Everett Harper - The Architecture of DEI

Everett Harper

Episode 38: February 27, 2023

The Architecture of DEI

Today on the show we're pleased to be joined by Everett Harper, CEO of Truss - a human-centered software development company that has been designated by Inc Magazine as a Fastest Growing Company for the past two years. Everett's book "Move to the Edge, Declare it Center: Practices and Process for Creatively Solving Complex Problems" was released in March of 2022. Everett and host Phil Wagner talk about the very means and challenges of creating a DEI infrastructure for both leaders, employees, and more.

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Show Notes
Show Notes
  • What it means to move to the edge of your thinking
  • How one can move their DEI work forward when faced with uncertainty
  • How Everett's own experiences led to his writing of his book
  • What are the best communication strategies when leading multiple types of people
  • How corporate leaders see DEI work as both a problem and a solution
  • What it means to build DEI infrastructure
  • How to build DEI infrastructure in the absence of consistent frameworks across the world of work
  • The difference between interior and exterior DEI practices
  • What the role of imagination is when solving complex problems in the DEI space
  • Why communication is so important when designing DEI architecture
Transcript

Everett Harper

The challenge would be, what are the small little pieces of infrastructure you can create? That doesn't have to be a big initiative. Often it's the small things, like how can we connect in an easy way with low lift that's sustainable and repeatable, that then builds culture over time.

Phil Wagner

Hello from the halls of the Mason School of Business here at William & Mary. I'm Phil, and this is Diversity Goes to Work. Buckle up because we're getting ready to take a deep dive into the real human lived experiences that shape and guide our diversity work in the world of work. Should be fun. Welcome listeners to yet another episode of Diversity Goes to Work, the podcast where we center real human lived experiences in our pursuit of a more just and equitable organizational world of work. I'm joined today by Everett Harper. Everett is the CEO and co-founder of Truss, a human-centered software development company. It bears noting that Truss has been designated as an Ink Magazine 5000 fastest-growing company for the past two years. Everett is an alum of Stanford and Duke, the latter of which I take small issue with because I'm an alum of the University of Kansas. But we're going to let it slide. But we're here today because Everett's thought leadership has led to a new book released this spring called Move to the Edge, Declare It Center, which is a strategy guide for business leaders facing complex problems that require immediate decisions in the face of uncertain outcomes.

Phil Wagner

Everett, it's a pleasure to meet with you. I'm a fan of your work and delighted to chat with you today.

Everett Harper

Thank you. I really appreciate it. And you have no reason to take any issue since you have bragging rights for the year University with Kansas, so Rock Chalk Jayhawk, you all earned it.

Phil Wagner

Thank you. Rock Chalk Jayhawk, indeed. Look, let's jump right in. First and foremost, I love catchy titles, and your title is so catchy I've read your work. But for those that haven't, can you give us sort of the elevator pitch for Move to the Edge, Declare It Center?

Everett Harper

Yeah. So Move to the Edge Declared Center. Move to the Edge is about moving to the boundary of your knowledge and into the unknown. And the book talks about methods to help people make decisions through all that uncertainty. Declare It Center is the part that once you come up with an innovation or new strategy where people often fail is they don't put it into a system and make it repeatable and sustainable. So Declare It Center is taking those discoveries, creating systems so you can share, scale, and sustain the work. And that's particularly important for DEI.

Phil Wagner

So one of the things I thought about as I read the work is where does the most difficulty lie? And when we're thinking about DEI specifically, sometimes I think it's that movement piece. We like to think that it's sort of the infrastructure that gets in the way the most. But I think a lot of people look at the landscape of DEI, a lot of leaders who would call themselves inclusion oriented, and they say, oh my gosh, there is so much going on, I don't even know where to start, how to get in, what to do, how to move forward. Can you share any strategies that you might have for people who are who want to get in, who want to move but find themselves so paralyzed by fear or that unknown? Any insight from your work?

