Chief Change Officer
#279 Greg Morley: Built, Not Bought—The Gen X Playbook for Real Inclusion
Tue, 8 Apr 2025
Greg Morley isn’t reinventing himself at midlife—he’s been reinventing all along. As a Gen X leader who’s shaped HR and DEI strategy at Disney, Hasbro, and Moët Hennessy, Greg represents the quiet force of a generation that never needed to go viral to make an impact.From Complaint Calls to Corporate Change“80% of the calls were complaints. That’s how I learned to listen—fast.”Greg started in the trenches and never forgot what real work feels like. That early frontline experience now shapes how he has led global people strategies with heart and head.Gen X Leaders Don’t Wait for Playbooks—They Write Them“I didn’t plan to be in HR. I planned to understand people.”Whether designing HR strategy at Hasbro or rewriting DEI systems at Moët Hennessy, Greg leads with insight, not instruction manuals. Diversity Without the Optics“Rewiring beats rebranding—every time.”Greg breaks down how he rebuilt DEI from the inside out, ditching the optics for honest structures, tough conversations, and measurable change.Global Insight, Local Action“Diversity in Cognac, France doesn’t look like diversity in New York. That’s the point.”From Paris to Hong Kong, Greg’s work proves that inclusion isn’t a one-size-fits-all program. It’s a flexible framework built on understanding where you are—and who you’re there for.Bond: The Book That Calls BS on Performative Belonging“People don’t want politics. They want to be seen, heard, and valued.”In his new book Bond, Greg cuts through the noise and reframes inclusion as something human—not hype. This isn’t theory. It’s the Gen X guide to building meaningful connection in work and life._________________________Connect with us:Host: Vince Chan | Guest: Greg Morley --Chief Change Officer--Change Ambitiously. Outgrow Yourself.Open a World of Expansive Human Intelligencefor Transformation Gurus, Black Sheep,Unsung Visionaries & Bold Hearts.12 Million+ All-Time Downloads.Reaching 80+ Countries Daily.Global Top 3% Podcast.Top 10 US Business.Top 1 US Careers.>>>140,000+ are outgrowing. Act Today.<<<
Chapter 1: Who is Greg Morley and what is his impact on DEI?
Let's explore what we'll uncover today with Greg. First, We'll discover how his early days handling customer complaints at call centers helped him develop empathy, quick thinking, and communication skills that became the cornerstone of his leadership at Disley, Hasbro, and now Monat, Tennessee.
Next, as we dive into advancing the DEI agenda at Monat, Tennessee, Greg will share how he's been listening intently to the people who embody the heart and soul of the group's businesses, fostering an inclusive culture that's grounded in reality. In our third segment, we'll dive into the complexities of managing DEI across Monet Tennessee's diverse array of brands.
Greg will explain how he tailors the DEI strategies to respect and reflect each brand's unique identity. while aligning with the group's overarching corporate values. Lastly, we certainly can't overlook Greg's upcoming book, Bond. where he shares invaluable lessons on building meaningful connections, not just within the workplace, but in our everyday lives.
It's about fostering a sense of true belonging and deeper inclusion everywhere. So if you are eager to learn how to make your own laws of change and hear from one of the leading voices in human transformation today, you are in the right place. Let's get started.
Thank you, Vince. We had the opportunity to meet at an Out Leadership event in Hong Kong during the Hong Kong Gay Games. So I'm really happy we finally made it happen.
Welcome. I'm very excited to have you on board. You are in the people function with a specific focus on DEI. Can you talk about how your early career experiences shape what you do today? What did you learn back then that still has implications and relevance for you being a people leader with a change enablement mandate?
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Chapter 2: How did Greg Morley's early career shape his leadership style?
And maybe I can start there as a place to introduce myself. So while I recently relocated to Paris, working for Mellet Hennessy, which is the leading luxury wines and spirits company in the world, part of the LVMH group, I spent prior to that 17 years in Hong Kong. with Moet Hennessy, with Hasbro, and before that, Disney, which is the reason I ended up in Hong Kong.
And I was very pleased to be part of the original organizing committee of the Hong Kong Gay Games, which was the first time Gay Games had come to Asia. And it turned out to be a huge success. with great support from participants and an amazing team of volunteers that made it happen.
I'm originally an American, still an American, but become a bit more of an internationalist, I think, during my career and have now worked outside the U.S. longer than I worked in the U.S.
And way back when started my career in commercial sales and marketing and distribution world, which was a great platform for me to spend then a good bit of my life in HR, in diversity and inclusion, and now on the verge of publishing a book that I've been writing, which I'm quite excited about.
