YouSaid · the spoken record

Joel Wittenberg

lines on the record: 77
first: 2020-08-31
most recent: 2020-08-31
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Was a little late. I didn't start my work in this business in any of the big cities, and I really didn't start traveling internationally until I was 32. That was my first European trip. And boy, I wish I would have traveled when I was younger. That's what I missed out. And that's what I tell my kids. And my kids are traveling everywhere. So not this year, but I'm telling them, get out, see the world because there's going to be a point at which you can't. And the lesson was in this business, I have seen the entire world and it has been the part I love the most about this business.”
2020-08-31 · Capital Allocators · Diversity, Equity & Inclusion 4: Joel Wittenberg – A Prescription for the Future (Capital Allocators, EP.154) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I come from a family, my mother was a single mother for about half my childhood, and I watched her work two jobs and have an incredible work ethic. My stepfather also came into this family and work unbelievably hard. He was the guy who, if he had to stay all night at work, he just stayed all night at work and got it done. And I literally would not be here today if I didn't have that upbringing.”
2020-08-31 · Capital Allocators · Diversity, Equity & Inclusion 4: Joel Wittenberg – A Prescription for the Future (Capital Allocators, EP.154) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Had a bad hire years ago, and it took me too long to own it, and it took me too long to deal with it. And it wasn't fair to the person. It wasn't fair to the reason.”
2020-08-31 · Capital Allocators · Diversity, Equity & Inclusion 4: Joel Wittenberg – A Prescription for the Future (Capital Allocators, EP.154) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's just being emotional. It's just being emotional and following a trend. Taking money off the table when something is up, not having fully researched it tends to come up a lot with me.”
2020-08-31 · Capital Allocators · Diversity, Equity & Inclusion 4: Joel Wittenberg – A Prescription for the Future (Capital Allocators, EP.154) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Drive myself crazy with our investments. I have a process whenever we do a trade, we have an ETF portfolio, we make tilts in our portfolio. I go back about six months if I can and try to look at the trades after six months and come up with what are the behavioral traps I may have fallen into Those pet peeves are the behavioral traps.”
2020-08-31 · Capital Allocators · Diversity, Equity & Inclusion 4: Joel Wittenberg – A Prescription for the Future (Capital Allocators, EP.154) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Talk without action. It just drives me crazy and it drives my team crazy. And we really focus on, we say it all the time, what are the actionable discussions we should be having? So we are action-oriented people.”
2020-08-31 · Capital Allocators · Diversity, Equity & Inclusion 4: Joel Wittenberg – A Prescription for the Future (Capital Allocators, EP.154) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, for me, what's important is just sticking to my habits. I get up in the morning, I exercise, I have a process of going through the journal and the FT and if I don't do those literally my whole day is off to the wrong start. So it's just stick to that process, see the news, and you can face the day is what I think of it.”
2020-08-31 · Capital Allocators · Diversity, Equity & Inclusion 4: Joel Wittenberg – A Prescription for the Future (Capital Allocators, EP.154) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, my son and I a few years ago started going to the Kentucky Derby every year and we are now Kentucky Derby obsessed. We study the horses, we place our bets, we lose lots of money, and we have the greatest time every year at the Kentucky Derby. And now my daughter goes with us as well. And it's really, it's an all-day thing, and it's the most fun I could ever have and never thought I'd be a horse person. But here I am.”
2020-08-31 · Capital Allocators · Diversity, Equity & Inclusion 4: Joel Wittenberg – A Prescription for the Future (Capital Allocators, EP.154) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By going in one of those entrepreneurs was a 35 year old person who couldn't get investors from the VC world. Another was a woman-owned firm that he's now invested in. There's this incredible opportunity and we're trying to take advantage of that to drive returns and our racial equity work.”