Everett Harper

Yeah, I would say there's probably two levels, and we can explore both if it's interesting. One is sort of the organizational level, the pragmatic level. What's the issue we're trying to address? Or what's the outcome you're looking for? And I feel like a lot of people forget to ask, what does it look like? Paint a vivid picture of what an outcome, a successful outcome, or a problem we're trying to avoid looks like that tends to narrow one's focus. And rather than saying, well, let's do DEI, it becomes, how do we have a leadership team that reflects the US population? What does it look like to design a product where we can reduce our blind spots by having more voices around the table? Those actually are outcomes that or questions you can ask. And then an outcome might look like, yeah, we want a product team that is comprised of these kinds of people. Now you've narrowed the problem. Now you've narrowed the solutions. So that's on the organizational side, briefly, on the personal side, where do you start? That's a really interesting question because I included, and I think, hopefully, it comes across in a business book. I include interior practices, the things where you have to develop your own self-awareness, find out where your blind spots are, understand your own reactions to stress and uncertainty. When you're talking about freezing, that's a really common problem. When people are faced with unknowns or I don't know the answer, and being able to sit with that and realize, oh, this is my reaction to uncertainty, and then be able to have strategies to move forward anyway, that is really the key to those interior practices, and both are important.

Phil Wagner

And I want to come to those interior practices, certainly in just a bit, because that occupies a significant part of your work. But I really first want to go back to its, like, in the intro section, right away in the preface of the book. I love good storytelling, and you drop us into a good story. You drop us into a tough conversation where you highlight an article by Ellen McGregor where she talks about the murders of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile and argues that when two black men are killed by police, one at a traffic stop in front of his four-year-old daughter. Employers must recognize that their employees, just like the rest of the country, are likely deeply affected.

Everett Harper

Yeah.

Phil Wagner

And then you talk about how this really hit you because you're the employer. Right. So you talk about how you occupy this strange position. You don't have a sign on your car, you say, that says, don't shoot, I'm a CEO. Can you talk about how your own experiences have sort of led to or informed this work?

Everett Harper

Yeah, I wanted to lead with that story because I wanted people to hear that it's both a business book and a personal book. And with this particular issue in particular, they're intertwined, and by telling a story, hopefully, brought people into that space. For me, as a black founder or black CEO, I think where I would go with that is I came to Silicon Valley in 1996, and you could probably put all the black founders and CEOs at a small dinner table, and that's it. It wasn't the image of Silicon Valley. And so it reinforced the kind of growing up experience of being the only one in this class or the only one in sports or the only one in this playing flute. Right, whatever. And eventually, what became a survival tactic just to navigate that became a skill. How do I understand what is in the room? And then it became an insight, wait a minute. I can see the assumptions that people who are in the center make about any given situation by being on the edge, whether it's being a CEO in the Silicon Valley in 1996 or being a CEO actually now too. And this is for everybody in some ways. It's not about being a black CEO. It just gave me an insight that the innovators and the people who are thinking around the corner, and the people who can solve problems are often those who are not at the center. They're the people on the edge and looking for ways to solve problems or be included in a different way. So I think that's probably the headline for me.

Phil Wagner

Yeah, I really appreciate that, and I think a little bit more about how that might open up conversation on the impetus to move. Right. For me, I'm a qualitative researcher. I'm a communications guy. I really prioritize lived experiences. That moves me. We also live in a world that prioritizes data-driven decision-making. And so I'm wondering, from your perspective back to that impetus to move, do you find that one of those is more beneficial, particularly in the DEI space, than the other?

Everett Harper

One of which?

Phil Wagner

So storytelling and or data?

