Episode 34: The Power of Being “The Other”: Chris Howard, EVP & COO, Arizona State University

An inspiring conversation on diversity and actionable ideas on how to move forward.

Chris Riback: Chris, thanks for joining. Thrilled to have you on the podcast.

Chris Howard: My pleasure. Happy to be here.

Chris Riback: Excellent. And we are joined today by Diane Flynn, who's filling in for Dr. Alexandria White, who couldn't join us today. Chris, let's start with just your background, if we could, and your role at Arizona State University.

How did you get here and what specifically drew you to a ASU? I'm assuming it goes beyond just the opportunity to have the Sun Devil as your mascot.

Chris Howard: Yeah, there we go. Forks up, there we go, ladies and gentlemen. But yes, I've had a really wonderful, eclectic road. If you were a kid of a certain era, you saw that great Santa Claus special that had those toys of Misfit Island. I've had the toys of Misfit Island journey. In a wonderful way, a truly American journey. I played football at a high school in Texas, won a State Championship in Plano, was a good student athlete.

Went to the United States Air Force Academy where I had success as a student athlete and won a Rhode Scholarship to Oxford as a young lieutenant and did my master's and my doctorate. Then I flew choppers in the Air Force, transitioned to Intelligence, and then I went to the corporate world. I spent time at Bristol Myers Squibb and at subsequently General Electric. In between there, went to Harvard Business School, which was a lot of fun. Like my colleague here, Diane, as well. I'm an alum as well of HBS.

And then I had a real epiphany moment when I was serving in Afghanistan. September 11, 2003, I landed in Afghanistan. 20 years ago, I landed in Afghanistan, running human intelligence operations, overt collection for then General Austin, now Secretary Austin of Defense. And when I finished my tour of duty, I thought, "Well, I'm going to General Electric as a junior exec, but I really want to do something where I'm giving back again, maybe go back in the military, maybe go to nonprofit."

I went to higher education, worked at University of Oklahoma as a Vice President for Strategy and Leadership. Then I ran two colleges, universities, Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia for almost seven, Robert Morris University in Pittsburgh for six.

And then I was in conversation about either staying at Robert Morris or going someplace else. Rekindled my relationship with Michael Crow, the President of Arizona State University, and thought about all the great things, Chris and Diane, I was doing at Robert Morris and Hampden-Sydney College and the University of Oklahoma, but to do it at scale. Arizona State University has a $5.2 billion operating budget, 180,000 students, 350,000 learners that are non-degree seeking, largest education partner for most of the major technology companies. We could just do some things at a scale that I was excited about doing them. So, that's why I came out to Arizona State about 18 months ago.

Chris Riback: Well, you played high school ball in Texas. I've heard that. I've heard that they play high school football in Texas.

Chris Howard: Yeah, they do.

Chris Riback: And we certainly could have a whole other conversation about Arizona State in particular and the transformation that has occurred there. When you talk about doing things at scale, I am aware from other reading that I've done, and there is stuff going on at Arizona State that people really ought to know about. That's my way to get you back as a guest in the future.

Chris Howard: Sure.

Chris Riback: We'll talk about your diversity of experience in a moment, because that range that you just rattled off obviously is ridiculous, right? Nobody has that range of diversity of experience.

Chris Howard: I am the Forrest Gump of educators. Run, Chris, run.

Chris Riback: I was going to say, keep running. But can I talk first about the word diversity? What does it mean today? I mean, we're talking with you just months after the Supreme Court decision on affirmative action in college admissions, just days after The Wall Street Journal, you may have seen it, released its diversity rankings on universities. What struck Diane and me as we were talking about this conversation with you. On the one hand, the Supreme Court decision seemed to reflect the increasing pushback among some around the importance or desire for lack of importance of weighting diversity. On the other hand, the Journal and others are looking at diversity as a measure to rank a university's strength. So, which is it? How should we think about, talk about and act on diversity in a university setting, or for that matter, a corporate setting?

