Hi, it's Reed. I'm excited to share the long-awaited season 2 of our sister podcast. Should this exists is about to drop should this exists is hosted by my friend Katerina fake and ask big questions about the technologies that shape our lives this season robot caregivers deep fake detectives psychedelics and more. Should this exists season 2 launches, October 14th, subscribe now in your podcast player,
R or visit should this exist.com to sign up for their excellent newsletter. Hi, it's Bob. As you may have noticed. There are now two kinds of Masters of scale episodes are classic episodes are hosted by Reid Hoffman each one proves the theory about how companies scale and feature surprise guests and original music. They're Timeless. This is an episode of Masters of scale rapid response here. We interview leaders in the thick of massive change for insights you need right now.
Based on your feedback. We're putting both episodes in the same feed. Here's how to tell them apart the headline for rapid response episode starts with the words rapid response and the headline for a classic episode starts with a number. I'm Bob safian your host for masters of scale rapid response, and now onto the
episode it's a thin line between desperation and inspiration sane and rational market system is built.
Built on pillars of citizenship. We all gotta show up. We all depend on one another it's been stressful. It's been high paced. It's been nerve-racking. It's been scary at times to consider opportunities. And then thing is that safe to have a successful business right now is to have built it on a foundation of systemic racism. It doesn't mean your business is super.
Definitely racist it means it says thrived in a system that was designed to be super actively races America is in a very deep hole and we don't get out of the hole by just stopping the digging now, you're just stuck in the hole. You have to climb out. You have to generate that positive Freedom which means anti-racism which means an active effort to undo the things that put us in the hole in the first place.
That's baratunde Thurston writer media entrepreneur Ted and South by Southwest speaker and host of the podcast how to Citizen with baratunde. A for many of us 2020 has been a year of upended business plans alongside unexpected and sometimes uncomfortable opportunities baratunde is not only experience that Journey. He's been a counselor and advisor to many other Business Leaders navigating these Uncharted times. I'm Bob safian former editor of
Ask company founder of the flux group and host of massive scale rapid response. I wanted to talk with baritone day because he's a passionate advocate for embracing change in business but doing so responsibly and intentionally from a love-hate assessment of tech platforms, like Facebook to blunt words about addressing race and diversity in corporate environments baratunde a offers clear honest advice about the need for what he calls citizen ink from companies and all of us.
Let's listen in.
We'll start the show in a moment after a word from our sponsor HubSpot.
There are three fears every founder will face. Number one is the fear of death. Number two is the fear of stagnation and number three is a fear of
complexity. That's Dharma Shaw co-founder and CTO of HubSpot a marketing and sales platform for growing companies. And those three fears star mesh just shared. They ring true
every entrepreneur that I've talked to over the years. They go through these stages at some point in their evolution. You feel like every mistake you're making everything that's happening to you. It's like this the
And this has ever happened in boy. Do you
suck fearing death fearing stagnation fearing complexity as a Founder Dharma has been there himself so he can tell you you're not the only one.
Well the attributes of Entrepreneurship in being a Founder is that it's a relatively lonely isolated world. And one thing that I've learned personally is that you are not alone. This has happened before in fact, it happens almost every time you know, what's around the corner you can be mindful of it and
react how can you face these three fears and conquer them don't mesh will share his insights later in the show.
Show and to learn how HubSpot can help your company react and real-time visit HubSpot.com.
I'm Bob safian, and I'm here with Barrett and a Thurston writer comedian and entrepreneur author of the best seller had to be black and host of the podcast how to Citizen. He's joining us from his home in California as I ask my questions from my home in Brooklyn better today. Thanks for joining
us. Bob is good to be here. Thank you so much for having me. It's good to be with you
again. You too, A lot has gone down in 2020 and I wanted to start by asking you as an
Turner like what has it been like for you
2020 has been so intense as an entrepreneur. I have learned things about QuickBooks. I never knew I have chased down attempted PPP loans. I have taught myself darn near the full Adobe Creative Suite as I have fashioned myself into my own producer and Editor to shift gears quickly.
And make a new type of presentation show because I couldn't get on planes anymore. And that was a big part of my business. It's been stressful. It's been high paced. It's been nerve-wracking. It's been scary at times to consider opportunities. And then thing is that safe. I'd never really had to think about that in my day-to-day.
