Ted Audio Collective.
All right, welcome.
Welcome, welcome, welcome.
It's great to be here and welcome back to HBS.
Yes, so, um, Youngmea and I are delighted to be here.
And let me just tell you a little bit about what we're going to try to do today.
So, briefly, we started a podcast about three months ago.
And it's been a fantastic experience.
And one of the things we wanted to do was actually create a live episode.
So that's where we're at.
We're having a live episode.
So first, I just should say, we are missing Felix Oberholzer -Gee.
But he's getting some, like, teaching award.
He won some award. Whatever.
He got pulled into some award ceremony.
So he's basking in that glory.
And so we're going to be missing him.
Usually, we have three people.
The idea behind the podcast is we think there's a vacuum for people talking about the intersection of business and society.
And so we tackle all kinds of issues that are associated with that intersection.
You know, Facebook privacy, gender wage gaps, universal basic income, you know, tech giants.
The future of Spotify.
You know, you name it, we can try to tackle it.
Today, unbeknownst to you, we're going to try to do Me Too.
So that went over well.
I think that was good, right?
That was good. Yeah, that went over well.
So that's another way of saying, if you don't want to talk about Me Too, that's okay.
So you should also know, though, that this is being taped.
So, you know, when you speak, and just to be serious for a second, when you speak, you're kind of giving your consent, okay?
To that whole language, by the way, it takes on a whole new meaning in this context.
So you're giving your consent to be taped.
And so you should just be aware of that and be okay with that.
I think we apologize for springing this on you, because it's obviously an important topic, but it's also a sensitive topic.
But the whole point of the podcast is to deal with difficult, sensitive topics and talk about them in clear, thoughtful ways.
The second reason we did this is really just because I'd pay good money to talk to Felix and young me.
And we just enjoy each other's company, and this is a way to make sure that we can get together and talk.
And then the final reason, and the most important reason is, part of what we love about being at HBS is the conversations we have in classrooms.
And we wanted to create a new way to do that.
This is a way to have those conversations on an ongoing basis.
And that's kind of the final impetus for doing the podcast.
Okay? And I will say that we like to disagree.
Like we do in our classrooms, we disagree.
I disagree with young me all the time.
But it's done in the spirit of...
I'm usually right, though.
Well, that is the problem.
But I tell you what, Felix is always wrong.
Felix is always wrong.
And so we really believe the disagreement is important, just like it is in our classrooms.
We're interested in light, not heat, but we believe in disagreement.
And we believe on this topic in particular.
It's a hard topic and we want to talk honestly about it.
Okay, great. So young me is going to get us started a little bit.
I am. So just this past week, Harvey Weinstein, a man who was once considered amongst the most powerful men in entertainment, was indicted on multiple charges of rape and sex crimes.
And regardless of the outcome of his particular legal proceedings, I think the ripple effect that that case has had on us as a society cannot be overstated.
The list of prominent individuals who have been accused of sexual harassment or sexual misconduct includes everyone from Matt Lauer to Charlie Rose to politicians like Al Franken to business leaders like Steve Wynn.
It's hard to think of an industry that hasn't been touched by this, whether it's Wall Street or tech companies or fashion or media or journalism.
So I want to start with a question for Yumi here, and then I'm going to throw it open.
Like this is a live case study.
So imagine you are the CEO of a company and your chief operating officer has been accused of sexual assault by another employee, a lower level employee that you honestly had never heard of before this moment.
According to her story, they were working late, just the two of them.
They finished work.
He offered to give her a ride home.
They got to her apartment.
He started to come onto her.
She resisted. They ended up having sex against her will according to her.
Okay, okay. She's very traumatized by it.
She reported it to the police, but the signal she's gotten from the police, there's probably not going to be enough evidence.
Right to actually file charges.
All right, but she's gone to HR and she wants this person to be held accountable.
He claims the whole thing was consensual.
He has admitted that something happened.
He says it was consensual.
What do you do? Okay, so let's get some more facts.
