Diversity Leadership in the Global Society

And now, onto my second one. I have the pleasure of introducing our next speaker. I’ve had the opportunity to get to know her, break bread together, and we got to know each other. She has a great personality and a great spirit, and she has been wonderful to get to know. She is Valda Boyd Ford, and she is the CEO of the Center for Human Diversity. Over the past 30 years, she has worked in more than three dozen countries with CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, tribal chiefs, Afghani teachers, and Buddhist monks, and we did get to hear about that one, to improve leadership skills, decrease conflict, and improve health. She has demonstrated that there are some basic universal themes that play out regardless of the venue and regardless of the geography. Ford earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Nursing from Winston-Salem State University, a Master of Public Health from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and her Master of Nursing Administration from Creighton University. She is currently pursuing a doctorate in Educational Leadership from High Point University. Thank you. [Applause]

Wow, it’s amazing to be here with so many women who are interested in taking care of themselves, the community, and ultimately the world. It’s my pleasure today to talk with you just a little bit about some of my experiences and relate them to what you might be doing in the future. So, why are we here? As a recovering academician, I have to have an objective, but it’s one that’s not too tough. We want to discuss some personal stories and ways to decrease frustration and fear while working in culturally diverse situations. We have those every day, and you’ll have more of them as our community becomes less distant and more intimate through all of the many ways we communicate. Give your actions, inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more, and become more. You are a leader. You are a leader regardless of where you are in the organization. You are a leader. People outside of the community are looking at you and are thinking, “Maybe I can do that too.”

We all lead by example. First, we have to know who you are. Leadership for me, I believe, began when I was born as a middle child. Any middle children out there? We rock. [Laughter] That’s because we grew up between rocks—two rocks. I grew up between two very aggressive sets of siblings, and so I learned to talk a lot right away in order to keep them from beating up on me. You understand. First, I am a woman. Then, I am in this society—black. Am I white? Do I love it? I have a story to tell you about that as we go along. People around the world ask me, “Am I mixed?” and I wonder if they mean “mixed up.” Am I good? Am I bad? I like this Midwest quote that says, “When I’m good, I’m very good, but when I’m bad, I’m glad.” I’ll take that.

There are a lot of things to know as you move around the world—some simple things that we do that might get you in trouble. So, if you’re out and you’re in other parts of the world or working with people who are here working with your company, know some simple things like hand gestures, whether or not you shake hands, is important. Do you bow? For women, I’m a woman who has a little bit of seasoning to her, as you might not ever have guessed. I’ll be 60 next year. Looks like I’m not sure if it’s a no, 20, 30, 40, or 59, but if you love it, it’s all good.

Hand gestures—this for us means it’s all good. In other parts of the world, it means “yours.” Do not decide if you’re going to end the meeting by saying, [Laughter] “He’s the right hand to use the right hand in friendship; left hand is in war.” Well, you remember that. Very important, and in many parts of the world, if you use your left hand, it is extremely offensive because, in places where water is not available, it is a question of having a clean hand and a dirty hand. So if you happen to be a person who has something wrong with their right hand, do something with your elbow; do not offer your left hand. Understand that it’s very important around the world.

How do you accept things? If you get a business card here, someone hands you a card, you just take it, stick it in your pocket. In many parts of the world, you should accept it with both hands; you should hold it as if it is a gift to you because it is a gift. It is a representative of a person and not just the card, and hold on to it until the communication is over. Then you put it away; otherwise, it’s considered offensive.

Hand washing, as I said, is something that is very important, but in many places, you will be more difficult. You may have to eat with your hands, and that’s perfectly fine; just get past what your mama told you that you can’t eat with your fingers when you were grown up. Just do it and accept it. The most important thing about leading in a global society is being willing to learn what is important there and always understanding that you can change back to whatever your behavior is when you go home.

I think about traveling like I thought about being at my grandmother’s house. When we say we’re at my grandmother’s house, we did everything when my grandmother did. If we ate, we ate when she ate, but we didn’t get up in the morning at seven o’clock on Saturday. I mean, really, we’re supposed to sleep in one day. With my grandmother, you didn’t get up at seven; you didn’t get to eat breakfast. You’ve been out here in these Saran Wrap rattling or any foil opening up. You cannot eat until the next meal, meal. So when I have the opportunity to go to another country, I just thought about acting like I do when I’m at my grandmother’s home. No problem.