Yeah, you're home sort of became the HQ for Last Mile right for getting PPE to
Yes. Oh so Elizabeth is my fiancee and she got roped in to a volunteer effort that started to look a lot like a small business which is coordinating the distribution of personal protective equipment to Frontline health workers here in Los Angeles. It was really interesting to feel the ebb and flow of having to entrepreneurs in the household and there were some weeks where like I did all the cooking and the housework and everything and she was just in slacks Zoom. What's
Sap and then there were other weeks when it was reversed because I'm locked in my little shed home studio zooming into 5 different time zones.
So you started this weekly show live on lockdown which is kind of audience participation Colin. It's not a usual format with that sort of desperation. Like I don't know what I can do from home like
what Bob it's a thin line between desperation and inspiration. Okay, so I'm going to lean into the inspiration and say this was
An inspired choice, we returned from New York City from where you are where we live for a very long time and I am particular did on March 11th of 2020 and we on the flight back. Listen to this epidemiologist. Dr. Michael Oster home who's a hero and it's just such a straight shooter when it comes to this pandemic and we were not the same people when we landed his when we took off because we had two hours plus of him on Joe Rogan breaking it down and freaking us.
Us out in a very scientifically sound way so we got ready and I got inspired / desperate as everything disappeared from my calendar and I had very well laid plans for this year and it did not involve the Erasure of money and events and community and people so quickly. So I woke up a few days after we returned from New York with a show in my head truly. It was like live on lockdown three or four in the morning, LOL little
A cube and I knew that I needed to just do it in part. I felt a service calling to do it and part. I felt like I'll show you Hollywood like a little bit of a competitive streak because I have been seeking permission from various Gatekeepers for many years to get my show and in this environment. None of them have power anymore and it actually helped.
Preserve my sanity and it did not generate $1. Not really but it generated some other opportunities and it made me sharper and it's open doors. And so in that sense, it was indirectly responsible for some of my own business Resurrection
in real life meetings. And now virtually you spent a lot of time talking to other businesses and organizations. I know people Taff you for your advice about all kinds of things as a consultant how has that piece of the pie?
Folio, like played
out. It's very connected the businesses that asked me for advice and my being trapped in my home with an increasingly high quality Studio One thing I've learned is when you have great sound you dominate Zoom. You just crush it. It doesn't even matter what you say. It's just like my mic is better than yours. And so you're gonna
Consciously give my words more weight because they digitally have more weight. There's like a higher definition audio signal that I'm sending through and saying with the lighting and the camera. So these things that I you know in my advising capacity, I would show up and work the room. So because of the racialized moment that were in in the summer of 2020 a lot of these businesses were calling on me to talk about race you don't to talk about diversity and equity.
Inclusion, and I think I've I've had that part of me for a while. I did a very big Ted talk about racism and white supremacy and I worked in business for so long that I kind of understand some of their complexities from the inside as well. But in this moment, there was an intensity to how I showed up because there is such an intensity to where we've been as a country. It's not a normal time and it's not a normal moment and to have the largest sustained.
Set of protest in the streets of the country ever has also happened in 2020. Like it's been a busy year. We had the greatest protest ever and quippy launch like it's a huge year, but it's huge. And so I've shown up a little more intensely and a little more I can only think of it as like
Acapella or of caustic version of me. It's just straight to camera. It's straight from the heart and it's like it's a more honest version.
There's a a rawness and with that a sort of intimacy that can come from this from this time and I've loved your podcast about we're having a moment and that rawness that's and honestly that was part of that and also is part of your new podcast house.
Citizen and I wanted to ask you about that podcast a little bit the new one. It's focused largely on individuals citizen. I know you talked about as a verb to citizen to do something but I wanted to ask you about organizations about companies like is a business a company. Is it a citizen and how does an organization citizen
I'd so love that you asked this question Bob. We live in a country where companies
Are considered persons and so when a technical legalistic sense a company can citizen it is a member of society. It is a party and in our most recent episode. I actually asked the question you just asked of me of our guests how should a company citizen so to answer that for you. I'll first lay out the four principles of what it means to Citizen according to us to Citizen is to show up and to participate it's a
Active thing not a passive thing to Citizen is to invest in relationships to acknowledge our interconnection and our interdependence. This is not a solo sport. It's a team sport to Citizen is to understand power where it comes from and the different ways we can use it we can show up in physical numbers we can spend money. We can generate and share ideas. We can of course vote in a technical political expression of power in a democracy and the fourth piece.