Everett Harper

Yeah. So I'm going to try my best to cite this well, but there's a woman named Christina Harbridge who wrote this book called Swayed, and she's been really informative for me about how to communicate these types of issues. And I'm very aware of talking to communications expert. So you might say, Ah, that's nothing. But here's the way I frame it, that there are people who are motivated by a couple of different things. Some are motivated by we like the team. Some are motivated by process. Tell me what is next, and then I can hear what you're saying. Some are motivated by purpose. What's the higher meaning of this? And others are motivated by goals. Tell me where we're trying to get to it. I'll just nail it. Every communication I'm making, my best communications address all four. So whether it's a story or an annotation, if I can weave in each part of that, then that's where I try and go. That's where I'm trying to drop impetus into the people who are listening. So obviously, the communication stuff, know your audience. What is my outcome I'm trying to get? What am I trying to do? But then the next level is knowing that everybody hears something different. And if I do it well, they will see themselves in my communication. And even if they're totally motivated by a different thing than the next person sitting next to them.

Phil Wagner

I think that's a wonderful framing, and it's not lost on me that that's a great way to not oversimplify and not overcomplicate, to find balance and be multiple things to multiple people without sacrificing your values, without sacrificing or conceding on the need at hand. You're just being strategic here in how you frame the problem, how you frame the solution, how you frame the outcomes. Let's talk a little bit about problem formation here. So as I read the book, one of the things I'm trying to figure out is a little bit how to reconcile notions of diversity as a solution or a benefit because it's often positioned that way, right? There's a benefit to having diverse people in groups and teams. Diversity is a benefit for organizations. Inclusive cultures offer benefits to employees. So there's this diversity as solution, but then there's sort of this guiding sentiment of diversity as a problem. There are problems related to diversity and equity and inclusion in the world of work that we've got to fix. So what I'm trying to do is better understand how corporate leaders see diversity as something that's highly beneficial in the solution or something that's sort of compliance anchored and a problem that needs to be fixed. Does your work give us any insight here as we think about the DEI enterprise? How do we see DEI as problem and or solution?

Everett Harper

Yeah, so that's a really interesting question. There's a lot of layers. I'll see if I can break it down a little bit because there's a lot of layers in there. There's a wide range of how corporate leaders in my experience address this and some address it well, some address it poorly. Let's just be frank. On the compliance side, this is where I think kind of the traditional older version of diversity, even coming out of EEOC, coming out of affirmative action, where the goals were, let's get as many people of color, let's get more women into positions, and it became a checkbox, right? We've hired somebody, so let's check that box. We are complying with the rules. The Rooney Rule in the NFL. Same sort of thing. We have interviewed a black candidate, but we also know that that's not the outcome. That's not the you haven't you've complied with the rule, but the rule has defined you defined the rule wrong, basically. And that's then the sort of emergence of inclusion started to come in, et cetera. So I also see enterprises focus on how do we become moral citizens in the world. It represents moral citizens in the world. So it's not necessarily a benefits at actually a third level. It's like, how are we representing us? I actually find that somewhat problematic too. Right? Let's put a commercial on, and then it's tone-deaf, and we can say all sorts of versions of that. Where I think it gets much more interesting is when people attach it to the business, attach it to the goals of the organization. I think I say in my book the reason why it's so important is if diversity is a side project and is disconnected with the mission of the organization, guess what happens when budgets get tight or a client decides to drop, or there's some other crisis. That side project becomes dismissed. The more that people can articulate this is important to our organization because we want these outcomes or because the operation of this business work best, or because we the amount of blind spots that we have in our business. Now, it becomes neither benefit, it becomes essential, crucial to the business, operational to the business. That's much more interesting, and for me, that's more sustainable. So instead of saying we have a D&I initiative, I can say we have cohorts in our recruiting. We have a process in our recruiting where we can measure every single cohort for new positions. And the people who are in charge of that is the people who are dealing with on a daily basis our recruiting team and our hiring team. And then, we have systems to make sure that we can be visible about the results. So it just becomes part of operations, and that gets really interesting.

Phil Wagner

Yeah, that's what's interesting to me too. And you are somewhat of an infrastructurist. I mean, this is embedded throughout all of your work, right? So you talk about infrastructure in the book. There's not one, at least by my assessment, there's not one sort of DEI infrastructure. I mean, there are a variety of models, there's some good rubrics that we can use for organizational success, but there's not one guiding sort of infrastructure here. So how do you build an infrastructure framework in the absence of one consistent for DEI across organizations writ large?

