MASSIVE news: Walmart is ending their woke policies. I can now exclusively tell you what’s changing and how it happened.

I told execs at Walmart that I was doing a story on wokeness there. Instead we had productive conversations to find solutions.

Below are the changes Walmart committed to. I have to give their executives major credit because this will send shockwaves throughout corporate America. This is the biggest win yet for our movement to end wokeness in corporate America.

Here are the changes Walmart committed to:

• Surveys: Walmart will no longer participate in the HRC’s woke Corporate Equality Index.

• Products: Monitor the Walmart marketplace to identify and remove inappropriate sexual and / or transgender products marketed to children.

• Funding of Grants: Review all funding of Pride, and other events, to avoid funding inappropriate sexualized content targeting kids.

• Equity: We will not extend the Racial Equity Center which was established in 2020 as a special five-year initiative.

• Supplier Diversity: We will evaluate supplier diversity programs and ensure they do not provide preferential treatment and benefits to suppliers based on diversity.  We don’t have quotas and won’t going forward.  Financing eligibility will no longer be predicated on providing certain demographic data.

• LatinX: Walmart will no longer use the term in official communications.

• Trainings: Walmart will discontinue racial equity training through the Racial Equity Institute.

• DEI: Walmart will discontinue the use of DEI as a term while ensuring a respectful and supportive environment. Our focus is on Belonging for ALL associates and customers.

Remember, Walmart is the #1 employer in America with over 1.6 Million Employees and they have a market cap of nearly $800B. This won’t just have a massive effect for their employees who will have a neutral workplace without feeling that divisive issues are being injected but it will also extend to their many suppliers.

We’ve now changed policy at companies worth over $2 Trillion dollars, with many millions of employees who have better workplace environments as a result. I’m happy to have secured these changes before Christmas when shoppers have very few large retail brands they can spend money with who aren’t pushing woke policies. Companies like Amazon and Target should be very nervous that their top competitor dropped woke policies first. I think Target specifically will suffer serious sales problems as a result and Walmart will benefit.

Our campaigns are now so effective that we’re getting the biggest companies on earth to change their policies without me even posting a story outlining their woke policies. Companies can clearly see that America wants normalcy back. The era of wokeness is dying right in front of our eyes. The landscape of corporate America is quickly shifting to sanity and neutrality. We are now the trend, not the anomaly.

We are winning and one by one we WILL bring sanity back to corporate America.

We remain focused on driving our business by creating a sense of belonging for our team, guests and communities through a commitment to inclusion. Belonging for all is an essential part of our team and culture, helping fuel consumer relevance and business results.

In every area of our business, we are constantly listening, learning and adjusting to set ourselves up for long-term success. As we start a new fiscal year, we’re continuing to shape the next chapter of Belonging at the Bullseye.

Our strategy is rooted in:

• Our team: We recruit and retain team members who represent the communities we serve and fuel a culture where everyone has access to opportunity and growth, enabling our team to deliver business results.
• Our guests: We aim to create joyful experiences through an assortment of products and services that help all guests feel seen and celebrated, increasing relevance with consumers.
• Our communities: We build deep and lasting relationships with the communities we serve, driving impact, economic vitality and connection that fuels loyalty.

Throughout 2025, we’ll be accelerating action in key areas and implementing changes with the goal of driving growth and staying in step with the evolving external landscape. We will continue to monitor and adjust as needed. Current actions include:

• Concluding our three-year diversity, equity and inclusion goals.
• Concluding our Racial Equity Action and Change (REACH) initiatives in 2025 as planned.
• Ensuring our employee resource groups are communities fully focused on development and mentorship. These communities will continue to be open to all.
• Further evaluating our corporate partnerships to ensure they are directly connected to our roadmap for growth.
• Stopping all external diversity-focused surveys, including HRC’s Corporate Equality Index.
• Evolving our “Supplier Diversity” team to “Supplier Engagement” to better reflect our inclusive global procurement process across a broad range of suppliers, including increasing our focus on small businesses.

This note was originally sent as an email on January 6th, 2025 to McDonald’s Owner/Operators, company employees and suppliers worldwide.
 

As we start the New Year and set our ambitions for McDonald’s, we want to also update you on our accomplishments embedding inclusion throughout our system and highlight a few important changes to our approach.

For the last several months, a small team has been working on refining our language to better capture McDonald’s commitment to inclusion.   

As part of this, there are four guiding principles we will apply to evaluate our work: (1) Our system thrives when we are shaped by the communities in which we operate, (2) Our early and full adoption of inclusion gives us a competitive advantage, (3) Individuals perform their best when they feel they belong, and (4) Our priority is to be a responsible business, acting lawfully and being responsive to the business environment.

