Podcast
Inclusion as a business lever with CEO Karen Brown
- Pariveda CEO Margaret Rogers talks with Karen Brown, founder of Bridge Arrow and former Fortune 100 executive.
About the episode
Pariveda CEO Margaret Rogers talks with Karen Brown, founder of Bridge Arrow and former Fortune 100 executive, about making inclusion operational and tying it to outcomes leaders already track. Karen offers field-tested stories and tools, from reframing a hiring challenge to changing staffing for customer impact, and why timely, useful feedback builds momentum. The conversation is about action leaders can measure and progress people can feel.
You’ll learn
- A clear definition of inclusive leadership and why people who feel seen perform better
- How to move from headcount targets to outcomes using baselines and simple metrics
- What a gender productivity analysis revealed and how it changed staffing to key work
- The question to ask before big decisions so blind spots will not cost you
- Ways to make feedback timely and useful so learning turns into execution
Episode outline
01:00 Meet Karen Brown
06:04 The essence of inclusive leadership
12:08 Measuring inclusion as a strategic driver
18:13 Common mistakes in advancing inclusion
23:59 The importance of feedback in leadership
30:00 Navigating change and uncertainty in leadership
36:02 Data-driven inclusion Strategies
41:49 Scaling inclusion in organizations
Episode links
The Leaders You Need: How to Create Diverse Leadership Teams for a More Dynamic, Resilient Future by Karen Brown
Karen’s Book Recommendation: Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
About the guest
Karen Brown founded Bridge Arrow, a Chicago-based management consultancy, to make businesses more profitable by focusing on return on equity for investors, shareholders, and employees. Karen has been an F100 executive at several global companies, such as Marriott, Baker McKenzie, and more.
With an understanding of 35+ years in the corporate world, Karen advises global companies on how to drive growth and profitability by promoting inclusion in their organizations. She has been a global keynote speaker at conferences on 6 continents. Her ideas have appeared in leading publications, including the book Building and Encouraging Law Firm Diversity (Aspatore, 2016) and popular Harvard Business Review articles, “To Retain Employees, Focus on Inclusion – Not Just Diversity” (2018), and “The Fear Black Employees Carry” (2021).
She has just written her second award-winning book, The Leaders You Need: How to Create Diverse Leadership Teams for a More Dynamic, Resilient Future, published by MIT Press. She serves as a patient advocate through national and state lobbying, a Department of Defense consumer scientific research reviewer, and other advocacy initiatives.
About the Doing Good by Doing Better podcast
Hosted by Margaret Rogers, CEO of Pariveda, the Doing Good by Doing Better podcast highlights founders, executives, and innovators who share hard lessons, bold ideas, and real strategies for purpose-driven growth.
Every conversation offers practical insights you can use to solve forward. In each episode you’ll meet leaders who prove that being impact-driven and achieving meaningful success are not mutually exclusive.
Follow Doing Good by Doing Better on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and join us every other week as we keep learning how to do good by doing better.
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