On April 14, 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. made a powerful observation in a speech titled “The Other America,” addressing the racially charged violence then sweeping the nation’s cities. “A riot is the language of the unheard,” he said, and he challenged his audience to think hard on the question “What is it that America has failed to hear?”

After the 2020 murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd and the wave of protests that followed, business leaders began asking similar questions: What is it that corporate America has failed to hear? What has my own company failed to hear?

I soon found myself being approached by countless executives wanting to combat systemic racism and seeking advice about how to do so. As a Black man with three decades of experience in the corporate world, I’ve gained a deep understanding of how to initiate and implement diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) agendas from the top. With my daughter Krista, I wrote the book Anti-Racist Leadership, from which this article is adapted, to share what I’ve learned.

In what follows I provide a playbook for getting started, drawing from my experience as an executive, a board member, a CEO coach, and an adviser and from discussions with others who have taken on and nailed transformative change. It comprises seven steps: listening to and learning from colleagues across the organization; enlisting senior executives to the cause; auditing the culture; documenting what’s already being done to foster diversity and inclusion; establishing benchmarks for measuring progress; building “action learning teams” to spearhead the effort; and developing and communicating an action plan.

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Source: Harvard Business Review, James D. White , mai 2022