2020-08-31 · Capital Allocators · Diversity, Equity & Inclusion 4: Joel Wittenberg – A Prescription for the Future (Capital Allocators, EP.154) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say we probably have one of the more diverse portfolios from the ownership of the companies and the management of the assets. We're certainly not where we want to be yet. I honestly believe that because diverse people, diverse investors don't get hired, there's some really great investors out there who have that ability. I was speaking to somebody in San Francisco, and he was 45-year-old guy working at Cisco, wanted to leave to work at a VC firm, but nobody wants to hire a 45-year-old guy. And so instead he took his money and started investing it himself in VC, and it started identifying these VC opportunities that were diverse people, people that can't get funding from the traditional VC firms out in the bay. And needless to say, he's an early investor. Was Zoom, one of those Zoom or Slack. I can't remember, but”
2020-08-31 · Capital Allocators · Diversity, Equity & Inclusion 4: Joel Wittenberg – A Prescription for the Future (Capital Allocators, EP.154) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're spending a lot of time talking to our peers about expanding equity. What we're in the process of doing is bringing those peers into this so that we can influence more of the managers to join expanding equity. And what we're starting to see is that our peers are saying, well, we're having some of the same issues with our hiring, but they want to make a difference, and we're talking to them about the conversation. And then what we're hoping to do is bring them into talking to their managers. They may have firms that we don't know and bringing them in because we're going to start thinking about future cohorts of expanding equity going out into next year. We started with the five this year, but we're starting to get a lot of energy on it into the future. And frankly, it's calls like this that are getting the message out there about this.”
2020-08-31 · Capital Allocators · Diversity, Equity & Inclusion 4: Joel Wittenberg – A Prescription for the Future (Capital Allocators, EP.154) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I know even just in this week we've had a situation come up where there was another foundation that was interested in learning from what you've been doing. How are you going about kind of making the experience base that you've had available to other organizations, both investment managers and other pools of capital that want to follow your lead?”
2020-08-31 · Capital Allocators · Diversity, Equity & Inclusion 4: Joel Wittenberg – A Prescription for the Future (Capital Allocators, EP.154) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On those groups, and we got managers, we've got women owned firms, African American owned firms, Latino-owned firms, Asian-owned firms, and it's really centered in the US.”
2020-08-31 · Capital Allocators · Diversity, Equity & Inclusion 4: Joel Wittenberg – A Prescription for the Future (Capital Allocators, EP.154) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very broad with this. Our focus is on the underserved communities in the US, which is mostly its African American, Latino, Native American, but there's all sorts of other people that fall within this. If you think about this, the Native American side doesn't even come up in diversity. At the Kellogg Foundation, it does come up. For us, it does come up. But we define racial equity. It's an aspirational pursuit insisting that all people regardless of their racial or ethnic group identification, skin color, or physical traits will have equal opportunity to experience well-being in our just society. And so it's very inclusive for us and it's very, very broad for us. But when we start to outline how are we thinking about our impact or the emerging managers portfolios, it is really on focus.”
2020-08-31 · Capital Allocators · Diversity, Equity & Inclusion 4: Joel Wittenberg – A Prescription for the Future (Capital Allocators, EP.154) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the questions that comes up that I imagine you've wrestled with is really what comes to the definitions of diversity. You said racial diversity, but then there's also this ethnic piece. I had conversations with people, does this include people, you know, there's African Americans, but what about Indian Americans or Asian Americans? What are the decisions that you've had to go through and conclusions you've reached about that?”
2020-08-31 · Capital Allocators · Diversity, Equity & Inclusion 4: Joel Wittenberg – A Prescription for the Future (Capital Allocators, EP.154) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The impact side is where we will eventually go there. We're still learning our lessons and the whole impact investment industry is learning its lessons. It's going to take time. It's not going to be quick. What we're seeing in impact investing is that other impact investors aren't talking about their investment returns, which tells me that the investment returns have not been good. And so this industry, in order to make it, has got to start showing investment returns and it's doing what I believe we're doing well, which is having not just the focus on impact, but having that focus on the investment side as well. And it's a different investment due diligence process, but you've got to get to that piece of it. So once that comes together, I think then you're going to really start to scale up and you're going to start to see some of the best managers coming towards that. But it's going to take time.”