This is very important as it relates to hand gestures in Colombia, South America. Have you been there? It’s an amazing place. It is a place where many people are afraid to go, but I can tell you, for the most part, you don’t have to be any more afraid there than in New York City. In New York City, I’m afraid of New York City. When I went to Colombia, I was saying, “Yeah, I’m looking for the woman who’s about this tall, you know?” Yeah, you’re talking about height, and trying to get to get then you say, “This,” this is reserved for animals. So if you say, “I’m looking for the woman this tall,” you automatically rank her with field animals.

This way, it’s not intuitive, but it’s something you can learn if you have the opportunity to work with people from other countries if they’re coming here. Just take a moment to learn about them. It’s really a lot of fun and not as hard as you think. How do we get to where we are now as it relates to how we think about things? It’s about mental models. I don’t know how many of you know Peter Senge, but I think he’s a really amazing person. He talks about mental models as things that are deeply ingrained generalizations. Where do we get that? At the house, at the school, at the church, in the neighborhood. When you see this, what do you think? Come on, does it make you feel okay, or does it make you feel a little uncomfortable? Well, uncomfortable.

Well, let me tell you, I was born a negro. I was a little colored girl born in North Carolina in 1954, and at some point in time, I became black. This was in the 1960s. We talked about that earlier, and all the changes that took place in 1964. During that time, it was the Make Love Not War years. It was a transition from having segregation to desegregation, and James Brown had a song to say, “Say it loud, I’m Black, and I’m Proud.” I would go home and say that; my mom said, “Girl, you better wash out your mouth. We’re not black; we have worked hard to make sure you are not black.” You struggle with that until she died, that she was a negro. But when I asked people what this is about, if you can guess what it is, it is simply cough sweets, cough drops from Hungary. The term “negro” there is just a phrase for the people on the back that drop happens to be a Chimney Sweeper, and because they get blackened as they are cleaning out, they call them Negroes. It has no negative connotation whatsoever. No one in Hungary feels badly about it, but an American going to Hungary gets upset if they see it. When I saw this, and I pointed this out to other people and asked what they thought it was, they said, “Well, I don’t know; it says Eros.” So, you know, thinking arrows are love, they’re wondering if it has to do with relationships. Some people thought it was a kind of rapper. I said, “100 grams,” and that’s all I’m going to say.

It’s just to clean your throat like a chimney, that is all.

Does anyone here speak Arabic? No one? A little bit, swayier, a little bit of Arabic. I had the opportunity to go to Saudi Arabia. My first job outside of the USA, I was called. I was working as a trauma nurse at North Carolina Baptist Hospital, now Wake Forest Medical Center, as a burn nurse, and in the middle of the night, a recruiter called to say, “We need nurses in Saudi Arabia. Will you go?” I said, “I haven’t been to South Carolina yet.” I think I’m going to take some smaller steps. The whole time, though, because of the crushing weight of my student loans and my family’s final capitulation, I decided I would go to Saudi Arabia. I had people tell me what I would need to do. The corporation even had these special folks who oriented you as to what you would need. They said it would be very hot; it can get up to 140 degrees and beyond in the summer. Thank God I wasn’t having hot flashes. I was a skinny young thing then, and I could deal with the heat, so I thought, “Okay, don’t eat.” So I got the clothes, and then I went to Saudi Arabia, and I found out I was in the mountains of Saudi Arabia.

What does this tell you? Get more than one opinion from someone when you find out about going to another country. Also, find out about someone who knows the geography. But when I got there, I was here for a little over two years. It was an amazing thing. I learned to speak Arabic, taught by three different people who spoke Arabic who came from three different Arab nations, and every time I learned to speak part of it, the next person would say, “Well, who taught you to say it like that?” And on top of that, I had Southern added on to it, so I’d say, “Assalam.”

