Black Leaders Confront the DEI Backlash: Businessweek Convenes

16:16Romaine Bostick:So you have to, and you have to play to all of them. So I forgive them. I don't forgive them if they literally continue to practice this bad behavior. They have to take a step back, and they've done that. I don't know all the target story. But they also know that the facts show that, I mean.

16:36Nicole Reboe:Foot traffic's down, sales are down. And if they don't adjust to that, then you just call them silly, right?

16:41Romaine Bostick:And tell them to close. I mean, we don't need them that much. And by the way, this is a cross-corporate America. I was going to say, it's this is not only the opposite.

16:46Lisa Wardell:Absolutely.

16:47Ursula Burns:And they're being targeted. But that's the danger, Joan, when you come out with corporate values. So is it better not to say it than to behave in a different way? Just live it. And this is what young people see, especially they're not living their values.

17:03Chris Williams:So was it a mistake for some of these corporations to come out and make these declarations?

17:07Nicole Reboe:I think we got to look at the foundation or the reason why they did it in the first place. George Floyd's murder was horrific. And you remember the level of protest that was going on, not just here in America, but outside this country. And so they responded to their consumers and their consumer sentiment. They weren't responding because their values told them that they needed to do something different. And then I think they figured it out, right? I'll throw money at the problem. And that's what they did. And then when the political climate changed, they pulled back. And many of them actually never.

17:50Nicole Reboe:They made statements, but never actually committed to dollars to those causes that they said that they were going to fund.

17:57Chris Williams:Even in the world of finance, I know we were picking on target for a while, but we had major Wall Street banks, Goldman Sachs coming out saying, We're going to loan more to minority-owned businesses, invest more in minority-owned businesses, invest more in venture funds and private equity funds run by minorities.

18:11Nicole Reboe:All those programs are now gone. All the chief diversity officers are now gone. And they recognize that the IRS, the Justice Department, the SEC, and all the other agencies at the bequest of this administration can be turned against them.

18:28Romaine Bostick:It's not a request. It's not a request. It's a structured law, set of laws. Some of them have been changed. They better do it. It's called a rule. I mean, they got to do it.

18:40Lisa Wardell:Executive Order 14172.

18:41Jacob Walthour, Jr.:Although in fairness to a lot of the companies, I would say the George Floyd tragedy was an affront to many of their values and the values of their employees and constituents. And so there was that support. I think what they found, though, you often can very quickly have a reflex response. We're going to do this. And then they realize it requires more work than just saying we're going to do this. It requires a lot of time to make sure you outreach, have a staff to follow up, to provide the opportunities, identify the partners. And that's where I think a lot of it fell apart. And then we suddenly ran into a period, as we are in today, where it is no longer even acceptable, but it causes more complications to follow up on those programs than it otherwise would have.

19:39Chris Williams:But one point you made, Erso, about this idea of not really blaming the companies. You understand kind of where they're coming from. Did all of you buy in to those messages when we were hearing them in 2020 and 2021?

19:51Romaine Bostick:I'm not here to defend these companies. At the end of the day, I can make some choices about where I spend my money, where I shop, etc. And we should all do that, which we actually don't, but we should all do that. Me as a consumer, I should be talking to Target as well. And I think that running a company is not easy. But I'm not even discussing it. I'm discussing us a little bit. Forget all of this thing called Target. There are individuals who run these places. They have to stand and say, guys, I don't agree with this. It's not easy to do. And I may have to follow this rule because the IRS is going to come get me if I don't.

20:29Romaine Bostick:But I don't believe or support the actions that this individual or this agency or this approach to business is taking. We've lost all of that. That voice. When I was running Xerox, I couldn't represent 100 ,000 employees in Xerox. I guarantee you 50 ,000 of them probably agreed with me and the other 50 ,000 didn't. So I basically have to kind of ride the middle. But I, Ursula Burns, have a set of beliefs. I have a voice. We've lost the braveness of them saying we got to fund DEI programs. We have to support them in other ways, even if I can't do it this way. We have to support them in other ways because they are important.

