Vernā Myers

Vernā Myers wrote the line that most organizations now use to explain the difference between the two words they had been treating as one: diversity is being invited to the party, inclusion is being asked to dance.

The distinction matters because it separates a hiring number from a working experience, and it is the reason a company can improve its representation figures for years while the people it hired keep leaving. Her work is about the second half, which is harder to measure and is where most programs quietly fail.

She has worked in this field for close to three decades, and in 2018 took the inaugural role of vice president of inclusion strategy at Netflix, where she built the function from nothing inside a company scaling globally. That is the part of her record most useful to a corporate audience: she is not describing inclusion work from the outside, she has had to make it survive contact with an operating business, a leadership team and a budget.

A lawyer by training, she spent years advising law firms and legal departments, one of the harder environments for this work, and the American Bar Association published both of her books: Moving Diversity Forward: Going from Well-Meaning to Well-Doing and What If I Say the Wrong Thing? She now runs The Vernā Myers Company.

Her sessions are direct without being punitive, which is a narrow register and the reason she is booked for rooms that are nervous. The second book title is a fair guide to the tone: the assumption is that most people in the audience want to do this well and are afraid of getting it wrong out loud, and the session is built to get them past that rather than to confirm the fear.