Speaking of Allyship with Minji Kim of Cross Border Partners and Sylvia Han of Merrill

In our fifth episode, Lisa Prior, President of The Boston Club, is joined by Minji Kim, CEO of Cross Border Partners and Sylvia Han of Merrill Lynch Wealth Management.

Together they discuss:

• Minji & Sylvia’s leadership journeys as first- and second-generation immigrants
• What it takes to be an ally in the workplace
• How cultural programming & stereotypes impact Asian & AAPI women
• Fostering relationships across of Women of Color initiatives
• Everyone’s favorite K-Dramas

Tune in then subscribe to the show and connect with Minji, Sylvia, and The Boston Club on LinkedIn.

Transcript

0:03

Welcome to Speaking of Allyship, a podcast of the Boston Club, New England's premier women's leadership organization. I'm your host, Lisa Pryor, President. Here we bring you personal stories and proven leadership practices for allyship, including what it means, how to be an ally, and how to receive or ask for allyship too. Leadership is expansive in the workplace, across gender, race, orientation, identity, or how about just thinking differently? This podcast brings you together with amazing business and thought leaders of greater Boston, Massachusetts and New England to hear their personal stories and journeys and how their experiences and lessons learned shaped their leadership approach. You'll take away insights and tips, learn how allyship and mentorship can play a role in your career and how you can pay it forward, and leadership practices on everything from how to create inclusive work environments to how to be brave and prepared for challenging conversations. Let's get started. Hello and welcome back. I'm Lisa Pryor, President of the Boston Club, and you're back with us at Speaking of Allyship. Today my guests are longtime Boston Club member Sylvia Hahn, Wealth Management Advisor at Merrill, and Minji Kim, President and CEO of Cross Border Partners. So thrilled to have a chance to talk with you both. Thank you for being here. Thank you very much for having us. Minji, maybe we could start with you. Maybe introduce yourself a little bit. Tell us a little bit about yourself and Cross Border Partners. Sure. I'm currently running my consulting business called Cross Border Partners LLC with my corporate development, business development in the background and experience in the life science industry to try to help startup biotech company and Asian companies to really grow their company and business along the way. That's great. And it sounds like you're a serial entrepreneur or a very dedicated entrepreneur. How did you start the business? I mean, this is my personal interest to especially help to bridge the gap between Asia and the US. But that doesn't mean that I'm just helping only the Asian companies. But with my Asian upbringing, I am always passionate about bridging U.S. and non-U.S. Expertise for most efficient business creation. Thank you, and I appreciate we'll come back to that a little bit to hear more about how you came to be in that intersection And Sylvia, you are a longtime Boston Club member. How many years have you been part of the community? So I've been with the Boston Club since 2012. So that's 11 years started in as the chair not, Starting as a chair, but I was involved with the corporate board committee and then the corporate relations committee And so those have both been great experiences as far as learning about the club and engaging with both our corporate sponsors and our main mission of diversity on corporate boards. I've worked for Merrill for about 10 years and I'm a wealth manager at Merrill doing financial planning, investment management. And prior to that, I was in the institutional money management industry as a portfolio manager analyst. Thank you for sharing that. And I imagine in March of 2023, as we record this, must be an interesting time right now given the sort of volatility of the financial markets. So thank you for making time to be here. Yeah. A lot of discussion of FDIC insurance and the forms of insurance that apply to our industry. Great, well, let's see if we can talk about some other things today that are equally interesting and important. You know, one of the questions I love to ask our guests as we start goes back to the idea that we talk about at the Boston Club, which is that leadership is a lifelong journey. And one of the observations I've had experiences as we've been going through the podcast series is the power of understanding sort of the early life experiences and how they shaped who you are and, you know, and the career choices that you've both made. So Minji, maybe just briefly tell us a little bit about the early stages of your life journey and how that brought you to the leadership role that you're in today. Sure. Maybe I'll just explain about my background and how I actually came to the U.S. So I originally grew up in Korea, South Korea, and finished my PhD there. And came to Boston over 20 years ago for my postdoc position at Harvard Medical School. And then, you know, always been interested in business, professional in industry, but it was very hard to make that transition as an immigrant and Asian and a woman. So, but fortunately, I was able to make the transition, but it was a great journey for me to really push myself outside of my comfort zone. And while I was doing that, I was actually learning a lot about different challenges that a lot of different people, Asian women and immigrants will face. And also, I actually developed my own course of career. And along the way, I actually get a lot of help and support, but also a lot of challenges to really improve myself and adapt myself to the the US culture. Minji, thank