2020-08-31 · Capital Allocators · Diversity, Equity & Inclusion 4: Joel Wittenberg – A Prescription for the Future (Capital Allocators, EP.154) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And Revolution Foods has created a financial model to woman owned business and they created a financial model that's working. They've created a model that's working with helping children to be educated better. And so we're seeing the financial returns. And this is how we think about our impact investments. You have, first of all, you have a financial return. We've got to earn a financial return. If we don't earn a financial return, this movement isn't going to work. Then you add to that the impact return. Are these children having a better education and how will that lead to a higher living standard when they get older? And then thirdly is what is that ecosystem benefit coming out? And the ecosystem turns out revolution foods is hiring people who previously had been hourly workers. Now they come into rub foods and they're salaried. They have vacation. They have health care and they have more stable families. And so that's how we think about the return on the”
2020-08-31 · Capital Allocators · Diversity, Equity & Inclusion 4: Joel Wittenberg – A Prescription for the Future (Capital Allocators, EP.154) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've talked about thinking, we've talked about publicly the revolution foods is the one that I'm thinking of. Revolution foods is a firm that provides healthy meals to children in schools. They're just a regular service provider, but they're serving real food to the children. This isn't the old from the 80s. The ketchup is a vegetable.”
2020-08-31 · Capital Allocators · Diversity, Equity & Inclusion 4: Joel Wittenberg – A Prescription for the Future (Capital Allocators, EP.154) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An example of one of the investments you made that you would take cross that divide that in the past would have just been mission and not had the investment focus and now kind of fits squarely in between.”
2020-08-31 · Capital Allocators · Diversity, Equity & Inclusion 4: Joel Wittenberg – A Prescription for the Future (Capital Allocators, EP.154) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so there's the impact America Fund. It's led by Keisha Cash and Impact America invests in large underserved markets and they're trying to expand opportunities in communities of color where entrepreneurs have been overlooked and undervalued by traditional investors. So the firms and founders with who they're investing with are creating products for those specific communities where the alternative investors really weren't serving them and they didn't exist at all. So because of this, Impact America is really increasing market transparencies and efficiencies. They're lowering costs for consumers, helping to increase incomes in those communities and mobility for those workers. 95% of their investments are with companies that have a woman or a person of color at the helm. So that's one of our better examples.”
2020-08-31 · Capital Allocators · Diversity, Equity & Inclusion 4: Joel Wittenberg – A Prescription for the Future (Capital Allocators, EP.154) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“See some real benefits come out of this thing where this ties into the work is it started off with a lot of investments into things like education, healthy eating for children, things like that. What Cynthia has taken us to now is a bigger focus on racial equity through finding those entrepreneurs who are people of color rather than sort of the concepts of education and things like that. And so by trying to create wealth in that community, that's really where our emphasis is. And by doing that, we have more focus on the investment piece of it because these are real entrepreneurs who really have experience with investments and histories in investing.”
2020-08-31 · Capital Allocators · Diversity, Equity & Inclusion 4: Joel Wittenberg – A Prescription for the Future (Capital Allocators, EP.154) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because they weren't investors. We had consultants, but the consultants were focused on the mission aspect of it. And so the function as it evolved ended up reporting to me and I tried to turn it into an investment team. And we got very few transactions done in that three years. And what we now have done is we have a director, her name is Cynthia Muller. She has been in this business for longer than our 13 years. And we have this incredible balance today of mission and investments. And we're starting to really see the benefit of that. Cynthia's work has been focused not so much on the mission is there as a focus, but the investment side is just as important now. And so for the last three years, our US portfolio had a return of nine percent. And so we're starting to”
2020-08-31 · Capital Allocators · Diversity, Equity & Inclusion 4: Joel Wittenberg – A Prescription for the Future (Capital Allocators, EP.154) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So again, in 2007, I was pretty busy year for a board of directors now that I think of it. They allocated $100 million to impact investing. And so we've been in this thing for 13 years. I think of us as one of the originals. We started by putting some people with from the mission side, from the programming side of the aisle. They were the ones who brought the idea to our board, got the okay for it, and they made our initial investments. And they made some terrific investments into companies, individual companies, structures, and a couple of funds that were just mission bullseys. They were right on for our mission. And as I came in in 2009 and started looking at some of the historical transactions, what I saw was great mission execution and improvements we could make on the investment side.”