How long has he been with the company?
It's a make believe case.
I know I know. Have there been any previous?
Have there been any previous?
Three years. Three years.
No, there has not been.
There's been no previous.
There has not been a previous.
No previous complaints at all.
And at the time have we confronted him?
Well, no, you've just learned about this.
You've just learned about it.
Your head of HR has come to you and said, this thing landed on my desk this morning.
Yeah. And you've got to figure out what to do.
Okay. I think there's a couple of first steps one has to take.
Yeah. And I'm not going to try to be overly legalistic, but I think you want to talk to your general counsel and you want your general counsel in the room with this kind of a topic.
And I think absent legal kind of constraints.
I think you want to confront him and ask him about the nature of this and it doesn't need to be accusatory, but it has to be you want to hear it from him.
What has happened subsequent to that, assuming he does the same thing he's done already, which is he's basically said it is true, but it was consensual.
I think you then have to go down a path of asking yourself in the best case outcome.
This is consensual sex between a superior and a subordinate.
In the worst case outcome, it's rape.
From my perspective, absent any constraints, I think that's fireable.
So the best case scenario shows poor judgment?
Yeah, more than poor judgment.
Yeah, I think it shows more than poor judgment.
And so I think this is something one has to pull the trigger on quickly.
Would your reaction be different if the woman making the accusation were not an employee?
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
It would be different?
Yeah. Then it's not an organizational issue in the same way.
So would you let it go in that case?
Well, I mean, I tell him just how horrible what he's done is and how he put the organization at risk, but that is not an organizational issue.
That is something for the legal process to deal with.
I think that's my instinct.
And she's not an employee, so then what is my duty to her?
My duty is to my employees and to our capital providers and our customers.
I don't know if I have a duty to her.
I'm trying to think that through on the fly because you didn't tell me about this.
But I don't know if I have a duty to her.
Do I have I have a duty to him to deal with him in a fair way?
This is not a workplace issue.
It's just incredibly stupid, egregious, horrible behavior.
Let me throw one more wrinkle.
Oh God. And then I want to open it up.
And there are microphones every other row.
The one other wrinkle is it turns out this woman just happens to have a really large social media following.
She just happens to be really prominent on social media.
Maybe she runs a blog.
Maybe she has 200 ,000 followers on Instagram, whatever it is.
She just happens to have a voice.
She has a voice. No, no, no.
It doesn't affect you at all.
That should not change my actions.
Okay. It should not change my actions because it's irrelevant.
Because once you make that calculation and you say, well she's going to broadcast it and then that's going to cause problems.
Wait a second, maybe that's not right.
I think it does end up impacting the company now.
So now it's become an organizational issue.
You're right to say that.
It's not become an organizational issue so I have a stake in it in a way I didn't have before.
But man I do not want to change my action.
I'm going to begin to open it up.
Thank God. And let's do the first version, right?
Yeah, the first version, yes.
Is it Greg? Yes, thank you, Greg.
So in the first fact pattern with an employee, I can't imagine there's a case you made that your conclusion wouldn't be what most people would reach.
I mean just this idea that an inappropriate relationship at work with a superior would represent a fireable offense.
And I would foresee moving very rapidly.
Wait, wait, wait. Can I just push back?
So are we saying that it's inappropriate for employees to have relationships with each other if there's a power differential?
I believe substantially that's the case.
And the reason why is because this dynamic that's created as a result of this intention of consent and someone saying it's not consensual immediately throws that out the window that it could be consensual because someone's upset about it.
Not even just in a power structure, but just in a particularly in organizations where lots of people work with different people and things like that.
It's just very hard to manage this idea where which relationships are acceptable, which ones aren't acceptable.
Yes, Heidi? My first thought was just this is the power of setting up the rules before things happen because things always happen.
And so a lot of companies, and this is something I instituted in my company, is just clear steps with regard to investigation of any allegations of sexual harassment, and we had an outsourced HR function that could do those interviews so you don't have to do them individually.