There was a woman who came up to me who said, “Are you Islamic? Islam?” The important thing to know is that if you’re in a Muslim country or specifically in Saudi Arabia, it is not appropriate to talk about your religion. It is fine to have a religion, but you cannot proselytize; you cannot talk about it. If you do, you can be ejected from the country. So this moment, coming up to me asking me if I was Islamic, was really worrying me more than a little bit. But I said, “La, no, why?” She said, “My husband is looking for a second wife, and I think…” I say, “Well, I got these child-bearing hips. They must be here. Sorry, I couldn’t do with that routine where I would be the second on anyone’s race.” She said, “You American women lie to yourself like that all the time.” Thank you. I said, “Well done.” She might have a voice, a second, third, or fourth wife. You don’t get to drive. He says, “Oh, you feel sorry for me. You’re here working 16 hours a day, 10,000 miles away from your family. I have a driver, a cook, a nanny. I don’t work, and I don’t need to drive.” Well done, right? Again, this is about my perspective about her life and how terrible that was and how you can live like that, and she was looking at me in the very same way.

The importance of leading in a global society is first finding out about the other person’s way of thinking, and perhaps it might not be as onerous as you think. When I went to Africa, I thought, “Wow, this is cool. For once, I will not be in the minority.” I got to Africa before I went. I was working in refugee camps right here in Omaha. I was working with a lot of people when the Sudanese population exploded. From Sudan, they were coming to me to say, “Why is it that the people here treat us as badly as the people we ran away from in the Sudan?” Doctors were coming to me to say, “Melba, why are these patients acting like this?” Specifically, that the men wanted to be in the exam room with the women. They thought that them being in the exam room was a way of the men keeping the doctors from knowing that there was domestic violence going on. What the doctors were failing to think about is that any woman coming into the exam room and any man for that matter could have been a victim of domestic violence, but they really keyed in on the Sudanese population. Ultimately, I went to the refugee camps because all these records ask me questions, all these folks are asking the question about refugees, and what am I saying? I don’t know; I’m black, but I ain’t nowhere for you. I don’t understand, so I had to go to get some information. The first thing I did was cut off my hair because I was going to be living in the bush. I was going to be bathing out of a problem with this much water. Yummy, but those of you who do that bird bath, you know we do not feel clean at the end. In America, we bathe more than any other country in the world. We take approximately three baths or some type of cleansing ritual every day. Go to bed at night, and you get up in the morning, and if you leave here and go to something tonight, guess what? You’ll do—shower and change clothes. Other people are happy to have enough water to bathe once a day, so I knew I wouldn’t be able to wash my hair, so I cut my hair. A young woman met me at the airport; the first thing she did was just stare at my head. He was just staring at my head. I said finally, “Young lady, what is the problem with my head?” She says, “Where’s your hair?” I thought I was going to be like a sister. No, they had more weaves and perms going on over there. Yep, number one, I was wrong. I didn’t get enough information, but when I was there, I had the opportunity to be with this group, and over the 12 weeks, I thought I got a chance to be known more and better. I’m going to go back for a second. One time I’m walking along the camp, and the little kid comes up to me. He’s just doing this and running and doing this and running and touching with all the detecting game for all of us who are Outsiders. So I asked the ladies walking along with me, “What is that child doing?” She said, “Oh God, you know there’s trouble when you don’t want to say what the child is doing but out of the mouth.” So ultimately, what is he saying? He says he’s calling you “fat.”

Well, I do know that I have a supreme amount of fabulousness. [Laughter] But calling me “fat” was, I was thinking, a little bit rude, so I went home later that day and talked to my landlady, and she said, “Fat is a very good thing because fat in this society means that your husband is able to feed you well.” I didn’t have a husband, but I obviously… that was okay, so I got used to that, and I became better with the fact that I was “sat” there, not “this PHAT,” “pretty hot and tempting,” but “yeah,” a little bit later on walking along when there was a kid who’s coming up going, “Oh well, okay, okay. I got the Obama part; what’s going on now?” It is “Oh God.” Thinking how much worse could it be, so now he’s calling me the “fat white woman.” Yeah, I have been called a lot of things. [Laughter] White was not wonderful, so I asked, “Why is it that he’s calling me white?” and he said, “Because you’re a stranger because you’re different,” and even though I thought I was one within the group and not the outlier, see him, I was just as different as someone who came in from Sweden. That was a very interesting perspective to find out that even though I looked like the people there, I was not accepted like the people there.

