7

Bringing Humanity to DEI through Leadership at Best Buy

For so many companies, deep introspection on DEI came in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. The pain of the moment was felt around the world, and electronics retailer Best Buy was no exception. But there was a difference at Best Buy, too. Its headquarters is located just seven miles from the spot where Floyd was killed.

On that day, the Best Buy executive team gathered. CDO Mark Irvin remembered it clearly. “It was a catalyst moment. When people saw George Floyd being murdered on their television screens in a way that reflected no mercy, no embrace for humanity . . . Many people didn’t understand the Black experience. The rationalization that is usually used is, ‘Well, this person did this or had that background.’ But all of us understand mercy. All of us understand justice.”

But this wasn’t justice.

Irvin recalled, “I remember going back to the executive team the day Floyd’s murder occurred, and I was talking to the executive team and our CEO, Corie Barry, leaned in and she said, ‘We have to do better.’”

Best Buy put out both internal and external statements reinforcing Barry’s words that the company had to do better. Barry wrote:

We are, I believe, in one of the toughest times in our country’s history, as we continue to battle a deadly pandemic and the resulting economic havoc while, once again, coming face-to-face with the long-term effects of racial injustice. Watching tens of thousands take to the streets to speak out against fear and inhumanity is, on one hand, inspiring for the commitment it represents and, on the other, heartbreaking for its profound need.

But what’s next? What do we do to change the cycle in which black men or women, with tragic frequency, are harmed by those who are supposed to protect them? Or the gut-wrenching truth that to be a person of color in America is often to not feel fully safe, seen or heard?

For me, it starts with seeing the situation for what it is, acknowledging these experiences for what they are and, quite simply, apologizing for not doing enough. As important, it includes committing the company I lead down a path of systemic, permanent change in as many ways as we can find.

I don’t have the answers, but I am no longer OK with not asking the question: If everything were on the table, what could Best Buy do?¹

Irvin fielded several communications from DEI colleagues from other companies. They said they had never seen a CEO take a stand like that. “They also told me later that we provoked their CEO to make a similar stand,” he said. It was a moment of progress on the necessary journey brought on through pure leadership. A CEO’s simple sentence, “We have to do better,” prompted a cascade of leaders to join the chorus. “People could tell the journey this company was on was to value humanity first,” Irvin said. And his and the company’s response to the murder, which had happened just down the road, was definitive and forceful: “We just couldn’t tolerate it.”

Making It Real

In 2012 Best Buy was a forty-six-year-old company at its nadir. The year before, the company’s stock had lost 40 percent of its value. It was struggling to compete in e-commerce against behemoths like Amazon to meet new consumer expectations and demands. Internally the company was also on life support; employee turnover was at an all-time high, and morale was nonexistent.

Many people thought decorated business leader Hubert Joly was incredibly foolish for taking the job as Best Buy CEO at such a moment. It seemed as if the company were destined to go out of business. Yet Joly did take the job. He was determined to transform the company through a focus on humanity, and that’s exactly what he did. Within a few years, Best Buy’s stock was soaring, employee turnover was down, and the company was consistently rated one of the best to work for. Even Amazon was putting mini-stores inside Best Buy’s stores. It’s one of the most remarkable turnarounds in American business.

DEI was central to the cause. “The most pivotal DEI moment for Best Buy was just as Hubert was joining,” Irvin said. “The company was at a place where many people would say, ‘You’re going out of business. You’re not going to make it.’ Hubert came in and was very intentional about creating the human approach, which is the reason why I joined.”

Irvin had been with Target (also based in Minneapolis) and was sold on joining Best Buy after meeting Joly. “It was really my first human conversation with a CEO,” Irvin said. “I was shocked at how accessible and approachable he was. Many companies in the North are very formal, but his approach began to unlock a more informal culture where you can have open and honest conversations. This human-centered approach led to our current guiding principles: Be human. Make it real. And our rallying cry: Let’s talk about what’s possible.”

Though Best Buy had some gender diversity efforts before Joly joined, many would say the company’s intentional efforts around DEI began when he took the reins. Part of what made the intentional efforts seem natural is that Joly’s overall philosophy for the business had elements of inclusivity built into it. Joly described this approach in his own words: “Our philosophy is that the company is a human organization, made of individuals working together in pursuit of a goal. And that goal is not profits. Instead, it is the pursuit of a noble purpose that starts with creating an environment where every individual can feel that they belong, can be themselves, and know the company will take an individual interest in them. Because I think that irrespective of size, it’s still one individual at a time. That was an essential element of our transformation of unleashing what I call human magic.”