At the same time, following our comprehensive review, we also identified a few practices that we plan to modify. Specifically:

• We are retiring setting aspirational representation goals and instead keeping our focus on continuing to embed inclusion practices that grow our business into our everyday process and operations.  
• We are pausing external surveys to focus on the work we are doing internally to grow the business. 
• We are retiring Supply Chain’s Mutual Commitment to DEI pledge in favor of a more integrated discussion with suppliers about inclusion as it relates to business performance.
• We are evolving how we refer to our diversity team, which will now be the Global Inclusion Team. This name change is more fitting for McDonald’s in light of our inclusion value and better aligns with this team’s work.   

We are proud of the work that we do at McDonald’s. We will continue to drive business results through all three legs of the McDonald’s stool, specifically with our people practices, by fueling economic impact and innovation through our robust supply chain and by building a franchisee pipeline that thrives in the communities we serve and fuels our growth.

It takes all of us to continue to create an environment where we can all be successful. Thank you for your dedication to making McDonald’s a place where everyone feels welcome and included.

Full Memo from Meta:

Hi all,

I wanted to share some changes we’re making to our hiring, development and procurement practices. Before getting into the details, there is some important background to lay out:

The legal and policy landscape surrounding diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the United States is changing. The Supreme Court of the United States has recently made decisions signaling a shift in how courts will approach DEI. It reaffirms longstanding principles that discrimination should not be tolerated or promoted on the basis of inherent characteristics. The term “DEI” has also become charged, in part because it is understood by some as a practice that suggests preferential treatment of some groups over others.

At Meta, we have a principle of serving everyone. This can be achieved through cognitively diverse teams, with differences in knowledge, skills, political views, backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences. Such teams are better at innovating, solving complex problems and identifying new opportunities which ultimately helps us deliver on our ambition to build products that serve everyone. On top of that, we’ve always believed that no-one should be given – or deprived of -opportunities because of protected characteristics, and that has not changed.

Given the shifting legal and policy landscape, we’re making the following changes:

• On hiring, we will continue to source candidates from different backgrounds, but we will stop using the Diverse Slate Approach. This practice has always been subject to public debate and is currently being challenged. We believe there are other ways to build an industry-leading workforce and leverage teams made up of world-class people from all types of backgrounds to build products that work for everyone.
• We previously ended representation goals for women and ethnic minorities. Having goals can create the impression that decisions are being made based on race or gender. While this has never been our practice, we want to eliminate any impression of it.
• We are sunsetting our supplier diversity efforts within our broader supplier strategy. This effort focused on sourcing from diverse-owned businesses; going forward, we will focus our efforts on supporting small and medium sized businesses that power much of our economy. Opportunities will continue to be available to all qualified suppliers, including those who were part of the supplier diversity program.
• Instead of equity and inclusion training programs, we will build programs that focus on how to apply fair and consistent practices that mitigate bias for all, no matter your background.
• We will no longer have a team focused on DEI. Maxine Williams is taking on a new role at Meta, focused on accessibility and engagement.

What remains the same are the principles we’ve used to guide our People practices:

1. We serve everyone. We are committed to making our products accessible, beneficial and universally impactful for everyone.
2. We build the best teams with the most talented people. This means sourcing people from a range of candidate pools, but never making hiring decisions based on protected characteristics (e.g. race, gender etc.). We will always evaluate people as individuals.
3. We drive consistency in employment practices to ensure fairness and objectivity for all. We do not provide preferential treatment, extra opportunities or unjustified credit to anyone based on protected characteristics nor will we devalue impact based on these characteristics.
4. We build connection and community. We support our employee communities, people who use our products, and those in the communities where we operate. Our employee community groups (MRGs) continue to be open to all.

Meta has the privilege to serve billions of people every day. It’s important to us that our products are accessible to all, and are useful in promoting economic growth and opportunity around the world. We continue to be focused on serving everyone, and building a multi-talented, industry-leading workforce from all walks of life.

CEO Update

Over the past two years, Stanley Black & Decker has undergone a significant transformation during which we’ve streamlined our operations and simplified our business from top to bottom. Our Focus Forward Framework has been our strategic roadmap, with “focus forward” being a call to action to continuously simplify and improve on behalf of our end-users, customers, employees and shareholders.

Having achieved many of the business and financial goals we set for ourselves, Stanley Black & Decker looks and feels very different than it did just two years ago – energized and focused.

That is a testament to all your hard work.

We’ve made great progress together, but as you’ve heard us talk about, our transformation isn’t over. Part of our ongoing journey means ensuring everything we do – from our product innovation and supply chain to our people strategy and Corporate Affairs initiatives – is closely tied to our business strategy and delivering for our customers and end-users.

