Love your Shareholders? Invest in Diversity.

You are one of the first black female CEOs in high-tech in the entire country. There wasn't much diversity when you started out. Not then when you were building your career. There still isn't a lot of diversity in tech, even now even though some progress has been made. What role should diversity play in an organization?

As you know Thuy, there has been study after study, after study, after study, after study, after study, that has shown that companies that have diversity actually have better returns to shareholders, have higher profitability, have better places to work for employees. I mean, all kinds of benefits. So, that is like not debatable. So, in terms of how they should and what they should do as a result, in order to make that work or stick, it needs to be part and parcel to the overall strategy. It shouldn't be like an initiative to the side. If it's important, then it needs to be one of the important things that you look at that you measure that you analyze all the time, just like you do profitability, revenue growth, customer satisfaction, et cetera. So, build it in. Now people are like, okay, but how do you build it in? Leadership. Every organization has managers. People want, if you typically move up the ranks as a result of being a first-time manager then a second line, et cetera. So, if diversity is important to you, then you know what? Being able to actually move up the management ranks into leadership ranks, you should have to demonstrate that you can actually build and manage diverse teams because that's an important element for the company, right? I think that's a reasonable thing. Well, when you do that, you say, you let people know, by the way, part of the expectations is you're a good manager. It means you can develop people. You can hire, you can do that, all these things you get work done through others, you can. And we also want to make sure that you can hire and develop diverse teams because diversity is critical to what we're doing just because something that you expect. Well, now that it's something that's just expected, people are going to be much more intentional about hiring diverse teams, about managing diverse teams, because they know that's required in order to grow and develop within the organization.

A lot of companies say they're committed to diversity. Yet when you look at the makeup of their workforce at the actual statistics, it's not the case at all. So, how can organizations accomplish true change on this front at a time when calls for greater diversity in corporate America are happening more broadly and more loudly?

Oh, nobody likes change. I mean, we all say, oh yeah we like change, what we mean, is we want other people to change. We don't want to change. I mean, so when you look at this, change is hard. Change is uncomfortable. And so if I can get by without changing, then I'd rather not do that. And that's been true in human nature always. Why do you think so many New Year’s resolutions never get kept, right? Change is hard. We don't like it. We don't like to do it. But that's why and if it's hard and it's not comfortable, then we're not going to be intentional about it. And we're going to let it slip slide away because if I can figure out another way to do it, then I'll do it a different way. That's easier.