you for sharing this perspective of being Asian American, Pacific Islander woman and your experiences and organizations. You also have this other experience of being an immigrant. And so, you know, how has that identity or experience played out along your journey? I would say on top of the Asian, being Asian or being female, as an immigrant, not actually necessarily actually coming to US when you're young, I actually came to US in my early 30s, I really have to overcome all the cultural ingression, like in a really cultural components in my upbringing. But also logistically, I had to take care of many different things that probably most of the Americans would not be able to imagine. For example, after I moved from Korea to Boston for my postdoc position at Harvard Medical School. It took me seven years to get my green card to be just qualified to work in the industry. And those are the kind of years probably wouldn't be necessary for most of the Americans. And also, I didn't have any pre-existing knowledge or connections or people to leverage when I try to make a create transition from academic research to industry business position or try to advance from a junior to a senior position. So really I have to push myself to you know work hard, go outside my comfort zone, really building my own resource and building my own skill set from the scratch. So if you think about whatever your second language it would be, if it is French for For example, if you go to France to settle down and establish your career as a foreigner, you have to overcome language, you have to overcome cultural nuance, but also you don't have anybody to support you. So you really have to reestablish your career from ground zero. Did you tell me once that some well-intentioned person gave you advice to watch old sitcoms, I guess it's interesting that you brought up. So I was fortunate to have, you know, coaches and HR professionals who try to very genuinely try to help me. And because when I started to... Feel the ceiling, the glass ceiling, whatever you call it. And it was not based on my work related performance, somewhat related with how I communicate with other people, how I, you know, engage with other people and so on. And at one point, you know, the senior executive mentioned, oh, you should participate in more teamwork because he thought that I was too silent, only just listening to all the soft talks or jokes when we had a dinner together, but I was actively listening. But then I didn't quite understand the whole spectrum of the jokes based on the old TV series. And then HR recommended me that, oh, you should watch the sitcom to just be a better, better perceived and maybe just, you know, there's some, you know, the particular jargons that you have to memorize. So there was interesting comments because I thought, I mean, I really attempted to really watch this TV series, but I thought to myself that, do I really have to spend my time- Watching comedy shows to be successful. That leaves me a lot of questions. I have never heard that in the leadership development body of research for the last three decades, watch more sitcoms has never come up as a suggestion. Sylvia, what do you think about that idea? Well, maybe someday we'll be asked to watch more K-dramas. There you go. And actually, thank you for saying that. Min-Chi, what do you think about the rise of K-dramas in the United States? They're incredibly popular. What do you think about that? Yes, and it's interesting. To be quite honest, one of the a white woman, senior leaders who I met through the Executive Women in Bio programs. And she and I got close while I were talking about all the K-dramas that she watched. And I was actually fascinated by the fact that sometimes I can get connected and get closer by talking about K-dramas. As I mentioned that I couldn't really imagine that happen in like 20 years ago. Having said that, that's a kind of one phenomena that people are here are more open to Asian culture and particularly Korean cultures. And I think that by doing that, they can appreciate more enriched cultural values and different like genre, different fun, right? And different opportunities. So I hope that they can translate that idea to the business side, whereby you embrace different ethnic and cultural diversity. Actually you will be more beneficial. I love that. It's how television opens the ideas or opens our eyes to. As Sylvia called it, the cultural programming, in other communities and builds empathy really for someone's experience. So I have to ask you both, I have to ask, do you have a favorite K-drama? I mean, Sylvia, you go first. I actually watched too much. The first one I watched was Crash Landing on You, and then I suddenly started watching many, many others. So if you want to get hooked. Watch that one. I like Attorney Wu. Extraordinary Attorney Wu. Yeah, actually, definitely I like those. And I mean, I can just, you know, keep on going. So I'm not going to just name a particular one. But I again, I really appreciate the breadth of different K-dramas are liked here. It's not just one genre. Like it's not romance. It's not only the horror, it's kind of pretty broad. And also through that phenomena, people are more open to try out Korean food and Korean games. And they're trying to just understand why they behave that way. So I think that's a very interesting observation. And I think that could be the one example of Americans. They're definitely, they are very open, but it's just a matter of, they need to be exposed to different culture more. Nice, thank you both so much. Sophia, I would just love to hear a little bit about your own life journey and what brought you to leadership. Well, I'll also, just because you