58. The groundbreaking, impactful work of The Partnership

10/03/23 • 36 min

Pratt Wiley is the CEO of the Partnership, a 35 year old organization whose mission is to provide leadership development for professionals and executives of color across every stage of a professional's career life cycle. In this episode we will hear about the incredibly impactful work The Partnership has done, and continues to do, to change the lives of many talented people – and the communities in which we live.

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Big Ideas/Thoughts/Quotes

The Partnership provides leadership development for professionals and executives of color across every stage of a professional's career life cycle.

We work with companies and organizations to help craft and influence corporate culture, which is what we believe is truly the most important competitive advantage that an organization can have.

We focus on what we call community - - being very intentional creating relationships of peers and mentors and sponsors and advocates, who are important for both professional advancement as well as personal fulfillment.

BoardLink

BoardLink started with nonprofits knocking on our door asking us if we had any board candidates that we could share with them. They were looking to diversify their board, but they weren't sufficiently connected to networks to be able to identify and recruit diverse talent themselves, and so that's what BoardLink is.

It is taking these networks of incredibly talented and accomplished executives of color and connecting them with organizations, nonprofits and for-profits that are looking for great board candidates and especially those who are people of color.

Impact

The Partnership was formed in 1987, since then 35 years of programs and 6,500 alumni who have gone through those programs, and you'd be hard pressed to find a prominent leader of color in Massachusetts - in a lot of corporate spaces - who aren't either a graduate of our program or one of the folks who helped create it in the first place.

There are a number of ways that we measure impact. The easiest to measure - probably one end of the spectrum - is retention and advancement.

We don't want to look at these programs as golden handcuffs, and so our folks advancing professionally is another piece of data that we look at, and we have similar numbers there.

Our alumni are CEOs and Chief Justices. They're entrepreneurs. They're leading Fortune 100 companies. They are leaders in healthcare and consumer products and financial services

To an extent the real value of an organization like The Partnership, that thing that we can provide that no one else provides, is this safe space that can serve as a safety net for so many of our participants that both catches you when you fall, but even more so encourages you to take greater risks knowing that there is that support system behind you.

Family Impact

My mother took over The Partnership after it had been in existence for about three or four years. There had not been a proof of concept in terms of, is this an economically viable organization. It was on the verge of bankruptcy. It was a moment not too dissimilar from this one where you had corporate leaders who were saying, "You know, we've tried this for a couple of years, and now it's time for us to move on to something else."

My sister and I still remember that it might not have been her first day, but it was one of her first days. She picked us up from school and then we went back to the office, and I started unpacking boxes and putting files away in the cabinet and I joked that The Partnership really was built on child labor for a number of years.

When I moved back to Boston I had this weird existence where not a week would go by where someone wouldn't stop me on the street and say, "I went through The Partnership when your mom was running it, and it changed my life."

"I was at this crossroads in my career and your mom had coffee with me and she helped me see the direction that I should take."

"I had gone through a major setback and your mom, or my dad as well, they were the ones who picked up the phone and called so-and-so and said, 'Hey, I've got a great candidate for you.'"

Impact of the Pandemic

Prior to the pandemic, the first 30-plus years of our existence, our programs were always in a physical location. By the time I took over, we would be hosted by many of our client companies. Starting in 2020, we could no longer do that, and so everything moved onto Zoom - - and I had never heard of Zoom before.

I sent an email to my board letting them know that we were going to be working remotely for the next couple of weeks as the pandemic sort of runs its course. One of my board members is Tsedal Neeley, a professor at Harvard Business School, and one of her...

We love our listeners! Drop us a line or give us guest suggestions here.

Big Ideas/Thoughts/Quotes

The Partnership provides leadership development for professionals and executives of color across every stage of a professional's career life cycle.

We work with companies and organizations to help craft and influence corporate culture, which is what we believe is truly the most important competitive advantage that an organization can have.

BoardLink

Impact

There are a number of ways that we measure impact. The easiest to measure - probably one end of the spectrum - is retention and advancement.

We don't want to look at these programs as golden handcuffs, and so our folks advancing professionally is another piece of data that we look at, and we have similar numbers there.

Our alumni are CEOs and Chief Justices. They're entrepreneurs. They're leading Fortune 100 companies. They are leaders in healthcare and consumer products and financial services

Family Impact

"I was at this crossroads in my career and your mom had coffee with me and she helped me see the direction that I should take."

"I had gone through a major setback and your mom, or my dad as well, they were the ones who picked up the phone and called so-and-so and said, 'Hey, I've got a great candidate for you.'"

Impact of the Pandemic

Previous Episode

57. What questions boards should be asking about AI

Ham is an active long-time member of the Boston entrepreneurial community, a seasoned board members, a prolific author on the subject of boards/governance and the founder of the Launchpad Venture Group, one of the driving forces behind organized angel investing in the United States.

In this episode Ham, we discuss many areas of board practice with someone that for many years has helped and written about how to make boards better.

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Big Ideas/Thoughts/Quotes:

Board questions around AI: What are the strategic objectives of the company, what are the business problems and the opportunities that that company should be going after. Three questions to begin:

1. What specific business problems or opportunities do you plan to address with AI?

And how do you anticipate that AI is going to help the company achieve its strategic objectives? It's all great to have tools like AI, but if they're not fundamentally driving the business in a direction that helps you achieve those strategic objectives, why bother?

2. How will you manage the ethical and legal implications of using AI, such as bias, discrimination, and compliance with regulations and industry standards?

AI tools where they haven't been trained on a wide enough data sets, they haven't had enough experience, nor have the users of it have enough experience to understand whether they're going down a path that might lead to issues down the road.

3. How will you communicate the use of AI to your stakeholders, and that includes employees, customers, investors, and regulators. And how will you address the concerns about the use of AI?