21:08Romaine Bostick:We've lost all the voice. And I am disappointed in that. So we're going to have this struggle until we can convert everybody to actual rule of law, just government, racial equality, gender equality. We're nowhere near that. All I want to make sure is that the people who are on this side, that on either side, have a fair voice. And right now, they do not.

21:32Chris Williams:Lisa, you were running a company at the time that this happened at Talam. And you put out a letter to your employees addressing this issue. And it was a call to action, was it not?

21:43Lisa Wardell:Yes.

21:44Chris Williams:How was that received?

21:45Lisa Wardell:My call to action, and I think this is apropos for today, was let's talk about it, right? Right. Let's we had many companies that let's let's have a town hall. Let's talk about this. We had a town hall. And the rule was you could ask me anything. And then I went further and said, we need to be able to collect the data back to the data around how having diverse management. We did not have a diverse management across all five of our institutions. You know, how do we measure that? And the call to action to my team was to make sure not only hire diverse people, black, brown, women, but are you making sure that you're looking at the very best universe of people that are qualified?

22:29Lisa Wardell:And it's just not possible that that universe is all white males. And that changed a lot of the dialogue within the organization. But what I will tell you is we had diversity in our DNA from the very beginning. I think the companies that rolled back quickly or may have gotten in trouble, this was, to your point, this was their maybe not first time, but they took these big, big strides and then realized just how difficult it is to ingrain that into, you know, into your organization.

23:01Ursula Burns:I just think in all of this talk, you know, we're talking about rollbacks and contractions and all of that. You know, in executive search, these are people. These are life changing moments for executives of color. You know, I've negotiated many comp packages where the equity stake will change their whole life. Intergenerational wealth is being built in a lot of these opportunities, which is why I do what I do. This has earned success and ascent. And then to sort of have it just, you know, sort of just pulled away, I think is really cruel and it's really harsh. And so when we talk about, you know, the companies making decisions and I always think about the human behind that decision who is now in a riff, who doesn't get the calls anymore or what have you.

23:40Ursula Burns:And, you know, just again, thinking about who's listening to us here, what we can share with them that you did deserve it and there will be something else. There has to be that continuity in our in what we share.

23:53Nicole Reboe:I've been doing this now almost 36 years. And my first job was at Shearson Lehman Hutton. And one of the first people I met when I got there was Chris. And Chris had ahead of him Frank Shepard and George Haywood. And mentorship was a really big deal. And what these guys taught me, and women, because I had people like Wanda Hinton as well advising me, was that I had to outsmart, I had to outwork, I had to outmaneuver, never walk into a room and have a spontaneous conversation with someone who doesn't look like me. I lived on a battlefield. There was all these rules that they gave me. And I followed them for a really long time.

24:34Nicole Reboe:And I would say they led to my survival at times, but they also led to my success. But post George Floyd, when I saw my kids out there in the streets, you know, I had to look back on my career and think about the number of times that I swept something under the carpet, that I just turned my head, that I let it roll off my back because I knew that these earnings were game changing. but I had to wake up and realize that, okay, your kids are good. There's a whole lot of other kids out there in the world that aren't going to be good unless you stand up and do something. It had to be about people and profits, not just profits.

25:19Lisa Wardell:But you kind of had to do the first part first to give you the credibility to do that.

25:23Nicole Reboe:To get the resources and the resources and the credibility.

25:26Lisa Wardell:Yes.

25:26Nicole Reboe:Taking the risk. Right. You're taking risk.

25:29Lisa Wardell:But before you said, I'm not sure why we're sitting here. For me, same thing. Three easy reasons. I have a 24, almost 25-year-old in the workforce. I have a 23-year-old who just graduated who's gone in the workforce and a younger daughter. And I can't afford to not have these conversations because, you know, I have two black men in the workforce that are at the beginning of what you're talking about.

