Episode Transcript
Speaker 1 00:00:07 Hello everyone, it's Josh person here, podcasting from the UK this weekend up in Northern England in the Lake District, going up to the dale, some of the most beautiful places I've ever been in the world. And I want to talk about three things with you relatively briefly since I'm on vacation, but I, I really wanted to make sure I had some thoughts available for you to think about this week. The first is I wanna reflect on the National Trust, which is an entity in the UK that we don't have in the United States that speaks to this issue of the public trust and how do we deal with the public trust as institutions. The second thing I want to talk about is the second shoe that's dropped on affirmative action and the confusion situation that a lot of you are gonna be in based on a letter that came out from a bunch of right wing state attorney generals this week.
Speaker 1 00:01:02 And I'll read you a few quotes from that letter. And the third is I wanna talk to you about AI and what we've been doing in AI and just mention the big reset group that kicked off this week that we would invite some of you to join if you feel like you have time. So, you know, when you go to the UK and if you do travel into the countryside, you see vast amounts of public land that is extremely well maintained. I mean, not just like the national parks in the United States, at least as good or better. The trails are very clearly marked, the trees are trimmed, the environment is, there's spotless environment, there's no trash, there's no litter anywhere to be seen. There's very clear signs everywhere you go. And you find out, I talked, we talked to a tour guide that this is all paid for by a group called the National Trust.
Speaker 1 00:01:51 The National Trust is um, a big organization here that gets a lot of money from the government and also from individuals. And you join it like you can join a public institution in the United States and they take care of all this stuff. And we went on a bunch of hikes while I've been here and came across gardens and fruit orchards and berry orchards and all sorts of things that are really, really well maintained with national trust employees taking care of them. And the reason I wanna bring it up is that for those of you that are in the United States or another country where our society is a little younger, obviously this is a much older country than the United States, we don't have quite the same focus on what you would call the national trust. The word trust of course, has multiple meanings, but it means you trust it.
Speaker 1 00:02:37 And implicit in the national trust is the idea that in the uk, the country as a whole, I'm sure there's people that disagree with this, want to take care of public good through public goods being the environment. And you can extend that to the global warming issues and other things as well. And what I walk away with as just a little thought here from our week so far this week is that we all are part of the public trust. We as corporations are part of the public trust too. And you know, moving beyond the idea of conscious capitalism and many of the other ESG initiatives that companies focus on and ESGs a controversial topic, we'll talk about that another time, but the idea that by acting in the public trust we become better institutions applies to all of the profit making enterprises you work for.
Speaker 1 00:03:31 Now, you know, in the United States and other countries that are more capitalistic in focus, we get rewarded for profit and growth and market share. So your bosses, your CEOs, CFOs, whoever you may report to, of course wanna do the right thing for, for the employees and for the customers and for society and the communities. But they have to do it in the context of are we making a profit and are we growing and are we beating our com competition and so forth. Well, I would say being here is another reminder, and this is why I like to come to Europe by the way as often as I can, is that the older countries, the older companies, the older institutions are better at this than the young ones because they've learned over ups and downs and cycles of different type that when they act in the interest of all the stakeholders they outperform.
Speaker 1 00:04:27 And I used to call this uh, uh, citizenship and I still think it comes down to that, which is whatever you are doing as a company for your customers and your products and services, if it is not good citizenship, it will bite you. There was an interesting article yesterday I read about Google and Google's a very well-run company and a very well-meaning company. I mean I, I know something about it cuz it meant a lot of people there, but they laid off 12,000 people recently and heard a lot of people because a lot of people at Google had worked there a long time and had never been treated this way, been laid off through an email apparently. I don't know how they come to those conclusions, but somehow this idea of being a good citizen may have slept or maybe they just weren't thinking about it that way because they're under a lot of financial pressure.
Speaker 1 00:05:13 But being here in the UK and experiencing the public trust face-to-face around your environment and seeing how it works reminds me that we all have a lot to learn about this. And another funny example that I just reflected on while I'm here, we're in a part of the UK where the roads are very, very narrow and we rented a car, not a huge car, but not a tiny car either. And I'm driving on the left side of the road and I'm sitting on the right side of the car and I'm sort of freaked out every minute we go around a corner because if we run into another car on some of these narrow roads, it's gonna be very, very tight. We're gonna slow down to one mile an hour, we're gonna be a few inches away from each other and somebody might hit the brick wall on either side.
