 Welcome, everyone. I'm Herminia Ibarra, Professor of Organizational Behavior at the London Business School, and our sessions this afternoon is part of the jobs reset summit, applied from for bringing together leaders across all sectors to address the big questions of the day concerning growth, jobs, skills and equity, the ideas to create solutions together and to really accelerate action towards more inclusive fair and sustainable workplaces societies and organizations. Our theme for today, which is the fourth and final day is equity, inclusion and social justice. So with today's discussions we really want to try to get at how the current disruption in the economy in labor markets can be leveraged to embed greater social justice and ensure greater opportunity for all. Our panel is about developing leaders for this great reset. We have a fabulous panel with Vijay Eswaran, Executive Chairman of QI Group in Malaysia. Jill Aider, Chairwoman of Egon Center in the UK. Brian Gallagher, President and CEO United Way Worldwide in the US, and Karen Van Bergen, Dean of Omnicon University and Executive Vice President of the Omnicon Group. Just to give you a flow of the session, we're going to be spending approximately the next 25 minutes or so in discussion with the panelists at 30 minutes into the session. We're going to be concluding the live stream portion and move into 15 minutes of Q&A with the top link participants. Before we begin, I just want to say we'd love your comments and questions from the top link audience and you can write those into the chat box. And I'm going to get us started interactively with a poll. The poll is this, which of the following characteristics and you can pick your top two. Do you expect from a leader? Decisive, empathetic, collaborative, transparent, persuasive, or something else. Great. Very interesting. So empathetic gets the top votes, followed by decisive, transparent, collaborative, persuasive less and it looks like we got the good, the good adjectives in that not many people have written some other ones. So fantastic. And that is a good jumping board for asking my first question of the panel. Thank you, Jill Aider. Jill, given your line of work, I really like your sense of what leadership competencies do we need these days to navigate, you know, everything all the consequences of the pandemic including the fact that our workplaces are changing including that they're moving towards a more hybrid way of working what kind of leadership is needed in this context. I think it's about navigating with very human answers. I think that's what I'd first say. I think we're seeing an incredible melting pot of everything that is hitting us in this pandemic. And what that is causing is a meltdown of some leaders, whereas others are rising to the occasion and shining so I think what we're going to see is more demand for leaders and less supply. That's what we're already seeing. The hard stuff continues, you know, hard and inverted commas continues to be really important. So resilience, delivering results, performance, all very important. But actually what's coming to the fall is the importance of the soft stuff, which is really hard. So that's the human factors, the care, the compassion, the trust. And I think overall I'd say that people have got to leaders have got to look at what's the psychological safety and trust that I'm generating now and engage every one of their actions and behaviors by by looking at that psychological safety and trust. So we see three or four shifts going on one is from invincibility, and I agree people have to be decisive but not recklessly decisive. So it's actually going from invincibility to vulnerability or humility, however you like to talk about it. Because leaders don't know all the answers now and people have to feel engaged. And they have to be able to talk about their fears. The second one is leaders are typically extremely busy doing and knowing a lot. And this shift is about being the leader. Because in a crisis people in the organization want to know and feel the essence and reassurance of their leaders, not see them heads down. The third one is purpose and values if you can anchor in purpose and values, then literally you're giving people the reason to carry on working so hard and be collaborative to miss out on the purpose is literally missing the point. And the fourth one is is really about. Are you really taking into account everything that's so important now that society expects or what's your license to operate on diversity, equity and inclusion on sustainability, stakeholder management. So we're looking at leaders we're looking at, yes what's their experience but we're looking at that potential, and the biggest driver of potential is curious. And that's that that's so important at the moment. So we look at potential, and actually have been a your work on identity is bottom, because what we see is those leaders who have been able to make the identity shift and move from stuckness or being a crisis into knowing they are holding an organization and breathing life and safety into an organization or whatever their version of that is. That makes a huge difference. So when we're coaching CEOs we're looking at their cognitive awareness, their emotional awareness, and also their somatic awareness you know how they're bringing that to life and that aura, just the spirit and essence that they give off. So those are the things that we're looking at it's definitely the hard stuff of resilience and performance, but you can't just perform. It's about transforming otherwise your organization can't transform. It is a massive shift from some of the ways of operating before and I was curious as you were saying that there is rising demand and less supply is part of the difficulty of making those transitions and making those shifts. And that are really a kind of what