2020-08-31 · Capital Allocators · Diversity, Equity & Inclusion 4: Joel Wittenberg – A Prescription for the Future (Capital Allocators, EP.154) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The third leg you've talked about, and we've talked separately about, is this impact investing piece. I know you've gone about this in a way you feel very strongly about. And why don't you talk about that program?”
2020-08-31 · Capital Allocators · Diversity, Equity & Inclusion 4: Joel Wittenberg – A Prescription for the Future (Capital Allocators, EP.154) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was really just getting to know them. We always will include these firms in any search that we're doing. And if they stand out, that's where they move forward. One was a very specialized bank. It's a firm that does just small bank, long-only equities. The other was a hedge fund that now has private equity fund. We invested in the hedge fund, and now we're investors in the private equity fund. They're outstanding firms. It was pretty obvious and wasn't hard to make that call.”
2020-08-31 · Capital Allocators · Diversity, Equity & Inclusion 4: Joel Wittenberg – A Prescription for the Future (Capital Allocators, EP.154) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, it's a small allocation to each manager for us. And frankly, we're not the largest investor out there. So it's not even their largest allocation as well, but it is an important allocation, and it gives them the ability to put our name in their pitch book, or a reference for them, and quite often we will set this up as a separate account so that if there's a problem, we can jump in and take it. But it was mostly stock and bonds allocations and pretty straightforward, a couple of hedge funds as well.”
2020-08-31 · Capital Allocators · Diversity, Equity & Inclusion 4: Joel Wittenberg – A Prescription for the Future (Capital Allocators, EP.154) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that emerging manager allocation, knowing that there's startup risk in an industry where odds are long of success, knowing that there's just more risk than just the underlying investments, how do you think about sizing something like that when you really want it to be successful?”
2020-08-31 · Capital Allocators · Diversity, Equity & Inclusion 4: Joel Wittenberg – A Prescription for the Future (Capital Allocators, EP.154) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Worked with a firm called Progress Capital and we started hiring diverse owned firms about 10 years ago. The idea was to bring in these diverse owned firms that are emerging. We're taking the risk of newer starting up firms. We were using track records from prior mandates. The real goal of this was again for investment performance to identify that next great manager. We have identified three managers with four mandates that we were able to bring into full blown allocations. And the program went pretty well. Progress recently closed in June so we're in the process of rethinking this now. The one thing that we had to really be careful of is some people see this as kind of the kids table and that's not obviously our goal, but that's one of the downsides of this type of approach. It's a very tricky area, but it's something we wanted to experiment with.”
2020-08-31 · Capital Allocators · Diversity, Equity & Inclusion 4: Joel Wittenberg – A Prescription for the Future (Capital Allocators, EP.154) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Making sure that the social side is being covered as well, that people are included, that there is plenty of opportunity to socialize. That's really a part of getting to know people from different backgrounds, which we just don't spend the time doing.”
2020-08-31 · Capital Allocators · Diversity, Equity & Inclusion 4: Joel Wittenberg – A Prescription for the Future (Capital Allocators, EP.154) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's the only example that I talked about, but it's really things such as having processes to ensure that there's equal access to development opportunities, making sure that the managers of these people are trained and making sure that these diverse people are not working for the wrong managers. There are managers who buy into this and there are people who don't buy into this. And you've got to set them up to be in those positions. So there's a lot in here about training. There's a lot in here about having the conversations at the business. And there's a lot about accountability. The accountability part, I can't stress enough. And as we talked to Henry Kravis about this, this was his key driver is he sees the accountability as how he's going to bring this into his organization. The one thing I just want to add is there's the social aspects of this.”
2020-08-31 · Capital Allocators · Diversity, Equity & Inclusion 4: Joel Wittenberg – A Prescription for the Future (Capital Allocators, EP.154) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then last, the fourth work stream is influencing, catalyzing racial equity in the financial services ecosystem as a whole and being able to talk about it as part of it, but it's also these firms that are in expanding equity are keeping track of their progress on this and they're going to be turning in their statistics to the database over the years as they go forward to measure how well they're doing it. And so measurement is a key part of this for these firms. And again, the reason that this is so action oriented is because we got the top people in on this, right? This isn't being driven by the HR department. This is being driven by the CEOs who know they've got to get this right. And that's why they're taking these actions.”