Pieces we do this on behalf of the many not just the few not just ourselves as individuals, but ourselves as members of a collective.
Those principles can apply to any party and including a collection of humans and ideas known as it Incorporated entity. And so I company can go through that and say well, how are we showing up? And how are we living in relationship with others? How are we understanding what our power is and are we using all that to benefit the many not just the few are we just maximizing thin definition of
Value or are we taking in a holistic view of the stakeholders of the employees of the environment of the families of the communities that we are a part of and there is a great way to Citizen as a company. In fact, we're in the midst of so many challenges but I listened to a report recently about the Paris climate Accords, which the u.s. Is scheduled to remove itself from and November of this year and we were
on a trajectory to kind of Meet the goals that we had set to reduce by 25% our emissions by 2020 for 20-25. We were only down sixteen percent. It's not on Pace to make it but we're closer than if we just fully stopped and why is that why with an Administration who clearly is not aligned with those goals and pulled us out is the u.s. Still managing to reduce emissions one is the state stepped up states and cities to is companies.
Stepped up and they said we're a member of a larger society and we are stakeholders in this greater entity called planet Earth without which a nobody making money. So it's on us and large and small companies have essentially signed on to this Global treaty to This Global agreement to reduce emissions and save our only livable planet that we have access to for billions of us at least. So that's a good way to citizen. I
think there's one other piece of this and it came up in the episode which is there is a short-term and long-term tension that happens with a lot of businesses, especially publicly traded businesses, especially those who term I recently learned from our guest Michelle from co-worker dot-org businesses have been financialized. And so your investors are just kind of harvest as much cash out of the business as quickly as possible versus creating long-term value and to Citizen is to build long-term value and it is to work, of course.
There's always tension with employers and employees. But without employees employers don't have a business and vice versa and without employees being compensated well and respected. They can't afford to buy the goods in a consumer-driven economy, which makes business possible. So sane and rational market system is built on pillars of citizenship. We all got to show up. We all depend on one another and so how does our whole society
holistically provide for all of us and I think that there is a constructive role for businesses and business owners. In fact, I'd say a necessary role. We can't achieve some of our larger goals without businesses citizen E2
well and they are platforms of power. Yeah, right is one of your one of your your pillars is around that I mean, I feel like it was not that long ago. We're sort of the the job of a CEO or business lie, or even a business person was just make money.
Right, like that's the goal. And sort of now. They're all of these layers of social interaction social issues pressures that do you make a statement about something do not make a statement. Do you feel like the burden on business people is like appropriate was that always there and we just didn't take that responsibility. We were having that impact or you know, something else
changed. I think both can be true. I think it's always been there.
And I'm 42 years old. So I have some sense of lived history but not a ton but I'm not a kid anymore either and I seem to recall that there was an error where businesses were part of the community. Now good corporate citizen could small business members Society Main Street business who knows everybody's name and supports the local Little League team and is supportive of the schools and the showing up it.
SO meetings and not owning the town but participating in the functioning of the town and delaying those layoffs of those furloughs because you actually know the people who are affected by those decisions not moving the plant. So the idea that business is just about money. I think as a recent and narrow phenomena, certainly my partner Elizabeth has been a lot more time in the world of impact investing in Social Enterprise and
that's what she says to me. So I'm going to like trust her one that that businesses as just money machines is something that is a result of a concentration of power of ADI regulatory environment over the past several decades of an increase in the dependence on financial services in our economy, and we might be forcing ourselves to return to a world where businesses are more active because in part we've like divested so much from our political.
System we defunded our political system in certain ways because the people who would normally show up to participate in their Community are very busy working. The fastest growing jobs are actually the lower wage jobs. So people don't really have a lot of time and because we have worshipped business for the past several decades in a way that's you know, a celebrity ization of Entrepreneurship of Business Leaders of what we need a good business person.
