When We Are Seen

From one of the first and few women of color to reach the c-suite in Silicon Valley, Apple's former chief of HR, co-creator of the Apple Store culture, and first VP of inclusion and diversity, comes a heartfelt story of growing up Black and female in a world with little regard for either and a practical road map for embodying the best in yourself and emboldening others along the way.

For her work as a co-creator of the Apple Store cultural experience, Denise Young has been deemed by leadership experts as one of the most emotionally intelligent leaders of her era. In this stirring narrative, part-memoir, part blueprint for action, she shares her vision of what it means to be truly seen at the workplace. As a "first and only" woman of color in boardrooms and leading roles across the Bay Area's booming tech industry, Denise was a trailblazer in a business that was never built for her. The first black and female senior executive under both Steve Jobs and Tim Cook, Denise was often in "the room where it happened." But within a white male-centric professional culture, she still had to work harder, smarter, and differently to get heard. She speaks candidly to that experience in these pages, offering lessons to those coming up behind her.

In When We Are Seen, Denise shares insights on using your own story, empathy, intuition, and more to unlock the potential in yourself and others. Her story serves as both solace and strategy for anyone who has ever felt left out, unseen, ostracized; anyone who has been an only or a first. This is a book for anyone interested in upending perpetual cycles of exclusion, and in reclaiming our individual agency in the ongoing quest to thrive and belong.

Denise argues that bringing your true self to work--from wearing your beloved locs to sharing your artistic passion--and, in turn, holistically seeing the attributes others have to offer is not a passive experience; it is a specific skill we can and should build. And the result is a deeper understanding of what it means to be inclusive, and powerfully human on the job.
About the Author: After a two-decade career at Apple as the company's first VP of inclusion and diversity and worldwide chief of human resources, Denise Young most recently served as Executive-in-Residency at Cornell-Tech, coaching young entrepreneurs on the importance of infusing humanity and inclusivity into the earliest stages of their products and businesses. She continues doing this work with various organizations and academic institutions. Denise performs, writes, operates her own recording studio and serves as the chair of SFJAZZ, the premiere jazz institution on the West Coast, in her determination to live out Steve Jobs's belief that "technology alone is not enough. It's technology married with the liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields the results that make our hearts sing." Denise has been named a "Most Powerful Woman" by Ebony and Black Enterprise, one of the "100 Most Influential in Silicon Valley" by Business Insider and featured in Fortune's "Most Powerful Women" issue.