00:03
This is Rainomoto's Podcast, The Creative Mindset.
Hi everyone, welcome to The Creative Mindset, a podcast about what the future holds at the
intersection of creativity and technology. I am Rainomoto, the founding partner of I&CO,
a global innovation firm based in New York and Tokyo. In today's episode, we speak with Darren
Wesley Martin Jr. and Dr. Rubina Malik. Darren is the President and CEO of Bulb Culture,
a multicultural communication firm that provides inclusive talent management and consumer marketing
research, insights, and consulting to media, marketing, advertising, and technology practitioners.
Dr. Malik is a global learning and development expert with over 20 years of experience in academia,
consulting, and professional services. Dr. Malik works as a Senior Strategist at Bulb Culture.
I met Darren about a year and a half ago when my firm, I&CO, hired his firm to be a DE&I
consultant on a project we were working on at the time. Part one of this conversation is about
really understanding the nuances of diversity, equity, inclusion, and as Dr. Malik added,
belonging. They share some simple yet profound tips on how to create an equitable and inclusive
work environment. We recorded this conversation a couple of months ago and it was before the
Supreme Court in the United States struck down affirmative action. Re-listening to this
conversation with Darren and Dr. Malik after affirmative action changed weighed somewhat
heavily on my mind and it gave me a lot to think about, particularly in the U.S. and as a parent
whose kids will be eventually going to college in a different cultural and legal environment than I did
25 years ago, just tastes and means very different than what I imagined. So this episode, especially
if you are living in the U.S., I think has a lot to teach us about the work and personal
lives that we lead and hope you take away something from it. So let's get started.
多様性、公平性、包摂、帰属の定義
I'm going to start with the very basics of the definition of DE&I and I'm going to start with
you, Darren, and then I'm going to switch over to Dr. Malik to see if you can also help us
understand, and particularly for the Japanese audience who might not be so familiar with
just the concept of DE&I. So Darren, first, again, this is a very basic definition, but I just
want to make sure that we have that right. But how would you define DE&I in the context of what you do
and in the context of today's society? And I guess with the American society first, just because
that's the way we are based right now. And to your question on what diversity is,
I always think of it as diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. They are all four
different things. Diversity is the different people that you have in the room. Equity is the equal
opportunities that they have. Inclusion is, are we bringing and letting people, are they at the
table as we say? Do they have a particular voice there? And belonging is, do they feel like they
are safe in our organization? Do they feel as if they are safe in just this world? And I think
that we're talking more internally now, but all of our work is across those four areas, diversity,
equity, inclusion, and belonging. Because equity, inclusion, and belonging, as our partners at
VMLYNR would say, creates diversity, right? The way that we focus on increasing equity and
inclusion and belonging creates and sustains diversity. So that's my definition. Dr. Mike,
多様性、公平性、包摂、帰属の場所の重要性
do you have anything to add to that? Well, I mean, you know, I validate what
Darren says. And just to put it in layman terms, you know, diversity is, you know, the people that
you invite to a party, right? So you invite the different people to the party. And then just
because they're invited to the party, the question is, do they feel comfortable? Are they being asked
to dance? Are they, you know, being invited to dance? Or did you invite them to sit down at the
table with you to make decisions? So, you know, diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging is
that's like a scenario or an analogy. You know, you can invite somebody to the dance.
That's one thing. But then did you ask them to dance? Are you making sure other people might
be asking them to dance and making sure that they're having a good time? Same thing, you know,
you're inviting them to the table. And, you know, are you giving them the food? Or is it just that
they're just sitting in a chair? Are they being included in the meal? So I think it's very
important that organizations not only have diverse employees and their organization,
but also making them feel like they belong, making sure that there's equity, that everybody's treated
fairly, as well as that, you know, there's inclusivity that you're keeping anyway.
Like, so for right now, you know, it's Ramadan for me. And that's a big thing. So like, you know,
Darren and I are doing work together. You know, he makes sure that I'm included in the work,
right? Like, oh, she's fasting. She has to break her fast. Or, you know, it's this, you know,
how do I manage, make sure she feels inclusive and she feels belonged, you know, like he sent,
you know, the note to you, like, hey, you know, just want to let you know. And that was making
him making sure that I was included and felt belonged. So it's more than a conversation.
多様性、公平性、包摂、帰属は行動が伴っている
And we may get into this more, but, you know, D-E-R-I-N-B is more than a conversation. It's
actually action. Thanks for your take and definition on these terms. But one term
that I actually wanted to dig in deeper is this concept of equity. And I have to say, and I have
to openly admit that even though I knew the term equity for a long, long time, and I had heard it
in the context of these types of conversations, really the enthusiasm about the topic of diversity,
equity, inclusion, and now belonging that you mentioned, Darren, is more intensified in the
last few years. And again, you know, for our audience in the U.S., this is an obvious inflection
point that happened in the summer of 2020 when there was the murder of George Floyd. And, you
know, days following that was a massive, the beginning of a massive movement. I mean, the
movement of Black Lives Matter had been happening, but I feel like that was a clear inflection.