Obolo and O’brony, in some parts of Africa, there are even traditions where there are feeding houses where the wives are put intentionally fed to be overweight because it shows the wealth of the husband. So any of you have extra amounts of fabulousness to sort of African baby, you’ll be hot like… [Laughs] When we talk about the whole idea of leading in a global society, we look at cultural competency and going a little bit past diversity—the idea that we can learn what we need to do as we go forward. If someone comes to me who’s from Russia, and I’m inviting him or her to my house, I don’t say, “Would you like some vodka?” I just say, “Would you like something to drink?” If I go to someone’s house, and they say, “Would you like some chicken?” I’m going to say, “Yeah baby, that’s fine. I love fried chicken; I’m Southern,” but if you break out the watermelon too, that’s going to be important.

But how can you become… you go from being unconsciously incompetent when you don’t even recognize it; that’s rude. How can you find that out in an environment like this? If you have people who are willing to talk about what’s going on, if someone is willing to tell the other, you know, when you said that, that really hurt John’s feelings, when you said that, I saw Sally blush, it will help, but you have to be willing as an organization to take the risk and be vulnerable enough to not only say, “I don’t know,” but to accept it when someone tells you that you might have done something that was offensive to someone else. That doesn’t mean that you have to tiptoe around the entire time being afraid of what you said. That is not good either; that’s a punitive environment. If you want one in which you have the opportunity to make a mistake, be told about that mistake, and…

Larry Purnell uses this model, which is just the novice to expert model, where you start off being unconsciously incompetent, where you don’t even know them; you go to knowing that you don’t know, and you do something to fix it. Once you fix it, you have to go through the processes every minute of remembering what to do, and finally, you become unconsciously competent, where you don’t even have to think about it twice. Think about those of you who, if you live in Nebraska, you have to drive. We don’t have good public transportation here. The first time you started to drive, you thought you knew how. I did. I watched; it was a hazard. What else did I do? I walked out, and I drove my mom’s car around the block and knocked the antenna off, so I think that’s why they took the antennas off the fronts of the cars now, so the kids wouldn’t knock them off. My mother died wondering what happened today at the antenna because I lied. [Laughter]

Then I realized that I didn’t know how to drive. I took driver’s education, and then I got in the car, and I adjusted everything, and I turned the music down, and I made sure my seat was just right, and the mirrors were perfect, and now I get in the car, and I get here, and I don’t know how. I don’t think about it at all. So the same thing can happen in your relationships with people, whether they’re local or international, because if you’re not comfortable working with diversity in your home, you cannot be comfortable working with diversity around the world.

Madeline Leininger, who’s a locally born anthropologist, asserts that culturally competent communication takes place when we’re willing to move from strangers to trusted freedom, and that is when you make yourself vulnerable enough to ask the questions. Your best friend now is someone you didn’t know originally; they didn’t act just like you. They were not a clone of you. You had to take the time to get to know them, to be comfortable with them, to accept that some things they do are not okay, and to talk about that in order to stay friends.

This was a time that I was in Sri Lanka. Remember the terrible tsunami of 2004? I had the opportunity to work in this refugee camp when I left Africa. This was a place where all of a sudden, people looked up, and a tidal wave of massive proportion came through and wiped out almost a quarter of a million people along that part of the coast. I talked to a woman who was there. We were doing an eye surgery and eye health initiative, and this woman hadn’t spoken to anyone in the eight months since that tsunami had hit. We were working with Buddhist monks trying to get people to accept us as Outsiders coming in to help, and she wouldn’t talk. We couldn’t get anything to happen. We were working really hard with these initiatives, and nothing was happening, and finally, one day in talking with this woman, one-way communication, I was able to relate to her that I lost a child when he was two years old. I don’t even know how we got to that part of the conversation, but just maybe in desperation or because I felt good about her even though she wasn’t communicating with me, and that helped her because she had a similar story where she was holding on to a tree when that tsunami hit, and she held on to it and held on to it and held onto it for hours, and she finally got so tired. You know how it is when you’re driving along the highway, you have a long way to go, and you just have another hour to get home, and your one part of your body is saying, “Stay awake, stay awake, stay awake. Put the window down, turn the radio on,” the other part is saying, [Music] “Don’t worry. Those little things that make noise on the road will wake you up. Hurry. We run into that semi. I might not be back,” but she took that moment when you’re just so tired, and she closed her eyes, and then she startled herself awake, so pleased that she was still hanging onto the tree and not washed before she let go of her job.

