Why Toyota, Walmart, and Target Are Cutting DEI

0:00Toyota, Walmart, Target, and other brands are cutting DEI.

0:10Here, I'll tell you what I think about it. I'll take the juicy one first, okay? I just think, man, like enough is enough. Like, yes, this stuff matters at the end of the day, but what matters the most is that you do good work and you be kind to people. That matters more than anything else. And the more we can cut these, I'm going to call it like they're distractions, the more we can focus on doing good work, the more we can focus on being kind, that is all we need to do. So, yeah, I'll tell you what I think about it. I look at DEI as, I don't know how DEI organizations are run. As a business owner, it's really simple to me.

0:41I don't look at someone based on gender, color, or age, or any of those factors. I look at it as black and white. Good person for the job, bad person for the job. If someone can do a good job or get trained into it, or they're smart, ambitious, and willing to work hard and learn, I'm all for it. If someone's lazy, I don't care about any of the other factors. In theory, why should lazy people who suck at what they do get paid well when there's a lot of hardworking people who should deserve that job? And again, I don't look at gender or race or age or any of that or even education. Both of us employ across the spectrum.

1:24Yeah, we employ all things and people can't say based on our organizations that we're sexist or anything like that, or we discriminate against any kind of race or if someone may be gender neutral, none of us discriminate or you and I don't discriminate against any of that. And we look at it as like, you do good work. Awesome. You know, you're going to do well in our organization, keep getting promoted, keep getting paid. Well, if you do terrible work and people hate the results and you don't want to show up or even work or do anything, why should you be around in the organization? It's not fair to all the other people who could either have the job or it's not fair to people who are working hard.

2:00Merit. People like to poo-poo on merit. It's like, oh, you think America is a merit-based economy? Yes, I do. And so, you know, more than most countries, right? I do think organizations should look hard for all qualified candidates. Yeah. And not just be like, this one person applied, so I'm going to hire them. And I think that's a bad part about recruiting. For me, that has nothing to do in DEI, but you can lump that in. because when people apply for a job, even if that person is amazing, we still go out there and try to find other people, no matter about their gender, race, or age, or anything like that, finding other people who could be potentially skilled.

2:40And what you'll find is you may end up finding people who are better for the job. And I'll give you a great example of this. I won't name the person. We had someone interview for one of our positions as a leader of one of our countries, male, all right? and in this country almost all the leaders are male did amazing on the interview and they probably would have killed it in the job we said one person let's continually find more people we found this female and when you look at this female in this country a lot of people will talk down because that's how culturally they are which sucks but that's the reality and it's changing but changing slowly, we ended up picking the female, not because the person was a female.

3:25We picked them because they had similar experience, if not even a little bit better of experience. They were more expensive, believe it or not. And there were a much better cultural fit. So a little bit better experience, even though they were more expensive, we look at the experience and better culture fit. And we're like, that's worth it. Never in my 13 years of knowing Neil that I've expected him to talk about cultural fit. Which is really important. When you have a lot of employees, it is, and I'm not saying we have a ton compared to like a Microsoft, but at our scale, it's still a lot when you're over a thousand plus.

3:59Cultural fit is really important. It's everything. Yeah, because when someone has to work with hundreds of people, it doesn't work out if they're not a cultural fit. And culture is just how you do things. And everything has a culture. Every organization has a culture. Your company does. Your family has a culture as well. So that's all it is. All right, quick note. This is about my company. It's called Single Grain and Single Grain is an ad agency where we're focused on driving innovation. We'll talk about a couple of new strategies. And if you need help with marketing, great. If not, here are a couple of new strategies that you should try out.

4:27One is programmatic CRO. So we are doing programmatic conversion rate optimization on our site. So it's building products that will automatically optimize your site to increase conversion rates. We're also auto optimizing, auto updating from an SEO standpoint. And we're constantly thinking about what else we can do in terms of enriching the visitors that are hitting your website and also tailoring custom messages for them using AI. And so there's a handful of things that we're doing from a marketing standpoint. And our mission is just to drive more innovation. So if you want to learn more, just go to singlegrain.com, grain like rice.

4:58So singlegrain.com to learn more and we'll see you inside. And it was funny when I interviewed her, she was telling me how she's a woman and, And oh yeah, and you know, in the country, it doesn't go as well. Cause some people I'm like, I don't care. And what do you, she's like, what do you mean? I'm like, well, if you're telling me people are giving you proms cause they're female and they're no good, we can make changes. And she's like, really? Well, not only that, she's dealt with it. Yeah, she's dealt with it. She's got the thick skin. Yeah, she has a thick skin. And she's just like, I can put up with it.

5:26And I'm like, well, if people are giving you issues and you don't think they're the right fit, we can make changes if you don't think that's best for our relationship. She's like, really? I'm like, yeah. She's like, you don't care I'm a female? I'm like, no, you're a better fit for the job. I'm like, gender doesn't matter to me. The question is, who's best for the company? Exactly. I think it's you. We'll make changes if people don't want to fall in line. It's that simple, right? That is it for today. Go to markingschool.io slash agency. By the way, that price keeps going up. It just doubled last yesterday, actually.

5:56So yeah, go check it out and we'll see you tomorrow.

6:05Thank you.