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So I’m really glad to be here and I think the speakers today have done an outstanding jobI particularly like the reference to love in a speech here and I’d like to go two better 
.
I’d like to
also offer you today fear and the ultimate resolution which is self determination so we will touch
on love fear and self determination we’ll see if I can make it though in one piece.
 
I’d to start, and the clicker is here great, I’d like to start by you know talking
about the elephant in the room. I think part of leadership is naming the things that are a little hardfor us to talk about and I wanted to say, here I am representing a law firm, a legal center thatfocuses on the rights of disabilities talking to a bunch of HR directors. Who may at some timehad some anxiety over these types of issues in the work place. And I wanted to come to this
event in particular and I’m so glad to have the invitation because I think this is exactly the
audience that should be having a conversation together about these issues. In particular id like tohighlight that when I think about it is often in the context of risk management the people and
employers thing about this issue. What is our exposure is we don’t do X. and I would like ot
introduce another lens that you might look at which is possibility, what might we do here that we
haven’t thought of yet that our employees feel, our customers feel, our investors feel, about whowe are and what were trying to get done. I’d also like to talk to one specific issue which is the
instrument we use we do something called high impact litigation, the case you might know is
Brown vs. Board of Education that’s the ultimate
example of high impact litigation, not use thatwas the NAACP but in proved a point that changed society and we try and do that for vets forseniors we do it for kids in school, and we do it in the context of employment situations
sometime. And I’ll highlight that we have in the past gone into court against
Nordstrom andStarbucks who are both now on our board of directors because they liked the outcome so muchthat they decided to join with us and try to get other people to see possibility as a way to deal
 
with disability. So there’s
the elephant let me try to do a few other things with the talk today thatI hope will move us forward.
First I’d like to start with where I think a lot of people are on the notion of disability. Thisis sort of where most people start. It’s a physical disability I intentionally picked you know this is
a modern wheelchair but its not a particularly sexy wheelchairs, it grey, I leaves the personphysically at a different level than other people in the office so people are either bending downor standing up and I think a lot of the context of disability is anxiety for people on both side of that conversat
ion. The person with the disability is saying I’m not sure what to do here in order to convince you I can do this job well and the employer is saying I don’t know what to do if deaf 
person walks in and I need to interview them, like what do I do? And I th
ink I doesn’t come from
a place of malice I think it comes from a place of anxiety and uncertainly. And so the role of 
what I’d like to do today is to give you context around disability.
Really successful disability communication evolves from context. So first
let’s
talk about
what we could do, not just what we think is out there. Here’s another image of wheelchairs, that
was back, this is a wheelchair as well, right? This gentleman is a very high caliber athlete, hehas a wheelchair that has been specially built for this purpose and he is doing things that are faroutside the spectrum of what most people would assume disability looks like. He is probably
moving faster than any of us could move, I’ll bet you his quarter mile or his marathon is faster 
than the current world record. Because he has adapted to his environment and he has givenpeople context and said I want to be a professional athlete or an Olympic athlete or whatever itis. And this is what I would aspire for in terms of the work place what can we do in the work place to make it possible. I would also say that it is incumbent on individuals to give you thatcontext.
 
One of my favorite stories is a guy named Mark Breimhorst,
he’
s a friend of mine whowent to business school with me at Stanford. And when I was there Mark introduced himself tothe entire class through the reply all list. Not always the best way to get to know people but Mark had a lot of experience, Mark has no hands, he was born with no hands, and he knew the momenthe walked int
o school he’d be walking down the hall and people would start avoiding eye contactand walking to the other side of the building so that they didn’t have to deal with him, right?Because they’re anxious they don’t know what to do here. So he wrote out, Mar 
k: the guy withno hands, right? Out it goes, first paragraph my name is Mark I was born with no hands, I wasnot in an accident, it is not painful, just this is how I grew up. When you meet me it will beawkward
 because you’ll want to shake my hand and I don’t have them, shake my wrist. It’ll feellike grabbing someone else’s wrist, and then we’ll go from there. And it suddenly changed the
whole conversation and I saw people the next day walking up to him in hall and like kind of wanted to try it, you know
like, here we go look I shook his hand, and suddenly they’re having a
much more intimate conversation than if they had avoided
him or if he’d had hands to start with.
He sort of took this thing that was alienating and turned it into a way for him to reach across andgive context.
So that’s one part of it, the other part of it is the employer reaching back and saying, look 
we respect your right to be private, to be confidential. At the same time just as we are verysupportive of all these other issues in our workplace, gender equality, race equality, you know
gay marriage if that’s where your office is, we also believe that disability is on that list of things
and we take it seriously
we have high profile people who have disabilities and they’re happy to
talk about it if they want. You know leave it like that. Again the anxiety can come in becauseeveryone wants to keep it confidential, which is the law, and its an important thing to do but, you
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