And a policy around kind of still the presumption of innocence when people are accused of a crime, but that there was a point, especially depending on the seriousness of the incident, that you would be let go.
Me too complicates things, and it's just good to be clear -headed when you set those rules up at a time.
And a non -fraternization rule is a very helpful rule.
If people choose to violate that, a lot of times it happens, and it's fine.
People get married.
They get married at work, but when things go wrong, they just can go so wrong.
Does it change things if he denies that anything happened?
And you have to adjudicate something that is essentially he said, she said.
So now the best case scenario is nothing happened.
Right. So in that situation, to your point, Heidi, you know, you want to act decisively.
You want to reveal what your values are as a company through your actions.
You want to be transparent about what you're doing.
It gets a little bit more complicated if you're not even sure what would you do in that scenario?
I think there you have to do some form of an investigation, and I think you have to make a call about the veracity of the claim.
I'm looking to you, Heidi, for some help.
But I think you've got to make a call about the veracity of the claim, which means that you have to investigate it.
Is that right, Heidi?
In many of these cases, the process is the most important thing.
And that's been an interesting part about Me Too.
I mean, the process has generally not favored accusers.
It's favored people in power.
And Me Too, going back to your third point, Young Me, has added this element of social media.
You can be tried. That's right.
And convicted in the press, in the social media, in a way that was not possible 10 years ago.
So perception is often reality.
And Harvey Weinstein was done long before he got indicted.
And I think in a company, it is important that you lay out the process.
And if people feel that a process has been served, they might not agree with the outcome, but I think there's a sense of fairness that I'll speak of as American, but that people respect.
And so you could do that.
Heidi, what are you doing in this case?
Oh, sorry, that there's this investigation that a third party would do, interviewing both parties.
The outside report comes back and says there's conflicting accounts.
And you've established this person reports to, she reports to him in some way.
Well, he's higher up in the organization, you know, but I mean, I think more generally, the things that we grapple with have to do with all the variations around this case, right?
So, for example, what if he weren't your COO and he was a customer service rep that, you know, you just hired six months ago.
Are your standards different for someone like that?
In which case, are you saying shouldn't the standards be higher for your more high ranking officers?
It gets very tricky very quickly.
Anisha, you had your hand up.
So I'll answer that question, but I wanted to offer a different point of view to the notion that as a CEO, your responsibilities only to your employees, because I think if I were in that position, I would feel like my responsibility, my duty is to both my employees and to society.
And I think there's a humanity aspect to that.
What do I think is the right thing to do in society?
And I certainly would launch an investigation.
But if there was anything coming out of that investigation that made me think that there was even a possibility that this person had done that, I would feel a duty to the woman.
And then there's also a business aspect to that, because there's so much transparency in businesses with the rise of technology and social media that if you don't make that choice, there's so much backlash that can happen that it'll affect your business anyway.
Can I just push you on this Anisha?
Can I push you? So any allegation made against any employee by anyone in the world, you will pursue?
I will at least have an investigation.
I confess I'm lost in the weeds, which is I can't imagine doing what Anisha said.
And I just want to know if everyone agrees.
Can I just qualify by saying for a C -level employee?
So I would feel differently if it was a customer service rep.
And for me, it's almost not the opposite, but for me, the thing that ties both of them is your values.
So for me, regardless of whether it's a COO or a customer service rep, what we're talking about is judgment at some point.
The character and all of those pieces that I hire for, whether it's my COO or my customer service rep, and that I hold both equally too.
And so at some level, this conversation where I can get to a place where the earth is solid is the matter of integrity and the matter of judgment and some of these pieces where if our values are codified about what we hold to be true within the company, and there is a clear, one way or the other, some
inconsistency to those values.
That, for me, is a matter that we can have a conversation over whether you continue employment.
I get that it's still not as easy as all that, but for me, whether it's a COO or a customer service rep...
I'm going to play the dumb man.
You don't have to play...
It's a total setup right there for you.
