Diversity and globalization: James Sun at TEDxBayArea Ignite

Please join me in welcoming James. Thank you for inviting me here today. It's a pleasure. Normally I talk about mobile technology and technology, but today I will focus on a topic that I am passionate about and very personal:

diversity

in

globalization

. 2012 has been a very interesting year. Lots of records first, we had the hottest year in the US we've ever had on a lighter topic, there was a person called psy who did a song called Kangnam style and no, I'm not going to do that dance here, okay? ? Sorry, I'm not going to do that thing all my Caucasian friends say: can you do that dance?

I go inherently. I do that dance because I'm Korean, but he had 840 million views on YouTube, which is Justin Bieber's record of 804 million in 2010, but more importantly for my topic today, 2012 was also the first time in the U.S. history in which over 50% of newborn babies in the U.S. were from minorities, over 50% of minorities were for the first time in U.S. history now, why is This topic is very personal to me as a high tech CEO because when I grew up in this country I faced racism and discrimination very much in the foreground, not in the background as we see it today, but I grew up in the suburbs of rural areas, not really.

It wouldn't even be the suburbs of Houston and basically back in the early '80s and mid '80s there was a lot of discrimination. I remember some days I would come home and the tires on our cars would be slashed with paint that said, "Go back to your country." some of my teachers who sat me in the back of the room and asked me why my lunch smelled different. I remember this when I was a kid and I was walking with my mom because she wanted to protect me in the neighborhood and other kids were throwing rocks at us.

I remembered it clearly and the reason it impacts me so much is because when I look at the world today I see beauty. I actually see a world that is made up of so many colors, so many dreams, so many inspirations and I feel that my job is to Evangelize my experience so that we can have a better world of

diversity

and

globalization

. In this image you will see a knight. Many of you have probably heard of it. Jeremy Lin. Very good basketball player. He is now in the Rockets' place and on the left hand. On the side you will see Kareem Abdul-Jabbar very, very different, very different, but they still have something in common: they both played in the NBA.

I remember when I was doing tests for the apprentice, this is my last apprentice story and in my year apparently they said 800,000. the applicants applied but I don't know if that's true Donald Trump tends to embellish the numbers, but God bless you Donald and in my year I remember they called me during the entire application process which was six months and invited me to Los Angeles. I got a call from Burnett Studios and said we'd like to include you as one of the 50 finalists who could be on the show and I thought, "I can't believe this is happening because I really tried to come up with a good story for dinner." I thought it would be a fun experience, but they called me and I remember being in Los Angeles and sitting in a room with a group of producers, Los Angeles producers, and we all know what they're like, and they started asking me questions. and the last question I get is James, why should you be on The Apprentice? why should we select you among all these people?

I thought, okay, this is an open question, so what I did was answer the question with a question. I asked him five seasons into The Apprentice how come you've never had an Asian man on the show I go. I know many businessmen who are Asian. How come you've never had one? He looks at me and tells me what we had. a little he looks up he stares at me I couldn't believe the answer says James do you want to know the truth is yes when I heard the truth he said that Asian men are not very good for prime time television so I'm watching him going, you could tell I'm Asian, right, and that brought me back to the experiences of when I was a kid, those feelings came back and I remember looking him straight in the eyes and saying, you know what you can pigeonhole all you want, but let me tell you. "When you are sitting around my table, Asian men are not quiet, they are not background people, we are not just good at math, we can be leaders, we need to help you understand that Asian men are not exactly what you are." I've always thought that and I said it with conviction and he looked at me and said, I believe you, he said, I actually believe you, so my goal in being on that show was to show America and the audience that Asian men are not I'm only good at math and that's why in every task they asked me to be on the math team or computer stuff I said no, no, no, I just want to see the creative.

I intentionally took the initiative to go on that show to show that Asian men can be cutting edge leaders and why am I only talking about Asian men? It's not because we're just watching Jeremy Lin because there's a change happening in this world. Asia is growing. There is Europe, there is the United States, North America, change is happening all around us. This audience today and I see so many changes in diversity is something that is happening even in Donald Trump's pageant system in the past, women didn't even want them to refuse to wear swimsuits in the pageant and then you look at this picture and obviously, she's wearing a very, very skimpy outfit, so change happens, whether we like it or not, in all areas, the last one here change happens.

Donald Trump is grooming his daughter now for her to really take control and in the early days of Donald Trump, he would never have thought of that change. it's happening in a big way right in front of us and it's about the collision of diversity and globalization, well you probably already know it by diversity, probably a lot of executives here or HR or someone has thought about diversity and inclusion , have you heard that you believe the female age. race religion a retention why Generation something deeper. I'm going to do a quick little test to wake myself up, first question, how many colors are in a Rubik's cube?

Only six, so six heads. Okay, we're off to a good start. How about how many individual faces are there in a Rubik's Cube? Individual faces, so there are nine in each phase. 654 right, how about the last question? How many combinations are there in a Rubik's cube? Any math requests here? What is an assumption? What is an assumption? 54 x oh, okay, you're so good, that's 43 quintillion every time I asked this question to a lot of people. Let's say one hundred thousand two hundred thousand, in reality it is 43 quintillion. Have you ever imagined that an eight-year-old could decipher a Rubik's cube?