There were other smaller inflection points, but that really sort of tipped the scale.
And from that summer for many, many weeks, if not several months, and, you know, me living in New
York, I saw many, many marches of all different races and all different colors and different types
of people going out on the streets to protest for people's rights and quote-unquote equality.
But tell us how you define equality versus equity, and how should we understand the
differences between the two? And my understanding, which may be correct or incorrect, it's one thing
to have equality, but it's really equity that makes a difference in people's lives. And, you
know, tell me if I'm right or wrong or help us understand the concept of equity. Yeah.
And it says, you know, while equality assumes that all people should be treated the same,
equity takes into the consideration a person's unique circumstances, right? So everybody can
be treated the same, but Black people or queer people or Asian people, right, or anybody who's
outside of the norm, right, do not have the same steps it takes to get to what is our ideological
equality, right? And many times when we look at equality, it's we all have the same opportunities,
but do we, right? We all can get ahead, but can we, right? If we don't assess the barriers to entry,
the barriers to staying in certain positions, the barriers to access to capital in other ways,
if we go more outward, that is what we're talking about with equity. So we need to create policies,
practices, procedures that ensure that underrepresented groups have a chance to meet,
right, to get to the same level. But equity says we need to know what those challenges are,
and we need to solve for that. Got it. Got it. Yeah. Dr. Malik, do you think you could
Equityのポジティブな実例
perhaps give a couple of examples of how equity works in a positive way, either in the corporate
world or in the educational world? And I have, you know, some examples that come to my mind,
but I would love to hear from you, again, just to paint a clear picture of what that means.
So, you know, talking about pictures, there's just, you know, a few equity picture. You see
the picture of there's like maybe a five-foot-10 person who doesn't need a box, and then there's a
five-foot-eight person who needs a little bit of a box to look over the fence. And then there's a
very small person who needs a big box to be able to look over to the fence. And that is such a
beautiful representation of what equity is. So equity could look like looking at someone's social
economic background and maybe understanding that, you know what, maybe they need a little bit more
training. Like if we're training everybody, maybe person X needs a little bit more training
because just because of their background or they don't have something that's going to help them,
so we can put them all on the same level. So, you know, sometimes I feel like what we do is
we kind of like do it's a, you know, it's a one-size-fits-all. And equity isn't necessarily
that, that one-size-fits-all. We might need to modify each one of us on this podcast. You know,
we learn and we need to hear things differently. You know, you may be in writing or maybe visual
or maybe auditory. So how do we make sure everyone gets what they need? That's equity. As well as,
you know, creating those opportunities evenly throughout for each person. So making sure that
I get the same opportunity that Darren has and, you know, you all have.
企業とメディアのアンダーレプレゼンテーション
So back to you, Darren, you know, in your practice since you're from both culture,
again, you know, we work, my firm and your firm have worked together on a couple of projects. But
say outside of those projects that we worked on and an example or two that you could mention
about how you helped another company to be able to provide a better type of equity for whatever,
say like in your firm's expertise, providing consulting advisory help to say marketing
and communication executions, right? So give us a few tangible examples.
One of the things that we see, let's see both in creativity and the distribution of that
from a media perspective is that one audiences are still underrepresented from a model
or even a crude perspective. And then they're also, of course, underrepresented from a media
distribution partner perspective. In the U.S. specifically, a little over 5% of all media
dollars are spent on Black, Latine, Asian, LGBTQIA media combined, right? 5% is shared across
all of these large minority offices. And so what we think about when working with our clients
is assessing what barriers those minority media companies may have to working with these larger
media agencies or even creative agencies, right? It's the same thing as far as the producers or
photographers or even makeup artists and stylists who are not getting the proper one representation,
but also to Dr. Malik's point, both training, but also support, right? There's no support.
There are no systems in place to say, hey, let's work with you. Even if they cross the barrier of
being represented, if that makes sense. And so what we do at Bold Culture is assess that.
For the creative side, we're looking at not only what can the creative tell in a story or how can
people perceive the storytelling itself, which is what we work together on, but also who's creating
the content, right? And if it's about a certain community, then what we normally see is that
agencies don't necessarily work with a large portion of the community they're creating content
for. So we look at one who's creating that content, how are they paid, right? What's the equity there?
