI journey, the most senior leadership teams had almost never sat down to have an explicit conversation about what the members truly believed about DEI or their own experiences with it. The purpose of the sessions was to get leadership teams talking, including having honest conversations about what sacrifices and trade-offs would be needed to make the vision come to life.

For example, one of the most common frustrations leaders share when they set off to hire candidates from diverse backgrounds at senior leadership levels is the lack of a pipeline. In 2020 Well’s Fargo CEO Charles Scharf received national backlash for his memo blaming the bank’s lack of employee diversity on a “very limited pool of Black talent.”¹⁸ In a later apology message to employees, he clarified his position, explaining that there was not a lack of Black talent in finance, but instead, the industry had failed to do its part to improve diversity. “I’ve worked in the financial services industry for many years,” he said, “and it’s clear to me that, across the industry, we have not done enough to improve diversity, especially at senior leadership levels.”¹⁹

Scharf’s comments were poorly worded and ill-timed—at the height of a national racial reckoning—but many leaders feel similarly about the lack of a talent pipeline. There truly are fewer people from underrepresented groups in major industries such as finance and technology, but the systemic structures that have historically limited access and opportunity for these people must be acknowledged. Weaver shared how she has seen pipeline challenges in the wine and spirits industry, even for a Black-owned and woman-owned business. “We had to pull teeth to actually find African Americans to work for us,” Weaver said. “Those résumés were not coming in. We literally had to be very, very creative to seek out African Americans, and one of the things I realized was that if I wasn’t getting résumés of African Americans, then nobody in the industry was likely getting résumés of African Americans. So, the question became, ‘How do we get more African Americans interested in the spirit business? How can we be creative about building this longer-term pipeline?’”

To change the status quo, leaders must acknowledge these disparities and realize that any solutions will take time and sacrifice. If an organization is committed to increasing its diversity of leadership, it may have to keep a position open longer than expected to identify a diverse slate of candidates. It may have to recruit outside of the schools it typically draws from. It may have to reevaluate the requirements it always had for the job (such as a bachelor’s degree): Are the requirements actually indicators of success? An organization may even have to consider nontraditional candidates who have had career success in other industries or business functions. Leadership teams must explicitly create opportunities for the DEI strategy to be implemented. This approach will always require trade-offs. Weaver is vocal about her willingness to embrace the trade-offs to build the most diverse team:

I was very clear that we were building a family here, and we were building something to outlive all of us. I would keep a position open for two years before I put the wrong person in it. I can tell you, if we were, for instance, to fall to 40 percent women in team members, I would hold those positions open for women, because I want their percentages in my company to match that of America. That has been my goal from day one. And I’m okay with that. I’m okay that if I look at a position and say the attrition on African Americans has put us below what our percentages [is] in this country, that position is held for an African American. Take me to court over it. I’m okay with that.

Assuming That Diverse Cultures Do Not Need Explicit DEI Initiatives

Achieving demographic diversity doesn’t obviate the need for DEI programs. You need to continue to build that culture through programming, or else the responsibility for DEI falls to people in underrepresented communities sharing their lived experiences and navigating difficult conversations about what it is like to be gay, or Indigenous, or disabled. It’s unfair to expect anyone to be the representative for their entire group. This practice also creates an unfair, monolithic sense of diversity, for example, encouraging the idea that all Indigenous people have experiences like the one person who spoke up.

The reality is that while people can share their individual experiences, most people without specific education or training are not equipped to navigate conversations about difficult DEI topics. Thus, even organizations with demographic diversity and diversity of thought benefit from professional DEI education and other initiatives to create inclusivity.

For example, as Weaver explained, even as a Black-owned company, the Uncle Nearest organization had to learn about the challenges of race in America: “We regularly have diversity training to educate our team on topics such as the Tulsa massacre and Juneteenth. We’ve done skills building on implicit bias to have everyone walk through their journey together and identify their own implicit biases. Every time we do training, team members share that one of their favorite parts of our culture is that we create space for everyone to learn about these topics together.”

Using History to Build Better Together

Despite its startup status, Uncle Nearest has avoided the common pitfalls that would keep it at the awareness stage. This success is due to Weaver’s intentional efforts to integrate DEI from day one.

