‘Time To Act’ Podcast Ep. 4: Why It’s Important To Have Diversity Roles In Leadership

John Rogers, Ariel Investments co-CEO, CIO and chairman Conversations around diversity and inclusion can be uncomfortable — particularly in the workplace. He’s the co-CEO, chief investment officer and chairman of Ariel investments, one of the largest minority-owned mutual funds in the U.S. He’s also a pioneer for diversity and inclusion in the financial services sector. The other thing we do when we talk to our management teams — we were on the call today with the head of diversity of a large publicly traded company today saying, “We want to talk to you about are you doing business with minority-owned companies and making sure you’re doing business in all aspects of our economy — professional services, financial services, technology — along with the supply chain decisions?“ And that’s kind of a different conversation. If you only do business with companies that are majority-owned — people you’ve done business with for 40 or 50, 60 years, when African Americans weren’t allowed to compete in those sectors — the wealth gap’s going to get larger if you make economic decisions to only work with majority-owned businesses. The second way that we create pipeline, which I think is often lost, is that at a firm like Ariel — you know, you try not to talk about yourself, but you know — we’ve been around 37 years, and if we look at many of the financial services leaders in Chicago, we have been the pipeline for that talent.