got you here won't get you there situation that a lot of the old skills no longer seem to apply. Exactly. And also the shortage of supply will continue unless leaders really invest in their own development, even though that that incredibly busy at the moment that development is so important. All right. Vijay, if we could have your take on the poll. And I know you're also eager to share with us some of your ideas about stakeholder capitalism and what that means for investing in a better future and in reset. I find the poll to be fascinating. I think that leaders are going to, in essence, need a little bit of all these attributes, but I'm a strong believer in decisive leadership. Empathy would be a very powerful selling point for a leader understanding the people that he leads is fundamentally the basis of good leadership. Integrity, something that's not there is something that I would have added on because I think that's really what we lack in terms of leaders today because leaders today. In essence, out for themselves more than anything else. And survival of the fittest doesn't really fit into the aspect of leadership that I would subscribe to. So having said that the issue would be the worst combination there would be in essence to be decisive. And at the same time persuasive, then you're hitting into the region of some of the worst dictatorships that we have had, you know, going all the way back to Hitler himself. So, I would think that the leaders of today, particularly this that are going to be coming into this new norm, so to speak, have to understand and relate to the people that they're leading with. And being decisive is something that's critically important because they're not going to make right decisions. Right decisions actually is something that you work your way towards. You know, in the first decision you make may not be right and usually is not right. So the point is to keep working until eventually you get the decision right. But honest leadership requires you to admit and deal with the mistakes that you're going to make. And I think you would get a lot more out of the people that you're leading if you are pretty much honest in the fact that you can make mistakes. I would rather have a leader that recognizes that than one who thinks is infallible. Thank you so much for leadership moving into investor. Sorry, a stakeholder capitalism. I was a product of an era where Milton Friedman, in essence, you know, built this whole concept of shareholder capitalism and shareholder capitalism resulted in Wall Street going in a sense, dessert. In the last few decades, an example of capitalism has taken on, in essence, a new form. I would imagine that picking the caucus of companies and turning them apart just in order to make profits over the years has become a lifestyle. And so I imagine at some point they're going to have to, if we continue to shareholder capitalism, then that bull that's up there in Wall Street needs to become a vulture. Having said that, moving on to what I think is critically important right now is the fact that stakeholder capitalism requires us to be aware of the other stakeholders in everything that we do, which includes your employees for a start, you know, and that's a very important start because it's people that are going to make the difference moving ahead. We need to basically upscale them and upscale them. We have to prepare them for the new norm moving ahead. And many of them are going to be out of a job, phenomenally so. And we're going to have to recognize that the most important element is to retool and upscale and upscale moving ahead, because that's really the norm that we are heading into. And faster we get things done, the faster we are able to adjust to the new norm. In terms of the company, QI, we are a e-commerce based platform and we are scattered across four continents and we have close to 15 million people in the database. So we need to be in constant engagement. So the empathetic part of leadership is very critical. If we were able to turn around during this time, it was primarily due to the engagement. So market feedback is a critical component, both online feedback and offline feedback. And because we have a composition of web direct sales and e-commerce is the platforms that we use to basically do business across the world. Both of these, the online and offline feedback systems were critical in us re-engineering, redesigning, and in essence redesigning the wheel as it was. So we had to do this on the move, on the fly. And fortunately, we were able to actually survive if not to some extent begin to thrive in the midst of this pandemic. In fact, just make a connection across the two. And this is a word that hasn't actually really come up yet, but it has to do with learning and a learning orientation. You've talked a lot, Vijay, about mistakes and that's the world we're in. And if you're also working on market feedback, this is an iterate and learn kind of approach and not an invincibility. We get it right at the outset kind of approach. And there's a direct link to the psychological safety Jill's been talking about. The research on that is very clearly from Amy Edmondson. You frame for learning. You don't frame for getting it right at the outset. You frame for learning. You make a shift from being what Satya Nadella called know-it-alls to learn-it-alls. And I'm already seeing that as a strong theme across our comments. I'd like to turn next to Brian. Brian, you've got some examples for us of some innovative leadership practices that you're seeing help build resilience in this context. Can you share a bit of that with us, please? Sure. Let me first say that kind of building on Vijay and Jill's comments. I think the leadership and the reset has to begin and be centered in rebuilding trust. Trust in institutions across the world, for sure government