Soon after becoming US chair at PricewaterhouseCoopers in 2016, Tim Ryan had this to say about his accounting career: You can be average, or you can really try to have an impact on society.
Ryan has spent much of the past four years doing the latter through his brainchild, the CEO Action for Diversity & Inclusion initiative. The Walpole resident had a modest goal when he chose to pull together chief executives to talk about racial equity, share best practices, and train employees about unconscious biases. Maybe a few dozen would join this coalition, he had thought.
A few dozen? More like 1,300 top executives, based on the latest numbers.
Starting this month, CEO Action moves into a new phase with a project that may well be unprecedented in the history of corporate America. The group has launched CEO Action for Racial Equity, a two-year fellowship program aimed at advancing racial equity through corporate engagement strategies and public policy reforms.
Until now, the initiative has primarily been about companies’ human resources. Now, it’s entering the world of government relations.
Participating companies “lend” employees to the cause: The fellows receive their full salaries from their employers, for two years, to work on racial equity policies full time. They put their day jobs on hold. Most of the nearly 250 fellows began orientation on Oct. 1, and more are expected to join later this year.
They’ll work remotely for now, focusing on four key policy areas: education, health care, economic empowerment, and public safety.
Their mission: to identify effective policies that address racial equity and to spread the word. They will also identify and call out bad policies when they see them.
“There was a clear desire for companies to do more,” Ryan said of racial-justice efforts, but "many of them don’t have the scale to do it by themselves.”
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The program’s steering committee features several CEOs with New England ties: Mike Mahoney from Boston Scientific, Marianne Harrison from John Hancock, Roger Crandall from MassMutual, and Christopher Swift from The Hartford.
Then there’s Ryan, the committee chairman. He has an office in New York and spent much of his time on the road until COVID-19 hit in March. Since then, he has largely been housebound in Walpole.
The undertaking can be traced back to a decision Ryan made soon after becoming PwC’s US chair. During his first week, Alton Sterling was killed by police officers in Baton Rouge,La.; a few days later, a gunman ambushed police in Dallas, killing five; white officers were apparently targeted. These were two of several incidents that prompted Ryan to hold a companywide discussion on race for a full day. One peer warned Ryan that it would blow up in his face.
The day wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t a disaster, either. For many white professionals at PwC, it was eye-opening to hear what their Black peers faced in terms of discrimination and inequity. These conversations continued internally, and proved to be helpful to distraught PwC employees in 2018, when a Black accountant with the firm was shot and killed in his apartment by a Dallas police officer.
Early on, Ryan was challenged by a Black colleague: This work on diversity and inclusion shouldn’t stop at PwC’s doors. So he dialed up all the chief executives he knew to sign the original CEO Action pledge, and soon had 150 on board.
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Over time, hundreds of best practices were added to the CEO Action website, a go-to resource for D&I executives. Eventually, Ryan even bought a bus with $10 million from his PwC budget. In pre-pandemic times, the vehicle served as a mobile classroom to help companies teach their employees about unconscious bias.
Then came the killing of George Floyd, and the Black Lives Matter protests that followed, which put more pressure on corporations to step up their diversity efforts. PwC, among other things, agreed to give employees 40 hours a year to devote to community service and to provide more transparency on the diversity within its own ranks. The first such report, out in August, wasn’t perfect: Fewer than 20 percent of PwC’s new hires in the United States are Black and Latinx individuals, for example. The goal is 35 percent.
This summer, Ryan also brought a new request to the CEO Action coalition, which had previously avoided taking on public-policy issues. Now, it was time to dive deeper, by gathering hundreds of people from the CEO Action companies for the new fellowship program. He went back to his Rolodex and started calling around again.
Among those who answered: Hancock chief Marianne Harrison. She said recent events underscore the need for CEO Action’s mission, and she readily agreed to be on the steering committee. She also put forward an employee, sales training consultant Muhsinah Nuriddin, who will be one of the 250 fellows.
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MassMutual’s Roger Crandall got involved in much the same way. Pia Flanagan, Crandall’s chief of staff, said they were working on MassMutual’s diversity initiatives and reached out to Ryan to see what CEO Action would be doing to respond to the protests. Flanagan was quickly recruited to be the fellowship program’s chief operating officer. (Its CEO is Roy Weathers, a vice chair with PwC.)
Flanagan said the program will focus on the Black community, but the results should help other people of color. Her new team is not naïve enough to think they can fully dismantle the country’s systemic racism, but she said she is excited to be on the front lines of the fight.
There’s no way Ryan could have imagined this four years ago. He hopes that four years from now, they can look back and say they made a difference. You can be average, or you can really try to have an impact on society.
Jon Chesto can be reached at jon.chesto@globe.com. Follow him @jonchesto.