This philosophy sounds noble, just as Joly uses that word. But without tactical implementation, his noble intentions would have just been words. Joly said that tactical implementation was part of Best Buy’s necessary DEI journey and also part of the company’s larger turnaround as a business.

“Part of the journey at Best Buy was figuring out how we create an environment in which everyone feels that their personal purpose, what drives them, connects with the purpose of the company,” Joly said. “We want employees to feel they can be human, imperfect, vulnerable, and they can be the full version of themselves. That was the central idea in the resurgence and success of Best Buy.”

Public Commitments as Leadership

Although the philosophy was in place, Joly recognized that it was not enough. “Of course, you cannot stop there, because you have to look at the systemic issues around diversity and inclusion.”

Like many other organizations, Best Buy started its DEI efforts with a focus on gender. Joly was an ambassador for gender diversity from the start. “For many years,” he told me, “I’ve been passionate about gender diversity. Half of my direct reports at Best Buy were women. My successor is a woman, and when I stepped down from the Best Buy board, the majority of the board members were women.” Irvin describes Joly’s gender equity commitment as a pivot point in the overall DEI journey: “He championed gender diversity, and the company began to transform. From a leadership perspective, he did what no DEI team could do: he made a public commitment.”

All along, one way that Joly used leadership to further his company on its necessary journey was through public commitments to DEI. In 2017 the company signed on to the Parity Pledge, promising to interview at least one qualified woman candidate for every open position at the level of vice president and above, including seats in the C-suite and on the board.² As of March 2019, Best Buy was one of only two Fortune 100 companies to have gender parity on its board of directors.³ In April 2019 Best Buy appointed its first woman CEO, Corie Barry, to succeed Joly, bringing the number of women on the board to seven and making its board of thirteen majority female.⁴ Today, Best Buy’s board of directors has ten members, including six women and four men.⁵

In his book, The Heart of Business, Joly admits that for all the marvelous progress on gender diversity, racial diversity proved a bigger challenge for the company and for him. A series of focus groups exposed how serious the disconnect was. In his book, Joly describes how focus groups made it clear that Black employees felt stuck at entry-level positions and saw no prospects for advancement. Those who had moved from other parts of the country were also suffering culture shock in Minneapolis, where they felt displaced and sensed that their local colleagues lacked an understanding of how their life experiences were far different.

What is often undervalued in having these types of listening sessions is how difficult and painful it can be for employees to share their experiences with discrimination or exclusion at work. People of nondominant identities in work spaces that are majority White and male can experience vastly different daily realities than members of the majority. During conversations about these experiences, there is often a dismal potential for victim blaming by people who may not have experienced the work environment in the same way. Engaging in respectful dialogue with people who hold opposing views is a major problem in society today. A global study of discourse and polarization in business by the Dialogue Project found that across the globe people struggle with respectful dialogue across differences and see it as a major problem (US 57%, Brazil 64%, India 49%, UK 28%, Germany 26%).⁶ Thus, Joly’s intimate conversations on race in the focus groups were challenging and at times uncomfortable but needed to happen for change to take place.⁷

Being grounded in humility helped Jolly navigate these tough conversations. “I was blown away, and hurt, by what I heard in these focus groups,” Joly writes. “As a white Frenchman living in Minnesota, I had had very limited exposure to the challenges that people of color face. I was also aware that my experience in driving real change when it came to diversity of all kinds was limited. I wanted to better understand the depth of systemic obstacles facing minorities, especially our African American colleagues.”⁸

Irvin said he saw the exact moment that Joly connected on this issue and began to understand the difference in people’s experiences. It was during a roundtable discussion with the Black Employee Resource Group (ERG). Irvin didn’t remember what was being talked about, but he remembered how it just all seemed to click for Joly. “You could just tell that was a moment for him, no question about it,” Irvin said. Joly appointed the then leader of the Black ERG as the head of diversity and inclusion for the organization. “And from then on,” Irvin noted, “we really started to make inroads.”