Everett Harper

Yeah. So first little definition just for people listening what I mean, because infrastructure, it's not buildings and roads, it's not bridges, et cetera. It's really the interaction between people, technology, and systems. So the operations of a business, it's the interaction between them that's the infrastructure. So everything from repeatable processes like your weekly all hands all the way to your CRM are versions of infrastructure. And when you think about it that way, it becomes much more flexible to think, oh, this is how it relates to DEI. The reason I emphasize infrastructure is a lot of DEI work for a lot of folks, has a very compelling moral imperative, has a compelling social imperative, and that's awesome. And at the same time, it's exhausting. If all you're relying on is heroism. Heroism is not sustainable.

Phil Wagner

Say that again.

Everett Harper

Systems are sustainable. Right. And so the burnout that people are feeling, and it's very real, and I'm sure there's some nodding heads out there like, oh my God. The question I would then ask is, oh, wait, instead of carrying the burden yourself or with your team, how can you take that work and create an infrastructure that enables it to be systematized? What that then does is enable the work to be not carried by the heroism of a few but by the small lift of many so that it becomes almost trivial to your daily experience. And there's lots of different examples, but that's sort of, for me, the connection between building infrastructure and why it's so important for DEI.

Phil Wagner

That's excellent. I want to talk you mentioned earlier, you teed it up so well talking about interior practices, and you talk about two in the book, right? Exterior and interior. That's a really profound segment of your work. So can you explain or contextualize those perhaps within sort of the greater realm of DEI for our listeners? Because both are very important to that infrastructure.

Everett Harper

Sure. And I'm glad you pointed out because it was a deliberate choice to say interior and exterior are important. Exterior, for the purpose of this conversation, are the processes, the methods that you can use within your organization to implement DEI. So, for example, if you are doing recruiting and hiring and blind interviews, so you erase someone's name, that's a piece of infrastructure. That's an exterior practice that you use within your organization to help get to remove bias in your interviews. An interior practice, on the other hand, is that what you do for yourself, your own habits, your own practices. In some ways, it's your personal infrastructure. So you may have something that says, I'm going to remove bias in my interview, but then the interior practice is, am I biased? If I'm biased, where are my biases? How do I learn about them? If I have them? Am I working on them, or am I just reactive to them? And so that second piece, the interior practice, is really important because we often replicate the systems we're trying to eradicate if we're not self-aware about our own reactions to different things. And the general point in the book is around the unknowns and uncertainties. But for DEI, it's the unknowns and uncertainties of saying, do I really talk that much in a meeting when I hear women say that, wait a minute, in the room? I've said a particular point, and it only got recognized when another guy said the exact same point. Was I that person? Those questions start to get real interesting, and that's the interior practice, being aware and then being able to respond in the moment and practicing it.

Phil Wagner

Difficult question here. Does every leader have the ability to get to that place? I mean, I think of some of the obstacles that we encounter in the world of work-related DEI. I think it goes back to a profound lack of the ability to self-reflect. Does your work offer us any insight on how to motivate those who seem reticent to do that deep digging, that have that intellectual curiosity to sort of get there and ask those internal questions?

Everett Harper

Yeah. Oh, boy. There are a lot of different answers I could get in terms of motivating. One, I think that we have been trained, and I talk about this in the book, we've been trained to have the right answer. Like everybody, think about when you're in fourth grade, were you trained to raise your hand first, say the answer loudest, say it first. We've been trained that way. We weren't trained to ask the right question. We weren't trained to sit within this country. Trained to sit with. Are there other answers or other perspectives?

Phil Wagner

Yeah.