“There's not time for this in every board meeting, but a board should have at least one or two strategic sessions a year that are focused on technology.”

“When you think about a financial institution, a healthcare institution, they have a lot of data that is extremely sensitive; personal data, healthcare data, financial data. You don't want that escaping out into the world by using one of these tools that you don't necessarily know what it's going to do with that data.”

One of the biggest concerns is that sort of bias and discrimination that can occur with AI tools where they haven't been trained on a wide enough data sets, they haven't had enough experience, nor have the users of it have enough experience to understand whether they're going down a path that might lead to issues down the road.

even if you don't get the full effect, it's important to get it right so that as you go forward, you've identified any issues that might exist, whether it's bias, discrimination, or something else before it's everywhere, which will make it more difficult to control at that point.

Whether you need to explain that AI is, for example, reading your medical scan, your MRI or your CT, or whether you need to explain to your customers that an AI is either giving you a thumbs up or a thumbs down on we're giving you a mortgage or whatever. I think that's going to be a more challenging question about how you communicate that- I don't think there's necessarily a good answer for that today

I do want to say one thing about all three of these questions that I've asked, they are questions that you should be asking of the chief technology people in the organization, not just the CTO because the CTO may or may not be the one who is most expert in these particular areas

Raza, what do you think about having an AI board member?

I think a copilot, an assistive technology, is definitely a very interesting thing for boards. It can make them more effective. It is possible that you have a large set of materials and going through those, you do miss things as a human, but an automated process and AI could definitely come up with more. This is a really great idea for a startup, and I think somebody will do it.

Note: All of the board questions generated by ChatGPT about AI are listed below

Board of Cambridge Trust

I was brought onto the board specifically to address one of the new strategic areas that Cambridge Trust wanted to go in. Massachusetts has a very high concentration of companies in sort of the innovation economy, startup tech, and life science companies. It was seen by corporate management at Cambridge Trust that this would be a good area for growth within the bank.

Most tech startups are losing money and most banks don't like to loan money to organizations that are losing money, so I had to explain what kinds of companies that, even though they might be losing money, would have good solid financials that would make it so that they could be the type of institution that you would give a loan to.

Lead Director

In our case, the lead director has several key roles.

One, the lea...

Next Episode

59. What do you do when your board receives a subpoena or the government is investigating your company?

Ian Roffman advises boards, directors and company executives when there is trouble - a government subpoena, a whistleblower complaint, a letter or a phone call from a government regulator. In this episode we talk about what a board and management should do when this happens - and how they can position themselves in advance for an inquiry by the government.

Big Ideas/Thoughts/Quotes:

Our guest Ian Roffman helps boards, directors and company executives when they're facing what can be a significant moment in the existence of a company. Those moments can come upon the receipt of a government subpoena, a whistleblower complaint or even something as seemingly innocuous as a letter or a phone call from a government regulator. Ian comes in to help the boards, help individual directors and help executives as they make their way through those sometimes sticky periods.

One of the most important things a company or a board can do when there is a government inquiry is to try to get its arms around the issue as soon as possible. There's a balance that boards need to strike between speed and hastiness. You want to act quickly, but not at the expense of good judgment.

The desire to ignore or push off bad news can be pretty strong, but directors have a duty to think about the steps that they need to take to reasonably make sure that they're fulfilling their duty to shareholders, employees and all of their relevant constituencies.

The SEC has said that there are the four benchmarks they will look at to evaluate whether a company and its board are good corporate citizens:

1. Self-policing (did you have in place good internal controls? Did you have a good risk function? Did you have an internal audit function, etc.?)

2. Self-reporting (was there transparency and speed in the reporting of the issue?)

3. Remediation (whatever the problem was, did you fix it?)

4. Cooperation (when we asked you for documents, did you give them to us? Did you also give us the documents that we didn't know to ask for? The SEC is very clear that cooperation doesn't just mean you did the things you're required to do. It means you did something extra.)

Even though other regulators don't use that same nomenclature, the concepts are always the same.

Question: When you get there and you see that there has been some, let's call it, avoidance or cover up, what kinds of things do you tell them to do then?

Answer. Often it comes from a really good place, which is that people see a problem and they try to fix it. Where it becomes a "cover up" rather than a solution is if there's a lack of transparency. Really, the key, when you identify a problem, is whether you're trying to fix it secretly versus trying to fix it transparently, and the fix might be identical, but a secret fix is a problem and a transparent fix is a solution.

Transparency and collaboration within an organization are among the most powerful things that companies can do to put themselves in a position to deal with regulatory inquiries.

Directors’ Duty of Oversight. The Marchand decision (2019) is sort of “Caremark duties on steroids.” The case involved the Blue Bell Ice Cream Company, which had a Listeria outbreak in its ice cream. The directors were sued, with a dereliction-of-duty-type theory. The Delaware Supreme Court said that directors have an active duty to oversee the operations of the company, especially when it comes to areas of significant risk within the important areas of the company's operations. In that instance, it was food safety. The director’s duty described in Marchand is much more active than what many boards had expected.

Whistleblowers. It's in the company's best interest to take a whistleblower complaint seriously - so listen to what it is, look into it. If there's something to it, deal with it. If there's nothing to it, make clear to the government that there's nothing to it, but do not be dismissive of your duty.

Insider trading. Insider trading investigations can be incredibly invasive because when the government is looking to see if someone engaged in insider trading, they know that people communicate on their phones and through WhatsApp, WeChat, Slack, Telegram, Snapchat and all those other apps, and so the government is going to go in and they will take your devices. They will require you to image your devices. They'll get forensic images of your device. It is incredibly invasive, and so what a company ought to do is manage its investigative risk around insider trading.