25:55Jacob Walthour, Jr.:But in answer to your question, though, where you say, are we there because we have the best performance or because we're black? It's a combination. We are who we are.

26:06Romaine Bostick:I just think that the question is BS. We've never been racially equal. And we're talking like, well, do you think that they're looking at you like they're black? The only way that they can look at you is the way that we've been taught to look at them. I mean, it's how you feel being a woman. I feel like Ursula Byrne's being a woman. How do I feel being black? I feel like Ursula Burns. Everybody else who looks at me feels as though, I guarantee you, you don't have a right to be here. You are here because you're black. If we think that that is not in the root, by the way, in who we are, but who they are, then we're BSing ourselves.

26:44Romaine Bostick:Does that hurt?

26:45Chris Williams:I mean, even today? No, it doesn't hurt. It is. Did it hurt in the past?

26:48Romaine Bostick:Not really for me. Literally, this justification, we are a racist, sexist society. This country was built on the back of young people, women, immigrants, black people. That's how we got here. Now, I don't want us to go back and keep blaming them. I just want them to get out of our way at this point. I don't want to have to justify the fact that we can perform equally. We are just people. Citizens, give us, get out of our way, have us, give us an education, access to health care like everybody else has. And we can move forward.

27:23Ursula Burns:But part of this also is that we will spin our wheels and talk about this stuff and try and answer the unanswerable when it's already answered.

27:29Nicole Reboe:We got to pick our heads up, but we also got to stick our necks out.

27:33Ursula Burns:For sure. But I'm not hating the people who are also taking a different road during this time, sort of consolidating their power, dealing with people that they want to deal with, doing business. with people they trust and not looking for affirmation outside of themselves. So I think this is another moment where it's like, okay, so who are you going to look to to affirm ourselves? We look inside first and then stop looking for anyone else to care. That's sort of where I'm at.

27:56Romaine Bostick:This is where I tell you, sis, this is where I am at. I am the same place. Okay. If we can get people on our bandwagon all for it, come on, let's go. But I am tired of asking, answering these questions like, do you feel, do, I don't care. I really don't care.

28:17Ursula Burns:My therapist helps work that out. That's right. Thank you, Alison.

28:23Romaine Bostick:Our point here is that there are also the people who have, who don't look anything like us, that have a responsibility too. Let's make sure that they carry some of that weight. We're helping them.

28:35Chris Williams:There are a lot of people looking at some of the hires that we've seen in this current government administration and kind of asking whether those people were even qualified at the same time, pointing at Lisa Cook or Susan Rice or someone like that and saying that they're DEI hires despite their accomplishments. I asked you whether stuff like that hurts, and I would have to think to a certain extent it's got to hurt sometimes, right?

29:02Romaine Bostick:Oh, my God. If this is not an anomaly, then I'm more than hurt. I'm pissed.

29:07Chris Williams:Do you think it's an anomaly?

29:08Romaine Bostick:I hope like hell that it is. Because in all of the badness in our modern times, not in the Jim Crow or enslaved people past, we've had some rule base that made sense. I mean, they didn't follow it all the time. It's all gone now. Now, literally unskilled, unqualified people who are just associated with other people who can run major departments of our government should not be allowed. And if it's not an anomaly, we are not the worst people are going to suffer here because we know how to suffer. I tell you, the people out there don't know how to suffer. If this is the way we're going to play the game, where it doesn't matter what the hell you've done in the past, what skill set you have, it only matters how much money you have and what friends you have.

29:54Romaine Bostick:No one in this country is prepared. Not enough people in this country are prepared for that kind of rule set. If the people aren't looking at us saying we are the canary in the coal mine, right, we're yelling, but they're going to have to yell too, then I think we're in trouble.

