The Diversity Blog
The Diversity Coach™ on Culture
Change efforts include mergers and acquisitions, restructuring, rightsizing, or any of the many strategic focus initiatives like six-sigma, innovation, performance enhancement, and learning organization. If you accept the fact that diversity management also involves...
What About Bob?
A recent movie starring Richard Dreyfus and Bill Murray tells the story of a man desperately trying to be included as a member of his psychiatrist’s family. Whenever the doctor attempted to exclude him, his family would respond by asking, “What about Bob?”.
Winning with Diversity: Lessons from the Field
Diversity refers to the broad mix of people currently or soon to be a part of your organization. It exists whenever you encounter anyone who has a view of the world, or “paradigm,” different from your own. Managing Diversity is a deliberate effort to create a work...
Simplify Strategy in Order to Implement Strategy
“No organization, team, or individual mission has ever failed for lack of a good strategy. They fail for lack of execution.” Moving people from knowing to doing is a critical and tough task. As facilitators, it is our role to not only bring a group to consensus about...
What is “It,” Anyway?
Before I start, let me acknowledge that I will probably offend a lot of people with this article. That’s because a lot of people have used diversity as a means to promote or further their personal or group agenda. I don’t mean to distract from those agendas. Others...
Blind Faith
Faith is often used by agnostics as a term of abuse. It is taken to mean blind credulity which accepts dogmas and creeds without question, repeating parrot-like slogans and closing our ears to doubt and reason. Such faith is composed of laziness, obstinacy, ignorance,...
Why Diversity is a Business Issue You Need to Understand
Often, diversity is simply defined as a social issue. When most people hear the word “diversity” they immediately think of affirmative action, the Equal Opportunities Commission or gender equality. We hear others talk about diversity and we think to ourselves, “These...
Facing the Facts of Life with Diversity
I learned very early on in my career that business people face two kinds of issues: problems and facts of life. Problems are solvable. As business people, we attack them. We invent solutions and follow through by executing a plan of action. Facts of life, on the other...
How to Leverage Diversity in the Workplace Like New Technology
Most people think of diversity management as a fancy term for analyzing and managing the demographic makeup of a company. This is an outdated approach to thinking about diversity. Instead, we need to think about diversity management as a new technology that can help...
How Do You Measure Success?
I encourage people to use, as a measure of success in all diversity work, the same measures that are used for business in general. A quality product, delivered on time, is always the measure in manufacturing. These are the same measures we look at when we talk about...