have first generation and a second generation Korean, I thought I would, just to kind of set the context, my family immigrated from Korea. My father's a medical doctor in quite a while ago and moved to upstate New York. So I was born in upstate New York, near the community Albany area. And I always admired my parents for their journey of immigrating. They were immigrating at a time when it wasn't, it was Korea was more of a kind of black box to people. And so, and when I was growing up, we had, there were very few Asians. So out of a high school class of 500, there were three Asians. So it was a feeling of being a little bit of isolation and feeling like kind of an outsider. And also the feeling that while I very much admired my parents, they were from a different culture. We weren't sure, you know, as far as whatever cultural training, you know, you would need to be an American. It's a different kind of upbringing. So, but always a lot of admiration for the generation that immigrated. So my journey is more like, you know, I grew up here in America. So, you know, going through after, I'll just start after college, so I'm not speaking too long. I started in thinking in terms of arts administration and worked at the conservatory. I was actually playing violin. I was a violin performer. And transitioned over to finance in 18 years, spent 18 years in institutional money management and then wealth management, as I said. How did you make that migration from musician to wealth management? What was that transition like? Well, it was quite a while ago. So it's very historical in the 80s. But at the time, you know, my biggest passion was playing the violin. But, you know, it's not that renumerative. Being an artist is something like, if you can imagine doing something else and you have an aptitude to do something else. You might do it just because of how committed you have to be as a professional musician. So I was an economics major at Cornell And so there was some inherent interest in. Finance and the economy. I just moved in that direction. And here in Boston, obviously, we have many options for asset management. Some of the best asset management firms are here. And I. Was lucky to serve at Wellington Management Company. Thank you for sharing that. And what I appreciate about so much of what you and Minji have both shared is, you know, we talk a lot about the lifelong leadership journey and how we are whole people, right? We bring ourselves, our life experiences to the work that we do as leaders. And you've both given so much to double-click on. What I'd like to do is kind of get us grounded. The concept and the idea behind our podcast is exploring allyship. And you've given us many threads to pick up. One thing I'd like to do is get us grounded, though, in this idea of allyship, because it means something different to different people. And so before we dig a little deeper into your history, your work today, how do you define allyship? What does it mean to you? Sylvia, let's start with you. I think in this context, because Lisa, you had discussed that Minji and I might just give kind of an Asian perspective. And then Minji can speak pretty eloquently about this too. It's kind of a cultural programming you get as an Asian, which is my parents were, you. Know, they definitely promoted me having a career and all that stuff, but they were always saying things like, oh, don't speak so loud, you might bother someone. You know, they were trying to promote modesty. And I think it kind of culturally just gets to maybe cultural harmony or avoiding disharmony. And so you grow up hearing that and then it gets interpreted or perceived by people as, oh, you're shy or you're reticent or maybe you're hiding something or whatever and you can see why that might happen. And then it kind of in my journey you know kind of becoming a professional working mostly in corporations you almost have to work against that programming and you know realize that you have to you have to kind of be self-aware enough to you know, work against that programming, right? Because in the States, you know, if you have to remember somebody, this is when I was in institutional management, I was doing securities analysis. And you're recommending stocks to people. And he was telling me, you know, you got to say it's a table county by, you know, you have to have this stylistic approach toward making recommendations. And he wasn't wrong. He's not wrong because maybe he was definitely helping me on how to have impact and be effective. My parents weren't wrong to tell me to be more quiet and all this other stuff because they had good reasons for providing that cultural programming. So you just have to somehow arbitrate between these things. It wasn't going to be me to say, oh, this is a table pounding by, that would never come out of my mouth because it's just I can't say that. Because I can't speak like that. So I think, you know, my insight would be as a young person, you just have to become acclimated to working in the U.S. You have to realize these things, that there's something you have to work against. It sounds like in that instance with your colleague, the person was trying to be an ally in some way offer advice in the best way that he knew how. So to be an ally, I guess, would be kind of me going back to that young. Like maybe helping a young Asian woman. And I don't know if Asian young women today have the same issue to the same degree, but, you know, to help being an ally to that person and being the person that could help, you know. Her through this journey. Nice and kind of reframing the way your parents taught you to see the world, this ally helps you see another way and maybe speak another way as well. Thank