Then came additional public commitment. In July 2017 Joly signed the CEO Action for Diversity & Inclusion pledge and named Howard Rankin the company’s first D&I officer.⁹

Humanity Creates Momentum, Metrics Create Progress

The work of building up Best Buy’s DEI program was made easier by leadership’s complete buy-in. The company never considered DEI just an HR task—it still needed to actually implement programs and measure progress. It used a multitude of approaches to do this. Here are some.

Narratives Connect DEI to the Business

DEI is not an esoteric concept that only academics and HR professionals understand. The best way to think of it is as an effort that creates the human experience of being seen, heard, and feeling valued in the workplace. By sharing stories, leaders can help people connect to those common and varied human experiences. One of Irvin’s first priorities was to get leaders to see themselves as a part of the DEI journey using narratives that connected it to the business imperatives of the organization.

“So often people talk about, ‘Is DEI the right thing to do?’” Irvin said. “Well, it is the right thing to do, but everyone doesn’t agree with that. But everyone that leads a business does understand the economic rationale of being locked out of a vast majority of society, and the economic ramifications of that.” In other words, the story Irvin wanted to tell was about how a failure to focus on DEI, whether you think it should be a priority or not, was just bad for business. And things that are bad for business are things that should be addressed. He explained his approach:

For our leaders, I paint the story using Amazon as an example, that when things start to change, such as the rise of e-commerce, companies that don’t adapt ultimately go out of business. And so it’s the same story here. If there is a dramatic shift in social change and understanding, if companies maintain their posture of barriers and resistance in a workforce that doesn’t mirror the society, a lot of businesses will not survive.

So we started to tell stories about the demographics and the representation of the workforce. For example, as you think about the evolution from the baby boomers to the millennials, into the postmillennials, and the demographic changes that are beginning to happen in the workforce, there are real economic implications playing out.

The economic implications of DEI that Irvin refers to are the basis of the business case for DEI efforts for any organization. Without recognizing the business implications of DEI, these efforts can lose momentum when other business imperatives take precedence. For a sustainable DEI strategy, it must have a clear connection to the organization’s business strategy and performance. Narratives helped Best Buy leaders make that connection, Irvin said: “If people can’t write themselves into the story, in most cases they won’t embrace the story.”

Using Business Cases to Drive Functional-Unit Level Change

Beyond the big-picture business case for any organization, there needs to be a business connection for every major function in the business. I often tell clients that managers are the most critical link to successful DEI implementation. However, many managers do not truly understand how the efforts of organizational DEI have a direct impact on their own responsibilities. They may even believe DEI doesn’t contribute to success, given the way success is measured for them. Thus, they are less motivated to focus on DEI than they are their other priorities. That is, managers have a hard time connecting the dots between DEI and their bottom lines, annual goals, and opportunities for internal advancement.

Furthermore, most managers feel overworked already. DEI feels like extra work. It’s easy to see how managers may care about the underlying issues but may not act on them, because they fail to see how DEI can actually help them achieve their individual and team goals. Managers often tell me, “I care deeply about these issues, but when I am evaluated on my team’s output or bottom line, it is hard to find the time for DEI.” This too is a human reaction. Vroom’s classic motivation theory tells us that people are motivated to increase effort based on the belief that their effort will increase performance and that high performance will lead to an outcome they value (i.e., money, recognition, status).^{10, 11} Thus, if managers do not believe increased attention to DEI will lead to better performance evaluations and thus desired outcomes, it is easy to see why DEI can fall further down their to-do list even if they are well intentioned. This is why it is vital for managers to see the connection between DEI, the success of their teams, and how this work is tangibly valued and rewarded by their organization.

Unraveling these issues can be challenging. I have worked with many client teams to help illuminate how DEI has an impact on their part of the business, and while the leaders understand the needs in theory, they find it extremely difficult to put into words or data the benefits of DEI to their specific business unit. If managers cannot clearly grasp how diverse teams with inclusive cultures can help them—for example, by solving problems faster or making them more likely to catch mistakes earlier or to attract new customers—then they are unlikely to embrace activities that create an inclusive culture.

For example, one way managers can foster an inclusive environment that welcomes divergent perspectives is to appoint a different dissenter or critic in every team meeting. Such a practice creates a space where opinions that deviate from the norm are not only welcomed but also expected to be a part of the critical thinking process. Yet the downside of this change in the decision-making process is that in the short term, it can prolong meetings and increase the time it takes to make a final decision. Moreover, people in this assigned devil’s advocate role may need time to create rules for authentic dissent on teams.¹² Yet countless social science studies and companies like Google and IDEO have implemented similar team roles and found them to be effective in limiting groupthink and spurring innovation.¹³ If managers can connect their desired outcomes with practices of inclusion, such as assigning a dissenter in a meeting, then they will be much more likely to make it an everyday management practice and will be less likely to think of it as something extra on their list of to-dos.