When you think that there are 43 quintillion outcomes that could happen, that's a lot, so the question is how do we see the world, how do we see the world? Do we want to simplify things to just race and age or do we see combinations like this gentleman's? Can we really move our society in that direction in our workforce in our churches in our communities? you see the world today even with so many combinations one thing I have seen is that the world is getting smaller eighty sorry two years ago I had a very very interesting opportunity with the BBC they asked me to take 18 months break from my life and they asked me to do a TV show around the world and basically what I did was help entrepreneurs and companies in 13 different countries turn their businesses around in 18 months and they filmed the whole thing and created a show called war. on a business trip, so I was the presenter.

Well, I came in and helped the entrepreneur, not on a high level, but on a deep level. I learned a lot from doing this program because I spent four months in Mumbai. I was able to spend time in Singapore, Shanghai. Beijing Melbourne around the world for 18 months of traveling and I learned that the world is definitely getting smaller every time you go to these countries, everyone speaks English, most countries now speak English, so the world becomes smaller. An email just one click away. I could communicate with someone in another country or many countries with a single click, but I also saw that as the ocean becomes wider due to technology, we can scale much further in our communication;

It's actually getting deeper - there are complexities in our lives that I saw being in the different countries, whether at a micro or macro level, when you look at a company in Mumbai versus Melbourne, you treat it exactly the same, if your consultant and you They come in, you treat her exactly the same, you're going to fail. one of them absolutely you will, so what's happening is that in business, not just in business but also in consumers, we are going broader because we can all communicate, we have technology, but we are actually going deeper, So marketers have a big challenge ahead of them.

I have to figure out how to segment this market properly because we marketers want us to be just one big group because it's cheap, so their dilemma was they came up with this segmentation strategy. There are behaviors, those demographics, geography, and psychographics, which is what marketers typically do. an opportunity to spend time with P&G Procter and Gamble with some of their marketing team executives and we talked about diversity not as an internal policy but as an external mechanism or strategy for consumer groups. Procter & Gamble is thinking about this the right way. We're not looking at all consumers and saying this is how we're lumped into one category, but you see we have different aspects, but this is just a we, let me overlay globalization on top of this, so now what happens when we're a country with 37% minorities in the US and now companies are doing business globally and also attracting employees globally, so it becomes very, very complex.

I will tell you a story that I took a friend to a Korean. I am Korean. I told him. When we go to eat, make sure you eat everything they serve you, don't leave anything because it's rude, everything goes well, it's an Asian thing, right, I'm doing well, it's a Korean thing, and that's how we go and he abides very well at every dinner. We went and in the houses of nice people, he ate everything on the plate and it was cordial, it's perfect, then we go to Beijing. I forgot to have another conversation with him, so we go to someone's house and he keeps eating everything I could.

Tell him he's being really silly but he keeps eating everything and the host says, "Oh my God, I feel bad because in China you want to have plenty of food, so the host wants it to be okay to have leftovers, you're supposed to do that." We're not supposed to eat everything, but he kept eating and eating and eating and I forgot to have that conversation with them. Globalization is complex, it makes things more complex, but we have to accept it because it is real. So, understanding diversity is understanding the complexities of being human. global consumer intelligence and behavior if we want to understand how the world works we have to accept diversity even in our own country.

In fact, I think the United States is very well positioned to not only dominate globally like we are, but even more so because we are a melting pot, we can actually focus on group testing here, we have the Vietnamese community, we have the Hispanic community, we have it right here so we might test it here before we release it to different markets it's a great place to be we're in the middle there's an interesting study that was done by Cornell University and this has more to do with corporations . Here they did a study for Fortune 1000 companies.

They had looked at the correlation between financial performance and diversity at the senior level. They took 25 of these high-paying people and asked them if they had anyone who was diverse and built this model to look at what the financial return on diversity is and Procter & Gamble asked me this all the time. The interesting thing is that I wish I could tell you an optimistic story and tell you that yes, there is always a return on investment from having a diverse executive management team; however, you will see on the left side that it is less diverse in leadership and you can see that it actually went down as they included more diverse leaders it actually went down, however, what happened is that over time when you add more diversity in the 25 percent tipping point, look at the results, astronaut guys, astronomically taller, so diversity works and there is an opportunity, but the bottom line is that you have To be consistent over time you can't expect something really fast just by having the status quo, you have to accept it as differences of opinion that really produce a better result.

Global executives and entrepreneurs must view diversity beyond the internal to the external, it is not about policies. It's about the market, how to grow your business because of theglobalization, here's a quick slide, what do you see? Do you see a man with a tattoo holding a baby or do you see a loving father? We all have perceptions. What about this one? What do you see? Here this is more acceptable to us compared to this. Because? Because we have inherent biases and in order for us to have this utopian society of true diversity we have to get rid of our inherent biases and we all have them, in fact, they start.

At three months, when you take 36 babies, they did a study and put them in three groups: one group was African American babies with African Americans, another group was Caucasian with Caucasian parents, the other group was African American babies with mixed parents and when they look at these children, what happened was that when you put pictures of them, the Caucasian babies who grew up with Caucasian parents will look at the Caucasian pictures, 60% more than the African American babies who were with African American parents will look at him. 30% more but mixed babies would be the same they will be exactly the same we have inherent biases that start when we are a small child and we have to recognize that and see how we can be more diverse in our own hearts and in our own thinking so that the world is not made up of only for Sally or Bob, but for all of us. different shapes sizes colors and that's what makes this world beautiful in my mind so I take the pain that I had as a child and today I'm trying to use it as an evangelism tool to say that we can have a more beautiful society if no Don't treat it as something simple, it's not something simple, it doesn't happen in a day, but it happens over time and when we accept the complexities of what diversity is, thank you.