2020-08-31 · Capital Allocators · Diversity, Equity & Inclusion 4: Joel Wittenberg – A Prescription for the Future (Capital Allocators, EP.154) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we started with our success at the Kellogg Foundation and our experience from 2007 to the current. And then we really broke it into twenty three work streams that are areas that these firms can look at and use and identify which ones are the most important ones to them. And they fall within four categories. So the first one is what we call a track. This is attracting and hiring the new employees of color into the firm. The second one is belong. And this is setting up processes that ensure that all employees, regardless of the racial identity, feel respected and are able to be successful. And this is where our roles as white men comes into this. Then the third work stream is regarding promotions, and there what we're focused on is ensuring that employees of color have the same opportunities for advancement as the white employees.”
2020-08-31 · Capital Allocators · Diversity, Equity & Inclusion 4: Joel Wittenberg – A Prescription for the Future (Capital Allocators, EP.154) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there was another one, a Harvard Business Review study that showed that diverse companies experience increased innovation and it results in 19% higher revenue, 2.3 times cash flow per employee more. So the facts are there about this. It's pretty clear that diversity drives financial performance as well as just better behaviors. One of the things that's crucial, and the reason I think that these really successful firms have gotten on board is they look out to their futures. They look out to the sustainability of their firms. They see that our country is going to be more than 50% diverse in 2050. Our workforce in 2050 will be more than 50% diverse. If you're not addressing these things today, if you're just a bunch of white men, that firm ain't going to make it to 2050. You're creating a headwind that just has to be dealt with. And it takes really the...”
2020-08-31 · Capital Allocators · Diversity, Equity & Inclusion 4: Joel Wittenberg – A Prescription for the Future (Capital Allocators, EP.154) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the things we see is that of the $71 trillion of assets under management, this number is unbelievable. Only 1.3% are from diverse owned firms, three point nine percent of mutual funds are diverse owned, 8.9% of hedge funds, and 1.2% of real estate funds. So the opportunity of, again, from the inside out is there. And then how do these firms do? There's a McKinsey study in 2015, and it showed that companies in the top quartile for racial diversity of leadership were 35% more likely to have financial returns above their national industry medians. This is a broad index.”
2020-08-31 · Capital Allocators · Diversity, Equity & Inclusion 4: Joel Wittenberg – A Prescription for the Future (Capital Allocators, EP.154) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a PE firm called the Lumen Capital that worked with Stanford's Spark area, and they did a study, and that found that professional investors tended to rate more favorably all white teams of fund managers over diverse teams with black managers, even when they had comparable performance. So that's the unconscious bias.”
2020-08-31 · Capital Allocators · Diversity, Equity & Inclusion 4: Joel Wittenberg – A Prescription for the Future (Capital Allocators, EP.154) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We think about this is this is changing Wall Street from the inside out versus hiring minority owned firms is changing it from the outside in. And can I give you some of the facts around firms? There is very strong research around how firms the traditionally white male owned firms can create success through diversity. And it's really not rocket science. Companies with the ability to bring in and promote those people of diverse background and ethnicities are of course going to have better conversations. They're going to have different perspectives and different results. I've seen it with my team.”
2020-08-31 · Capital Allocators · Diversity, Equity & Inclusion 4: Joel Wittenberg – A Prescription for the Future (Capital Allocators, EP.154) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The whole notion of this expanding equity a lot of times when people think of DNI, they think of placing capital, allocating capital to minority-owned firms. And it focuses more on the people in the top. It strikes me that this expanding equity has more to do with the existing organizations and promoting the practices within them. How did you think about the balance the existing organizations that may be majority owned by a white male compared to the fostering of minority-owned firms?”
