Walmart CEO Doug McMillon on social unrest

Walmart CEO Doug McMillon says company has been working on diversity and inclusion "forever" and is now focuing on what more it can do.

Video Transcript

DOUG MCMILLON: Well, as a company, as you probably know from following us so closely, we've been working on diversity, equity, inclusion forever. And when George Floyd was murdered, it served as a moment for everybody, I think. And inside the company, the conversations that we're having escalated. And we started trying to figure out, OK, what more can we do.

Clearly, there are inequities-- inequities here, and too many of our systems are generating those inequities. The numbers speak for themselves. If Black and African-Americans could participate in our economy at the same level that others do, it'd be a boost to GDP growth.

You know, what has to happen underneath all of this-- not just policing reform and things related to criminal justice-- but the financial system, the education system, health care. What has to change in those complex systems, and what are the underlying roots that we can get at that will create more equity on the other side.

And at Walmart, what we've done is create four different teams that are led by African-American officers focused on those systems that I just mentioned. And in parallel, Business Roundtable, the CEOs, decided to do the same thing.

So we had a group of CEOs-- Mary Barra, Craig Arnold, Jamie Dimon, and many others-- they got involved in understanding what these systems look like, learning from experts, and coming back with changes that we can make inside of our companies, or policies that we can recommend to government that would create more equity on the other side. In addition to that, Walmart did set up a $100 million Center for Racial Equity that will help support some of this change.

But the core systems work reminds us of the environmental sustainability work that we've done. If you can find ways with our purchase orders, think about sourcing from diverse suppliers, or where we put our cash at night, so that black-owned banks can loan money more so than they could before. Just different policy choices like that, that when you add them all up, the systems result in more equity and more opportunity for-- for everybody. That's ultimately what we're trying to create.