I'm having trouble with this.
Here, if someone from the outside accuses your senior management team of something, that's not something that you feel like you have to respond to in some way?
Well, and the senior management denies it, but by the way, it's also the customer service representative now, according to Avni.
And so, I don't know.
That's a world of...
Let me make sure I am not way out on a...
It's the cost of doing business today.
So I agree that it has to be values and you can't differentiate what you investigate based on level.
Many organizations establish hotlines, and if you're not prepared to respond and look into and investigate accusations, how trivial they may be, then you put yourself and you put the company at risk, quite frankly, because we all know that if one of those calls came in through a hotline or somebody
went to HR, whether it was around a customer service rep or the CEO, and there was no action being taken on that.
One, it does speak to the values and the integrity of why would you have a hotline and not even look into whether or not these things happen.
And yes, I think a lot of organizations look at that and go, what if we get a thousand phone calls a day?
And I just think that's the cost of doing business today because one of those phone calls could end up on the front page of the New York Times or CNN, and then you're dealing with it as opposed to having an established process where you're actually saying, we're going to take each one of these seriously
because this is what's important to our company.
We're going to track it down.
We're going to understand the facts of the case, and based on those facts, we're going to make judgments.
And not everyone's going to agree on what decisions you make, but if they're based in your values, they're based in your principles and integrity at the core of that, they may not disagree, but as Heidi said, at least they'll understand that there was some process there and that there's going to be
some judgment based on the actions that you take.
Are people generally in agreement with that point of view?
Many companies have hundreds and hundreds of thousands of employees worldwide, and you are by necessity going to take a situation that involves a very high -ranking, powerful member of your team differently than if it's a production worker on a production line in Singapore.
So the practicalities, I think, intrude even though you might in theory like to do that.
And Lori, did you? Yeah, I was just going to say the level of practicality for that when in this scenario, it's been taken to the police, and the police say there's not a case.
That's where I get stuck on the investigation, is what's the burden of proof?
If the police have said there's not a case here, how do you decide that your HR team is both qualified to do the investigation?
And then what is the burden of proof that's going to be put in place to protect everybody?
Think about a different scenario where you are not enabling your lower -level managers to fire people if, let's say, one of your employees beats up his wife, and you're saying, well, she's not our employee.
So that's outside our domain.
I mean, at some point, all I'm saying is either extreme is very uncomfortable.
Certainly we have a criminal system which has a very, very high standard of proof.
Right, and arguably too high a standard of proof, especially in rape.
I mean, I think... Exactly.
And so I would like to think that particularly organizations that claim to have a set of values that we hold ourselves to a higher standard.
I just have a quick comment on the impracticality point.
If you do start receiving thousands of calls every day, instead of saying it's impractical, wouldn't the right question to ask yourself is, isn't there something deeper wrong with the company?
Absolutely. But also I think the broader context in which this occurs is still one in which it's very difficult for people to come forward.
So you can run a company with 100 ,000 people and no one ever comes forward.
And so on the one hand you can talk about the impracticality, but right now, even today, even with all the MeToo stuff happening, it's not as if companies are being flooded with lots of ambiguous cases.
That's not... That's not the problem.
That's not what's happening at all.
That's true. I was going to say, if someone, in this case, a female employee of mine has brought this forward and has shared that something has happened, it's definitely my responsibility to make sure that my team and staff and company feel safe.
But alternatively, it's also my responsibility to make sure that this individual who has been accused receives a fair process.
But for me as a business leader, what would be my biggest concern would be the bias to your question around sort of the larger MeToo movement.
And I think it's important for us to reflect on that this is very present in the culture right now would be to interpret it one way or the other right off the bat, that she is right or that he is wrong.
So like the first thing that literally came to mind for me if this were in that scenario would be to bring in, besides legal, a team, a diverse team that could actually help me better understand the things that I may not be thinking about in this scenario.
Me, personally, I would be biased towards her.
It's just where I would initially...
If she's an employee or if she's not an employee?