I run this city county country would have you and so we've built up the brand of business for a while and now we're expecting things from in the same way that you study stage in Z and Millennials expect Brands to represent their values, you know, we expect that more of us expect that from businesses to and partly to backfill for the people who no longer do that and partly because I think there is something actually sound
Natural about that
I want to ask you about this in the context of some of the tech platforms. Yeah, because they often talk about their mission and their purpose you and I have talked about tech platforms for years the good and the bad you wrote a cover story when I was at Fast Company about unplugging even though you're the in many ways. You're the most plugged in person. I know what do you see the role of tech platforms is being right
now. Yeah, the big Tech platforms are saving us and destroying us at the same time.
At the beginning of 2020 friends of mine who have kids were managing their screen time and mandating, you know device free moments and outdoor time and some of them were sending kids to unplug camps or detox camps some adults were doing that too. And we can't do that right now. Not really it's our only connection to other humans and we need that connection psychologically much less financially. So we depend on Google Amazon Facebook, etc, etc.
And they're still platforms of major problems, you know, they were built with narrow intention many of them were built to extract value from us.
At our own expense sell us back to ourselves build a huge surveillance Network and then put a price tag on it and then encourage one segment of the economy marketers and advertisers to drive all the Innovation and we the consumers the users the products. We're not really invited to determine how we would be used and that's one of the greatest flaws, you know, the internet Visionaries in the beginning did not
Intend this but when we pursued the narrow monetization strategy that we did we made it almost inevitable. So I think we're in a tight spot because there's like I who am not a fan of Facebook have found myself. So grateful for it in this time and my oh thanks what I wouldn't give for a baby picture from a person. I sort of knew from high school. This is great human human, but also the trolls and the election and affair.
Rinse and the still issues with privacy and abuse. It's so much. Yeah, and so here's what I want what I want what I've always wanted when my show how does it isn't with Burton day is about is collective power and then we still we set up this system and where we've allowed so much of these choices in his power to be in a literal handful of entities.
And that's not small D democracy. I don't also think that's a healthy Marketplace as we get more digital more HD more screens more immersive. We've got to redistribute some of the way we make these decisions and it's not something I can do alone one person just saying. No, it doesn't add up anymore. The forces are too strong. We only have strength together. And so we need some sort of collective way to represent our will and to balance out.
I'd have an influence over the decisions that are being made about us and literally with our
information. So for your citizen inning do you struggle with I'm not happy with some of the things that Facebook does but I'm using it like what you're saying is like boycotting Facebook as one person is not going to do anything and you'll get more out of leveraging them.
So that's part of what I'm saying. I grew up in Washington DC with a football team that
that bore a very offensive name to the indigenous people of this country many of them and for years, they said you got to change this name and the team owner said no will never change his teammate mark my words they're changing the name and it's not because like I boycotted which I started doing as a 16 year old in high school in Washington DC in the mid-90s didn't change anything. They didn't even listen to the indigenous people. They didn't have enough respect for them to Value their voice. They listen to
A global powerful business that decided to use its power and say not in our name. It was instant. It moved at the speed of a FedEx package, you know, like talk about delivery talk about Express overnight delivery Bravo. It shouldn't have come to that but it did come to that because money is power and they possessed a lot of it. I think where we've seen Facebook move isn't in response to individual consumers logging off a face.
Book it the momentum on that machine is too big but when the advertisers pulled their money, they started shifting their policies and acknowledged a little more adjust the thing a little more. They're used to being beat up in the Press. They're not used to a company like Procter & Gamble saying, we're just not spending money with you for the next month until you get this right that's power. That's a company understanding its power with another company and using it to create a healthier environment for all of us to live in and like buy soap and toothpaste.
Which is their goal.
We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor HubSpot.
The first fear is just a fear of death will I get any customers at all? As this company going to survive you're facing imminent death multiple times a week. Sometimes multiple times a day.
We're back with Dharma Shah of HubSpot. He's been telling us about the three fears every startup founder faces. You might think there's nothing worse than death. But the fear in the next phase can be just as deadly stagnation.
It's like, okay. I've managed to avoid death for a while, but you can stagnate and still run the company for a very long time. So you're kind of Walking Dead. Where are they?
He still operational but it's really not going
anywhere Ramesh has watched thousands of startups survived the first phase only to discover that they don't know what to do. Next. Most companies will need a
second act. You have to say. Okay, we're not going to abandon the thing that we were successful at but we are now going to stretch ourselves and do this new thing that's going to feel very uncomfortable.