Chris Howard: Well, it's a very important question, and it's not just about race, but race is part of this. And as Ralph Ellison, who wrote The Invisible Man, says, "You talk about race, it gets complicated." And America's history is complicated, and how we deal with differences is complicated, yet important. So, what we do know is that we can't get around it. We can talk about it differently, we can use different phraseology, but whether it be gender, whether it be race, whether it be differently-abled, whether it be ethnic origin, we have to talk about this. We have to figure out the ways to reconcile this in the 21st century going forward.

So, the SCOTUS case was a case. We'll see what happens next, but people are thinking about how to implement that, including the Biden Administration. That happened.

Chris Riback: Yes.

Chris Howard: Recently at ASU, was from my memory, so did George Floyd. It happened. A man was murdered, a Black man was murdered in front of, thanks to a very brave young lady, billions of people. That happened. There was weeping, there was pain, and there was a thinking that maybe there's something wrong with how we put this all together in terms of our society or whatever. So how do we move forward? And I'll say a couple of quick things, and they'll apply back to I think the corporate setting. And that is at Arizona State, which is a particular institution that has an interesting approach I think is relevant, we judge ourselves through our charter by whom we include rather than whom we exclude in their success and their outcomes.

Whereas Harvard, and I'm on the Board of Overseers at Harvard, where different type of institution, they have about a 3 to 4% acceptance rate. My joke is that next year they're just going to take three and four students. That's it. Like three people and four people. That seven people can go to these schools. It's just your model. There's nothing wrong with those models. We, on the other hand, we take in more. We took in 16,000, 17,000 students last year, including those that could have gone to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Duke, or whatever. And there's another article in another newspaper, The New York Times, it talks about the fact that I think well over half of all Black, Hispanic and white students go to universities that accept at least 75% of those that apply.

So, let's face it, the big meaty part of what is happening in terms of diversity, inclusion, equity, belonging, whatever you want to talk about, is actually, in a higher education setting, not happening at the schools that the SCOTUS case spoke to. Because most people don't go to schools like that, right?

Chris Riback: Yes.

Chris Howard: That doesn't mean we shouldn't debate it, that doesn't mean people shouldn't talk about it. There's friends of the court briefs where a lot of people said, including the military that weigh into this is important, but let's just say that we're addressing that other part. And in terms of corporations, I'm on a corporate board, a couple of private boards, whatever, as McKinsey reported, diversity, good diversity, good diversity outcomes is good business outcomes. And as shareholder equity, stakeholder and shareholders and what have you, we have a fiduciary responsibility to think about what it takes for management to get it right, and diversity is part of that. And so I think that there's still room for this conversation that is in another inning, but the game's still going on.

Diane Flynn: Follow up on corporate, because the space that I operate in is primarily helping companies attract, promote, and retain women and diverse talent, and so we have been putting on leadership programs, mentorship programs, special things for these talent pools. How do you see this Supreme Court ruling impacting that? I know some of our clients are starting to say, "Well, we can't do these just for women anymore." What advice would you give, whether I guess it's educational institution or the corporate world?

Chris Howard: Well, I would say this. I'm not a lawyer, and even if I were a lawyer, most lawyers say I'm not that type of lawyer. So, I'm not making a legal, I'm not giving sort of you the ASU line. I'm only saying that if you are in business, you have certain objectives, goals, things that you're trying to achieve, you need to do everything you can as a fiduciary to achieve those goals and ends no matter what happened a few weeks ago in the court case, your ability to your point, Diane, to retain and grow and bring in talent, that hasn't changed. So, you're going to maybe do it differently, but if you don't do it, you're going to lose, going to lose the talented people that are in those groups, but also going to lose majority people that still care about this issue in a way.