These are the kinds of experiences we don’t have when you’re working with people in another environment. First, you have to understand what their stressors are, what their background is, what their history is, and what are the impediments that are getting in your way. They may have nothing to do with what you’re doing. Your initiative might not move forward. The work might not happen until you become a trusted friend, letting her know without even realizing the importance that I had suffered too. Long term, to believe that I got her.

It’s a tough thing for me to talk about even now, and that’s been 30 years. I can’t imagine what it was like for her, eight months later. The mental models we have and working with these people who are Buddhists, I had no way to understand them. I didn’t know how to think about them. I was putting up my own barriers, and we can do the same thing sometimes in business.

There’s a matter of inference, which if you haven’t seen, you should get to know it. If we believe certain things about certain people, about women, women many times in academia are not succeeding the same way as their male counterparts, sometimes because they have babies. Guess what? We’re the only ones who can. Why is that a penalty? But if we think, for example, that if you look at the observable data, a meeting was called at the last minute. The next morning, Sally came in late, didn’t explain why. If there are people in there who believe that Sally was late on purpose, that she always comes late, we can’t count on Sally. She’s not reliable. What happens? We isolate her. We get rid of her.

When you’re working in diverse situations here or around the world, do not put too much weight over what you observe. Take the time to ask the question to find out the answer. In many studies that I’ve done with many organizations, I can tell you that sometimes women are not involved in many of those things where they stretch out to do other things because it interferes with showering, and many times, those organizations will do something as simple as having a meeting at lunchtime instead of at seven in the morning or at six in the evening. More women would be able to participate. Now, more fathers are very responsible for childcare now, but traditionally, that has been one of the reasons women have not been able to show themselves as stretching out because it was impossible, especially in this sandwich generation. We have children on one side and elder parents on the other.

So if you’re looking at ways to get women more involved, look at how you schedule meetings and events and whether that is reasonable for them. When we look at our world around the world, color blindness or cultural blindness is a problem. If we have the inability to recognize that our own lifestyle is getting in the way of others, when I was in the Buddhist country, I can tell you that for me, being a Southerner, and I looked last night, there were a lot of huggers, there are a lot of huggers, and then there are some people who were like, “You could tell there were some people like I love,” and others like, “Yeah, you’re a hugger.” You had to assess whether or not the person you’re hugging is okay with it as well. Being a Southerner, I had to unlearn that behavior because if I don’t walk in my family and give somebody a hug, they’re wondering, “What’s wrong with you, child?” In this same place in Sri Lanka, working with this Buddhist monk when we finally had the breakthrough after this one woman had kind of given me her seal of approval, everyone else warmed up to me. So we finally got back after about three weeks of working hard, and I get out of the car, and I say, “Oh, thank you so much forever, DJ. This was such a great day,” and then I thought, “Oh Lord, I am touching the Monk.”

So I think the monk is not something you do; no one does. Everyone genuflects; they don’t touch the monk. So I have hooked up on the Monk, and all of my orienting interns have owed up on the market. I’m thinking, “Boy, hooking up times three.” The next day when we came back to go out to work with them, goodness, we have done all this working, else about the end because I have too much. I asked his assistant, who was our interpreter, “Where is the Monk?” and he said in interpreting things, and around the world, most folks don’t think they have to give as much information as we give. Don’t think that that’s being rude. He answered the question. He’s not here.