You have been in the people function, in the HR function for long, but then you were in the commercial world for like eight years. Tell us more about your transformation or how your commercial experience prepared you going into the HR area.
Good foundation and good question. The first professional job I had was working in a call center. And there's nothing like working in a call center to prepare yourself to be a good communicator. 80% of the incoming calls were complaints. And so you really had to be able to think quickly and help people solve problems.
When I was in high school and in university during the summer, I used to work in a warehouse pulling orders and preparing orders. And then after my graduation and my call center experience, I worked in an outside sales role for GE, General Electric Company, in different roles.
Why is that very critical to my life now is that I understand things like a supply chain from the very basis of it in a warehouse. I understand what people who work for the companies I work with when they're trying to handle customer complaints, customer issues.
uh solutions i understand what it looks like to be a sales rep with targets and and pressure from your boss about getting things done and sold so those things were helpful to me and i continue to have an appreciation For those people, I like to be out with those team members, even doing my current role in diversity, equity, inclusion, and certainly within HR.
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Chapter 3: What role does teamwork play in DEI success?
You come from the client-facing and operational side. In your experience, how important is it for people leaders to work closely with other leaders like CFOs and CEOs? Can you share with us how this chemistry, this teamwork impacts the success of a modern day company
The most savvy leaders of people are those that know how to work with an HR team or with their HR partner. I've worked for a number of individuals who quite rightly said to me, on my right hand is my CFO and on my left hand is my CHRO. And that's the way I run my organization, because most organizations are fundamentally made up of people who then work with teams who deliver the business.
So the business is an outcome of having a great team and great leadership. And so smart people leaders, smart organization leaders know that it's important. For example, you talk about the H.R. people potentially not knowing the business is to bring a new HR person and say, hey, let me tell you about my business. Let me tell you what we're trying to achieve here.
Let me tell you about, you know, what successful profiles look like in this business or not. And that's where a good HR person can come in and help that leader think about what's the change or what's the profile that is going to accelerate their business.
If I think about when I've had conversations with leaders and they've struggled to build enough competence in their organization or enough experience. depth in their organization to have real success, that's a partnership that we could have together where I can help them. Again, the business is being driven there, not by HR.
HR does play certain roles in an organization, certain control roles, certain investment roles, development roles, hiring roles. All of those are part of creating a dynamic, resilient, evolving organization. And I think the best partnerships are those like I explained when a senior leader can say, on my right hand is one function, but on my other is HR.
Throughout your career life, you've been involved in the DEI efforts at different points in time. Now, at Monette, Tennessee, have your approaches to DEI changed over the years? Are there any big lessons you've picked up along the way?
Sure. If I think about my experience within diversity, equity, and inclusion, even that has changed since I was first involved with diversity at Disney, say 20 years ago, and then leading it for a while at Hasbro. And then of course leading it within my most recent experience in MOA, Tennessee. I would say that my experience was one of learning from my own failures in the past in this space.
Also trying to diagnose over time why in the organizations I worked and in other organizations where we had really not made significant progress over such a long period of time on something that's so fundamental to the business. And I'd start with why is it fundamental to the business? In any business, it's fundamental that your organization understands the consumer, the end user, the client.
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Chapter 4: How has Greg Morley evolved DEI strategies at Moët Hennessy?
And that understanding, I think, comes mainly through the people who are on the front line of the organization working with those clients, consumers. It comes from the people who work in the research part of the organization. It comes from the leaders who are reflective of the markets in which we work. So representation is critical.
And then making sure that when we have a representative company, that people can be fully participating and heard and work in a safe space and really be adding value to the organization. So those things are part of how I sort of, when we started to kick off this effort four years ago in Moet Hennessy, thinking about, okay, how do we get started?
Yeah.
And one of the things that I recognized from my experience and again, some of my failures is you really have to start with the end in mind. So what was it as an organization we were trying to impact positively by becoming more diverse, more inclusive, and more equitable?
And for us, it was creating an organization that was more reflective of our consumers and customers so that we could make sure that as we were growing the business, that was able to scale up because we understand better the consumer and the customer and that we create more of a reason to be in the company. So one could take two different approaches.
One could immediately go out and start saying, okay, I want every profile of every recruitment to have a diverse candidate slate. That's an approach, which we did some of that in some organizations. The other way to go is let's rewire the system. And so we took very much, I would say, a rewire the system.