What's the challenges of getting paid? There are a lot of diverse influencers who definitely
cannot chase the net 90, net 120s, net 360s that these companies are putting out, right? And so
what I've seen in certain clients is that they are reducing that barrier by allowing you to kind of
do like a 0.5% or 1% discount, right? To get your money up front. Those are ways, of course,
that you can ensure equity because if we're thinking about equity, we're talking about
dollars here on the business end, right? And that's one of the larger barriers to doing this
work at a corporate level for minority businesses, either media or creative, right? It's actually
waiting on the money, being able to support oneself until that net 90, 120, 360 comes.
So with clients being able to use things, I think it's called C2FO. C2FO is one of the platforms
there where you're able to work with any vendor and pay them early, right? And get a minimal
discount, but it's helpful to that small business. That's one thing we've seen. We've also seen,
of course, assessing the types of influencers or media companies you're working with, again,
and how much money that you put into the table versus, let's say, larger white media companies
that have gotten millions or if not billions from the advertising industry, right? And so
it looks different in different ways, depending on where we are, if we're at like the internal
level or external level. But I would say it's all about, again, assessing the people process
and procedures across any portion of the creative and media world.
コロナ禍でのDEIの変化
I want to pick one of the things that you just said to talk about another topic that I wanted to
talk with you both of you about was DEI in the corporate space and how, especially since, say,
2020, that topic became a hot topic that every company, especially in America, had to do and
say something about. And it's interesting what you said about the DEI backlash that is happening now
in this year as well. So in the last couple of years, and again, me working with many corporations,
global corporations, American corporations, and Japanese corporations, I have noticed a very
noticeable uptick since 2020 with companies talking and or at least promoting that DEI
is an important topic in their environment. But I question how many of those companies were really
sincere about that. So because you just mentioned about the DEI backlash that you're seeing,
can you talk a little bit about what are the specific backlash examples that you're seeing
and why that is? Yeah. So it's quite a few reasons. We love saying that there's aspiration
and then infrastructure. So a lot of these companies got more aspiration. They aspire to do
better. They aspired and they needed to because consumers were pushing, wanting inclusion,
equity across all business facets. And in the corporate sense, a larger corporate world
across industries, DEI is not a new thing. They've always had diversity officers,
especially on the corporate side, less so on the agency side. There's always been people
like consultants doing diversity, equity, and inclusion work for corporations. What has changed
in 2020 versus what really the difference of 2020 was, is that we couldn't ignore it. We were in the
once in a lifetime era with the pandemic, still are, right? So everybody could see it. Everyone
were talking about what's the solutions. It's hyper visible now with social media where people
can keep individuals accountable. And so there are so many different advances that have placed,
that helped 2020 or us get to a place in 2020 where we could hold companies even more accountable
and they had to push even more money. One last thing is that it was driven by social media,
right? Because all you heard was open your purse. That was a big thing as far as what can companies
do after George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and stuff. And people were saying, open your purse,
invest in companies. And so that's what you saw, right? Because the PR companies who had to deal
with this, who had to deal with corporation responses to George Floyd and Breonna Taylor
had to listen, do social listening to see what people were saying. And because the collective
voice was invest more, do more, we started seeing that. Now we're in a different state. It's three
years later, right? People may have felt like they've done enough or people are doing some
really internal work and not talking about it. So it's two different things. Some people are
pulling back because we're in a macro economic, I'd say uncertainty as they say.
But also you have people who did take heed to saying we need to do some really
deep work and they're doing that. And those are some of our clients, right?
But I think that they could do a better job with saying what they're doing instead of retreating
back into just themselves. So yeah, there are certain people that are still doing it and maybe
retreating into themselves. There are certain other people who are just putting it down,
but that's just a historical kind of movement. This isn't new. I think it's just the advances
have helped us expand even more. There are certain obvious and very
tangible things, tangible actions companies can do to make the workplace more diverse,
多様性とは見えないものもある
more equitable, and more inclusive. Say, pay is one thing. That's a very clear metric.
Is everybody getting the fair compensation across the board? Is there any gap between
compensation? That's one of the tangible things. Another thing that I can think about is the
balance of different types of people in the organization. What are some specific actions
that companies can take to make the workplace more diverse, more equitable, more inclusive?
Yeah, I think that maybe then we could keep in the recruiting conversation. I think that's
the biggest one, not having, not requiring a degree. And what we mean by that is I think
more tangibly, you could assess for competencies, right? You could assess for values. And that's
one thing that we teach in our rethinking hiring course is we really debunk all of the myths that
we hear around people not being able to hire diverse talent. And one of them is that they
have not come from a great program. And maybe it's not even an Ivy League, but a great portfolio
school in the advertising world. And the question is, well, do they fit within the competencies that
we have for the role? And the competencies can be both technical and also values-based so that
you understand if they, not if they're a culture fit, but if they connect to the values of the
company, right? Are they a self-starter? Are they always wanting to be, are they teachable,
I should say, right? Do they want to learn? And is it always on learner in that case?