Now how it's manifest itself, how the program looks like, how the train looks like, maybe it's going to change. But you know what? Think about any important function that's happening in society today, civil society, whether it be teaching, whether it be, I was watching a documentary on PBS about Ford making automobiles. Do we do anything the same way we did it 10 years ago? Heck, even five years ago. But look at what's happened with AI. This is another management leadership governance challenge to get to something that we think is important. And I think that human fulfillment and capital growth and human capital growth and development is important.

I think that people, whether it be a woman, whether it be a person of color, they might experience that different than a majority person. And the step function is how you do that. And we have to come up with ways to do that that don't run afoul. The higher education sector run afoul the law. That's important. I know that the business people are thinking, do I get ahead of this or whatever, but they have to do something because again, it's not the how it's done, but what is important. This is important work. I can imagine having a company that didn't have the best talent develop the best way to achieve its end game and just took all that off the table because of a Supreme Court case that would not be spot on. That would be wrong.

Diane Flynn: Are there one or two things that you think would have the biggest impact in developing some of this more diverse talent?

Chris Howard: I think that there's, Eisner said years ago when he was at Disney, he says, the fish stinks from the head down if you're not careful. So leadership matters and communication matters. I think that when, especially line managers, nothing at all against my HR managers do amazing yeomen, yeowoman's work. When leaders in an organization, especially the ones that are running the big P and Ls say that this is important and that we're going to communicate how it still is important and do it a way that makes sense for us going forward, I think that's going to make a difference. Now, how does that manifest itself? I'm not saying memos and manifestos or whatever, actions speak louder than words, but words do matter. And so I think that the biggest arsenal in their toolkit, the biggest tool in their arsenal will be communicating that this is something that still matters because we want to win this business to be profitable. We want it to grow so forth and so on that.

Diane Flynn: Well, I will no longer work with a client where the leader doesn't buy into this because if they don't model and message it, I've seen that nothing happens. You're absolutely right.

Chris Riback: On that messaging. And I love your use of the word language because how one speaks, I would think impacts what other people hear. And I'm curious about the importance of needing to speak about ideas and about ideas in ways that simultaneously convey the leadership that you are talking about and that someone like you presents every day, but also delivers it in a way that the range of audiences are able to hear. And what's making me think about that is going back to that diverse series of experiences and your background. And I'm curious, I realized not all of us have experiences as diverse as yours. Not all experiences need to be as diverse as yours, but if you feel like diverse experience helps generate diverse thinking or at least an openness to diverse thought, how do you encourage or enable diverse experiences for students? And what advice might you have for a corporate CEO about advancing the same goals in the corporate world?

Chris Howard: Well, let me go back to mindset first, and I'll go into the same things that are more concrete. And I gave a talk about leadership and I talk about one thing about effective and efficient communication, which is speaking to express rather than to impress. So, know your audience and speak in a way that doesn't get them going like this.

Chris Riback: You've got your arms folded and a look on your face. Like talk to the hand. I'm not listening.

Chris Howard: I would say the other thing I talk about in my talk is about the leaders are empathetic. They have the ability to put their selves in other people's shoes. And what you described about me personally having a set of diverse experiences, and one of the things you didn't note is that I grew up in the community. My dad was an army officer for several years, very mixed community. Then when he got out, I went to a very mixed community. Then I went to a very African-American community, then back to Plano, Texas as a fourth grader, as the only Black kid in my class. And then graduated from my high school. I said, we mentioned we won state, we had 1300 people in my graduating class. There were fewer than 20 Black people, and I was student body president and held myriad leadership roles.

So, I was a guy who for years was one of only or few Black people in every setting all the time. Went to church and the Black church, went to school in mad predominantly white school. So, whether it be called it code switching, I'm putting my air quotes up for our listeners, code switching or diplomacy. I just had to navigate and had to be what Warren Venice, the great writer thinker from a president of University of Cincinnati Marshall School Professor whisper to people like Howard Schultz is, I had to be the other. In his book called I'm Becoming a Leader, which I recommend to you. He talks about it's very important as a leader to become, spend some time as the other. And so I start with that mindset, and if you're a CEO of a company or a president of university, you need to think about how do I help my people be comfortable being the other because they'll be a better human being and they'll be a better leader no matter what area they might go into.

