What specific things can leaders do to advance ESG goals?
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When talking about diversity and inclusion, one of the things I told my boss was that if you want a more diverse pipeline at the bottom of the funnel, you have to diversify the top of the funnel. If you're still recruiting at Stanford because it's just down the road from you, you're not necessarily getting the diverse population we're looking for. And if you're looking at serving underprivileged communities, we have to have methods of inclusion from a job description standpoint, where everyone doesn't require five years of experience, a college degree and doing X or Y.
One of the things that we’re starting to do is looking at our job descriptions to see if we can't bake out some of that collegiate experience. That’s what I used to do with the defense contract I work for; it requires a particular level of formal or informal experience or X supplement. We're trying to figure out ways to do that but it's still a work in progress. We’re also working on changing our recruiting model so that we’re not only looking at Stanford, Carnegie Mellon and other Ivy league schools where the level of diversity driven by economics isn't there right now. We want to look at other nontraditional institutions that have good programs in technology. I’d recommend that organizations spend some money investing in those technology programs.
You want to invest in organizations that are doing things to help bring people along, transition careers and serve in non-mainstream communities. Intuit spent some time investing in the program I built at Arizona State a few years ago. We set up a scholarship program through Cyversity within the environment to get people basic training in skill sets from governance to cloud, to security. We’ve done that through Cloud Security Alliance and other places as well, and our goal is not to just give them training and say, “Good luck.” We're looking at taking some graduates of those programs and bringing them in as interns, so they truly get the opportunity and not just the training. I give credit to my boss because he listened and said, “Okay, let's try this.” Having that level of support was helpful.
When we were talking about this very topic, our chief people officer said that while we can focus on different schools, there's also a certain focus that people tend to take in within bigger schools, like ASU. The accounting firms are known for that. You go to the business school, the accounting clubs or the business fraternities, and they're predominantly made up of people that look like me. You're not necessarily hitting the organizations that have some of the broader, diverse groups.
With massive caveats, I agree completely and it’s with massive caveats that we're tiptoeing down this path.We're also looking at how we can better serve those rural and underserved communities in various states. So in addition to looking at ASU, we're also looking at creating inroads into Boise State and doing work there. That could lead to phenomenal work within some of their underserved communities.
I'm spending a lot of time on the equity and sustainability side, and collaboration plays a big part in that work. At iMasons, we're uniting people on common causes because the sum is greater than the parts. That allows us to move forward faster and have a larger impact. We're coming up with a common sustainability action for digital infrastructure, and we're getting companies to sign up for this coalition to drive for carbon neutrality. Carbon neutrality is the first step towards net zero, which is extremely difficult to achieve. But if we don't take that first step, we're never going to get anything done. Everybody's doing great individual actions but when we bring them together, it compounds the impact.
When I started at Sun Microsystems, we had a sustainability strategy to balance the ecology and economics because you shouldn't have to trade off between the two. Now the investment arm has turned, and ESG investment is a primary focus rather than a nice to have. The money is rolling in; if you’re a startup company and you put “green” in your concept, many more will listen to you from a fundraising standpoint. Investors want to know how you are contributing to sustainability.