These are actual things that you can do to assess individuals. Of course, on the technical side,
it's can they do the role? If it's graphic design, that's where you're working with the actual
hiring manager to talk about the technical competencies they need. But I think that's
one of the larger replacements for one, how do we stop hiring people from different
Ivy League institutions, but also implementing a hiring board or committee, which can be of
two or three people, can actually also reduce the chance for bias within hiring too.
So now you have a rubric with competencies that you're using and you're using multiple people
in order to talk to this individual, right? Because if we only have one person
assessing them, even to get to the next phase of the process, then we innately,
it's going to be a chance for bias, right? Because we all hold them. So having a panel allows us to
talk to each other, call each other out about the biases that we may have,
and then choose the best candidate. That was part one of my conversation with Darren
Wesley Martin Jr. and Dr. Rubina Malik of Bold Culture. There were three key takeaways
from this conversation that I like to share with you. Takeaway number one,
diversity is not always visible. Takeaway number two, don't just invite them to the party,
ask them to dance. And number three, calling out versus calling in. First point, diversity
is not always visible is somewhat of an obvious point, but when Darren talked about the flavors
of diversity, it's not just about racial and ethnic background, but it could be socioeconomic
backgrounds and other cultural backgrounds that might not be immediately visible on the surface.
One of the tips and actions that they shared, and they talked about the importance of,
パーティーに招待するだけでは不十分
it's not just about having the conversations with various people, but it's also turning those
conversations into actions. And the thing that we need to be aware of, and particularly in the
corporate and professional environment is what type of people we hire. There's obviously before you
start working, you go through different stages of education. And as I mentioned in the beginning,
affirmative action is going to have a profound impact on the future that we'll be living in.
But also beyond that, as individual professionals and managers, the type of environment that we want
to create can make, even small actions can make a big difference. So for instance,
especially for those of us who might be in the position to hire people, it has been somewhat
natural and somewhat accepted that we look at not people's working background, but also academic
background, and make a decision even before we meet the candidates. And as natural as it might be to
use, say, the academic background as one of the filters to make a decision, we also need to be
aware of, again, especially in the post-affirmative action era, the impact of education and the lack
of access to education can have a very meaningful and very profound influence on the future of
somebody who is going through different types of paths than we might have gone through. And those
things are not immediately visible on the surface, and we need to be paying attention, again, especially
after the post-affirmative action era. So number one, diversity is not always visible.
Takeaway number two, don't just invite them to the party, ask them to dance. This was a comment that
Dr. Malik mentioned, and I have to say that until she brought it up, I don't think I ever thought
about it this way. We may think that just because you invite them to a party, you may feel that
you've done your job or we've done our job to be inclusive and even be equitable. But again,
in order to be equitable, inviting them just to the party may not be enough, but to be truly
equitable and to show and demonstrate equity that we need to ask different types of people to dance
with us. So key takeaway number two, don't just invite them to the party, ask them to dance. I
thought this was a really apt and poignant metaphor that I hadn't heard before, and it was a really
Discomfort and growth
good lesson for me. Takeaway number three, calling out versus calling in. This is an extension of
number two, but they went deeper into educating people around us, especially those of us who are
in the minority group. I'm Japanese by birth, and I belong to the Asian American community in the US,
and we might, whether you are Asian, Black, Latino, Gay, Lesbian, Disabled, different types of
minority that we might belong to, and just because we might not be part of the norm, so to speak,
we might not think that it's good to call people out. And a tip that both Dr. Malik and Darren
gave me was that, you know what, calling out is one thing. We can make people aware of the biases
that they have, but it might be more effective if we, quote-unquote, call them in, meaning that
ask them if they said something hurtful or if they said something offensive, they might be coming
from a certain bias that they might be aware of or might not be aware of, and ask them to
inquire within, call them into searching within themselves why they made those hurtful comments,
even if they didn't mean them. And especially if they didn't mean them, it's important to,
instead of calling them out, it might be more effective to call them in and ask them to look
within themselves and see what caused them to say hurtful things, especially if they didn't intend
to. So just to summarize the takeaways from my conversation with Darren and Dr. Rubina Malik
of Bold Culture, key takeaway number one, diversity is not always visible. Number two,
don't just invite them to the party, ask them to dance. And number three, calling out versus calling
in. This was part one of my conversation with Darren Wesley Martin Jr. and Dr. Rubina Malik
of Bold Culture. In part two, we go into the specifics of D and I, or as Dr. Malik mentioned,
D, I, and B belonging in the communication industry. So stay tuned. I am Ren Inamoto,
and this is The Creative Mindset. See you next time.