Dharma has been there himself HubSpot had to find their own second act when they expanded their offerings from marketing software to a full customer relations management
platform the way we could
And ourselves into that second act is we said hey marketing software. That's a great business, but it's not going to work forever. And so we're taking that same set of values the same culture the same customer centricity and we're expanding it to also bring that value to another industry that we think needs
it the key is to make sure your next move connects with your
mission look deep inside yourself and say, okay. What is it? That makes us and how do we use that to move into this next ACT
but as a business expands it enough.
Really becomes more complex and that brings us to the third fear, which star mesh will tackle later in the show. In the meantime. Learn how your company can evolve with HubSpot CRM platform at HubSpot.com.
So I don't want to press you too hard, but I'm going to ask you this question. So like you're working with I heart right? I look and I Hearts board has nobody black on the
board. Yeah. Yeah. There's no perfectly aligned Choice available.
I went with I heart because I knew they reached people that I wanted to reach with this message. It would have been simpler for me and more values aligned in one direction to go with a more explicitly Progressive media Outlet or something that felt in sound a little more like public radio. And I know that listener knows me and agrees with me and that's not growth for me as a business. It's not growth for me as a citizen.
It's not the highest version of the idea that I'm trying to live which is to citizen to connect with people who I don't always even agree with and I looked at a company like I heart that reaches everybody almost literally ninety-four percent of the country connects to I heart I'm like a daily or at least weekly basis. I'm like, well that's gonna be a challenge. Let's go and I see it in the ratings of my show, right? There's people who jump from Rush Limbaugh over to me and I
For that and that's a challenge. So yeah, I'm not happy that their board is as non-representative as it is. I'm also not surprised. I live in a country that has terrible representation in the Senate of women and people of color and Indigenous folk and I still try to operate in that environment and make it better as a bit more of a choice around I heart that I Living in America, but there are some Parallels for me. So yeah. Thanks for the question and I definitely thought about
Out it is like do I want to be on the same slate as Rush Limbaugh? I think for this show in particular. That's kind of the point. Let's see what happened and we're seeing what's happening. And a lot of people are getting exposed.
I will say you have always had a capacity for being able to move between different communities right in ways that like sort of a translator in some ways. I
yes. Yeah.
There's a lot of discussion among Business Leaders right now about the issue of
Stay about hiring more black staff, you know publicly you hear a lot of interest privately. I know what I hear is a lot of frustration like yeah, I want to I don't really know how to I don't know what I do about it. How do I make progress right now? I'm sure you're getting questions like this. Also. What do you say when you get those
questions?
Yeah, I do get those questions a lot and in my now less varnished place of being I say a few things to have a successful business right now is to have built it on a foundation of systemic racism. That's kind of a historical fact. It doesn't mean your business is super actively racist. It means it says thrived in a system that was designed to be super actively races.
And so if you have difficulty finding talented black people to fill position X that's on purpose and we live in a designed space with hundreds of years of intention and effort behind it. There's no instant fix to that.
One thing we need to do is to stop digging that hole and in fact Bob, you know you I'm thinking even more clearly about this because I'm remembering who you are listeners. I had a revelation when I was a strategy consultant doing a ton of discounted cash flow analysis on behalf of investor clients and Telecom speculators or operators. What's this business worth and we would do this cash flow analysis. I learned what cash flow wasn't I?
Learn how to make waterfall charts which is super fun because they're called waterfall charts and I would have that song in my head don't go but I see visually understood what it meant to build a business, especially if you're not making money in the early days, you're digging a whole year one- year to negative your three- And so you have this cumulative picture of a hole that's very deep. And then you start earning Revenue cool net revenue better. So you're starting to climb out of that cumulative hole.
And one day you make a profit on that day. You're like, whoa, we're profitable today, but you still have this cumulative whole so you're not really sustainable until you pay back those loans or those investors are those markets or wherever you got that money from that you leveraged into this moment.
What I say to my business colleagues fellow citizens clients, the United States of America is in a very deep hole. We were built on a negative investment in Freedom and justice for a really long time and we don't get out of the hole by just stopping the digging now, you're just stuck in the hole. It's great. You're not digging a deeper one, but you still really deep in the hole. You have to climb out. You have to generate that positive.