Everett Harper

Right. You get to being a leader, and you're all of a sudden faced with all sorts of different challenges, and you don't have the answer. Many leaders, that's a freeze moment. And we saw that in the pandemic. We saw that in remote work. We saw that in response to the killings of George Floyd and other things. And so you reach that point of not knowing, and you're not trained in that. And so the self-awareness to say, wait a minute, I don't know the answer is, for some leaders, the first time that they come in contact with, oh, what do I do now? I'm uncertain. I'm trained as a leader to know all the answers. So any leaders out there that hasn't had that moment, I'm going to side-eye you a little bit. So that's first, the motivation it's like, you're going to get there, so how do you deal with that? The second motivating thing is I am very deliberate about saying these are practices. So, for example, I've been meditating mindfulness meditation since 1992, so almost 25 years. And it's a practice. I was terrible at it at first, right? And I get better, and sometimes I regress, and so forth. But like any riding a bike, like any practice, you get better with repeated cycles, and you get trained and you get mentors and so forth. And then, eventually, you realize you have a body of work that I can rely on. So for me, meditation has been I can slow down when things are really intense. I can feel a sense of emotional distress or uncertainty, but then step back and say, Ah, that's uncertainty. It's not me. It's a feeling. And those feelings shift and change. Then I can start to pause and take a moment. So I'll give you a practical example for DEI. So one of the things as a CEO you realize that you should hold your tongue more often than not. One of our newer employees a couple of years ago, our first trans employee, came in and bravely said, within about a couple of weeks, hey, you know what? We don't have any pronouns. I would really appreciate and this person. They wrote up a diagram that said a proposal that said, I'd like to include our pronouns in all of our slack channels and on our zoom calls.

Phil Wagner

Wow.

Everett Harper

My initial reaction inside was, why are you doing that? It's going to make all our names too long. It's going to be clutter in our feeds. Right. But I recognized, oh, that's just my initial response. Let me take a pause and realize, wait a second. This is a new employee making a suggestion that works for them. Is there really any cost to that? No, this could be an experiment. Cool. That pause was critical. That's part of the practice. They decided to do it, and then people got on board, and I was like, okay, this is important to people. Great. I'm glad I was quiet. We implemented it easy. It was really helpful for folks. But here was the payoff. The next three people I interviewed because I used to do all the interviews. When I was the final interview, the next three people, unprompted, said, hey, and I really appreciate that you have your pronouns. I said, really? Why? Well, it's not my thing. It's not important necessary for me to have pronouns I'm he, him, or she her. But if you've created an environment that's comfortable for folks, who are they them? You've probably made an environment that's comfortable for me too, and my issues or in my challenges and my identity. And I sat back after the third one. I sat back and like, wow, I was completely wrong. I'm glad I paused, and I'm glad the practice of including and accepting, and creating an environment for people to make those suggestions paid off in ways that could not have possibly imagined.

Phil Wagner

I am so glad you went there because I think that's a perfect retelling of something you teed up earlier, which is that you can be multiple things to multiple people. That specific example has clear organizational outcomes, right? So you've got those recruits, those new hires, coming in and expressing appreciation, feeling plugged into the culture. That's great for the organization, but for those that are wrapped up in sort of that higher moral imperative, there's data on this, too, right? The Trevor Project did a study. It's like 40,000, folks. Those specific affirmative communication patterns decreased the intent to commit suicide by a significant amount. Right.

Everett Harper

Wow, wow.

Phil Wagner

So for organizations, great benefit for people getting life benefit. This can be multiple things to multiple people. Same practice, but speaks to multiple sort of different access points. I love that. And then I think too, thinking about self-reflection, your tale here of your immediate reaction, your pause, and then your reframing is important because I think often when we have those immediate reactions, either we don't vocalize them, shame ourselves for having them, when growth is something that I think we should prioritize here. So that, self-reflection also has a way of eventually giving you grace for yourself and then bringing about grace for others as they work through the stuff.

Everett Harper

Yeah, absolutely.

Phil Wagner

And this relates to something, one of my favorite parts of your book. It's kind of a small piece, but I loved it. I learned something new here was about imaginable cells. Do you remember that part of the book?