2020-08-31 · Capital Allocators · Diversity, Equity & Inclusion 4: Joel Wittenberg – A Prescription for the Future (Capital Allocators, EP.154) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's the hiring process. If I, as a white man Generally, a bunch of white men, maybe a white woman occasionally. My thought process is am I part of this team? How do I contribute to the team? How do I see myself fitting into the team? A person of color going into that same interview is wondering, am I being judged on information that is not correct? Will I be excluded? All those things that I interviewing people don't think of, but the interview process has to be inclusiv as well. So as I brought in people to the foundation to interview, I made sure that they were also interviewing with people of color at the foundation, people who could help them understand what it's like to work at the Kellogg Foundation. And to be honest with you, the hiring is of diverse people becomes very easy when they see their path to success and that they see it in the long term. Those are the types of things we identify.”
2020-08-31 · Capital Allocators · Diversity, Equity & Inclusion 4: Joel Wittenberg – A Prescription for the Future (Capital Allocators, EP.154) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Issue is a huge issue, and it's one of the things where, as we talked about it with the firms, you could see people's eyes light up, their pens go to the paper, and it's one of the things that people know they need to focus on. People didn't realize that. I didn't realize that. And that's just one of the examples of the types of things that we're seeing.”
2020-08-31 · Capital Allocators · Diversity, Equity & Inclusion 4: Joel Wittenberg – A Prescription for the Future (Capital Allocators, EP.154) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The women of the workforce study showed us was it in the financial services industry, we're doing a great job of hiring diverse people. But as the funnel goes up, those diverse people fall out. And what ends up being promoted is a very small number of those diverse people and a very large number of the white men. And so these firms are out there doing the right thing. They're doing the right hiring, but they need the processes that will help people to be successful and to be promoted most importantly. So one of the most obvious examples once we had the Women of the Workforce study, an obvious example was this idea of the onlys. When you have a department that has one diverse person in it, that person is more likely to not be successful than if they were to have other peers and other diverse people in that department. And this only”
2020-08-31 · Capital Allocators · Diversity, Equity & Inclusion 4: Joel Wittenberg – A Prescription for the Future (Capital Allocators, EP.154) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You mentioned the difference between hiring and then you said more important promoting people at the racially diverse people. What is the research show in where those bottlenecks and challenges come along the way in someone's career path?”
2020-08-31 · Capital Allocators · Diversity, Equity & Inclusion 4: Joel Wittenberg – A Prescription for the Future (Capital Allocators, EP.154) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of how they are going to change their organizations and drive their organizations to hiring better and then most importantly promoting better and giving opportunities. We have four in-person meetings, now the first one was in person, now the second one was over Zoom. We're hoping to resume them at some point. And again, it's these top five people, the HR people, a few others that are doing this. And we're seeing some really incredible results. It's just getting started, but we're also starting to see others hearing about it coming to us, talking about it.”
2020-08-31 · Capital Allocators · Diversity, Equity & Inclusion 4: Joel Wittenberg – A Prescription for the Future (Capital Allocators, EP.154) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this started three years ago at the end of 2017. We went back and we spent a lot of time on this. One of our directors, Carlos Rangel, is really the driver of this. And we put together a program now called Expanding Equity. It is our first cohort. It's being done this year. And this is five firms. These are, again, some of the largest firms. You know the names. Some of the names allow us to use the names KKR, Varde, and Beacon Investments Real Estate Firm in Boston. And what we've done is we're working with a consultant and we're using data from the McKinsey Women of the Workforce study. That study is broken down by race as well. And what we've done is we've built a workbook for them. And each firm is taking that workbook, focusing on what their needs are, and then going through a process.”
2020-08-31 · Capital Allocators · Diversity, Equity & Inclusion 4: Joel Wittenberg – A Prescription for the Future (Capital Allocators, EP.154) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Between the two locations, we had about $2 trillion of assets represented there. It was a really powerful group of people. And we sat for the afternoon, we talked about our journey. We talked about unconscious bias. We brought in some professors to talk about that. We talked about microaggressions. And then the conversation just opened up and people talked about what was working for them, what wasn't working for them, what their frustrations were. It was an incredible afternoon, mostly private equity firms. And at the end, we said, what can we do? How can we help you? How can we take this to the next step? And they said, we need more than talk. We need the roadmap. We need the actions that will get us to have a truly diverse organization.”