Cash flow that positive Freedom which means anti-racism which means an active effort to undo the things that put us in the hole in the first place and for the for the business person. I hope that translates because if you're especially if you're a CFO, but if you're anyone who has any understanding of the numbers that power this that is just true and you don't let yourself slide on it. Your investors would never let you slide. Would you just write off the maybe you declare bankruptcy and you fold the highwomen?
Thing maybe that's your way out. But otherwise, you gotta pay that back and you got to get out of that hole. And so that's the size of the moment. That's the size of the deficit. That's the size of the opportunity. And then what I say two more things when it comes to recruiting I hear the frustration of people especially in very quantitatively assessing Fields, like law, we look at GPA we look at school. We look at LSAT scores and I
my friend George fatheri. He's a lawyer and he shared this analogy with me, you know, he shows a picture of people finishing a race and the right at the tape take a snapshot and he asks folks Whos the best runner and people answer whoever's closest to the tape. They're the best runner. They're clearly go about to win the race and he says, how do you know? Well, we'll look at right here. It's like that's a snapshot. What if I told you that the runner in second position wasn't Racing for the past hundred meters before the past, huh?
Miles now who's the better run context matters and there's a very simplistic attitude that I hear from my libertarian-leaning and efficiency minded and talent first business friends who I just want the best person. I just want the most qualified person. What are these qualifications? And are you taking someone's life into account when you measure them and when you start asking that question it can start to shift your whole Talent assessment the last
Peace on that is a lot of people who run businesses see it as a privilege to let someone into it. Well, I have this standard and you must meet it because you're lucky to work for me. That's not an exchange. That's not interconnected. That's not citizen a you grow when you're open to the possibility that this person you're bringing in has something to teach you as well and may actually change your business for the better because what you define as a standard is actually pretty small because you've been missing a whole Market you've been missing a whole use case. You've been missing a whole
Type of talent because you didn't grow up with it and you're seeing this other person has the impoverished one as the one who's missed out on opportunities when you're missing out on an opportunity right now to benefit from their genius, if you would loosen up and let go and be open-minded write all the things you're expecting them to do to adapt to you. Maybe you should adapt to them some as well
as you're talking. I'm thinking of the other side of this equation to which is if you're one of the
Fewer black employees black leaders in business you're getting asked questions and have burdens put on you to represent in a way that probably always been there but becomes more and more heightened right now. Do you have advice or perspective for colleagues friends things you say to yourself about like, why do I keep having to answer this question or be put in this spot? And what do you say to white folks like me who may be posing those questions.
Yeah to the people who are being burdened with answering this. I try to remind my fellow black people and folks who are in similar situations to remember that we are more than our traumas and our vulnerabilities and to look at the bright side. There's a beautiful architectural metaphor in the national museum of African American history and culture in Washington DC. He starred in the basement in like the Thirteen or fourteen hundreds and you climb your way through this.
The slave trade through Jim Crow through lynching through mass incarceration and you get to Obama right? It's a clue a manager and then you keep going in the upper levels, which I didn't understand and didn't leave enough time to explore is like all this beautiful culture that sits atop all this pain and Trauma. It's just worth remembering to celebrate our existence and our resilience and our creativity in the face of all of this attempt to minimize us putting it.
I think to my wife friends and occasional colleagues who have these questions. Most of me is glad that people are asking to live in a lie for one's whole life has got to be really hard to be raised without having to think about race is a great privilege, but it's also a burden when someone finally shares with you that this exists that there's this whole system that's been to been designed in your name to do things for you that you didn't explicitly
ask for but you also didn't explicitly reject and now you have an opportunity to explicitly use for some good if you choose to interpret the possibility that way and as a man I face it to do, you know, I'm not just a top woke Mountain alone dispensing wisdom. Like I think I'm pretty good at things. But also I have a penis and people take me more seriously than they would someone who doesn't I didn't choose that and it doesn't lessen me to acknowledge that if I don't let it so
I want us to get to a place where that burden that Education Works monitory burden becomes more distributed. We all have work to do and undoing and redesigning the imperfect system into which we were born. It's not all garbage, but there's a lot of garbage in and we need to clean it up and I've got my own versions of white supremacy that I carry around that burden my sense of self-worth a white person has a different Journey an indian-american person has a different Journey a lot.