Days passed; no monk. It’s two days before I’m supposed to leave, and I’m thinking that my initiative is just going right down the toilet. The next day, then if the monk was there, and I ran to him, and I said, “I am so sorry. I am so very sorry for touching you. I know how much of a problem that is,” and he listened to his interpreter and he told him to say to me, “That was not a problem because I already know your heart. I have seen who you are as a person. That was just an act because of what you gave us before that. I was not offended by it, and I was simply away doing the business of my order.”

If you make a mistake, don’t spend so much time worrying about it if you don’t go back to the person to continue the relationship because what makes it an interaction difficult, it may be anything. It can be accents, it can be the way you dress, the way you pray. In many organizations, I’ve had people who are upset with Muslims because they go out to pray five times a day, probably two or three during the workday. Now, what happens is no one gets upset about the smokers who go out 10 times during the workday. Think about why things upset you, and they might not make as much sense when you look at it critically. Understand that all this creates stress. Give yourself time to relax because sometimes around the world, the basics are not always the basics. There were women outside who were saying they didn’t want to go into the men’s toilet. I want to go into the real woman in the bathroom; they all flush. I’m not sure why, except the men’s bathroom was kind of straight.

When you’re out and about, understand and take care of yourself in other countries. Know your surroundings; de-stress. When I was working at a refugee camp for 12 weeks, I did not know this beautiful beach was less than two miles away because no one in the camp could afford the four dollars admission to go there. According to Maya Angelou, courage is the most important of all virtues. Develop your courage in small ways as you’re learning how to lead in many ways around the world. Take small steps, be courageous, don’t worry about rejection, try again, learn to eat new foods, and just a little piece of fun as we go. This is called red-red. This is basically black-eyed peas and plantain. It’s really good, but in other parts of the world, this is what I was offered to eat. I don’t like feet. I don’t even like my feet until I’ve been to have a pedicure. On the upper corner is a bull’s foot, chicken feet, and pig’s feet. Cultural pain, though, is if I say to the people that I’m staying with, “I don’t eat that,” or if I make the mistake of first thing, “Yeah, no problem. I eat anything,” then they bring me out some feet. So what I say now when I go out is, “Uh, I’m diabetic, and I can’t eat that.”

Try not to be so ethnocentric. Don’t just look at your way as being the only way or the highway because Americans are known for being really ugly out and about because we think it’s our way or nothing. If you want to find out about how to figure out what kind of biases and prejudices you have, biases and prejudices, this is a wonderful place to go: just Harvard—harvard.implicit.harvard.edu for Project Inclusive. It’s absolutely free. You go on; you can look at a number of things like religion, about body size, about race, about country of origins, many things to tell you where your biases lie because it’s hard to know what you actually don’t like. See me when I was skinny? I thought anybody who was overweight lacked discipline and determination. Now I’m saying, “Uh, would somebody be wearing my dogs?” That’s all I know. My honor finally says, “Nothing human can be alien to me.” When you’re out and you’re trying to learn about the world and how to do a good job of bringing business back to your organization or how to take your business to others in the world, remember that if the person is here, it cannot be alien. We are all the same. This is a mother in Africa doing the work. Imagine. Look at the woman down in the corner who’s carrying wood on her head, a baby on her back, and a bag in her arm. That’s motherhood, and many of your folks will not tell you that you’re being rude.