In general? In general, I would probably take that because of the severity of the claim and because of what I believe to be the difficulty of coming forward.
But as someone at this company, if assuming they both worked there, I would have a responsibility to both.
And my concern would be to bring in a diverse team to help me think through what is the right legal process.
But then also, what is the right way?
Because your reaction was, I think you said you would sit down with him first.
I would actually go to her first.
Well, you're right.
That's a great point.
You're absolutely right.
I made a mistake on that.
So but like... You're absolutely right.
I take that... But I wouldn't want to answer this alone is basically what I'm saying.
I guess the thing I'm struggling with is, I mean, I don't want to give you guys a hard time, but it's easy to talk at a level of generality.
Like, yes, we want transparency.
Yes, we want processes.
Yes. But I think some of these...
I agree. The beauty of the nitty gritty is, what am I...
What the heck am I going to do in that setting?
And I think we all know, in some sense, we know what the right kinds of things to do in a principled way.
The struggle is, damn it, on the ground in that example, these are organization -defining things.
But wait, I don't want to lose what you just said, because just listening to you speak, it reinforced for me that so much of how you will be measured as a leader in your response is simply the tone you set.
It's not necessarily the action, the ultimate decision you end up making, but the tone you set in getting there.
And so everything that you described is the first thing I would do is I would just talk to people, like, I'd get a bunch of people together.
Who do I talk to first?
Do I talk to him first?
Do I talk to her first?
Everything you do sends a signal about your integrity and your attempt to move forward in a way that converges with your values.
And I think that matters.
To me, that matters.
And I think a lot of organizations, I think we do recognize that these are hard things.
And so when we see our leaders actively trying to take actions that incorporate that level of sensitivity, I think that inspires people.
Nikki, I know you wanted to say something.
When you were speaking and you mentioned off the campus something that has nothing to do with your behavior here or your qualifications, the analogy of the NFL players comes to mind, right?
So there's a morals clause.
And so if I think about trade associations and organizations, the broader duties to society, it strikes me that organizations now have a different responsibility given the age that we're in.
And implicit in your statement about when the woman is outside of that community, outside of your organization, how much responsibility you have, you're defining a boundary between organization and society, which I think these days is becoming really blurred.
And so people don't hold organizational leaders too.
Well, what I'm trying to draw a line between is the responsibilities of the state and the responsibilities of companies.
The state is meant to arbitrate and adjudicate claims between people.
And they do, well, they may do a good job, they may do a bad job.
I don't know, but that's their job.
Now you're making, I think what you're doing is making it a company's job.
To a certain extent.
So it depends on your values.
Professor's point. Young me.
Young me's point. Sorry.
It's like so, so uncomfortable for me to think about that.
Because I think that the expectation, dare I say millennial expectation, of the way we operate these days is that we actually, we don't rest on just the state to have that responsibility.
We expect each other to have the social media, right?
Why does social media work?
We kind of expect the people around us to influence.
And whether that's right or wrong, I won't comment on, but I think the integrity, the values that you hold dear.
So I work for a company where I think that we all, you know, we prize diversity and inclusivity and that matters to me a lot.
And so when I think about companies that don't necessarily have that and we see them in the news these days, I judge that company and therefore its products because they don't, they don't align with what I value.
And so whether that's the state's job or the company's job, I think it can impact the reality of being blurred.
I agree with you, Nicki.
I mean, I think it's absolutely OK for companies to say that if you want to work with us and you want to be part of our organization, we have a standard of behavior.
We have a set of values in how you behave 24 seven, 24 seven.
And if that doesn't align with the way that you want to live your life, then this probably isn't the right company for you.
And I think those companies have their own sort of magnetic appeal.
And I think if you're one of those companies or if you aspire to be one of those companies.
I want to say that, you know, one of the nice things about these podcasts and these conversations is you change your mind.
And so, you know, when Anisha, you said that originally, it felt so wrong.
I'm being totally honest with you.
It felt like, no, that can't be right.
