Transcriber: Shihwan Go Reviewer: David DeRuwe
Life. It's about making decisions.
Some are big; some are small.
Some are intentional; some are not so intentional.
Some are trivial; some are pivotal.
I made a pivotal decision in the fall of 2003 to accept the job
to head up IBM's Human Ability and Accessibility Center.
This organization's mission is to develop advanced technology
to make sure people with disability and people who are aging
are not excluded from technology participation.
In other words, we wanted to make sure that there's complete digital inclusion.
By the way, that was not my first job.
By then, I already had almost 25 years with IBM.
Some of you who are probably calculating how old is this lady?
(Laughter)
I actually held many different jobs, very exciting jobs,
including, for example, in the 90s, I went to Beijing, China,
to help build out the China payment system,
which is equivalent to the Federal Reserve interbank clearing system.
So when I accepted this job, I thought I have something to learn
because I wasn't aging, so I couldn't really relate to that.
And also I didn't have any disabilities.
So I thought I could do this job for two, three years,
then move on to my next job,
like I have done in the prior twenty-some years.
Little did I know, that became a life-changing job.
Because, for the first time,
I was working with, for example, blind scientists.
And they developed technology on the web
so that people who are blind or low vision can hear the web.
I also worked with these incredible talented deaf researchers
who wrote elegant programming code
to take continuous voice conversation
and translate them or convert them into texts.
That's when I realized, "Wow, this company really created a work environment
and really understood the basic concept of authentic inclusion,
that is diversity is the source
that drives disruptive innovation."
Then, I started reflecting on my own story.
Back in a beautiful spring day in June of 1979,
I was a fresh graduate from the University of Kentucky.
Go Wildcats!
(Laughter)
And, I was in a campus interview,
sitting across from a gentleman by the name of Frank Friedersdorf.
And at that time, I had only been in the United States for three years,
so my English was actually quite broken.
And my only one job experience was waitressing in a Chinese restaurant.
But boy, did I want to join this great global company,
so I used every English word I knew and tried to impress Mr. Friedersdorf
that being a waitress was the best training to understand customer service.
At the end of a one-hour interview,
I was offered a job to be a systems engineer.
And for the next 37 years, I had a very fulfilling career with IBM.
And that is the thing about authentic inclusion.
In that, this is a company that really understood
that every person can make a difference,
not in spite of but because of our differences.
But I didn't really focus on this topic of inclusion
because I was busy working until 2016 when I retired.
Excuse me, I don't like to use the word "retire"
because that made me sound really old.
(Laughter)
I like to say, "I graduated from IBM."
So if you recall, that was the year,
this was the height of Silicon Valley inclusion crisis.
There was that famous Google walkout,
remember that,
and almost everyday you would see in the press how the Silicon companies,
whether it was Google, Facebook, you name it, were not diverse enough.
And they were basically trialed in the press for lack of inclusion.
So as a result, all these companies started really trying to address the issue
by spending a lot of resources, time, and financial resources
to conduct, for example, diversity training.
And it seemed like overnight there was a rising of the D&I,
or Diversity Inclusion [Index].
A lot of consultants, you know, started setting up shops,
and a lot of time and energy were spent.
And, yet, you read the report by Deloitte consulting company
that came out in 2017.
It said that over 80% of millennials,
which are many of you sitting out here, think that inclusion is very important,
and that over 50% of you will leave a job or a company
if you don't think the company is doing enough in the inclusion area.
And yet, over 30% of you believe
that the upper management or the senior executives
are really doing something real about inclusion.
And another report came out of a "Wired" magazine last year
said that between 2014 and 2019, within the five-year time span,
the inclusion dial in the technology industry really hasn't moved that much,
maybe with the exception with the gender area.
So that's when I decided that,
because I was very fortunate
and was able to benefit from authentic inclusion,
that I need to do something about it.
So I wrote a book about it, and also I started sharing my work
at the United Nations or with the United Nations.
Now, some of you might say, "Why the United Nations?"
Well, because inclusion is a topic about human.
And human is a very tough topic because we sometimes have
the strong perception or biases, it's hard to change.
And especially in today's world, every human seems to hold on
to their beliefs so strongly that we really need to work
with a global institution such as UN because they work across the world
and really put out what I call the "aspirational goal,"
such as the UN's sustainable development goals of 2030,
which call for the ending of, for example, poverty and also climate change.
So I work with the UN to help business.
In this case, business includes government
it includes, you know, startups, includes nonprofits.
Every organization really needs to understand
that they need to think about inclusion as part of the principle
and also the governance of their institution.
I also started working with startup. I love working with startup.
Actually I know some startup executives in this audience,
and they are millennials.
Why?
Because the entrepreneurs and startup,
you are the future of the next Google, next Microsoft,
and it is so important that you understand authentic inclusion
or inclusion of everybody
and recognize their differences can make a difference in your thinking,
so that you can create and design in the right experience for everybody
and be conscious about it.
So this is the kind of work that I do on a day-to-day basis now.
Now, some people ask me, including my own two sons,
and say, "Why are you working so hard?
Why do you have the sense of urgency?"
And I say to them, "There are three reasons."
First, I'm a technologist.
I spent the past 40 years or so in the technology business,
and I know where technology is going.
If you look at what is happening in the world,
everything we do today and everything we will do in the future
will be underpinned by technology.
It affects how we learn, how we work, how we play, how we socialize.
So if technology is going to underpin everything,
we have to make sure that we think human first.
Because as technology is being developed,
such as artificial intelligence, to augment the human being.
And what I always say, "As technology gets more human,
human needs to get more human."
In other words, we need to increase our higher sense of our humanity,
so we can design the technology to augment us,
not create unconscious bias in that.
So that is one of the reasons why I have the sense of urgency
because we're at the cusp of significant technology innovation.
Second, I'm a business woman.
I think profit making is very important because money makes the world go around.
And money, profit motivates people for growth, for sustainability.
And I want to advise all the leaders, especially business leaders -
like I mentioned it covers the whole gamut from government to, you know, business -
that, there is actually a sea change
created actually by millennials such as yourself,
in that the social expectation of the company's changing -
if you think about the movements
such as Black Lives Matter, Time's Up, and Me Too.
The world is becoming such that they expect people who are in power
or decision-making positions to be responsible.
Now last year, about 180 companies,
the biggest US companies, led by Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase,
came out and made a declaration.
In that, they said,
"The responsibility of a business is no longer just to the shareholders
but to the stakeholders as well
and that a company has to be purpose driven."
So I'm an optimist from the East,
and I believe that there is a beginning
to have a change for the business to recognize
that in order to differentiate themselves
and also in order to recruit the best talent
and also to create a bigger market expansion,
they need to think about inclusion and also operationalize inclusion
through every fabric of their business as a competitive advantage.
So this kind of a thinking
of recognizing inclusion, not just the buzz word or an HR initiative
but fundamentally a competitive advantage
is becoming what I believe a kind of a business imperative.
Last but not the least, standing in front of you
is a first-generation, Chinese-speaking immigrant.
I, like I said, benefited tremendously from a fronting inclusion
even though the framework was created for business consumption.
It came from my personal belief and aspiration
that we are in the world, we have to think human first,
and that if we collectively and consciously make decisions
in everything we do, in every person we meet,
that we put human first
and harness and understand that differences actually can help us
to create incredible disruptive innovation.
Then we can help address some of the bigger problems in the world
and make this world a better world, not just for some but for all.
Thank you.