30:09Nicole Reboe:It does hurt. And I'll tell you why. Of course it hurts. Because when I started my career in investment banking, there was a whole bunch of us. I looked around three or four years later and 70 % of us were gone. And every year that I continued to do what I was doing, I watched more and more of us walk away. Not necessarily get fired or asked to leave, just walk away. So yeah, it hurt watching some of our very own people, our friends, people we cared about, get pushed out of the industry because they just couldn't take it anymore. But what I will say is that it hurts in a different way in that you have so few examples of success at our level, and there's no real means of amplifying that.

31:09Nicole Reboe:I feel like for all the success that those of us around this table have had, there are so many people that have not been able to travel the path. And there are so many kids out there who don't know that there is this path.

31:24Jacob Walthour, Jr.:Yeah. It's interesting because I think it's good that even among this table, we all have different ways of viewing and dealing with our experiences. For me, I try not to even acknowledge the hurt part. It has nothing to do with anything. I am going to constantly try to convert to what is the opportunity, what is the objective performance data that will hopefully allow me to achieve most of what I'm trying to achieve. And I think it's okay to acknowledge hurt.

32:07Nicole Reboe:It's how you deal with that hurt. Yeah. Right. Do you deal with it in a constructive way or do you deal with it in a destructive way? What is the constructive way? You get up every day and you figure out how to fight, but you figure out how to do it in an intelligent, calculating way. You figure out what your contribution can be. Stop thinking about the problem. What can your contribution be to the solution? Because all of us can do something. Whether it's bringing one kid in as an intern, whether it's stroking a check to some nonprofit that's focused on career development and young people, whether it's serving on the board of a local school board.

32:52Nicole Reboe:I mean, there's something that we can all do to change this situation. And to me, it's that hurt that gets me up every day and makes me want to fight. I just know better than to go out there and use my fists.

33:06Chris Williams:Lisa, are you having these conversations with your sons? You mentioned two sons that just entered the workforce. Yes.

33:12Lisa Wardell:And I agree with all of that. And I am really focused on, okay, but what's What's the solution here, right? So if we think about DEI, what is the access issue and what's the inclusion issue? So I cannot just be either hurt or angry, right? I have to be far more constructive. And for me, in talking to my sons and my daughter, it's about service. And I believe that this is a pendulum. And I think to Ursula's point, we're far more equipped, far more equipped to make it through, you know, the current sort of environment and atmosphere than a lot of folks. And we will.

33:53Romaine Bostick:I have a voice, a position, money, followership, whatever the heck it is. And we have to use that, even though it is really expensive. Right. It's one of the more expensive things. So just use it all the time, every chance that you can. We're not trying to convert all of these people out here to believe that I'm better than them or equal to them. I don't give a hoot. I just want them to either to follow. This is why I'm so nervous now. Follow the rules. Follow the rules.

34:24Nicole Reboe:That's been going on for a long time where people haven't cared about the rules.

34:27Romaine Bostick:Yeah, but now we have a structure, a structure that's changing. Right. We have nowhere to go. We have to be really careful about this. It literally, if they pick you up on the street and send you into a place, you could be there for 21 days, even though the rules say you can't. And we'll send you somewhere and let you out. That makes that should be making everyone nervous.

34:48Lisa Wardell:It is different.

34:49Romaine Bostick:Everyone should be nervous and pick one of these common things and make sure you fight it.

34:54Ursula Burns:But it's hard to catalyze that fear into action. It's really hard to do that when you don't feel that you have the privilege or access, whether real or myth, to do that. So I just, you know, as I speak to people every day in executive search and they don't necessarily feel self-empowered to kind of say, you know what, this is a toxic culture. I don't care if it's Fortune 500 or 250. I'm out.

35:16Lisa Wardell:But that's why it's so important for us to be out there and use our voice and pick our cause, particularly for and around young people. It's just it's critical.

35:29Chris Williams:How deep seated, though, do you think this will be? I mean, we talk about the person in the White House. In theory, he'll be gone. But you have a court system now that seems to be tilting in favor of a lot of his ideas and policies. You have state legislatures that seem to be tilting in favor of those policies. Is what's being done now going to become so entrenched that it's not just your children that might be dealing with, but maybe your grandchildren?