With that in mind, we’d like to update you on a few changes we started putting in place over the past year to further align our core programs with our business goals and growth strategies and will continue to implement as we look to the future.

People & Culture Update

Our employees are the lifeblood of this organization. Each and every day, you focus on delivering the highest quality and most useful products, building our best-in-class brands, and driving constant innovation to meet the ever-changing needs of our customers and end-users.

Today, with the publishing of our 2023 Impact Report, we introduced a new People goal – Workforce of the Future. This holistic goal encompasses our formal commitment to attract, develop and retain a workforce that represents the future of our company – a workforce with a spectrum of views and lived experiences at all levels of our company that reflect our end-users, which better enables us to innovate to meet their needs. To achieve this goal, we strive to create an inclusive environment that drives increased employee engagement, where all employees thrive and are motivated to deliver their best work. We will measure our progress in various ways and hold ourselves accountable by including this goal in our Impact Report.

Alongside this new People goal, we remain committed to Grow the Trades as a foundational corporate initiative. With an estimated 500,000 trade jobs currently unfilled in the United States alone, the trade skills gap is an urgent challenge across communities that we have a right and responsibility to help address. That’s why we’ve committed $30 million in grant money over five years to nonprofits that are helping fund important vocational skills training and reskilling programs in construction. We have spent over $15 million on this initiative since we announced our commitment in 2023 and next week, we will announce over 150 competitive grants awarded to organizations that train tradespeople across the United States as we continue to engage with and support young, aspiring tradespeople from all walks of life to help close the divide.

With Workforce of the Future and Grow the Trades as our core People programs, we are sunsetting prior People programs around increasing supplier diversity and gender diversity on the leadership team. While these programs served an important purpose, as our business has transformed, we believe Workforce of the Future and Grow the Trades are more closely aligned with our business priorities.

We continue to believe that having a diversified supplier base helps create a stronger supply chain and a more resilient organization, and we will continue to expand the pool of eligible vendors we work with as part of our supply chain transformation, but we will no longer be tracking and reporting on these efforts. Similarly, we will continue to always hire the best candidates for open roles. We have never had enterprise hiring quotas or incentivized the hiring of employees with specific profiles, whether directly or through executive compensation programs, and our Workforce of the Future program is aligned with our imperative to build –engaged workforce focused on delivering results for our customers and end-users.

Accordingly, we will also focus our company-sponsored trainings on leadership and

professional development.

Office of Impact & Inclusion

We will be formally launching the Office of Impact & Inclusion with a core mandate of advancing a culture of inclusion to drive business impact. We began this work in May 2024 when we asked Allison Lawrence to lead this evolved function, and today we are pleased to announce her as Chief Impact & Inclusion Officer. She brings 20 years of commercial, sales and channel experience to this role, which affords her a unique perspective that will be invaluable to driving business outcomes. Her remit is to ensure that our related efforts and initiatives are in service of delivering business performance and maximizing our positive impact on all stakeholders.

As part of this, we will be mobilizing the Impact & Inclusion team leads to partner directly with each business leader and HR leader within Tools & Outdoor, STANLEY Engineered Fastening, and Corporate. These team leads will now integrate into the functions and become thought partners to the business, understanding the critical areas of focus, identifying gaps, developing solutions and helping drive results.

We also continue to review the Office of Impact & Inclusion’s partnerships to ensure they align with strategic business initiatives and our customers’ and end-users’ priorities. That means continuing to collaborate closely with our Corporate Affairs function, and together, moving from largely philanthropic donations to increasingly customer and end-user focused activations, like Grow the Trades. As this body of work progresses, you will see our commitments evolve as we partner with organizations more aligned with helping close the skilled trades gap and growing the number of end-users in future generations of trades. In addition, as we will now be measuring and reporting on employee engagement as part of our Workforce of the Future program, we will also be ending our participation in all external culture surveys conducted by third-party organizations.

Business Resource Groups

Employee Resource Groups will complete their evolution to Business Resource Groups (BRGs), a change we introduced in January 2024 at the annual Leadership Meeting, and we have been working on an enterprise-wide rollout over the last several months. BRGs will continue to be inclusive groups open to all employees that activate key strategic initiatives in support of our mission and business objectives.

We have taken a fresh look at the BRGs’ charters to align their activities, energy and focus with driving business outcomes and maximizing their impact on customers and end-users.

Examples of initiatives BRGs will help advance include:

•   Acting as ambassadors for the Grow the Trades initiative and engaging with end-users and local trade schools to drive brand penetration and loyalty.
•   Serving as company and brand representatives at recruiting events across the country and world to help attract the best talent, as well as formally integrating into mentoring efforts across the organization to drive retention of the best talent.
•   Being thought partners to our business leaders across innovation, strategic market expansion, employee experience and engagement, marketing, and brand amplification.