Best Buy used the narrative approach to bring to life the business case for each part of the organization, especially for frontline managers. “We began to tell stories of the demographic dollars shifting,” Irvin said. “And Best Buy was strategic about this as well. We have been cascading this message in a way to make sure that in every area that we’ve done it, we’ve got our marketing team fully engaged. We’ve got our customer office fully understanding the ramifications. For example, we tell stories about customers of different backgrounds that walked into a Best Buy and had an experience that none of us would appreciate because of unconscious bias.” The stories—for example, that a bad store experience affects sales—create the connection between DEI and sales, one critical part of the business. “So we began to really spread that [message] across the organization: that one of our strategic priorities has to be to create an inclusive culture where everyone is engaged and valued and appreciated for the difference that they bring.”

Accountability Unapologetically Drives DEI

After getting the organization on board with DEI as a leadership challenge, it was time to see change that could be measured. Accountability is usually evaluated as the extent to which leaders do what they say they will do about DEI. But true accountability for DEI requires having some skin in the game and a willingness to take risks to get it right. “What gets measured gets done” holds true in the world of DEI.

I’ve seen many companies that had seemingly impressive DEI progress ongoing for years but never wanted to put metrics in place for fear that doing so would expose failures. Joly’s approach eventually was to embrace metrics, no matter how unapologetically they might reflect shortcomings, because then the company could see what it needed to do. His leadership had already impelled the organization forward, but once it was on its journey, metrics would mark and drive the progress. Joly explained:

You make a difference by touching the hearts of the employees and the leaders in the company, by bonding as a management team and saying we’re going to make a difference. I believe now—something I didn’t believe then—that you absolutely have to set quantitative goals. I was reluctant to do it initially, because I wanted first to touch the hearts of people. But then ultimately, once you’ve given them a chance to be touched, you say, ‘Now let’s create a goal.’ Now, for many companies, that has started to change. Many companies now are setting goals, and their boards are holding them accountable. When that happens, you can manage it as any other business priority.

Today, Best Buy has inclusive leadership behavioral metrics on vulnerability, empathy, courage, and grace. Each leader is annually evaluated on their performance of these behaviors as “off track,” “on track,” or “leading.” Notice these metrics don’t have to be statistically complicated—it’s a three-point scale. But assigning any measure fosters the change both in the behavior of those being measured and in the culture of the company, which now understands that these attributes are valued in performance assessments.

“If someone is off track, we give them feedback,” Irvin said. “For example, someone off track on exhibiting vulnerability means they’re not open, not willing to hear different points of view, not interested, not curious. In our performance process, we look at where each leader shows up on this metric. And that has an influence on whether they might be considered for promotion and other opportunities across the organization.”

Still, without the willingness to take risks and stand behind your values, even the best-written metrics can fall flat. For example, many organizations say they are committed to diversifying their leadership pipelines but have no systems of accountability in place to make sure that this happens. Or they don’t hold people accountable if the goals aren’t reached. Once Best Buy had metrics, its leaders realized they had to be bolder in their actions to make the metrics a reality.

“I needed to change my board because at the time, we didn’t have any Black directors,” Joly said. “We told the headhunters that we have made great progress on gender but not race, so for this next wave of recruits, don’t bother giving us non-Black résumés. In this way, we went way past the Rooney Rule.” Joly was referring to a National Football League initiative (promoted by former Pittsburgh Steelers owner Dan Rooney) that told teams to interview at least one minority candidate for every coaching or front-office vacancy. “I felt it was important to send a clear signal,” he said. “I told the headhunters, ‘If you believe you’re not going to be able to give us good résumés of potential Black directors, we will just work with another firm.’”

Acknowledging Mistakes and Embracing Challenges

There is a level of humility that must accompany any organization on its DEI journey. Everyone will make mistakes; it’s part of how we adapt and get better. These mistakes can be terrifying when we are dealing with sensitive topics like race, especially in light of the cancel culture we live in today. Studies find that fear of saying the wrong thing often inhibits leaders, especially White men, from saying anything at all when it comes to DEI.¹⁴ Joly, who is White, led by example, even when he made mistakes.