So, we at Arizona State University, as big as we are, we have myriad programs where whether it be study abroad, we have 13,000 international students. We have 158 countries. We have as many Jewish students or Muslim students as any university in the country. We are an MSIA minority serving in a Hispanic serving institution, which means we graduate 30% of our class or Hispanic. If we were an historically Black college university, we'd be number eight or nine. So, we created a diverse environment where people navigate with a set of values, some from the nation, some from our university, some from their homes. That allows them to have to bump into that. And that's what we've been able to do in a university setting. Back to the corporate side, I am a fan of ERGs, when they're quite often led by or co-led by a majority person who really wants to do it, not just checking off a box.

I'm a fan of them when the top leadership does it. When I was at GE years ago, first it was Jack Welsh and it was Jeff Emmelt. I mean the African-American Forum, African, African-American, Afro-Caribbean leaders. I mean, it was on the calendar 10 years in advance for the CEO. That person would go to that event, and it was big. I mean, I got a chance to, I met Al Roker. He was an NBC guy. This a great company. I met Al Roker who was a, at that point, a fellow GE leader as it were. So, I think there's some intentional programs. There's some things we've done at ASU that are very unique. Like I said, I think the biggest thing is that mindset of that I need people to be the other, because the empathy that they develop makes them better commercial leaders, better business development leaders, so forth and so on.

Diane Flynn: I love that point, the importance of being the other and what can be learned from that. What would you advise as a closing question here. What would be one or two things that leaders or managers can do to demonstrate and practice empathy? Tactical.

Chris Howard: Yeah, so tactical, I would say if you're looking around in your calendar and your meetings are 90% of people that look like you. And Admiral Mike Mullins makes a great point. He's a former chairman of joint chief staff. He goes, ducks tend to get other ducks. They just tend to like, I went to this school. You went to that school. Come on. If you start looking at your calendar, and most of your meetings are with people that look just like you at the same background, same pedigree, then you need to put a little chlorine in that gene pool and think about how can I find a way professionally and personally just to get other vantage points because you're going to be better because you're just going to be better having to, even if you don't change anything, you're like, at least I saw another vantage point.

So, I would say the intentionality of who you sort of associated with. And then the last thing is just books are good, whether they're on tape or whatever. There's some great literature out there about understanding the human condition. That's why I love literature so much. A lot of my friends that are clinicians now, they spend a lot of time in what we call the medical humanities. It's like understanding that Black woman when she presents to you with a case, and many times there's a bias that says Black women can take more pain.

I think Serena Williams talked about this. Black women have a difficult time. This has been empirically proven, right? They're talking to a doctor. So, I see a doctor didn't look like them, and they say it hurts. They're like, no, no, it doesn't hurt. I'm not listening to you. It really doesn't hurt. So, it's not only doctors that have that fall into that. There are other people. So, if you're not doing things that are intentionally so you're not in your library reading literature, reading and sort of growing your capacity to see other what have you, then I think you're in a bad way. So, look at your calendar, read some really good books, whether it be fiction or nonfiction. Think about being the other. I think that's all useful, directionally useful.

Chris Riback: You just quoted Admiral Mullen as part of the importance of being the other and having that understanding. I know you heard as well at an event that I had the privilege of attending that you and Diane were at Admiral McRaven reminding all of us that a shepherd should smell like his sheep, which is not to say, just to be clear, you do not smell like a sheep. You smell and look and act like a leader, and thank you. But thanks to Diane for joining us today and filling in for Dr. White and Chris, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us about these topics.

Chris Howard: My pleasure. Thank you for your time, and I wish you all the best.

Diane Flynn: Thank you, Chris.