The fact that the distiller has extended its journey to the broader industry shows exceptional maturity for a young company. Uncle Nearest is at the integrated stage of its DEI journey. In 2020 Weaver had an epiphany. “The piece I think our industry was missing until now was that we were all trying to figure out how to foster diversity within the American spirits industry separately,” she said.²⁰ The urgent demand for action against racism from the US public created the opportunity for cooperation, and Uncle Nearest Distillery and Brown-Forman, the parent company of Jack Daniel’s, jointly pledged $5 million to the Nearest & Jack Advancement Initiative. The collaboration is a three-pronged initiative aimed at increasing diversity in the US whiskey industry.

One of the prongs was the creation of the Nearest Green School of Distilling at Motlow State Community College in Tullahoma, Tennessee. “When I began looking a few years ago,” Weaver said, “I realized how few people of color and women were in the pipeline for master distiller roles within our industry. And I came to the conclusion that we’d need to create the pipeline if we were ever going to have more women and people of color in those roles.”²¹ The Jack Daniel’s parent company “immediately said yes, and we began working on it together the following day.”²²

The second prong of the joint pledge funded the Leadership Acceleration Program, which offers apprenticeships to African Americans who are currently in the whiskey industry and who want to become head distillers, heads of maturation, or production managers. “We realized that what we were doing with the Nearest Green School of Distilling was not going to create an impact as large as was needed and as fast as we wanted . . . ,” Weaver said. “We decided to expand our initiative to address three issues: developing a pipeline of women and people of color in the distilling business, creating a program that helps African American startups in the spirits business . . . , and helping put more African Americans and people of color into leadership roles.”²³

The last prong was the formation of the Business Incubation Program, which will provide expertise and resources to African American entrepreneurs entering the spirits business. These resources include access to marketing firms, branding executives, and expanded distribution networks. Through this program, various advisers from Brown-Forman and Uncle Nearest meet with other African American–owned whiskey makers to share their expertise with these firms.

The two companies are offering financing, resources, and their time but will not own any part of the companies they’re investing this time in—they’re essentially creating competitors.

But competition is okay. The goal is to create a platform where discussion is open and encouraged so that the whiskey industry can welcome a greater diversity of businesses into its fold. Weaver said, “If an African American–owned brand such as mine was willing to come alongside to help build up another African American brand so they could have the same success as Uncle Nearest, but I will own no piece of it, then it’s something we can all rally around.”²⁴

Uncle Nearest and Brown-Forman have used the perils of a traumatic racial history between their founders to propel change a century and a half later. In a 2020 interview Weaver mused about the relationship between the two whiskey makers, one a free White man, and the other an enslaved Black man: “You had this interesting friendship and bond that was created during the most racially divided time in our nation’s history. Now, to bring the names of those two people together to help solve [problems] now is the most rewarding thing I have ever done in my life, hands down.”²⁵

Uncle Nearest is a model of a company intentionally using its entire sphere of influence to create change in the spirits industry. This wide-ranging model is one that every company should consider as it moves through its DEI journey.

When I asked about the future of DEI for startups like Uncle Nearest and others across industries, Weaver shared her excitement that the landscape for DEI in the workplace has the opportunity to be forever changed.

When you set this as your intention from the start, then you are able to build a culture where DEI is so innate that people will question when something is not aligned with that value. In many companies, it is not until someone comes in from the outside and points out, “Did you know your whole leadership team is White?” or “Did you realize everyone here is wearing blue button-up shirts?” But in my company, that would never happen, because everyone, from the manager to the VP level, would speak up and call out when something is not aligned with our culture. For us, it was a part of our foundation. So, I think the beauty of companies that began in the last few years [is that they] have the opportunity to let today’s standard for DEI be the foundation they’re being built upon. Ten years from now, this conversation [will look] very different because we have solid foundations being built right now, and that has never been the case before now.

Fawn Weaver’s vision of a workplace utopia seems clear; she’s busy creating it. But she added one element to the vision I didn’t expect: friendship. It’s not just culturally accepted to be diverse and create diversity of thought; it also creates lasting, familial bonds. She put it this way:

I saw a quote recently that said something like, “Company culture isn’t buying a beer keg; it’s actually creating a culture in which people want to have a beer together.” Our team members go out of their way to travel to each other’s markets, just to hang out. We have an annual summit, and it will be like a big, giant family reunion. And it’s not because we’re doing all sorts of these things to make it feel that way. Literally, just people walking through the doors are going to feel that way. This company culture is unique, and I’m not confused about what we’ve built. It’s special. Utopia for me is exactly what I walk into every time our entire team is together.