“When I began on this journey with my team, we said, ‘We don’t even know what’s okay to talk about,’” Joly said. “So, I promised everybody I was going to make mistakes and I would learn. For example, in one meeting, I said, ‘We have too many pale and male executives,’ and a White man heard this and filed a complaint with legal. Once it came to my attention, I realized I was totally wrong to say that, and I reached out to my team to say I’m sorry if I offended anybody, and we talked. We are all human beings, and we have to forgive ourselves and each other as we grow.”

At an individual level, humility is the key ingredient in owning mistakes. But at the group and organizational level, it can be harder to recognize mistakes and course-correct. A reluctance to admit that what we have been doing is not working and to start from scratch and rebuild a more equitable system is what holds many organizations back from putting into practice the things they claim are their values. For example, during the hiring process for a senior leadership position at Best Buy, Irvin noticed that bias was creeping into the candidate evaluations. Two of the candidates were John and Ricardo. Most of the team seemed to be resonating with the experiences of John.

“I was the only person on the interview team with a diverse racial background,” Irvin said, and he thought, of course the team was connecting with John over Ricardo because the team members’ experiences and backgrounds were similar to John’s. Not only did Irvin think this was unconscious bias at play, but he also thought their decision was maybe not the best for the organization. Diversity includes diversity of experiences and of thought. Wouldn’t the team be better served by bringing in someone different instead of someone more like the people already there? Irvin explained what happened next:

So, we’re fully committed to DEI, but I saw us being led down an unconscious-bias journey. As we’re recapping the interview, I said, “Wait a minute, help me understand. Are we hiring to double down on capabilities that we already have? Are we trying to round out the experiences of our team in a way that makes us better?”

Other leaders later said to me, “We don’t know how to inter view for diverse perspectives. We’ve always hired for who we thought was best.” What they came to realize during that situation, though, is that “best” is usually based on our own experiences. That’s a biased hiring strategy.

It’s this type of willingness to acknowledge errors and shortcomings and, crucially, to talk about them that organizations need to do more of. One thing that prevents this level of openness is the fear that by calling out biases or other problems, you might be judging your colleagues. Irvin wanted to surface something, but he wasn’t suggesting his colleagues were bad people for their behavior. And the discussion afterward ensured that they knew that his motives were sincere. Acknowledging, talking, correcting, and pivoting help organizations overcome these challenges.

Sharpening the Saw

When Joly first joined Best Buy, the company was at the tactical stage of its journey. It had active internal DEI initiatives, many of which focused on gender diversity, but DEI was not yet a part of its core business model and could not yet be seen throughout all aspects of its work. Under Joly’s and Irvin’s leadership over the next decade, Best Buy homed in on DEI and matured to the integrated stage as evidenced by its employee-focused programs and initiatives that span Best Buy’s large sphere of influence in local communities and the larger business community as a whole.

Though Joly stepped down as CEO in 2019, the spirit of his work lives on as a core company value and has had rippling impacts on the company’s DEI journey. He established a clear value that still holds today: DEI is not an HR challenge. It’s a leadership responsibility.

Today, Best Buy structures its culture around four strategic pillars of diversity and inclusion: workforce, workplace, marketplace, and community.¹⁵ The company has received wide recognition for its efforts. In 2019 it ranked number eleven on the Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) Connect’s list of top employers for HBCU students and graduates. That same year, it sponsored forty Black employees to attend the Executive Leadership Conference in Washington, DC an event held with the goal of increasing the number of Black leaders on the top five hundred corporate boards and CEO offices.¹⁶ In 2020 Best Buy was named a Noteworthy Company for Diversity by DiversityInc (one of just two retailers on the index) and a World’s Most Ethical Company by Ethisphere (they won the honor in 2021 and 2022 as well).^{17, 18} It was also recognized on the Bloomberg Gender-Equality Index.¹⁹

Best Buy’s most recent progress includes the creation of a Task Force for Racial Equality in June 2020, a group appointed by Barry to challenge the senior leadership team and board of directors to identify substantive ways the company can address inequities.²⁰ In December 2020 the company announced a five-year plan focused on hiring BIPOC and women employees and creating additional educational and career development opportunities and support for youth and emerging leaders.