Speaker 1 00:06:00 But lo and behold, despite the fact that a lot of the British drivers drive very fast in every single situation where I ran into this, which was a lot, this just in the last week, the other driver immediately slowed down and stopped and waited and we slowly inched our way by each other. And I know that sounds kind of silly and a very small thing, but I don't sense that it would be like that in the United States. <laugh>, I think we're at a little more of a dog eat dog kind of climate where I live. So let me leave you with that idea that slow down, make a little room for the other guy, squeeze by so that you both come through safely and the world is a better place for everybody. And I think that's a little bit of a vacation lesson for us to think about in our work environments in terms of how we treat people if we have to do a layoff, are we being fair and so forth.
Speaker 1 00:06:54 Okay, second thing I'm gonna reflect on a little bit, and there's much more research yet to do on this, is the second shoe that is dropping somewhat like a rock on the affirmative action by the Supreme Court. Now the affirmative action decision by the Supreme Court only had to do with education and admissions. But as Keith Derling warned me, Keith is the chair of the E E O C and a very, very strong advocate for business people and for fairness. And he warned me this was gonna happen and it's now happened this week. A scathing letter was written to the Fortune 100 CEOs by the attorneys General of Kansas, Tennessee, Arkansas, Alabama, Indiana, Nebraska, Iowa, South Carolina, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Mississippi. All right-wing governor states, I'm sure. And what the letter basically says, and it's a pretty insulting letter, if I was a C E O and I read this letter, I would be a little put out by it.
Speaker 1 00:07:56 But what it's essentially saying is that we are now extending the affirmative action decision by the Supreme Court to corporate diversity programs. And we are warning you and threatening you that if you use race-based quotas or any form of race-based reverse discrimination, we are going to sue you based on the Supreme Court, uh, results that just happened a couple of weeks ago. And the conclusion they come to is that social, let me just read you a couple of these comments in here. It's a very, very strongly worded letter. If your company previously re resorted to racial preferences or naked quotas to offset its bigotry, that discriminatory path is now definitively closed. Your company must overcome its underlying bias and treat all employees, all applicants, all contractors equally without regard to race. Social mobility is essential to the long term viability of a democracy and our leading institutions should continue to provide opportunities to underprivileged Americans.
Speaker 1 00:09:02 Race, however, is a poor proxy for what is fundamentally a class distinction, which I'm not sure what that sentence means. Responsible corporations interested in supporting under underprivileged individuals and communities can find many lawful outlets to do so. But drawing crude lines based on skin color is not a lawful outlet and it hurts more than it helps. We urge you to immediately cease any unlawful race-based quotas or preferences your company has adopted for its employment and contracting practices. I don't know what a preference is, but we'll figure that out. If you choose not to do so, know that you will be held accountable sooner rather than later for your decision to continue treating people differently because of the color of their skin. Now I live in a mostly black community and I know not personally, but pretty closely what it's like to be African American in the United States.
Speaker 1 00:09:55 It is not a pretty picture, it is not easy even if you're well off and highly educated. Affirmative action started in the 1960s and 1970s. It was um, outgrowth of the civil rights movement. The intention was to promote women and minorities into better positions and it worked really well. My, I, my wife and I were just talking about this, you know, we are pretty sure that my wife and a lot of her friends, female friends who were became executives were helped by affirmative action. We have laws in California that force boards to put women on boards, which by the way are probably unconstitutional now thanks to this new ruling. Most of you have race and gender and other forms of diversity targets and metrics and dashboards and you do comparisons between different groups and you do to comparisons between different managers. And the reason we do those comparisons is not to reverse discriminate by race, it's to point out bias and try to root the bias out of our companies so we can be more inclusive organizations.