And I'm not saying it's right.
But I'm saying I'm closer.
Yeah, that's entirely possible.
But this is like a very expanded notion of responsibility to constituencies outside the corporation.
And that's I have to think about that a little bit more.
One thing that struck me was when you're looking at organizations at scale, a lot of the times our organization, we look at decision velocity.
And I think what it comes down to is when there are lots of different scenarios where there are gray areas.
But I think it it's upon us as leaders.
We'd love to think that people can act in the best interest every time.
But sometimes you have to be very explicit about this behavior is OK and this is not.
And so I just wonder, you know, it takes more onus on the leadership team to be very explicit about these behaviors.
And these are the values of how they're lived so that when these situations come up, there is some type of playbook so that there is no variance when something happens.
And I know that that just within my organization that specific actions are codified of what you do in certain situations.
But I think that that actually can help in terms of an organization functioning in these times of crisis or whatever.
And so in this specific example, you know, you have to get all the data and the facts.
But I think to your point of, you know, don't let a crisis go to waste.
It becomes an opportunity for the organization to say, hey, let's take a look internally and see if other cases come up, how would we behave or how would we respond in this situation?
But I mean, Sherry, I think to your point.
So right now we are in a moment of such deep ambiguity about what's acceptable behavior in the workplace.
And it's no wonder that everybody is so confused.
You know, are you allowed to date a co -worker?
I've had colleagues in Europe say, am I still allowed to hug and give you a kiss when I see you?
Can we socialize after work?
And if so, you know, how do I know I'm not crossing a line?
And I think that's where things get really tricky because we don't have a playbook for that.
Can I can I ask you a question about that?
Yeah. I'm going to channel an argument this time, which is what people often say when you talk about issues like that is and this is the counter to the me too, which is you don't know the harm you're going to do to women if you police behavior that closely.
Because what men are going to do is they are going to withdraw from interacting with women and not mentor them and not work with them for the fear of running a foul, these kinds of provisions.
Do you know what I'm trying to get at?
And so this is a common thing when here's what do you make of it?
I think that within the category of people that you describe, I can imagine a lot of people saying, oh, now I have to walk on eggshells.
And I think within that group of people, there are a lot of well -meaning individuals.
And I think those are the people that we need to build bridges with.
It can't be that it's that strenuous an activity to engage with each other respectfully.
It just can't be the case that it requires that much self -control to just behave with each other with a little bit of sensitivity.
And I think the fact that some people feel that it is too strenuous to do that, we need to make transparent to them that this is not a scary thing.
My husband recently said, you know, should I be changing my behavior?
And I said to him two things.
I said, here are a couple of things just to kind of keep in mind.
And he was like, whoa.
I had I had no I said, here are things to watch out for.
And he's just, what were they?
Well, they were, you know, but no, but seriously, what were they?
So the problem is, he listens to the podcast.
But but I mean, and he's like the best man ever.
Right. Cara, help me out here.
We're all people. Right.
So when we interact with each other, we're all going to have a different opinion about what feels right, what feels comfortable and what doesn't.
And the point is that we communicate with each other about how it feels to us and what when something's making me feel uncomfortable or or, you know, making me feel awkward in the workplace.
There's not going to be a right or wrong in every situation.
It's just going to be do you create an environment in which people feel comfortable expressing themselves, sharing their opinions and being candid with each other.
And then that's how you can kind of shape how you interact with each person.
Of course, there are clear moral like immoral acts that leaders need to take action upon.
But most of what we're talking about is just how you treat each other on a day to day basis.
And I feel like we can just resolve that by talking.
I completely agree.
So let me give you that an abbreviated version of that scenario, which is you run an organization.
And you learn by looking at Glassdoor that a variety of people in your organization consider your organization to be characterized by, for lack of a better term, bro culture.
There's a lot of discussion of weekend activities.
There's a lot of discussion of people's appearances.
You don't read anything that suggests there's anything violent going on.
There's anything like that.