I’ll end with one story, the parable of the ground meat. In Sierra Leone, after making all the mistakes in Africa and all the mistakes in Sri Lanka, when I went to Sierra Leone, I said to the young people there, “If I make a mistake, if I say anything wrong, if I touch a monk or do anything like that, please tell me so that I won’t continue to do it.” The answer from this young man was, “Let me give you the parable of what we thought he said was the ground meat.” Trying to think, “What does hamburger have to do with this?” But he went through and he told the story of a man who was in the river, and his boat was overturned, and so he’s trying desperately to get to the shore, and he couldn’t make it, but he finally worked himself to the shore, and he got there, and there were reeds, and he grabbed the reeds and pulled them. His thrust back into the water. Over time, the water was getting heavier and whiter and more rapid, and he forced his way and forces way in again and again. The reeds broke, and he was not able to get. Finally, he could hear the waterfall, and he knew that if he didn’t make it that particular time, he would surely die. So he used his last bit of strength, and he prayed and he prayed, and he got to the end, and when he got there, he saw not reeds but swords, and he knew that if he grabbed the swords, he might lose his hand, but if he didn’t grab the sword, he would lose his life. So he was able to grab on and pull himself onto the shore, and he stopped the story right there, and I was thinking, “I don’t understand what that means.” [Laughter] I was just seeing that I didn’t understand what it meant. He said, “We are people who are vulnerable. We need you. We need your services. We are not going to tell you. We are not going to tell you if you hurt our feelings. We are not going to tell you if you smash our face in the mud because we’re afraid that then you’ll take your business or your service away.” Understand your responsibility. Your responsibility in a global society is to recognize when you are the sword because it’s never too late, and this is who I am.

Do you have any questions? Questions one year.

I was just so good. You don’t have to answer. Well, first of all, I appreciate some of your comments because even though it’s in the cultural global world, there are many things that we have subcultures within our own society at Union Pacific that we could break down, so I saw some similarities there. So thank you for that. Now, I’m going to cheat a little. I’ll cast a question that I knew you were you had some insight on, and so I’m going to cheat and make Eric ask the question that he asked Lynn, I believe, earlier. I can’t remember out there. You said it so eloquently that I would not want to steal it from you. Well, I actually remember the question. Okay.

The question was basically, in this, in the review of the way it affects people in organizations, what is the breakout as it relates to minorities versus white women, and there is a significant difference. There are studies that show it over and over again. That if you have those 16 executives or 74, or whatever number, you might have one African-American female who’s going to be the executive. The issues are that we do have a layering loan process. No matter if we want to believe it or not, we do look at people in a number of different ways, and first, we’re going to see you as a woman, then we choose an African-American. When I’ve been brought into executive positions, I can tell you that what happens is they want me to be a certain way. Well, first of all, people hire me because of who I am. I am vibrant, exciting, and fabulous. They hire me for that reason. I’m also smart, and that helps too, but they hire me because they think I can give them something based on what they see in me. However, over time, they want to grind me back into that same mold that is the corporate mode. I don’t respond to that very well. That’s why I own my own business. But what happens as an African-American woman as well is their expectations, and I hear many times people saying the old saw about how well I represent my race or as a black woman how wonderful that is. It is offensive to say as a woman, just say as an executive, as a person, why we do a great job not to do a great job as a woman, and then when you add on black woman on top of that, that’s another layer, and it’s something that is difficult. There’s another thing called “Introducing the introducing concept” is that the crabs in the barrel is what you think of that if you are the person who is the lone person, that “onesie” who has been allowed to get up and crawl out, that other people will try to pull you back because they think there’s only the one spot. They will be the people who will tell on you and break you down and degrade you because they know there’s only one spot or they’ll think when you get in it, well, that’s it. We can use the presidency as it. No matter what you believe as far as who should be in the White House, there’s a black man in the White House, and people say, “Well, okay, he’s black. We don’t need anybody else but doing anything else.” Or what if it would have been a woman? It would be the same thing. Okay, we don’t need another woman in for the next three or four decades. That is the way it is about things. Things happen where we do things where we isolate and insulate ourselves as the one because we’re fearful that the next person will diminish our importance as that shining star that… [Applause]

My time, but maybe there’s one more question in the back. Yes, you have to run, darling. [Laughter]

All the different cultures that you’ve experienced and studied, what would you say women globally are doing better than we are here in the US, and how can it be good, man? In many countries in the world, women have been in leadership roles for many, many years, and they accept it as a natural thing to happen. We are still sometimes surprised and delighted that we’re doing things even with Barb Schaefer’s mom when she said she was so proud of her being a lawyer, but she was the most proud of her being married. That is not a negative for her generation, but wow, she’s a lawyer; she’s an executive in a big old company, but I’m most proud that she got that good-looking man. [Applause] [Laughter]

All right, for you, season one. [Laughter] [Applause]