institutions, businesses, even NGOs, media have been crushed over the last number of years. Inequality has been a big issue in the across the world. There's a question of globalism and am I benefiting by all this economic activity or is it some narrow portion of leaders that are benefiting? So we've got to begin with thinking about trust. The societies in the countries that have the highest trust numbers have the lowest inequality and then have a sense of collective purpose. And so the examples really for me center there. You know, secondly, and to the point of the examples I want to bring forward, once you focus on trust, the way to sustain it is to focus on people designed systems. You know, the pandemic and the economic fallout has laid bare in many countries, certainly here in the US, that our systems have failed. And that you can have a healthcare system that's high quality efficient just in time, but is a horrible response in a public health crisis. And so, putting people first and the way people define their success is personal safety, economic security, I don't want to get rich I just want to be able to sustain myself and my family, a sense of purpose. If you don't have a sense of purpose. You drift, and then connecting to something larger in community, and if you're not connected to something larger, you're going to find yourself radicalized or off the off the economic track and become a drag on society not a contributor. A couple of examples. Mark Benny off the founder of Salesforce, headquartered in San Francisco here in the US, San Francisco like a lot of cities in the US has a huge homelessness issue. And, you know, the leadership that Mark showed was being supportive of a tax referendum to tax businesses more in order to provide more support services to people who are chronically homeless. That's putting people first, you know there's an economic interest for Salesforce and businesses in San Francisco. But for a corporate leader to say we should be tax more to provide more services to folks who are homeless on the street is the kind of leadership an example that I think builds trust and confidence. We visited a number of countries the last, you know, starting two years ago looking at migration patterns and I can't get into all of them but I think what German Chancellor Merkel has done, and her government did and has done in terms of dealing with the refugee crisis is an example of unbelievable leadership. That was a political risk to accept that number of refugees from the from the Middle East, mostly Syria. And when you visit into in Germany to see how they're trying to integrate these new refugees into society. It's universities, it's businesses, it's NGO, it's government, and it's making sure that that these new refugees becomes become part of German society. So it was a huge, I think, unbelievable example of the kind of leadership that we need going forward. In both Mark's case, and in the Chancellor's case they took huge risk, got outside their comfort zone, and went across sectors last thing I would say is, everything has to, it's not surprising to me that the poll would say collaborative. The, everything has to be cross sector now it has to be around inclusiveness if you're not focused on your employees on your citizens on your customers and building the systems from for them, and not for you as leaders. Long term will fail. Last last thing I would say is, this can't be short term. You know the great reset is not going to happen in 60 days. It's going to be the great reset and the great rebuild and in order to rebuild differently we've got to reimagine the future, and it can't be a race to the bottom it has to be an imagination to something different. Thank you Brian I'm hearing one very clear indicator towards action and that is to both get higher trust and a greater sense of collective purpose action against or towards lowering inequality is probably a best bet for a leader. Karen I want to turn to you next I don't know if you'd like to comment on the poll, but I particularly want to ask you a follow on on this which is how can we ensure equity and inclusion remain front and center in this time of crisis when it can be so tempting to say this is not of the essence we've got to get things better before we can focus on those luxury items. Yeah I know with regard to the poll, I was definitely the decisive empathetic and I wanted to add collaborative but I wasn't allowed to do a third one. I love the integrity as well that VJ said, and I think if Brian already alluded to it. If the current crisis had made one thing crystal clear is that the lack of equity has had a devastating impact on the global population. And therefore in this time of crisis there are two arguments to double down on on addressing equity. The first one is a moral one. Because of that devastating impact companies the private sector is able to have such a positive impact on the communities in which it operates that we need to really really continue to to support any initiatives for for equity for a moral obligation. But there's also there's overwhelming evidence that it makes total strategic business sense that when you have diversity which cannot exist without equity and inclusion that you come to better business solutions and better long term business impact. So, and I would say now more than ever and and Brian again alluded to it already how a company shows up in this time of crisis will have a long lasting impact on its stakeholders. Current employees future employees consumers. Anybody else who's a stakeholder in your company so you have to think about the actions you take. And there are companies that have stepped up and personally you know I work for Omnicom. I was incredibly proud of our company that in July, our CEO stepped up our efforts on diversity equity and inclusion and and published a. We call it open 2.0 plan that has