The courage to embrace change

“Fortune calls I stepped forth from the shadows to the marketplace Merchants and thieves, hungry for power…

Gentlemen, he said I don’t need your organisation, I’ve shined your shoes I’ve moved your mountains and marked your cards But Eden is burning, either getting ready for elimination Or else your hearts must have courage for the changing of the guards”.

Bob Dylan, Changing of the Guards

In my time as Chair of SkyCity Entertainment Group, no matter how much money we make, how big and bright our buildings, or how popular our entertainment, I will consider myself a failure if we do not look, feel and act to the people who work here, play here and stay here much more like our community, than we have in the past and are today. Here in “the marketplace of merchants and thieves, hungry for power” we must change.

SkyCity is incredibly diverse. Our staff speak and write in over 50 languages. Chinese, Indian and Filipino staff are among our largest ethnicities. We have many Ma¯ori and Pasifika staff. We have LGBT people, about even male and female, some gender diverse and some with disabilities.

But we have major challenges in diversity and inclusion across every measure. For the SkyCity Board and management, it is a significant task to lift representation at all levels and to reflect the diverse cultures, identities and attributes of our community — not just in numbers, but in how we work and in the services we offer. This does not happen, we know, by just recognising the numbers or the needs. Nor by just reporting. Nor by winning awards for each step we make. It requires dedicated and ongoing attention, embedded in our business plans and actions. And it is not a process which can be effected “top down”. It must engage and be led by people throughout the business. In Dylan’s terms, “our hearts must have courage for the changing of the guards”.

You might think that a casino is an odd place to reflect this aspiration. But it is also precisely here, in big business, in the heart of commerce, in “the marketplace of merchants and thieves, hungry for power” that the importance and opportunity for change is greatest.

As in nature, so in society and in business, it is risky to not reflect and incorporate the diversity that surrounds you. Diversity nourishes and protects.

We have many positive reasons to welcome the “changing of the guard”. Increasingly it is recognised that there is a genuine “diversity dividend” which we have denied ourselves in the past. It really is extraordinarily myopic, to the point of wilful blindness, that business would deny itself the skills, insight, and behaviours of everyone who did not look, sound and think like the boss. In a world where old, white, university educated males (like me) make up less than 2 per cent of the global population, why should we be the ones to keep on trying and being allowed to make the world in our own image on everyone else’s behalf?

Covid-19 has caused many people, many businesses and many countries to pause and reflect. Time to reflect on the actions which got us here. The danger is that we are allowed back onto the ‘global economy’ playing field having not learned any lesson.

In the boardrooms of “the marketplace of merchants and thieves”, I am not convinced that this is fully understood. Many of us have had to think hard about changing our business practices, to pivot our business models. This is good and necessary work. We might label it recovery. It might be considered the commercial equivalent of government spending on social, business and infrastructure projects in the name of recovery.

My hope is that our boardrooms will see this as an opportunity to reset. I think that this reset is needed around sustainability of nature just as it is around social equity within the business and within the community within which it operates.

This reset will only really happen if we also have a full “changing of the guard” at all levels of power. Power and business are directly linked. How we run our companies is an expression of power over information and resources and ways of thinking about them. Unless we diversify this to reflect the inherent diversity of our communities we will fail to reset.

I have personally made a priority of achieving some real progress on this changing of the guard within governance and management of the organisations where I work in the next year.

Diversity is literally a blessing of nature. It makes no sense to ignore it.

It is destructive to suppress it. Let’s embrace it. Let our hearts have courage for the changing of the guards.

It is risky to not reflect and incorporate the diversity which surrounds you. Diversity nourishes and protects.