Everett Harper

Yeah, of course.

Phil Wagner

I have to be honest. I had no idea what those were. Can you talk a little bit about those and the role of imagination in solving complex problems in the DEI space?

Everett Harper

Yeah. So I'm glad you noted that. I wanted to put that little piece in. Also, just like a little mark in the book, a little pause in some ways. So for listeners, imaginal cells are cells within a caterpillar, and those cells are actually antigens to the caterpillar's existence. However, they also include all blueprints for making a butterfly. So, yes, this is another butterfly story, but I promise it's.

Phil Wagner

No, it's a good one.

Everett Harper

And the key is those imaginal cells, as antigens are in some ways not able to function. But what they do is try and link with each other. Once sufficient numbers of these imaginal cells link with each other. They form this network. That network then signals the caterpillar to go into chrysalis and dissolve completely into goop. You're now a mass of proteins. However, those imaginal cells take over. They are the architects. They reassemble all those proteins into the butterfly, and then the butterfly flies away. The metaphor for me of the imaginal cell is about it can be lonely sometimes to do DEI work in isolation. You could think that if you're an innovator, it can feel really for people who are in internal innovation teams. I've heard so many stories of feeling like no one understands what we're trying to do, and everybody attacks us because we're threatening to the established order. However, when you reach out and you do podcasts like this, and you create a network of people trying to make change, all of a sudden, it's like, wait a minute, we're onto something. We can support each other. So there's the network, and if there's sufficient people in that network who are saying, yes, let's try and make a change if you apply the right leverage, you could be the architects of something beautiful. You can be architects of something new. So for me, in some ways, it's less about imagination, except perhaps that you can imagine there are other people like you, but it's really about connection, it's about networks, and it's about being able to create massive change with small amounts of highly strategic action and with leverage. So that's why I like that story. And I forgot you can't do it without going through the goo. You can't do it without the messiness that comes with it. And it's not messy for everybody else. It's messy for you, too, right? So that's the thing.

Phil Wagner

That's so good. Our own president, Katherine Rowe, here at William & Mary a few months ago, was speaking to faculty and reminded all of us to not be held back by the fear of doing something not fully perfect in the DEI space.

Everett Harper

Absolutely.

Phil Wagner

Be brave enough to do the right thing, to do the thing that advances our shared values and commitments in this space, and know that we're probably going to mess it up. We're going to go through the goo, as you say, and to give ourselves and others grace as we do that. And to me, I've never heard something that really just stuck with me of giving ourselves permission to go through that goo and know that it's messy. So that's good. I'm a communications guy, Everett, and so one of the things I really appreciate about your book is that it is about infrastructure, but it's also about the small things that build infrastructure. One of those things to me is always communication. You can tell a lot about an organization by the tenor of communication that exists within it. So you've got a few, like, communication activities.

Everett Harper

Yeah, sure.

Phil Wagner

What purpose do you sort of see interactions or those interactions serving in problem-solving? Can you tie together communication and problem-solving for us?

Everett Harper

Yeah, absolutely. So for context for the people who are listening, Truss, we're 130 people or so, and we've been primarily remote first for an entire decade. So we've developed a lot of these communication practices, in part because we have to solve the problem of how do we join our work. So there's lots going on with sort of doing the work, but smartly one of our employees decided, wait, but we have to make sure we stay connected also. And so they said, let's create a half an hour every Friday, and it's before our all-hands meeting for something called being humans together. And being humans together is optional. You can attend as much as you want. Anybody at any level can attend. And we started this when we were 20 people, and it still goes on. And it's basically you get on if there's one, if there's sufficient people, you go into breakout rooms, and the question might be, tell us a story about the thing that's behind you on your wall. Tell us the most boring, interesting story when you were 13. Tell us what movie character you wanted to be when you were five, and tell us your favorite dad jokes. The dad joke ones are crazy in terms of participation. But what it does is it's a piece of infrastructure. It is a regular, systematic way for people to plug in with very little effort. It's just half an hour. You can go when you want, but it creates a place where you can be silly, where you can find out more about the person behind. And that develops trust. And trust is really key to being able to have any organization. But particularly in a DEI frame, the challenge would be, what are the small little pieces of infrastructure you can create that doesn't have to be a big initiative? Often it's the small things, like, how can we connect in an easy way with low lift that's sustainable and repeatable, that then builds culture over time.