you for sharing that, Sylvia. Minji, how about you? When you think about allyship, what does that mean to you? I think that allyship means pretty broad concept in my mind, which I think core meaning to me is more commitment. To build long-term friendship, to learn about that individuals and support the career advancement by providing access, mentorship and sponsorship. It's not just introducing someone to you and then that's it. I think that's a very minimal definition in my mind. I think creating a good relationship for allyship is very tough because everybody's so busy, particularly leaders who have very demanding schedules and many conflicting priorities at work, home and communities that they are in. So without intentional commitment, our efforts can end up easily as an occasional and passive help. Which I believe that it's really hard to create sustainable and tangible impact on somebody. But also different levels of allyship should exist and can exist, for example, from a simple acquaintance who you met at a networking event and share general insights and knowledge to a more like committed mentor-mentee relationship sharing personal advices, list for a dedicated time period. And to someone who has known you for some time and can advocate for you and bring your name up at opportunities to give you a fair and equal shot at advancing your career. Definitely, the latter part of allyship should require a very deep relationship and understanding because you definitely risk your own reputation to buy sponsoring someone. So I guess this is a more of a long time kind of journey and within that you have many different types of allyship but the important thing that I would really like to mention is that typically Asian, I mean I can actually speak about my experience, Asian women who immigrated at your late stage of your life and who is so busy to be survived and succeed in the very different US corporate world. I should admit myself that I had to, I mean, I spent most of my early career really head down, work hard, and really focus on my own career journey, not necessarily really taking intentional efforts to really help others. But the more I progressed into my later stage of my career, you know, with my own experience, I was in a position to better understand what other, let's say, Asian American women are going through and facing in their career journey. And I became naturally passionate about helping them because I knew what they're actually going through. But then still with my own career objective, I had to really make intentional time to really help them and be friends with them. So I hope that everybody really appreciate the, the value of these efforts, lifelong efforts, and it's just creating and nurturing this close relationship so that both parties can be benefited. Because one thing, one concept or belief that I have is that to create a long-term, very beneficial relationship, is should be mutual side. Like the both parties should be benefited mutually, not just one side. Thank you so much. What I appreciate in both of your responses is you've taken your own reflection of being either feeling different or having, Sylvia, as you said, this sort of cultural programming, but showing up in a place where that programming doesn't seem to work to advance your. Goals. And you've somehow both taken your own experiences and transformed them to want to be allies, especially to other young women who are either from Asia or are descended in second generation and kind of turn that into mentorship and support for other women. And Minji, that word that you used several times, that idea of being intentional, that, you know, allyship, as we've been learning in this, this journey is, is not, we can think of ourselves as natural allies, but you both describe being very action-oriented in showing up for someone, in mentoring or advocating, or Minji, as you said, putting your own reputation out there as you recommend or advocate for someone. So thank you both for sharing. And what I see is you feel this so deeply as you talk about your own experiences. Minji, Sylvia tells me you started a support network or a network for Asian American Pacific Islander women in the life sciences community. And how did you come up with that idea? It is a very recent initiative that I started with another Asian American woman to build close allyship and sponsorship among a female executive and investors in the life science industry. And over the last couple of years, I was working as a volunteer to launch a bioscience investor inclusion group, which is a D&I effort within life science VCs and portfolio companies. And it was a fantastic experience for me to learn about different activities in D&I, as well as some of the challenges. In the search of existing DNI groups, we found a decent number of women's group in the biopharmace space and a few women of color groups. But I was able to find an Asian female DNI group in biotech community. And given that there are so many Asians and Asian female professionals in this industry, I was pretty shocked and while I was asking for inputs for Asian females, I also realized that there are a couple of significant misconceptions about Asian American women. First of all, many people think that we are not even a part of the underrepresented group and it is very difficult to find statistical data or reports specifically about Asian American female because most of the TNI reports showed aggregated numbers for all Asians or all women of color. Also oftentimes we are not included within women of color along with Black American or Latin American women. If you think about how many Asian females are in this industry and how many Asian students study STEM areas and try