Diversity in the Corporate World

[David Floyd]

FWIW, saying people will buy whatever you put in front of them is one way to make sure you never succeed in business.

Technically, I said people will buy whatever is *SOLD* to them, not what is put in front of them.

DanS,

I understand your point about diversity of talent, however, my point was more about when people go after minority hiring for the sake of hiring minorities. That's basically what federal diversity guidelines are about - not making better business decisions, but making hiring decisions for their own sake, sometimes in spite of what would be the better decision.

[Imran Siddiqui]

I said people will buy whatever is *SOLD* to them

Well then that's just a dumb ass reductionist argument.

[Zkribbler]

TDanS,

I understand your point about diversity of talent, however, my point was more about when people go after minority hiring for the sake of hiring minorities. That's basically what federal diversity guidelines are about - not making better business decisions, but making hiring decisions for their own sake, sometimes in spite of what would be the better decision.

Diverse people are hired to get diverse viewpoints. I don't know anyone who hires minority simply for the purposes of hiring minorities*. In fact, to do so would violate the Bakke decision of 1973.


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* Exception: Minorities may be hired to remedy past discrimination, i.e. a lily white police department policing a neighborhood that is 90+% minority.

[MRT144]

Well then that's just a dumb ass reductionist argument.

And circular. Don't forget circular.

[VetLegion]

Diverse people are hired to get diverse viewpoints. I don't know anyone who hires minority simply for the purposes of hiring minorities*. In fact, to do so would violate the Bakke decision of 1973.

Isn't that inherently racist? How can you assume that yellow people will bring diverse viewpoints to the company unless you think that just because they are of different color they also think differently?

[VetLegion]

What is more important; diversity of ethnicity, race, gender, etc. or diversity of thought? Does one necessarily imply the other?

I'm taking a corporate governance course and they brought up the idea of diversity on a corporate board of general 8-14 people and how necessary it is. One comment was that 80% of a consumer decisions are made by a women, and yet women comprise less than 10% of the board memberships. Does this even matter? They buy whatever is sold.

Take banks for example. They have silly services (or "products" if you will) like credit cards with annual interest of 79%. There is a market for that, apparently. Do people who designed that product use it? Hardly. They probably don't even know anybody who uses it, yet they created it.

I think it's completely silly to assume that you need women in order to design products that appeal to women. You can have men design it and then test it on a random sample of women.

Companies and products are hit and miss any way you look at it. Microsoft has superb engineers who build software and some of that software is a success and some is a flop. It's like that everywhere.

[Japher]

I think it's completely silly to assume that you need women in order to design products that appeal to women. You can have men design it and then test it on a random sample of women.

Exactly. Still, it may be more trial and error than instinct and consumer knowledge going into the product, but I don't think so. Large companies do things in a terribly overcomplicated fashion, especially in marketing. Most of the hoops are set up to prevent mistakes or losses due to an ineffective or unaccepted product. These hoops don't changed based on the sex, race, or ethnicity of the product manager.

When you reach board level, how much of the actual decisions that effect the product offering are weighed? The decisions at the board level are more strategic, are the not? If so why would having X# of females or Asians matter? It's really whether or not they understand the business and can formulate a strategy, not whether they have consumer insight or not.