Rohit Bhargava was already a Wall Street Journal–bestselling author and well-regarded keynote speaker when he met Jennifer Brown. But Bhargava, who specialized in marketing, trends, and diversity, didn’t have the kind of corporate experience that Brown, the head of Jennifer Brown Consulting, had gained from years of helping companies form more inclusive workplace environments. When the two of them teamed together to host the Non-Obvious Beyond Diversity Summit, a virtual event featuring over 200 speakers giving talks about diversity and inclusion, they were so thrilled with the resulting dialogues that they knew they had to keep the energy going. Inspired by the participants of the summit, Bhargava and Brown created the book Beyond Diversity. Their goal was, and is, to turn conversations around diversity and inclusion toward tangible and real change, as they discuss in the introduction to the book:

If there is one shortcoming of the worldwide conversation about diversity and inclusion, it is this: focusing on only one aspect of our identities prevents the opportunity to better understand ourselves and others outside that one label. Instead, there is a concept we will discuss frequently in this book, known as intersectionality. The term, first coined by American lawyer and civil rights advocate Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, refers to the idea that none of us can be defined by a single label, but only through a combination of social identities. Embracing the idea of intersectionality requires us to switch to a wide-angle lens. What if we had conferences, TV shows, or corporate recruiting programs dedicated to bringing people and perspectives together that might never otherwise share the same space? It is exciting to imagine the sorts of questions and topics that might arise. 

Beyond Diversity delves into those sorts of questions and topics in great detail, including resources for readers to watch video footage of the original summit. Bhargava and Brown bring in a whole host of contributing writers as well as the work of many sensitivity readers. The book focuses not on identifying existing problems but on making real changes, and Kirkus Reviews notes that “managers, CEOs, and hiring directors—as well as ordinary people—will find a great deal of valuable insights in these pages.”

Beyond Diversity is split up into 12 chapters matching the 12 categories of the summit. Each of the chapters, with titles like “In Storytelling,” “In Leadership,” and “In the Future,” work to bring together what are typically segmented conversations. “The way we landed on the twelve themes was by first deciding what we weren’t going to do,” says Bhargava. They wanted to avoid dividing up their speakers and stories into singular identity boxes, like “women” and “people with disabilities” and so on. “Instead, we structured the book under twelve universal human themes. Each one of these topics is not specifically about any one subgroup, it’s about everyone.” 

And so each chapter shares stories by people from many different backgrounds and overlapping identities. In the same way, Bhargava and Brown brought in several other credited contributors in order to ensure that as many kinds of people as possible were able to contribute their stories and make the book truly inclusive. 

Bhargava, who lives in Virginia, notes that there’s a tension between the increased focus on inclusion and diversity and the ways in which those conversations are often fraught with resentment and blame. So many corporate Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion efforts don’t go anywhere. Maybe someone is given a title like “Head of Diversity,” but they don’t have any power to make changes. Or maybe there’s an HR meeting or two, and nothing really happens after that.

As a result, more and more people are understandably resentful and suspicious of any further attempts by those like Bhargava to start these conversations. “What we talk about in our book is how to make this topic, which feels very niche and sometimes combative, and make it a more inclusive conversation,” he says. “A lot of companies are trying to check a box. And the problem is that a lot of well-intentioned industry practices encourage them to do that.”

Bhargava has seen firsthand how refocusing on intersectionality opens people up to actually connect with people who aren’t like them rather than worrying about saying the wrong thing or distrusting the other people in the room. “When you create an atmosphere of fear, you can’t have open conversations,” he says. Bhargava and Brown felt that part of that problem came from either a limited scope that ignored intersectionality or from conversations that weren’t intended to create change. “The authors repeatedly point out that merely noticing diversity problems is not sufficient,” says Kirkus. “They urge their readers to take action and lay out several strategies for how to institute changes on the grassroots level, including how those in majority groups can be better allies for their colleagues.”

With that in mind, Beyond Diversity includes access to video footage of the original speakers at the summit as well as suggested conversation questions for groups and concrete steps to take to create change. Bhargava felt strongly about making sure that Beyond Diversity itself was available to as many people as possible, and so the book can be found in paperback, hardcover, audiobook, e-book, large print, and, later this year, a version for young readers.

The idea is to get people to use the book to start having their own conversations and making their own changes. “The writing style and a lot of the format was intentionally made to be used in a classroom, to the point where each of the twelve chapters is independent,” says Bhargava. That way, it makes it even easier for teachers and readers to go one chapter at a time or even skip around in the book.

As Bhargava notes, the book itself is evidence of its own success. After all, Beyond Diversity isn’t just Bhargava and Brown’s vision. It belongs to the many credited contributors as well as the 200 people who participated in the original summit. “That was our ambition,” he says, “but what’s amazing is how much that actually did happen.”

Chelsea Ennen is a writer living in Brooklyn.