From Intention to Impact: A Practical Guide to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

Businesses must back up their professed support for diversity with meaningful commitment to building a more equitable society, according to this direct program. Lazu, founder of the Lazu Group DEI consultancy, encourages companies to adopt a more inclusive way of doing business to better appeal to socially conscious customers and workers. She outlines seven stages business leaders can expect to pass through while implementing DEI strategies, suggesting that initiatives will likely meet resistance from white employees and will require doubling down. Case studies examine how racist corporate practices led to public faux pas and detail how readers can do better. For instance, she recounts how Wells Fargo CEO Charles Scharf came under fire in 2020 for blaming the low number of Black employees at the bank on a lack of worthy candidates. Such “pipeline” problems, Lazu contends, usually indicate the company is not an “attractive place to work for people of color.” Lazu has a refreshing, suffer-no-fools style (“The key here is to recognize these reactions [to DEI initiatives] for what they are: pervasive racism”), and her recommendations to hire more employees of color, change company policies to better serve them, and contract with more vendors from marginalized groups offers a welcome alternative to the milquetoast guidance in other business manuals focused on corporate “culture” and posturing. This walks the walk. (Feb.)