35:53Jacob Walthour, Jr.:I think there are mindsets that are pro and con DEI that are becoming more entrenched one side or the other. Because aside from race, on every aspect of American life, the differences, the gulf between one viewpoint and another viewpoint is more entrenched and clear. So I think really we have to, again, as always, look at these circumstances and map out our own direction, which we're constantly trying to read the tea leaves for how we're going to navigate and succeed as well as possible. The pendulum does swing to a certain degree, but I think what we're seeing now is unfortunately a very, and we've heard this many times, divided, philosophically divided country, which is concerning for the entire country.

36:52Jacob Walthour, Jr.:Right. But that pendulum analogy, I mean, can you even rely on that in this environment?

36:58Chris Williams:Exactly.

36:58Ursula Burns:Also, why do we want to look at something that's going to swing at us? We've got to tell people, look inside now. We want to look at it if it's coming.

37:06Lisa Wardell:Right. And duck.

37:07Ursula Burns:And duck, of course. But I do think, you know, also telling young people to look, drive with your own values. Stop looking outside of yourself for affirmation of what wealth looks like. What does success look like? Define this on your own terms. And I really mean this. I have a seven year old and I'm thinking about AI. I'm thinking about where my son will be in like 20 years. What are the skills that he will need? And I think the pull is to like be like, yes, over here, follow this one person. That's not going to work anymore. Look, look where we are now. And I think.

37:34Chris Williams:But don't people need examples?

37:36Ursula Burns:I mean, we all are. We're right here. Yeah, absolutely. 100 percent, Romaine.

37:40Romaine Bostick:They see them. Yeah, 100 percent. They see them.

37:43Chris Williams:Do you feel ownership? I mean, of this country? Is this your country? This is my country.

37:49Romaine Bostick:OK. Absolutely. Absolutely. This is my country. Absolutely.

37:52Nicole Reboe:And this country's been very good to me. Exactly.

37:56Romaine Bostick:Exactly. I'm not throwing that out.

37:58Nicole Reboe:So you feel that ownership? Absolutely. Absolutely.

38:01Ursula Burns:And the rest of the world. We ain't going nowhere. And the rest of the world. Absolutely.

38:06Romaine Bostick:My mother and father came from Panama. I am an American. I am an American, and I am going to fight for my right in the words that they wrote down. Not the way we're living it. With the amendments to the Constitution is actually not a bad document. I think this is a great set of rules. Let's go for that.

38:25Nicole Reboe:I mean, your story is remarkable. My father had a seventh grade education. My mother had an 11th grade education. And in this country, they were able to raise and put through college three kids, own multiple homes and other properties, start their own business, become pillars of the community and have a street named after them. This is a great country. And I agree with you, Ursula. We have the skill set and the wherewithal to prepare our own. And unfortunately, I think we've done a pretty good job of lowering the bar for some of our children. Fear has been my number one motivator, right? So I woke up in the morning and sat around the oven because that was the source of heat in an apartment.

39:13Nicole Reboe:And so that fear that comes from that experience of waking up in the morning with my siblings sitting around the oven to get heat, that motivates me. And I think that every generation tries to make things easier for the next generation. So I've worked really hard so they don't have to live that way. But I'm not sure in the process. That should be a good thing, though, right? I'm not sure in the process I've done the right thing by them.

39:35Ursula Burns:They will have, like, you haven't lowered the bar. It's a beautiful thing to make something easier to step over. You know, I think, you know, why is it that I think it's easier. And that's what I mean. So now they're, rather than worrying about what I did, you know, sitting there with, Yes, the red line bill from Con Ed, the lights went off. You put your headphones on, you put on the flashlight, and you get on and you do your homework. Okay, Kai will not experience a red line letter from Con Ed, but he will experience other things. So now he has the emotional space to take on other things. I'm worrying about if the rent is going to get paid.