to get into this industry, but there are only a handful number of Asian female senior executives or members and partners at VCs. The attrition rate and inequality toward this specific group during the process of moving up the career ladder is actually very significant. The other mind-blowing misconception, perception about Asian American women that I heard is that we are hardworking and modest but have no opinion and no leadership as Sylvia mentioned. And there definitely there is a risk of generalization and we all face different challenges as individuals but Asian females, particularly East Asian females, share a similar cultural belief and upbringing as Sylvia mentioned, emphasizing the value of humility and harmony. And this could be a reason for this stereotype of Asian American women and a cause of some of the hurdles to be successful in the U.S. workplace. For example, many Asian females, including myself, are too reserved to boldly articulate their achievements or share their opinion since they think, tend to think that their achievements are not good enough, or they wanted to make sure their ideas do not have any flaws before they raise their hands at a meeting. Because how they present themselves do not come across as being confident, and they look very different from the quote unquote, what has traditionally has been seen as successful leaders in the US. We are perceived as less competent, less participating, less strategic, and poor at leading. And I can tell you that when I actually shared this stereotype of Asian women, a lot of Asian women leaders, they're so upset because this is a very wrong view of who we are and who we can actually provide. Although I agree that there are some areas of improvement needed from, Asian females to a certain degree because we have some cultural differences, different belief. But you have a very different way to communicate and interact with each other. However, this important thing is that this stereotype for Asian American women is very unfair because opportunities to shine and grow during their course of career journey are not even given to them easily, which makes it harder and takes longer for Asian American female to reach to this inner position in their organizations. And it is also an unfortunate loss to the industry, unable to best leverage what individual Asian female can uniquely offer. This is a great point about representation where there's actually some research that shows that you don't often see an Asian female face kind of leading the charge, right? So you don't, you know, acclimatize to that. That seeing that and it's perceived. There's this research that Cornell did that said, it showed that people perceive recommendations from female securities analysis in this case. But I think we can generalize that recommendations from females as being more risky, because you don't see something as much, right? Even though their track records was actually better. It's this representation thing where you don't see an Asian female, you're not accustomed to their style of leadership. So they're not perceived as leaders or they're not associated with leadership. And what I'm hearing in that is it creates a self-perpetuating cycle. When you don't have that role model, then it undermines those who come into it. And thank you for sharing this perspective. One thing, Sylvia, that we have chatted about earlier is just even using the AAPI label and the fact that it covers so many groups. I wonder if you could share some insight about what that means to you and what might it look like if we were more respecting more sort of the individual groups or experiences. I personally still associate with the, I consider myself a member of it, but at the same time you're thinking, well why did they create this incredibly heterogeneous group? You know, because it includes South Asians, Pacific Islanders, South Asians is itself extremely heterogeneous, North Asians. So, and there's quite a bit of difference both in the... Not all the cultures aren't uniform at all. So it's pretty different. Also socioeconomic differences, et cetera. But it goes hand in hand with the fact that, like Minji was saying, women of color also get bunched into the same thing. Same thing. And if you look underneath, there's quite a bit of variety in the experience. So I've been in my, you know, your company sometimes does events for women of color, which is, you know, I applaud it. You know, I think it's great. But usually the Asian, subgroup is you're not, you're not sure. It feels like an afterthought usually, because you know, it's what our experiences are being measured to the same degree as other women of color and. On the one hand, I'm glad I'm glad you know, I think you know an Advancement for other women of color helps Asians too. So I'm glad to see it on the other hand, You know, it does always feel like an afterthought like we're not sure what's happening with Asians ourselves just because it's not being studied or tracked or there's no research you can look at it doesn't seem like so. It's just interesting. I appreciate you sharing that on any number of levels. It's almost a sense of being invisible. I don't know how else to say it as you both have described. I'm not an expert in this area at all. I'm not, you know, I'm just speaking as kind of a regular somebody who works in the corporate world. But it's kind of just what I I perceive as like lack of being seen. And I appreciate that. And that's the point of these conversations that we're having through this podcast and throughout the Boston Club. It's understanding each other's experiences and seeing each other as individuals, right? As much as how our common cultural experiences or not common