I mean, making sure that the processes, policies, structures in the organization were prepared to post a more diverse and inclusive workforce. So things like making sure we had domestic partner policies, making sure that we had a relatively clean hiring process that was as free as possible of bias.
making sure that when we were selecting people for development opportunities, it was done in a equitable way, not in a way that maybe there was some bias or unconscious bias. And then making sure that our communication to the whole organization was consistent and thorough about what was happening. And over time, we started to see impact in certain metrics.
The other thing that was critically important in this success story, which is still being written, is to make sure that we had senior leadership, not just supporting, but advocating. There's nothing more powerful than the CEO saying something's important and saying it over and over and over for the rest of the organization to think that must be important if he keeps saying that.
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Chapter 5: What challenges did Greg Morley face in advancing DEI?
And that gave people a sense of, oh, maybe I do have some bias. It may not be intentional, but it could be for whatever reason, where I was raised, it could be through experience. So that allowed us to create the first rewiring, which was everybody having a better understanding of themselves.
And it also opened the door for people to be having conversations about bias, about diversity, about inclusion at a very early stage. And I would say then we moved to the next level, which was like, OK, how are we going to make sure that our policies, processes and procedures are at least contemporary, maybe progressive?
We went to the next step, which was to open the door and train employees to be able to start employee resource groups. We also then went to the stage of starting to put some measurement in place. measurement around representation, measurement about employees' sense of well-being, measurement around employees' sense of inclusion in the organization.
Certainly it had to be reinforced by communication and a sense of what was our message internally and externally and how are we going to amplify that. So each one of those pieces was a kind of change management agenda. which continue to this day, although we've now pivoted more towards speaking specifically to the topics of representation, inclusion, and leadership.
And those things that were the rewiring are really embedded. If I think about the kind of benefit things we were working on four years ago versus what we're working on now, the landscape's changed. hugely impacted by COVID and people's expectation of the organization and the organization's expectation of people.
But a lot of those fundamental early pillars still exist and are still part of the constant rewiring. There's for sure constantly change.
Monet Tennessee is a diverse group with brands all over the world. Given this depth and breadth, diversity becomes a source of complexity. I can imagine that in such a multicultural, multi-layered enterprise, you must respect each brand's uniqueness while maintaining alignment with the firm's overall values. How do you tailor the DEI initiatives to manage this complexity?
Great question, and one I could probably speak with you on for hours, but let me try to condense it. One benefit for us as an organization, when I say we're the leader in luxury wines and spirits, is from the business perspective, we know what our place is. Wines and spirits is a huge category globally. And we very much play in the luxury, maybe more select area of the market.
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Chapter 6: How does unconscious bias training contribute to DEI?
Now, that being said, If you go from spirits to champagne, to wines, to the other products and maisons we have in the organization, it's a complex culture. On the surface, you can imagine there's the culture of I work in France, so I deal with French culture, or I work in Hong Kong and I'm dealing with Hong Kong culture, or I work in Argentina and I deal with Argentinian culture.
So there's that cultural element. Then there's the layered on cultural element of our different maisons and where they're from. We have some maisons that are French, some maisons that are in the US, India, China, around the world. So that puts a different sort of cultural complexity on the work. And then there's another element of what I would say, which is sort of the maturity of the business.
So when I was talking with you about visiting a Maison, I was visiting specifically the Hennessy Maison. Now Hennessy is the largest Maison we have in Moet Hennessy, and it's the third largest Maison within all of the LVMH group. So it's a huge part of the business. And it has an incredibly diverse consumer.
The consumers of Hennessy in China are very different than the consumers of Hennessy in say North America or the UK. So from the perspective of knowing the consumer, we know that Hennessy is a very diverse consumer around the world. When you go back to where it came from, which is Cognac, France, which is in the southwestern part of France, this is not a very diverse part of the world.
It's a relatively small community where people know each other. And even within our facility in Hennessy, oftentimes you have people who have worked in the organization for many decades. And maybe their parents worked in that same role they have, and maybe their grandparents worked in that role.
So diversity in Cognac, France, looks very different than what we would say of diversity in, say, Hong Kong or New York or London or Paris. So why this, you know, kind of sandwich approach is important to the success of any diversity and inclusion initiative or strategy is that there needs to be some strategic orientation.
And I talked about that, which is understanding the consumer, being close to the consumer, having a representative organization.
Can you be more specific about a representative organization? What does it look like?
What does representative organization look like in Konya? Or what does representative organization look like in Tokyo? What does representative organization look like in Kuala Lumpur? It looks different, right? We're not talking about the same demographic and the same representation in all of those places, yet we are talking about being diverse and close to the consumer.
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