seven very concrete action points to create systemic equity across Omnicom and and the most important one is that he laid out accountability up to the highest level himself. And I think that's how we that's how we need to operate in a time of crisis. And we've also doubled down on our support for the UN sustainability goals and we've always been concentrating on education and I am a passionate believer that if you don't address education, you cannot address equality and equity so you know as Sonya Sotomayor the Supreme Court judge once said until we get equality in education, we won't have an equal society. So I think all of us need to double down in this time of crisis. I love the fact that that we can talk to each other share best practices and continue to learn because we haven't found the solution yet so we need to share best practices and be accountable to each other. And I ask you follow on just specifically, you know just recently, I have been reading just a spade of different studies coming out just showing how a lot of the things we try to do in organizations to somehow fix or mitigate the problem of inequality of diversity and inclusion just don't work. You know at the same time we've got this crisis here that has mobilized us in so many ways you know look at all we can do online that we never thought possible, what becomes possible as a result of this crisis that can have better chances of getting the kind of impact we've been trying to achieve for so long. So I would say the transparency, I would say that talking to each other, being very open about what works and what doesn't work and take you know really take accountability for the role we can play. There is, again yes it's easy to say well we shouldn't do trainings etc. I think we should do and and we should do we should keep doing the trainings that have a positive impact. But I think I am a firm believer in sharing best practices between companies and organizations and talk talking to each other, and then engage all your stakeholders in that discussion and first and foremost your own employees. We have a few minutes to just kind of talk across and to each other that lots of really interesting inputs that really keep bringing me back to the question of how we learn from each other and how we learn from the different sectors, and how we not assume that we're going to get it right at the And just kind of practice an approach in which we get better at learning. Anybody want to jump in and add to this and also the transparency wasn't at the top of the list but I see that also coming in as a really important factor in trust in learning. What can we add especially around examples of what's bringing these new leadership models to life. Yeah, go ahead. I was just going to say being very honest with ourselves about what are the stories we tell ourselves, both as individuals and as companies, because sometimes we tell ourselves things I was talking to a CEO this morning where we've just done a very diverse search for him. And I said did you make any compromise and he said no but you know so many people tell me that there isn't diversity out there. You know, we tell ourselves stories. And I think we have to be really curious about those stories. What I was going to what I was going to say is, in terms of learning as a discipline. I'm not sure we know right now how we create knowledge in this, in this time. You know, so we have the, we have the historic. I don't mean academic is in terms of scholarly academic but it kind of a, a disciplined event, learn, event, learn, but we live in a just in time exchange of information and artificial intelligence that is breakneck speed, giving us input as leaders as citizens. And we're not sure we my guess is that the way we've created knowledge historically is too slow. And the way that we're exchanging information and quote learning is really not knowledge quite often. It's just exchange of information. So the question becomes, I think, how do we, how do we create disciplines to exchange in real time with large numbers of stakeholders in order to create an understanding and knowledge. So if you look at, I was in a, I was in a meeting recently with mayors of large cities across the world, and they're using digital technology to allow their citizens to talk to them in real time, and to watch patterns of behavior, so they can change trash pickup or, or, you know, mass transit rooting and so forth. It's that's knowledge and this idea that we can sit together and tell you what we did eight months ago for you then to learn to then do something eight months later is just not the way the world works today. For example, I'm going to turn to VJ quickly we're not going to need to wrap up this portion in about a minute and a half, and I'd like to get a few last words from VJ and from Karen. Well, in terms of diversity, it's important to remember that both in terms of our workplace, as in terms of employees as well as customers. The tremendous changes actually occurred right now. And that's simply the fact that we have to deal with the millennials. We have to deal with the centennials and now the gen alphas and all of that. And these people are the people are inheriting all of these issues that we have, you know, encountered up to now. And they're thinking styles and difference is something that's very important to take into account, because they are different. I'm going to go to Karen with our last couple of minutes but I think you're saying VJ we've got a lot of material to work with out there. Karen, please. Yeah, no, I firmly believe in that learning culture and the focus on education and whatever the private sector can do to work to help there. And as Brian said, the way we're working virtually now will enable that faster learning and sharing best practices. Fantastic. Thank you so much to our panelists and for our public.