cultural experiences may have shaped us on that journey. And I think one of the goals we have at the Boston Club is kind of using this opportunity in 2023. To say a chief officer of an organization, whether that's the chief executive officer, the chief science officer, financial, marketing, whatever industry a woman might be in, there's been a model in the past of what that CXO needs to behave like or look like. And what we are trying to say is effectiveness comes in many forms, whether that's different styles, or we don't look like how a chief executive might have looked 40, 50 years ago. So that's part of our conversation today. Thank you for sharing that. Minji, back to this group that you've started within the life sciences community, what's your goal for the group? What are you hoping to affect? So with all these discussions, I actually came up with three principles to create this group. First of all, is because there are so many women groups and the AI groups out there, and I didn't necessarily want to recreate the same organization for women, and definitely we should just help each other to share the resource and insights, but really try to have a laser focus to help on specific group of Asian women. Professional leaders in life science, executive investors so that they can nurture the longterm allyship and sponsorship so that they can appreciate and they can create tangible benefits create tangible benefits out of these events, not necessarily attending another women's networking event. Because as you pointed out, there are so many heterogeneous groups even within women of color and probably the individual challenges they are facing may be very different. So you cannot really generalize too much, but also you can obtain some general insights, how to become a C-Chief level executive building executive presence, but what they're actually facing to overcome their cultural background and personnel and history may be very different. That's why we wanted to focus on a smaller group so that we can actually create tangible benefits within this group. And along with that, we think that we should actually start from the top part of the pyramid to make the real life impact. Especially when you actually feel that we have a meaningful advancement in the careers in executive investors and that they help each other, then there's a natural ripple effect. Coming down to the junior level of professionals and the next generation and leaders. So, we really wanted to make sure that initially we wanted to be successful to create allyship within the top leaders so that we feel comfortable and we create a very dedicated leaders who are also really intuitive to pay forward to others. And then thirdly, as Sylvia and Lisa you actually also mentioned, you know typically the D&I groups, they tend to actually focus on their own circle of underrepresented group. For example, if you go to the women D&I groups, oftentimes the participants are all women. So I believe that we can actually help each other but also we really definitely should expand our allyship to outside our own circle so that we can benefit from a broader network and also learn from each other with objective views. And oftentimes I get recommendation to find white male mentor, not just, you know, women mentor because they are the one who can, you know, meaningfully advance your career. But I can also admit that that has been a very hard, you know. Hard things to do. So I really wanted to start with, to create a group of key Asian female executive investors who can share our vision but also we can attract. Other leaders like white male leaders and also other marginalized communities so that we can share insights and grow together. And Lisa as you pointed out about the purpose of the Boston Club I really don't want it to create another very silo you know D&I group we are talking about we versus them. I mean, that's not the purpose of this group. It's more about I wanted to really increase the awareness of this Asian female group, how smart they are, how wonderful they are to the external world. But also, we can actually improve our own awareness of other diversity groups as well. So that's the kind of vision that I have. It's a long way to go. But that's something that I wanted to set up. But I so appreciate Minji the principles that you are bringing to this. So first of all, it's about fostering relationships and honoring the reality that each individual, whether they are of Asian American perspective or other, we all kind of have this, as Sylvia called it, the cultural programming, right, that we grew up with and how do we honor and and acknowledge that, but how do we also foster relationships as an important part of allyship? And I think what I really appreciate about everything you've just described is it's very inclusive, right? It is not just about one group, but it's recognizing men as allies as much as allyship across differences. And what I appreciate, because that's really what we're trying to accomplish as well. On the one hand, acknowledge and respect. We each have our own lens because everybody's journey has been shaped uniquely. And at the end of the day, it's about being inclusive and intentional in how we make room for others at the table. Thank you so much for sharing that. And Silvia, what are your thoughts on this? On this? Well, yes, as Minjee was speaking, our firm has done some research on the impact of diversity, the financial impact, and it is associated with better company performance. And part of it is engagement, like a more diverse workforce, they feel more engaged. Possibly because no one feels has that outsider feeling, right? If you have enough of a diverse workforce, there's not this monolithic