Shari Slate is Vice President, Inclusive Future and Strategy and Chief Inclusion and Collaboration Officer at Cisco. Her organization, which includes Inclusion and Collaboration, Community Impact, and Strategy and Market Insights, is responsible for designing Cisco’s next horizon people strategy to deliver on the company’s commitment to power an inclusive future for all. Slate has been widely recognized for her visionary leadership and transformational views on the business value created at the intersection of diversity, inclusion, collaboration, and technology. Guided by her thought leadership in this area, Cisco is embracing new models of Inclusion and Collaboration to fuel innovation, accelerate market leadership, and reimagine workplace practices in the digital era. Under Slate’s direction, Cisco has achieved its highest diversity levels for five years running, and the company was ranked #2 on Fortune’s 100 Best Workplaces for Diversity list for 2019. With her guidance, Cisco has reached the highest level of employee participation in terms of community impact in the history of the company. As individuals across the organization make community impact an everyday habit, the company has reached a ground-breaking 80% employee participation in 2020. At Cisco, our purpose is to build an inclusive future for all, and Slate believes connection has to be at the center. Connection enabled by technology creates an unprecedented opportunity for people to fully participate and collaborate, anywhere, anytime, on any device, and in any dimension, allowing the full spectrum of their diversity to be amplified and accelerated in every outcome. This is what Slate calls value creation at the intersection of diversity, inclusion, collaboration, and technology. Slate believes that we are architecting the future of fairness, the unprecedented opportunity for people to participate and deliver on the promise of diversity. At the heart of the future of fairness is our increased ability to deliver data and insights at the exact point of real time decision making. Her teams’ mission is to leverage inclusion, diversity, collaboration, and technology to remove the barriers standing in the way of people fully participating in work, life, and society. By directly addressing systemic racism, oppression, xenophobia, and other pre-existing inequalities, they look to increase participation, enhance value, and further social cohesion in the fourth industrial revolution—the age of digital transformation.