It is just the pervasive sense that you're dominated by a masculine and bro kind of culture.
What do you do about that?
Because you said like, this is a nitty gritty, right?
Look, I mean, I think the single most important question that you have to ask yourself as a leader, if you run a business, a business unit, a function, a small team, it's a very simple question.
And that is, are you willing to take ownership of the culture of the thing that you're leading?
If you feel any ambivalence around that, then you're going to respond in a way that reveals that ambivalence.
And you're going to say, oh, okay, I'll do a few things.
You know, if you feel like, no, no, no, I'm going to own this thing.
I am going to try to influence the culture of this thing.
I have been asked to lead.
Then you're going to get in there and you're number one, try to diagnose what the problem is to get a sense of the scope, the scale, and then do whatever you can to create a stream of activity that begins to make it better.
And the problem is, is that so much, I mean, this is to your point, Cara, so much of the stuff that creates the pollution boils down to discretionary behaviors that are small.
Who gets included in a meeting?
Who gets listened to?
Who gets, sometimes it boils down to things like emotional intelligence, social intelligence, understanding how your words can have an impact.
So it's all that stuff.
And fixing that stuff, I think, is really complicated.
I mean, Starbucks closed all its stores, like, what was it, two days ago?
Two days ago, yeah.
All its stores the other day to do sensitivity training.
And so they do that.
And on the one hand, you can sort of laugh.
But my opinion is you're only allowed to make fun of them if you have a better idea.
Seriously. That's right.
They're trying to do something with scale.
And because they don't have to change their policies, they have policies in place.
Policies weren't enough.
So they've got to do something in between.
What do you do? They don't know what to do.
There's no playbook.
So they're trying stuff.
Yes. Yeah. And to the point of, I think, the pendulum of where we were, which was obviously that it was completely unacceptable.
Or it was acceptable that people weren't going to speak out when there was this harassment and discrimination.
I think the danger is that you let the pendulum go the other way to the point of you have sterile environments whereby you have the villain and the victim on the one side, which was the accuser or the guy harassing and the woman victim.
I think it's actually quite dangerous to go the other way, which is that the guy is always going to be in the wrong, that you have to give him the lessons about what to say, because at the end of the day, there's a victim and a villain in that case.
And to the point of, do you just automatically assume that your CEO is in the wrong?
And I think it's how do you get back into that middle place?
So do you think we've over corrected?
I feel we're way on the other end of the pendulum in the sense that everyone is super sensitive.
They don't know what comments you can make.
And for me, that's just a sterile environment.
Yeah, Richard. I agree with that.
And I think there's sort of say an elephant in the room, but I mean, we've all mentioned social media.
But to me, like the widespread nature of social media today is really the key issue here.
I mean, I kind of wonder if there really has been a big cultural change in values over the last 10 years or what I think is more likely, you know, we just live in a society now where when an accusation is made, there's this possibility of it just spreading like wildfire to people who will tear down
the company, you know, who have really no stake in the outcome and, you know, have basically no standard of evidence at all.
You know, so for me, like as a company leader, I wonder, sort of, you know, what responsibility do we have to push back against that?
Can we push back against that kind of, you know, what seems to me like a really negative outcome in that, you know, people being put on trial by, you know, by Facebook?
I respectfully so disagree with this worldview.
I think we haven't gone nearly far enough.
And I think that all of what's happening on social media in the press is largely a red herring.
It doesn't actually make any difference.
It hasn't moved any of the real numbers that we should be looking at, which are composition of CEOs who are coming from a much more diverse group of people.
I mean, the reality is the leaders of these companies are still largely white and male.
So the fact that their cultures are row cultures shouldn't be largely surprising to any of us and their boards are largely white and male.
Their leadership teams are largely white and male.
And until that changes, frankly, like, I don't think there are sexual harassment policies matter that much because the people who are making the hard decisions, the decisions on the margin, the gray area decisions, are making them from a particular perspective.
And their perspective hasn't changed because their team composition hasn't changed.