40:08Ursula Burns:I don't want my seven-year-old to worry about that. Now he can worry about other things that he will still have to navigate that I faced. So I really say there's no lowering of the bar. You're allowing them to step higher.

40:20Jacob Walthour, Jr.:If you don't meet your own expectations, and God forbid you fail kind of publicly and objectively in what you're trying to do, think of how devastating that is and the pressure that puts on a child. Or to live up to the expectations of your parents. They're going to have their own bars to leap over. And when you try to do things on your own, that's a challenge for anyone.

40:44Lisa Wardell:Both of my sons get stopped, so I hate to tell you, but he will have that challenge.

40:49Ursula Burns:Well, that's why I'm thinking, let him not worry about Con Ed, because he will get stopped. And God, what would I have been able to accomplish if part of my mental health had not been delivered over to dealing with racism? Internalizing it, navigating it, showing up in the room, figuring it all out, being competent, overcompetent, blah, blah, blah.

41:06Nicole Reboe:We talk about how the socioeconomic climate is impacting us. I think that there's something even larger impacting our children and that's social media. And how much that places a priority on a different set of values.

41:27Lisa Wardell:But you know what?

41:28Nicole Reboe:Because they think they're making it when really they're just faking it.

41:31Lisa Wardell:But tying that back to this conversation, though, part of where we are today, because you started with where are we today as America, Part of where we are today is because they want us to look over there, right? Look over there at diversity when, in fact, you know, AI is changing the workforce forever. Not just our children will have a hard time getting a job. All young people, Gen Z and then Gen A, will have a hard time getting a job. So I think part of our responsibility is to help people understand this is just another look over there tactic. This is all reborn into success.

42:10Jacob Walthour, Jr.:is dependent on the success of America. You ask, are we invested in the success of this country? Absolutely, because we will not succeed at all if the country doesn't succeed. So we have to do what we can to succeed, regardless of the headwinds that we face, and try to do what we can to see America succeed.

42:31Romaine Bostick:By the way, one thing, if I can just... I don't disagree. AI does not mean that our kids will have difficulty getting a job. They'll just have different jobs. Yeah. And by the way, I am starting to be more and more convinced in my private equity firm, we are looking at ways, not ways like real ways. We are going to add a lot of value and take out a lot of drudgery. Yes. Now, the thing is that we have to do something useful with that time. We have to figure out what we want. What do we do with that time? And by the way, we better be thinking of things to do with that time. We still have energy problems.

43:10Romaine Bostick:We have water problems. We have health care problems. A lot of things to do out there. We just have climate problems. We just can't sit there and go, my God, all the transaction processing work that's, you know, is going to go away. That may be true. Let's make sure we find something to do with these relatively skilled or at least desirous to be skilled people and put them there.

43:29Ursula Burns:But I do think for AI, I mean, wherever people were during the rise of the Internet, think back to 99, 2000. Where were you in that conversation? Were you where you wanted to be? These are the things we should be thinking about for our communities now. Are they in the conversation now? Because if you do use AI, we'll be like, do you use the Internet? It's going to become a rote question. And that's why I talk about my son, Kai. I think about him using AI and basically what are the skills that people will need 20 years ago now, 20 years from now, that will be fueled by AI. These are the questions we need to ask, not whether to engage.

44:03Ursula Burns:It's here. It's evil. It's not. It's here. Let's get on with it. And I would love to hear more black and brown voices talking about where we are at the intersection of technology right now.

44:13Chris Williams:But with everything you said around this table, so does this mean that if for some reason we were to convene this 20 years from now with maybe your children or something? Or your agentic colleague or whatever it's going to be. But is this going to be a better place for black Americans, for black people around the world?

44:29Jacob Walthour, Jr.:Some of it depends on what we do. I think everyone here is results oriented. So if we sit at this table and only talk about what's wrong, that doesn't make anything better. We have to work with whatever cohort of people and family that we can convene and influence to at least follow steps that help prescribe a path to make our little worlds better and hopefully set an example for others to have a chance of making this dialogue a more constructive dialogue 20 years from now than it is now. We don't know how the winds will change the impact of AI, the impact of war, the impact of climate change, the impact of clean water, clean air.

