About 24 leaders of businesses based in the Metroplex will meet Wednesday to discuss diversity, equity and inclusion in the third North Texas CEO Forum, the Dallas Morning News reports.
Participants in the forums, which is hosted by the Dallas Morning News and McKinsey & Co., are all CEOs of local organizations and will talk about best practices, obstacles and possibly solutions they can implement. And the media are closed from the meetings to encourage the leaders to speak honestly.
Preston Hollow neighbor and Dallas Mavericks CEO Cynt Marshall plans to attend the Zoom conference. She says cancel culture is preventing deep, meaningful conversations about race relations from happening.
Cynt Marshall. Photo courtesy of the Dallas Mavericks website.
Marshall joins Highland Park neighbor and The Beck Group CEO Fred Perpall in wondering about the impact of George Floyd’s death.
“It’s been 10 months since George Floyd got killed — a public lynching is what I call it — and we still have to talk about the things that we all rallied around and committed to do,” Marshall tells the Morning News.
The Dallas Mavericks CEO also says she thinks the executives need to leave the forum with a couple initiatives or ideas and all work toward achieving them.
“We need a sense of collective ownership, and frankly, collective celebration when we hit a milestone in these areas. That’s how we continue to make progress on that inclusion index,” she says.
Marshall wanted to create a sports management major at Paul Quinn College, but her boss and Preston Hollow neighbor Mark Cuban told her to do even more than that. What resulted was the Mavs major, a bachelor of arts in leadership called LISTEN, which stands for leadership, innovation, sports management, technology, entrepreneurship and networking.
The Mavericks contributed $500,000 and will help raise the rest to hire faculty.
“We’re going to provide internships for students who go through this curriculum, give them an opportunity to work for us permanently,” Marshall says. “That’s how you invest.”
