Organizations don't have a culture problem. They have a power problem.

For the leaders who already know something is broken and are done waiting for permission to fix it.

Every leader you know has run an engagement survey. Launched a culture initiative. Hired a DEI consultant. And most of them will quietly tell you: nothing fundamentally changed.

That's because organizations keep trying to humanize workplaces without changing the structures that make them inhumane. They layer empathy onto extraction. They perform values while practicing hierarchy. And the workers inside, trained for years to equate suffering with merit and competition with excellence, become unwitting enforcers of the very system harming them.

This is the problem nobody on the conference panel wants to name. I will.

Hi, I'm Aparna — and over the past 15 years I've been the immigrant woman in rooms that weren't built for me, building things anyway: three companies, a movement of 20,000 women of color, and a body of work dedicated to the idea that workplaces can be sites of democracy instead of extraction.

Forbes, Seattle's Most Influential