And so my first question on the scenario about if my company had a bro culture on Glassdoor would be like, look at the composition of my company and the leadership team, whether I was retaining a diverse group of people, I mean, until that changed, I don't know if I would be so concerned about shifting
the existing culture because I think there'd be a problem at the root.
I think that was one of my biggest revelations out of this me too moment is it's like fundamentally about power.
It's all about power.
It's not about gender and sex.
It's like about power.
And I think that is in part your point, which is it's about power dynamics.
But I also think that this last exchange right here, this illustrates the importance of diversity, right?
I mean, what you have and what I love about our classrooms is that you can have people that experience the world in very different ways and feel comfortable speaking out.
So to all of you who who did today, I appreciate that so much.
I mean, how often do you get to have a conversation like this and not feel like you're going to be crucified afterwards?
We have to create environments where we can have more of these kinds of conversations.
But more importantly, we have to create organizations where the people leading those organizations are representative of this kind of diversity.
And until that happens, we are operating a little bit in an echo chamber.
We're almost out of time.
Let's do a quick round robin kind of thing, which is we end with recommendations.
I'll go first. Yeah, one of the books I read over the last year is a book called The Power by Naomi Alderman.
And the premise of the novel is very simple.
And that is the teenage girls around the world start to discover that it's some kind of evolutionary quirk.
They have the power to discharge an electric charge from their bodies, that if they touch you or you touch them while they do it, like electric eels, that can be deadly or at the very least extremely painful.
What this means is that every interaction that you have with this generation of young girls, and as the book goes on, eventually women, every interaction, they have the ability to overpower you.
And it's a simple physically overpower you.
And this very simple biological twist changes the power dynamic around the world.
And the novel spans, it goes from India, to Saudi Arabia, to Europe, to I mean, there's just radical transformation across the globe.
But to me, the most, because the book is weird, I'm telling you, but to me, the most powerful moments were these small scenes where you had parents warning their teenage sons.
Please be careful when you go out.
Don't be, don't be alone with those girls.
Stay away from those girls, where you had men being afraid to be in interactions with women and upsetting them, provoking them, ending up often saying yes when they sometimes actually wanted to say no because they didn't want to upset them, or anger them, or put themselves into danger.
I mean, there are all of these little, they really fascinated anyway, it just blew my mind.
So that's my recommendation.
Okay, so we should.
Yes, Frank. In that circumstance, do the women then become as obnoxious?
So you see every variation of humanity, the extreme goodness and extreme badness, every variation.
There's a big question here that we haven't talked about, which is whose comfort are you worried about.
And I think for the first time, me too has made men deeply uncomfortable in ways that women are very accustomed to being uncomfortable.
All the time, yeah.
All the time. And so I'm, I don't think the pendulum has swung far enough, and I know it's not gonna go as far as I think, but I want just the men who feel uncomfortable, those are the right questions to be asking.
And they're questions that two years ago, men were not asking, as women are always trying to, let me not stand too close to Tom, because you know, he's handsy.
All those things, all the way to being worried about walking anywhere at night or without people around, these are just how women feel so often.
Okay, so we're running out of time.
We could do this for a long time.
I'm going to give you my quick two recommendations.
So just quickly, this is a 45 minute book.
It's by Mary Beard, who's a classicist in the UK, and it's called Women and Power.
It's spectacular. And it goes through history about how going back to the Greeks, women were silenced, and how things don't change until we gave women a voice.
It's just, it'll take you an hour max to read.
And the second one is a little harsher or weirder, is I listened again last night to the short story in The New Yorker called Cat Person.
And I really, I really recommend it.
You guys heard of that one?
Cat Person? It's called Cat Person.
And it's by, oh God, Rina Kuppemans, I think is your name.
It is a very uncomfortable story to listen to or to read about a sexual encounter between a man and a woman.
But it is such a fascinating story.
Okay, we've got to wrap this up.
We do. Thank you all for coming.
It's really great. Thank you.