Speaker 1 00:11:02 And we don't do that because we like it. We do that because it's good business and it's good sound management practice, it's good for hiring, it's good for customers, it's good for, I talked about this in the last podcast or the one before, but thanks to this group of attorneys general and this what I consider to be really over the top letter, you're gonna all be asked by somebody, maybe your c e o, maybe not to look at what you're doing with respect to this recommendation by these attorneys general. And no company wants to get sued, no company wants to be made an example of, but some of you will probably will wanna push back on this. Some of you won't. The reason I bring it up is not that I know the answer, but I wanna sensitize you to this, that we're in a political environment going back to Donald Trump and the Charlotte Charlottesville uprising and a lot of other things where in some states the attorneys general and others are going to look for examples of companies that are using race-based quotas.
Speaker 1 00:12:13 Just like what happened to Harvard University. And if you read the background on the Harvard case, the Harvard lawyers and many of the people supporting Harvard were arguing that the reason they did affirmative action were to make the university more diverse, which improves the quality of education, but also to help the society become more diverse and inclusive given the fact that they're pretty, you know, rarefied institutions and they're not very open-minded, generally speaking, they have a lot of preferences for legacy candidates and so forth. Well the Supreme Court for what I believe is political reasons struck that down. So because of the imbalance of right-wing justices in the Supreme Court, this is now becoming law. And if you're in a right-wing state or doing business in a right wing state, I think a lot of these things are gonna become issues to discuss. And the reason I don't think this is clear is that the word preference is a very vague word.
Speaker 1 00:13:14 I'm sure there's a legal definition for it. But let's suppose you have a disparity in hiring between different, two different groups. You have one manager who's hiring all white males and another manager who's hiring a more heterogeneous group of people and you go to the non-diverse hiring manager or team or organization, whatever it is, and you say you're off base here. Here are our metrics across the company. Your metrics are underperforming in this area, fix it. Did you just violate the law? Did you just create a preference? Did you just create a quota? I don't know, read that letter and you figure out what it means. I don't know the answer to that. I think there's a little bit of a panda box that's been opened here that is going to make the role of d e i even harder. Now, I wrote an article more than a year ago, maybe it was two years ago, where I stated that I think the head of d e I is one of the toughest jobs in business.
Speaker 1 00:14:10 It just got harder. And you know, the research that's come out the last couple of weeks on heads of d e i is, it's a very difficult job. The average tenure is 1.6 to two years or less. And I think what happened in diversity and inclusion is we, we left affirmative action behind because people don't like it. I mean, something like 60% of Americans actually are against it. So, you know, as well as it worked in the old days, it's not relevant or so much in in vogue at the moment, but you're being asked in some sense to create a softer version of that through these training programs, these ESGs and other, you know, un you know, bias reducing tools to create a more inclusive workplace. And all of a sudden the Supreme Court says no. Well hold, hold on a minute there. Don't go too far with that because if you actually bend over backwards and try to make your company more diverse by possibly excluding a white male into your company, we just might sue you.
Speaker 1 00:15:09 So what that leaves you in a very difficult situation. Now, a lot of you are d e I specialists. A lot of you will have thought this through already in a much more detailed way, but I wanted to just point this out to you. And what I'm gonna do personally, Kathy and I have been talking about this, is we're gonna go back through our d e I research we did a year and a half or two years ago, and we're gonna talk to a lot of you guys again about where you're at with this. I, the reason I decided to put it on the podcast is I, I read that letter at least 10 times and I just thought the tone of it reminded me of the book 1984, if any of you ever read that book. It's really old now, I think about it.
Speaker 1 00:15:46 But it was about the future of the world written in the 1970s and they used to talk about double speak and I believe that was the book where they talked about double speak and double speak was this idea that the government says one thing and means something else in order to confuse you. And that's a little bit what this is, what they're saying in a way is the word discrimination. We're gonna redefine what discrimination is the original definition of discrimination. It's discriminating or hurting somebody who is disaffected by a decision in a way that is unfair to them. The this new crew is reversing that and they are saying if you give preferences to somebody who's been discriminated against, you are practicing discrimination. And I think they're playing a big word game here, but, but we won't get into that. The bottom line is this is out there, this is happening.
Speaker 1 00:16:43 I'm sure there's lawyers looking around for situations to, to create a case and, and those of us that are interested in D E I as a real business strategy and not a big political issue are gonna have to figure out how to tiptoe around this. The funny thing about it is, in Europe, everybody's going in the other direction. The Europeans are creating stronger and stronger rules for people. Sustainability for transparency of diversity and pay, pay equity metrics. I mean they're just going full bore towards more and more inclusive business practices. And I think the United States goes through these gyrations because we are in fact, whether we believe it or not, one of the most inclusive countries in the world, one of the most diverse countries in the world becoming more diverse all the time. And that creates stress and we're going through a period of stress.