The next person has a different Journey. So we all have work to do and I hope that we all find ways to do
that. Yeah, that's what friends do for each other. Right? That's what communities do for each other. You always punctuated your podcast with specific actions with the lessons the takeaways about what your listeners could put into action from the episode. Do you have suggestions for our listeners here if you want to have impact and have your organization
Company your business be a better citizen or two citizen better how you would frame that how you would do
that? I think probably three steps to see if I can do this in Three Steps step 1. I will quote my older sister Belinda who wrote a great piece during this time called tend your own garden. It's very tempting to issue statements and press releases and turn your Instagram black and call out someone else for being wrong.
On a thing, but we all have our own work to do and I think we're most powerful where we sit. So before you go marching out into the world do kind of an internal assessment. You say black lives matter check your board check your hiring practices, check your compensation schemes and just understand yourself as a business. Where are you on this issue? Then I think there's a process that I'm starting to call a self inventory of power.
We have power in mostly where we are. You know, I have power in the chair that I'm sitting in right now in where I choose to put my attention which is with you right now and where I put my money, you know, and how I spend it. But also what bank I give the privilege of doing Shady things with it a business has a long list of power ways that it can use it.
A business is seen as like a Civic Leader by default because we live in America and every business is already a more valued citizen than a human version than a solely human version. We give a lot more breaks to businesses than we do to human people. So if black person shows up to city council and says, I think we should maybe reallocate the funding from police to Mental Health Services that's expected. If a local business leader, does that though? Well, that's a pillar of the community and we gotta take that.
Advisement thank you so much. Who's gonna listen to you where they would ignore someone else saying the same thing? Hmm, that's power as you're doing your inventory. That's the sort of question. You can ask yourself and then choose to use it and it's not a one-day thing. It's not a one-time initiatives that a Black History Month special. It's not Taco Tuesday. It becomes a part of how you exist becomes a part of how you citizen as a business. So if you want to be a person business then
Be human and make mistakes to and recover from them and learn from them. But choosing to use your power affirmatively to make our entire Community better is exactly what's needed and it will probably accrue to you in measurable business long term value, like Customer Loyalty higher retention of your workers, like positive, press and brand equity and all of these things that you explicitly say.
You want but maybe can't do these things because they are distraction. They actually could be the path to increasing the value of your Enterprise. The thing that I also say to my fellow business Americans is is about this election. What we have before us is a choice not between like a Democrat and a republican. I think we have a choice between an empathetic human being and a fully self interested in Te t
We have a choice between right and wrong in a basic sense a president is more than your tax break.
The president is more than some oversight rule that you can escape to get a few more points on your valuation. The president is a leader sets a tone helps create an environment. We're in a very toxic environment right now, and it's not just because of the president. He's an accelerant though. He's a clearly detracting from our comments and your business exists in a
Commons not in a vacuum of a policy and as that Commons gets ruined so do the prospects for your business. So I encourage the business American voter to think about the environment that they want their business to be able to thrive in and think about what a business likes which is for site order predictability soundness and Sanity and think about the choices we have now who's
Provide more of that who's going to provide less of that. What's really good for your business was good for us. All right. Well, right. Thank you. I'm off my
horse. Oh, that's great. That's great. And again, there are 20. I always love talking to you. I learn things every time thank you so much for taking the time with us. Thank you. And now a final word from our sponsor
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masters of scale rapid response is a wait what original the show is recorded remotely using sanitized audio gear. It's hosted by me Bob safian masters of scales and editor-at-large.
And masters of scale host Reid Hoffman. Our executive producers are June Cohen, and daren't riff are supervising producer is Jay Punjabi. Our producer is Jordan McLeod scripts by Christina Gonzalez original music and sound design by Ryan holiday and Daniel nissenbaum audio editing by Keith Jay Nelson and Lena solisten mixing and mastering by Brian Pew special. Thanks to Emily me.
McManus Sarah Sandman Adam heiner Kelsey Capitano Tim Cronin Charlie Meneses and Sayid sap Eva visit masters of scale.com rapid response to find the transcript for this episode and be sure to subscribe to our email newsletter.
