very experiences that
get us to the place that
we are, and we have to
respect that not all of us
have unique experiences.
LESSON 7
THOMAS: I can remember, and
I’ve been in this space for a while,
when it was about assimilating.
You bring all the people and all the
differences and bring them to the
Bank of America and you assimilate them into the Bank of America. Several years back, the focus
changed. It’s not about assimilation because when
you bring in the assimilation, then you lose the
LESSON 6
LESSON 5
LESSON 4
LESSON 3
LESSON 2
LESSON 1
value of the differences.
You need the innovation, we need
the approach to problems, we need
the thoughts that come from wherever you are to help us make better
decisions, bring better products
to market, make better business
decisions.
REDIA ANDERSON BANKS: Look
at the progress we’re making on
a number of fronts, and yet there
is still a level of ignorance around
some key human-relations issues
that we can’t seem to get over. You
can go back as far as the oldest
known book and there are issues
within that book that we’re still
dealing with today. It strengthened
my resolve in terms of thinking
about diversity, and particularly inclusion, the whole concept of being
inclusive of persons with different
thinking styles, communication
styles and perspectives—which is
really important in our business,
being a professional-services organization, because we don’t have
a product, we provide a service to
our clients. We are providing innovative ideas or solving problems
for them.
DIVERSITY
IS PERSONAL
BUCHERATI: Before I came into
this job, I was sort of sitting out
there in left field viewing it with
that view of “This really can’t be
that hard to do.” What I found as I
talked to people around the subject
was that everybody had their own
personal definition around it. You
couldn’t have a really solid conversation because everybody
thought they were
talking about the same thing
and they were really
talking about something
different. That meant really
having to change my whole mindset. Because everybody had their
own personal definition of success,
you had to think about everything in very personal terms. You
couldn’t think about it in terms of
the group, the company; you had
to remember everything
about an individual, and
what it meant to him or
her. That was probably the most
significant early learning for me
around this, having been on the
outside looking in and thinking
this has got to be pretty easy to do,
I’m sure, and learning it was very,
very different.