Phil Wagner

Yeah, I love that. That human connection. Stephen Denning reminds us that analysis often excites the brain, but it doesn't offer a path to the heart. Right. So we've got to go to motivate and to drive change and to drive action. And so what I like about that being humans together thing is it centers humanity, centers dignity, it centers the why behind our DEI initiatives. That is what brings sustainability. So, final question for you today. Your work gives us a lot of insights, not just in DEI. I mean, we can apply the principles here to a litany of organizational problems, which is what I love about this. But I think specifically for DEI. There are just so many takeaways. So if we were to buy your book, which I hope all of our listeners will please do, it's a wonderful read, and we were to put those principles in action in the DEI space, what could you envision for our realities? What would come to fruition if we took your principles and applied them to DEI?

Everett Harper

I think the key would be, particularly for leaders, is something you referred to earlier. You don't have to be perfect. You have to step up, and you have to speak up. And you're going to say, I might mess up, but I'm going to acknowledge that this is in the room, and I don't know the answer. Can I facilitate this for us so that we can create a better outcome for all of us? That's for leaders in particular. Second, it's starting with outcomes and purpose and then designing little experiments. So take the weight off, take the weight off. Design a little experiment, something that you can do, that you can reverse, and you just get data. Third, you don't have to do it yourself. There's so much wisdom in the room. And as a leader, your job is to create an environment for that wisdom to come out. And then, finally, I think it's I'm going to quote Damian Hooper Campbell, who's a leader in a variety of companies, latest at Uber and Zoom and Lyft and so forth. And he said DEI progress is measured in quarters and years, not in weeks and months. So by doing these little experiments, what you do is get 1% better. 1% better every week. Every quarter starts to accumulate, and the next thing you know, you've made incredible progress, but it hasn't felt like a heroic lift. So I think that is the last piece that I would add.

Phil Wagner

It's fantastic. This is such a great conversation. Again, I just want to reiterate for our listeners what a good read.

Everett Harper

Thank you.

Phil Wagner

Just so well written. And as a professor, I'm always looking for ways I can take really interesting concepts and put them into pragmatic outcomes. And you have both. So thank you for great writing, thank you for great conversation. Thank you for your work. It's such an honor to speak with you. Everett, thanks so much for joining us on our podcast.

Everett Harper

I really appreciate it. And just to add, book is Move to the Edge, Declare it Center. You can get it on all the places, Amazon, as well as the indie bookstores. I'm a big supporter of independent bookstores, so indie books and bookshop.org is ways that you can get it. Or you can follow me. I have my own site, everretharper.com. I'm at truss.works. That's for my company. And we are definitely hiring. If you want a kind of environment that is fitting in with this, and then on all the socials I'm Everett Harper, Twitter, et cetera, come interject and please ask questions or challenge things. This is the start of a conversation, and I really appreciate where you went with this because it's a different look and a very unique look, and so I really appreciate it.

Phil Wagner

Thank you, sir, and listeners, as we do this work together, let's build those networks. Please follow support. Everett, Everett thanks again for your time today. It's been a real pleasure.

Everett Harper

All right, all you imaginal cells out there, let's go.

Phil Wagner

There we go.

Everett Harper

Cheers.

Phil Wagner

Thanks for taking a second to listen to Diversity Goes to Work. If you like what you heard, share the show with a friend. Leave us a review on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts, and reach out because we're always looking for new friends. And if you'd like to learn more about any of our programs or initiatives here in the business school at Women & Mary, be sure to visit us at mason wm.edu. Until next time.

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