The Evolution of DEI

Welcome to the HBR Executive Agenda for July 31, 2025. In This Issue: The Evolution of DEI We’re Looking for Your Feedback The Evolution of DEI HBR has written a lot about the future of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiatives. Washington has practically criminalized the practice, leading some companies to simply drop their programs and others to seek ways to sustain them, in new forms and under new names. To understand how we got here and where we’re going, I reached out to Doug Melville, who has spent a career thinking about these issues. Melville, a former chief diversity officer who now consults on leadership and culture, believes there are opportunities to reinvent diversity initiatives in ways that can more directly benefit business. Melville has seen the corporate world’s approach to diversity change multiple times. Early in his career, “diversity” was mainly an issue of marketing and segmentation—an effort to capture untapped audiences via new products and advertising. “Diversity was essentially an emerging market,” he says. As chief diversity officer for a big advertising and marketing firm, Melville’s primary role was to make sure his clients’ products and services were relatable amid changes in cultural norms and attitudes. That focus shifted around the time of the 2016 U.S. election, when politics spilled over into almost everything. Identity issues took hold in the culture and the boardroom, and diversity efforts became more of an HR imperative: how many members of various ethnic, racial, gender, or other groups were represented in workforces, leadership, and boards. The 2020 police killing of George Floyd accelerated another shift, in which many people looked increasingly to corporations to address social justice issues. In Melville’s view, companies became advocacy groups. Diversity measures weren’t tied directly to the business, but companies felt they were needed to show employees and customers that they were sensitive to what was happening around them. Melville believes companies also granted excessive power at that time to their diversity champions, elevating to chief and officer-level status people who hadn’t worked previously in senior management and who may not have been provided enough support as they leveled up. Some companies also ended up with a sizable diversity complex within their organizations that, while well intentioned, could also feel like a costly distraction. But the main issue, Melville says, was that there wasn’t a clear definition of what diversity should look like, or even what problem such initiatives were trying to solve. There’s a lot at stake, which is why companies are struggling to get it right. Some, including Costco and Apple, are reaffirming their commitment to DEI. Others are abandoning their efforts. And many are in the middle, staying quiet publicly while continuing their work. Even companies like Meta and McDonald’s, which publicly ditched some of their DEI efforts, still have them largely in place—albeit renamed and with some changes in focus. It’s a clarifying moment. If your leadership is committed to upholding DEI principles, Melville offers a few steps for how to drive these efforts to help ensure their success: Take this moment to rethink the vision for your DEI efforts and what problem you’re trying to solve. Make sure you have a clear business reason to justify a DEI program that will come across—to employees and customers—as authentic to your brand and mission. Appoint a diversity department head who has significant management experience and leadership gravitas to drive things forward. Can they own a room? Do they have enough experience and knowledge to be credible? Invest in research to calculate the actual value of your DEI initiatives. Try to determine the benefit of these efforts—and/or the cost of their absence—in terms of brand equity, reputation, and perception. Decide how visible you want your programs to be. Is it excessively risky in this environment for you to speak out? As the legal landscape around DEI continues to shift, you may need to adjust your communications strategy. If you’re a global company, you’ll need to adapt your program to suit local needs and sensibilities. In some countries, the very word “diversity” can suggest an overly U.S.-centric approach to issues of equity and inclusion. It may be that you’ll want to import certain attitudes and practices from other countries to the U.S. Make sure you’re committed at the highest levels of your organization. If the CEO and top team aren’t fully bought in, the efforts will go nowhere. We’re Looking for Your Feedback Now that HBR Executive has been live for a few months, we’re looking to speak with a few subscribers to better understand what’s working—and where we can improve. Are you enjoying your subscription? Is it delivering the value you expected? What needs are we not meeting? We’re setting up short interviews with HBR Executive subscribers between August 4-15. If you’re open to a brief 30 to 45-minute conversation, we’d love to hear your perspective and your feedback. You can schedule your session here.

The Evolution of DEI

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