Speaker 1 00:17:32 Okay, I'm not gonna give you any clear answers here, but I just want you to be aware of this. The third thing I wanna talk about now is ai, which is obviously fun for everybody. Well we have this amazingly successful program in our company called The Big Reset. And what it is is a five week sprint, one hour per week. We have about three or 400 senior HR people who join us, no vendors, no consultants, these are people who volunteer to be a part of this and join in and participate in these conference calls. And we discuss what we're working on in different topic areas and at the end of the five week sprint, we write a report on what we discovered. We've done this 12 times over the last two years, maybe been maybe even more like three or four years. And we do starting another one next week on ai.
Speaker 1 00:18:21 And if any of you would like to be in the big reset, send a message to the info email and we'll you know, let you know if you're qualified or if you, if if we've got spot for you on the next sprint. But anyway, the one we're doing this week's on ai and we're gonna be doing this for about a month and a half, two months, then we'll write the findings. We're gonna look at diversity, we're gonna look at AI and recruiting. We'll look at AI and employee experience. We're gonna look at AI as an infrastructure and in the implications of hr. We're gonna talk a little bit about the generative AI stuff that we're building, that we've been prototyping and showing to a lot of you. And we'll come back to you in about six or eight weeks as part of that whole focus.
Speaker 1 00:19:00 This week we launched a report that I spent many, many, many hours on interviewing almost two dozen senior tech executives and mostly HR tech companies about what hr, what AI means to hr. And I encourage you to read that report, but a link to it in the podcast notes. This is gonna be a big deal. And you know, we have already had first call this mor this yesterday and people were asking questions like, what does this mean to my job? And what are the areas of AI that are gonna be the most successful and so forth. As you know, you've probably heard from me before, I think this technology is going to revolutionize almost all of the things we do in HR eventually and disrupt many of the technology platforms that we have. And the vendors are very aware of this. There's a lot of exciting things going on and there's a lot of plate tectonics taking place on the big platform side.
Speaker 1 00:19:54 Open AI versus Google versus Microsoft. Elon Musk feels left out so he's gonna try to get into it. Um, lots of incredible vendors that have built large language models. I think most of you are going to have IT people building LLMs for your company and they will probably be very powerful tools you'll be able to use within your company with the data inside of your company. The external LLMs like chat g PT are great too, but a little bit less trusting because you can't really be sure where the data and information comes from. Just like when you type a type of search into Google, it's pretty good at telling you what's an ad. The generative AI is a little bit tougher, but you don't really know where the content came from. And that's really what we've been building is a very, very trusted system for HR based on all the research we've done and no other sources of content.
Speaker 1 00:20:50 So anyway, we're gonna be working on that. We'll keep you in the loop and I think that's kind of it for today. I encourage you if you have time over the summer to take a couple of days and go someplace different. Because what happens when you travel? As you know, I haven't had a chance to travel for some time that your eyes are always open to things that you didn't really appreciate or didn't understand or didn't necessarily see in context in your home location or your home business or your home job. And that's what's been happening to me. Of course, this week that I've been in Europe, we are really excited about many, many things that are coming out. We're working on our new leadership study, which is getting completed. Janet Mertons is finishing that up and lots of things there to teach you about leadership that have changed that we've discovered.
Speaker 1 00:21:35 We have a really, really fascinating research study going on on the adaptive organization that we're gonna be launching in probably October. And then we're also launching the systemic HR research in October that's coming along. And our team has been doing a lot of work on hybrid work and the extended workforce, the workforce ecosystem, more research on learning and skills. We just published an amazing piece of research on how SAP does pay equity, really, really innovative approaches to pay at sap. And for those of you that are clients, you should probably read that and we'll talk to you about what it means and how it all works. So anyway, lots of fun stuff going on. Have a great summer. I'll try to do this podcast next week as well and keep giving you a little bit of outside perspective on what's going on in the world of work, the world of hr, the world of taking care of our employees and taking care of our organizations. Thank you.
