The Diversity Playbook: Transforming Business with Inclusion and Innovation

Hephzi Pemberton’s first nonfiction, business book The Diversity Playbook provides an empowering and uplifting experience. It contains proven expertise, factual examples and practical tools to transform your business and leadership approach with inclusion and innovation as a central shared goal and priority.

Hephzi founded Equality Group in 2018, as an inclusion and diversity specialist business focused on helping financial and technology companies, to diversify their teams and create more inclusive cultures, to manifest a brighter, kinder and bolder future for all.

Her book demonstrates with clarity, relevant case studies and the latest research, as well as an applicable exercise in each chapter, to show how leaders and firms who embrace and embed inclusion and diversity into their business will benefit. They will be the businesses that innovate and adapt more rapidly. They will have a workplace culture that the latest talent seeks out and stays with. They will reach a wider set of customers and clients who feel valued and understood. They know that to achieve these benefits and many others besides, leaders and businesses now and in the future will have to take inclusion and diversity seriously.

Her cutting-edge, poignant, ten chapters feature how the time has arrived for inclusion, right now and exactly how to

•apply inclusive leadership skills;

•ensure that communication is key and data matters;

•enhance business values with purposeful action and positive return;

•celebrate success using incentive and accountability applications;

•debias systems and ensure inclusive hiring;

•achieve parity across reviews, retention and promotion;

•build inclusive foundations and positive policies; and

humanise work making sure that social sustainability is achieved for all.

She reveals, with a compelling and expert presence and urgency, how emerging events have demonstrated that new leaders are needed more than ever before in our brave new post- Covid world. Leaders with a growth mindset who will shape the way businesses evolve and remain competitive, or flatline and fade into extinction, using Lehman Brothers as a relevant opening example. She shows that - how you lead is as important as who is leading - citing representative, inclusive leadership as the only way forward. Balance and bias are addressed, as well as the competency traits of the culture makers who are our world’s future.

Using colourful and engaging illustrations and graphs, her book shows exactly how to: activate accountability; make inclusive policies visible; turbo charge your taskforce; incorporate valuable incentives and rewards; as well achieve balanced scorecards and celebrate successes. Her highly-relevant book illustrates the latest hiring and team building pathways to ensure inclusion and diversity parity and debiased systems for all.

Each chapter ends with clearly presented Reflect and Act calls to actions, which can be applied to make a difference and conscious contribution in the world, as soon as each chapter has been completed. As a whole, the book provides an easy to read, interactive playbook, revealing how to optimise business for inclusion and diversity. How to equalise, amplify and innovate within a global context and ensure authentic productivity, performance and profit, leading to true social sustainability for all humanity.