2020-08-31 · Capital Allocators · Diversity, Equity & Inclusion 4: Joel Wittenberg – A Prescription for the Future (Capital Allocators, EP.154) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About three years ago, it was the CEO of a real estate firm, and he said he really wants to get this right. And it was really important to him the same way it was important to us. And as we kept having these conversations with other managers, we realized there's a real need here for our work because people are seeing our journey from 2007 as their journey. Just because we're a foundation doesn't make us holier than everybody else. We're going through the same difficulties and growing pains on D&I that everybody else is going through. We just started them a lot earlier. So what we did was we had two focus group sessions, one of them in New York, one in San Francisco, and we invited our largest managers and our most successful managers. And it was an afternoon where we said we had to have a top five person and the HR person from these firms, and we had about”
2020-08-31 · Capital Allocators · Diversity, Equity & Inclusion 4: Joel Wittenberg – A Prescription for the Future (Capital Allocators, EP.154) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Our staff was 24% racially and ethnically diverse. Today we're forty five percent racially and ethnically diverse and we're still growing. If you include gender again we're seventy percent. Now we don't include gender when we talk about this and obviously we are very pro-gender hiring but when you separate out gender and talk about gender alone quite often in the investment world it ends up being about white women. And so what we're trying to do is make sure that we're bringing in everybody and so that's why we don't focus on gender. So over the years we've had just informal conversations with our investment managers about the work and about how we do things. And at Kellogg we're not about shaming we're not about guilt. We're not about quotas. We're all about the conversation because we believe this is something you have to do from your heart. And in a conversation with one of our managers.”
2020-08-31 · Capital Allocators · Diversity, Equity & Inclusion 4: Joel Wittenberg – A Prescription for the Future (Capital Allocators, EP.154) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Expanding equity is really the interesting one. So let me kind of give the backstory to it. In 2007, the Kellogg Foundation made an announcement that we were going to be an anti-racist organization. Now, we had been in racial equity work going all the way back to the 1940s. We made our first grants in the 1940s that were made for the purpose of dismantling the crippling effects of racism. In the 1990s, we got to a spot where we said, okay, we're going to really focus in on this racial equity journey. And then in 2007, we made this bold announcement that we're going to review everything we do, grant making, hiring, promotion, investing, everything we do with a racial equity lens on it. In 2007,”
2020-08-31 · Capital Allocators · Diversity, Equity & Inclusion 4: Joel Wittenberg – A Prescription for the Future (Capital Allocators, EP.154) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Focused on several different things there. We want to be a part of what the foundation is doing and a part of the mission. And so we were able to do that. There's three different ways we're doing this. So the first one is through a program that we call Expanding Equity that I'll describe. The second is we've got a fund of diverse emerging managers. And then thirdly is our impact investment portfolio.”
2020-08-31 · Capital Allocators · Diversity, Equity & Inclusion 4: Joel Wittenberg – A Prescription for the Future (Capital Allocators, EP.154) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As you've been able to work in and foster this inclusive environment within Kellogg, you also have this pool of capital that has the potential to influence more than just a subset of the team you have in place. How did you think about the diversity and inclusion in your investing process?”
2020-08-31 · Capital Allocators · Diversity, Equity & Inclusion 4: Joel Wittenberg – A Prescription for the Future (Capital Allocators, EP.154) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kellogg again, I can have the conversation and ask people uncomfortable questions and they know I'm coming from a good spot and they will help me understand things. What's really interesting and makes it so incredible and fun about it is people can ask me questions. I'm Jewish and there's a lot of questions that come at me about what I've had to deal with with anti-Semitism and where I come from. And that's that conversation. And when you understand those unconscious biases, when you understand what we call microaggressions, what is happening when you make a comment, when you make a statement, and somebody then calls you out on that and says, you know, here's what I heard when you said that. That's that piece that helps that got me to where I am.”
2020-08-31 · Capital Allocators · Diversity, Equity & Inclusion 4: Joel Wittenberg – A Prescription for the Future (Capital Allocators, EP.154) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source