Looking Forward

The updates we have shared today are the culmination of extensive work of colleagues and teams across the company and reflect deep thoughtfulness on behalf of our employees, customers, end-users and shareholders. With the progress we have made and the hard work we continue to do, we will continue to deliver exceptional outcomes for customers and end-users and positively impact all our stakeholders and the communities we serve.

Thank you for showing up each and every day to drive our business forward.

Sincerely,

Don

Caterpillar team,

This year we are proud to celebrate 50 years of our Code of Conduct, which establishes our shared commitment to our Values in Action, namely, integrity, excellence, teamwork, commitment, and sustainability. Our Values in Action enable every individual to achieve their fullest potential and every team to drive business success.

As we work together to implement our enterprise strategy for profitable growth as well as our purpose of helping our customers build a better, more sustainable world, we hold firmly to our commitment to fostering an inclusive environment and continually look for opportunities to more closely align our policies, procedures and practices to these objectives.

After a comprehensive review, we are making a number of changes to better align with our enterprise strategy and our purpose: 

1.   Learning and Development. Learning and Development (L&D) is an essential element of employee engagement and productivity. All training, both formal and informal, must be focused on our business and designed to foster high performance and execution of our enterprise strategy.
2.   External Recognition. External recognition for our work at Caterpillar can be a great source of pride for our employees. However, most external surveys and award applications require extensive company resources, including employee time. The decision to participate in a survey or apply for an award must be focused on our business objectives and approved in writing by the responsible Senior Vice President, Group President and Chief Human Resources Officer.
3.   External Speakers. Use of any external speaker requires the approval of the appropriate Senior Vice Presidents. SVPs are responsible for ensuring that speakers are properly vetted and the content aligns to our enterprise strategy and our purpose.
4.   Employee Resource Groups (ERGs). Our ERGs exist to foster an inclusive culture through internal networking, mentoring and development opportunities in support of our enterprise strategy. To ensure this focus, new ERG guidelines will soon be distributed that govern external sponsorships and donations, external speakers, training, and more. All ERGs will remain open to all employees.

Across our many diverse geographies, cultures and languages, we are united by our common dedication to integrity, excellence, teamwork, commitment, and sustainability. Thank you for your continued dedication and support as we execute these changes together and help our customers build a better, more sustainable world.

The Executive Office

WHAT TOYOTA STANDS FOR

Over the past year and a half, there has been an ongoing and highly politicized discussion around corporate commitments to diversity and inclusion. Given the recent focus on Toyota and our actions, we wanted to share more details on what we stand for as a company and how we plan to move forward.

For nearly 70 years, Toyota has been rooted in the Toyota Way Philosophy of Respect for People and “Kaizen,” or Continuous Improvement. These core values helped create an environment for collaboration, innovation and a place where everyone feels respected and that they belong. We are a values-driven, customer-focused company which has built a foundation of trust with our team members, dealers, customers, suppliers and other stakeholders. We have a shared belief in always striving to do the right thing.

For us, the right thing means:

•   Developing our team members to help them reach their full potential
•   Investing in STEM education (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) to inspire innovation and create the workforce of the future
•   Focusing on our customers’ current and future needs
•   Making meaningful contributions to society by providing mobility for all

As we work to do the right thing across our diversity and inclusion efforts, our objective is simple: To ensure the organizations and activities we support and engage in are aligned with our core values and strategies. When we find something that does not align with our values and strategies, we will address it directly.

For example:

• We will continue with our Toyota Business Partnering Groups (BPGs), which have always been open to all team members. The BPGs serve to encourage an inclusive environment where diversity of thought can flourish. At the same time, we will work to ensure that the activities and events are focused on professional development, networking, mentoring and volunteering – team member engagement that drives our business.
Furthermore, we will work to ensure all company activities are aligned with our values and create an inclusive environment for our team members.

•   We will continue narrowing our community activities to align with STEM education and workforce readiness. As a result, we will no longer sponsor cultural events such as festivals and parades that are not related to STEM education and workforce readiness.
•   We have also been conducting an extensive review of our investments and strategic partnerships in every area of our business. We have already determined we will no longer participate in external third-party culture surveys and indexes on a national/regional level such as Civic50, Fair360, Human Rights Campaign (HRC), and others.

In the spirit of Kaizen, we will continue to review our investments, strategic partnerships, and community events. and make any adjustments needed with care and respect for all of our stakeholders. 

It is our mission to continue building on the trust of our key stakeholders and enriching lives around the world by providing Mobility for All. We remain focused on making great products, giving excellent customer service, and doing the right thing for our team members, dealers, customers, suppliers, and our diverse, global society.

That’s the Toyota Way and we will not compromise our core values. We are a values-driven company- always have been and always will be.