Rick Weddle (Site Selectors Guild): Welcome to Site Selection Matters where we take a close look at the art and science of site selection decision-making. I’m your host, Rick Weddle, president of Site Selectors Guild. In each episode, we introduce you to leaders in the world of corporate site selection and economic development. We speak with members of the Site Selectors Guild, our economic development partners, and corporate decision-makers to provide you a deep insight into the best and next practices in our profession.

In this episode, we have as our guest, Bob Hess, vice chairman, Newmark Global Corporate Services and practice lead for its global site selection platform. Today, Bob will talk with us about diversity and inclusion as a business imperative in corporate site selection. Join me today as we welcome Bob Hess to Site Selection Matters. Bob, we hear a lot today about the evolving importance of diversity and inclusion to business. Take a minute or two if you will to describe exactly what’s meant by that when we referenced diversity and inclusion as a corporate concern, and maybe how this issue has evolved over time.

Bob Hess (Newmark): Thanks, Rick. I’ve been looking forward to the podcast today. It’s a topic that’s been part of my business life and my personal life for many, many years, and it has evolved over time. I mean, there’s a really interesting temporal time component to diversity, and it was awareness back in the, I’ll call it ’70s and ’80s more from a business perspective, obviously, the ’60s, you had social moments, you know, to a concern. And then it moved into a business imperative and then action, various levels of action I think that are starting, and, of course, it’s always been about talent, right?

So this evolution diversity has been about talent attraction, development, and retention, but we’ve come at this talent issue from a diversity perspective, you know, many different ways. And one of the issues that I think that’s impacted diversity is, you know, boardroom directors and how important it is there. Back in the ’70s and ’80s, it wasn’t prevalent in the boardroom. It was left to the boards to interpret this, but there really wasn’t a lot of understanding of it in terms of how you measure it. And, of course, fast forward to the ’80s and the ’90s, I was actually part of a diversity initiative, which more than diversity initiatives came into play in the ’90s, when I was at a Big Four firm.

I was actually a new partner and I was asked to lead the diversity initiative for about 2,500 people in a region of the country. It was one of the more wonderful honors of my life to be involved with that. And at that time, it was about, okay, the business case and making people understand the dimensions of diversity, which are beyond, you know, age and race and ethnicity. They get into class and values and even thinking styles and working styles. You know, that was the discussion, and it may be more accelerated for tech firms and other types of firms, public firms, but then the accelerators happened. These speaking of this timeline, these accelerators and catalysts for the last couple of years and recently, you know, the human experience, social justice, obviously Black Lives Matter and other external stakeholders, climate change, politics, and the labor market again, the war for talent.

The war for talent has always been central to diversity and inclusion and even ESG these days. And the last thing I’ll say about, you know, this evolution, even the word diversity has evolved. It was diversity, right, for a while, then it w