group and a smaller group. It's like there's a more, I personally felt that like some of the best team, experiences I've had were very diverse groups. So I think what Minji is saying is like, you know, help people understand Asian females, Asian women executives. But also we need to understand and have empathy toward other types of groups. So that's how we then don't just perceive somebody else in this very superficial fashion and make quick judgments or whatever. So if everybody put that effort in, it would be easier. really see them all coming from different places. That's really nice. And what you're making me think of, Sylvia, is we live in a global world today. You are on project teams with people in Asia. And as I sit here in Boston, Massachusetts, you're on a call, what, at 7, 9, 10 at night with people from across the world, right, and different time zones and bringing different perspectives. And at the end of the day, it's great for all of our leadership and all of our organizations to understand and unpack those those differences. You know, as we come to the end of our time, we'd love to hear from each of you. Min-Chi, we'd love to start with you. What's one idea or wish you would want to leave us with for. The future? A practice that today feels kind of out of reach. For me, I think I mentioned it earlier, but it's not particular practice or measurement or like criteria, but it's more about more interest or commitment or intentional leaning to this efforts from the, I would say the top people, like decision makers, because I mean not really to criticize them, I think it's a kind of human nature that if you're in a a very top authority with decision-making power. You don't need to go beyond. You don't need to go extra miles. But I think that in the interest or intentional help from that group, really fostering to really, we can actually celebrate in a different diversity. And truly, we can be benefited from the different values coming from different backgrounds. Because one of the things that I've been discussing with other women's and D&I communities, or even though there are so many reports and hard evidence out there, diversity really matters for the success of the company. But when it comes to the actual decision-making process, do they really. Embrace the concept of foreign and difference and uncomfortableness? Because the difference means that naturally it's not comfortable to you because you cannot really understand. So you need to put extra efforts to do that. But do we really understand that that's really required for for the success of the business. Then only then, I guess, we can have a buy-in from the top. We can actually create a more tangible impact, not just necessarily creating the systems, but. Not necessarily just going to the real impact. Maybe I would just leave that as a future, more interest or trend from the top. Yes. I appreciate that. It sounds like I'm hearing more executive leaders leaning into allyship in the way we've defined it, being intentional and sponsoring and encouraging more of that open understanding. So thank you, Min-Chi. And Min-Chi, what is the name of the group that you founded, the Life Sciences? What is it? We don't have the official name, but then my partner actually proposed the NT Playbook. So we're not a playbook, you know, that's the idea. But again, just now I started and we had a kind of one meeting during the J.P. Morgan. And obviously we need a lot of insights and inputs to create a more meaningful meeting series in the down the road. So I'm planning to have another meeting sometime in June in mostly, most likely in Boston. So I hope to receive more inputs and comments. That's great. Let us know, we'll help you get the word out. And thank you, Min-Chi. Sylvia, same question for you. What's one idea you'd like to leave us with or something that feels out of reach today but that you'd love to see in the future? I think it is very hard to understand other people's cultural programming. So it does in that sense feel out of reach. It takes tremendous effort, but if, especially people in leadership, if they understand that if they made that effort, that that group will feel less isolated and therefore more engaged in their work, that maybe they'll see what the dividends are for them. Because it does feel, if you feel like you're not seen or you're not understood, that does lead to a feeling of isolation. So if people can maybe, maybe they can empathize with that idea. Thank you so, so very much. The idea that everyone has something to contribute and is worth being seen. Sylvia Han, Min-Shi Kim, thank you so much for being guests on Speaking of Allyship. And we're especially grateful this will air during Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. And what I appreciate so much is the lens and experience you've offered us. And what I think is a balance and a hard balance to achieve in some way, which is how do we hold and understand this cultural programming, these differences that we bring to the table, and yet also include and understand and respect the differences that others bring as well, all to the benefit of the community or the organization that we're part of. So grateful to have you share your perspective and experiences today. Thank you. Thank you, Lisa. Thank you, Sylvia. Thank you, Wenji. Thanks for listening to Speaking of Allyship, a podcast of the Boston Club, New England's premier women's leadership organization. You can find resources and links from this episode in the show notes at www.thebostonclub.com. Follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter. This is. Your host, Lisa Pryor, President. Be well and ask yourself, what's one thing I could do today to be an ally.