Its commitments—again, made publicly—include a goal to fill one out of three nonhourly corporate positions with BIPOC employees, and one out of three new nonhourly field roles with women by 2025.²¹ The company also announced a $44 million commitment to expand college prep and career opportunities for BIPOC students, including the launch of a scholarship fund for HBCU students in partnership with the United Negro College Fund.²² To enhance its inclusive culture for employees, Best Buy expanded its network of ERGs to include diversity and inclusion steering committees.²³ These cross-functional groups of leaders focus on attracting and investing in top talent and fostering inclusion.²⁴ In June 2021 they upped their commitment by pledging to give at least $1.2 billion with BIPOC and diverse businesses by 2025.²⁵

Best Buy has also expanded its sphere of influence beyond its own walls—another natural offshoot of Joly’s vision for a stakeholder-driven company that serves the community as well as employees and shareholders. For example, broadband access—especially in a pandemic—is a significant need. “It’s a big issue in New York City, and in rural Minnesota, for example,” Joly told me. “And of course, it affects different groups differently, right? There is enormous inequality and injustice in the country, around broadband access.” His successor, Corie Barry, partnered with a few other CEOs and governors to mobilize together for a solution. The contribution of people, time, and effort to cross over and talk with competitors and other leaders is as crucial as anything else in a company’s sphere of influence. “Writing a check is easy, right?” Joly said. “But doing things is even more important.”

Irvin described how the company has worked to extend its influence:

The number one thing that I’m most proud of is how we’re using our voice. The entire senior leadership team, sixteen people strong, coming together after some event occurs, saying, “What do we want to say about it? What do we want to say to our government affairs office? How do we want to influence policy? What do we want to say to our internal employees? And then how do we want to use our platform to make a difference in the communities in which we operate?” We’re thinking about that constantly. We recently put out a statement about the impact to the Asian community around hate crimes. And we’ve also invested in organizations as well. We make a stand against hate. I think that makes a difference.

Given Best Buy’s increased attention to DEI over the past few years, it would be easy to think the company has arrived. But it hasn’t. The DEI journey is always evolving. DEI is about humans, and humanity is always evolving and changing; thus your organization’s DEI journey will too. Best Buy is now looking at the future of its DEI efforts and how it can become increasingly intentional. Just as Iora Health focused on what unique DEI steps it could take rather than just implement generic DEI goals (see chapter 1), Best Buy wants to move forward similarly.

“You can’t set out to do one hundred things,” Irvin said. “It does not work to say we are just going to throw all these things down the road and just see how that all lands. In the inclusion and diversity space, and in the social-impact space at times, organizations can be involved in many things. What I’m asking us to do is sharpen that saw, be more intentional about who we are, and figure out where we can make the most decisive difference.”

For example, by 2021, Best Buy had opened thirty-five teen tech centers in underserved and undervalued communities where kids can use the latest technology. The goal is to create career aspirations in technology for kids who may otherwise never get access to a place that would inspire them to go in that direction. “I think that is unique to us,” Irvin observed. “So we’ve made a commitment to scale those teen tech centers from thirty-five to a hundred. I think it’s important to not do too many things and instead be intentional enough to just do a few that represent authenticity and the DNA of the company.” At the time of writing Best Buy had already increased to forty-six centers, with a continued commitment to expand to one hundred centers and reach thirty thousand teens annually by 2025.²⁶

Human Magic

I asked both Mark Irvin and Hubert Joly what a workplace utopia would look like to them. Both focused on a workplace where people could be themselves. And both effortlessly connected that to the results it brings to business.

Irvin said, “You know, if you think about the moments you’ve had in life, where you thought, ‘I have a different voice, but my voice is valued. And I’m allowed to help us all to make a difference.’ That’s what I’m looking for. I’m looking for a workplace where the barriers are removed, where we actually listen to people. I don’t want them to feel like they have to use similar terminology and have similar perspectives to everyone else. I want people to be their authentic selves in a way that makes us all better. That’s the world that I’m fighting for.”

For Joly, DEI is a big part of what will create what he calls “human magic”—what happens naturally when people, not profits, are the goal. He believes utopia is a workplace where “I am seen as a human being, which honors all parts of who I am, including the color of my skin. Because if many of us are not seen, we don’t have a voice. We don’t have a seat. That’s why diversity and inclusion is not a sideshow; it’s essential to unleashing human magic.”