45:28Jacob Walthour, Jr.:We know it affects various people and often disproportionately. But we have to control what we can control and also map out plans, maybe that have to change and be reworked every year or two, but map out ways to influence everything.

45:47Romaine Bostick:I say 100 percent on my dead body. Absolutely.

45:49Nicole Reboe:History repeats itself. And we started this conversation talking about these moments in history where we have to deal with the backlash. Each one of those periods has set the stage for us to bounce back and level up So I think we're getting back to a period where nobody's given us anything We need to be accountable prepared and perform.

46:11Lisa Wardell:I agree a hundred percent. It will be better

46:15Ursula Burns:Somebody kicking my ass though. I can I can handle a level up without somebody reaching behind

46:19Nicole Reboe:You want to be coached with love instead of I will coach

46:22Ursula Burns:Well, you can do both and you can see which one turns out a little bit better. I think what we're doing right now here is also making the change. Just by even sitting around this table talking about this will change the outcomes for sure.

46:35Lisa Wardell:And I think you can see we are optimistic results oriented, like solution people. We're not whining.

46:44Romaine Bostick:I've had a great life. I've never been reset. If you know what I mean. By the way, and part of it is I think maybe my mother was, my mother struggled. We lived in nowhere. We had nothing, nothing. And she died when she was 49 years old because literally we couldn't get good health care. But my mother was very clear about how much of the control of my life I have. and she, I think she was lying to me half the time or telling me a story, not lying to me. She said, basically, it's on you. It's on you. Fortunately, I had all these people around me, Mr. Jordan, Ken Chenault, my husband, all these, my mother, my sister, my brother, who said, keep going.

47:39Romaine Bostick:You know, you can, it wasn't like you can do this. It was just, keep going. I mean, just keep going.

47:46Ursula Burns:Could I join with you in that, Ursula? Because this one thing to land with people is it's not one person, one mentor, one parent. It is a constellation of people that you surround yourself with in your life, more so now than ever, when people can be on social media and be socially isolated. It's a constellation of people that will get you through to the next phase. And I think the sort of like I did it myself or was on my own back. I love that. It has to be. Let's just it has to be a constellation. and we have to reach for, oh God, that sounds corny, to reach for those stars. And sometimes you have to draw them in.

48:21Ursula Burns:But if people could just, you know, stop thinking, well, I've got to do this on my own. It's my promotions. Surround yourself with a constellation of people. What a beautiful constellation of people. And that does not sound corny.

48:31Chris Williams:That's beautiful. Thank you. And I think that's a great place to end this conversation.

48:36Ursula Burns:You all are in my constellation now.

48:38Chris Williams:Thank you, Romain. Ursula and Chris. Thank you. This is a wonderful conversation. Hopefully we don't have to have it too many more times.

48:45Romaine Bostick:We'll have it. We're going to rather get over it. Maybe proactive. Can we do it over food next time? Maybe not on camera. We'll do it.

48:55Ursula Burns:Ramin, thank you from the bottom of our hearts for being our voice in places and spaces. Thank you.

49:05Chris Williams:Thank you for joining us for today's special presentation of Business Week Convenes, a series dedicated to bringing together prominent leaders for discussions on vital and sensitive subjects. Today's conversation centered on the state of Black leadership in corporate America as we see diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives rolled back across the country. Joining me on today's panel were Ursula Burns, co-founder of Integrum Holdings, Nicole Rebo, CEO of Rich Talent Group, Jacob Walther Jr., CEO of Blueprint Capital Advisors, Lisa Wardell, board member at American Express, and Chris Williams, the chairman and founder of Siebert Williams Schenck.

49:48Chris Williams:I'm Romain Bostic, and this is Bloomberg.

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