The Diversity Blog
Why Understanding Culture Matters
Much of the work of performing culture audits as a part of diversity work misses the point. It is clear that an unexamined culture will likely continue to create an environment that will tolerate rather than appreciate and manage diversity. But to conduct culture...
CultureScan™: 3 Steps to Determine an Organization’s Readiness for Diversity Management
Before a consultant can get started helping an organization implement an effective diversity management strategy, its important to know what kind of culture surrounds diversity within a company. In other words, the consultant needs to know the default way diversity is...
Blind Spots: We All Have Them, But We Don’t All Manage Them
Everybody has blind spots. They arise from the fact that, as human beings, we are situated in a world that elicits responses from us at all times – often without providing an opportunity to stop and think about how we go about responding. In other words, we all have a...
Radical Selection: Who Should be Involved and How to Recruit Them
I just served as a resource person for a client I’m working with. I did so because I know nothing about manufacturing, and that’s the best criteria for a resource person: Someone who knows nothing about what you do. They bring in a fresh perspective. Good people to...
Radical Selection: Listening to Ideas from Outside the Circle
“Radical Selection” is a crucial step in the Deliberate Diversity™ process. It is based on the idea that the broader our perspective is, the better our ideas become. When we put together a design team or an innovation team, it’s important to get as many different...
Could Deliberate Diversity™ Have Prevented the Great Recession?
Look at the lineup at the Federal Reserve Bank in 2008: Ben Bernanke, Donald Kohn, Randall Kroszner, and a few others. What do these people all have in common? They’re all bankers and economists. They all see the world in essentially the same way. When financiers...
How Diversity Management Fuels Procter & Gamble’s Success
When A.G. Lafley became CEO of Procter & Gamble in 2000, the company had a commercial success rate of 15 to 20 percent. Less than a decade later, P&G’s success rate was up to 50 to 60 percent. The company has only gotten stronger since then. There’s no mystery...
Determining the Real Value of Representation: Diversity of Perspective
It’s easy to take the “affirmative action approach” to representation. That’s when a company says “We’ve got 100 thousand employees, but only 2 percent of them are women. We have to go and artificially raise that number to 17 percent.” But this approach to...
Why Nothing Stifles Ideas Like a Culture of Harmony
Embracing Deliberate DiversityTM means learning to communicate in a diverse environment. This can be a challenge for employees, because communication in Deliberate DiversityTM often differs from what they’re used to. The key is to be clear about what Deliberate...
If Your Inner Circle Backs You Up 100% of the Time, Here’s What You’re Doing Wrong
Hank Paulson, the former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, has said that every leader that he’s worked with has had significant blind spots – and he’s worked with a lot of important leaders in the financial world. These leaders know they have strengths and weaknesses....