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Not yet, but these are still pretty new to corporate environments. I've been in "harassment prevention" training sessions for years, but only within the last ye

Not yet, but these are still pretty new to corporate environments. I've been in "harassment prevention" training sessions for years, but only within the last year sat through my first "diversity, equity, and inclusion" (DEI) training. (It was not an inquisition; quite helpful in the opinion of this middle aged white guy.) There is research that shows that companies with diverse leadership and staff financially outperform the average. See for example: https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/diversity-and-inclusion/diversity-wins-how-inclusion-matters# https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/diversity-and-inc... The problem is, no one knows for sure how to take an existing corporate culture with low diversity, and transform it to one with higher diversity and higher performance. Cultures can be extremely resistant to change. DEI trainings are just the latest attempt to find something that works. It will take a few years to see if they do.

Udik 6y ago
> There is research that shows that companies with diverse leadership and staff financially outperform the average Ah, that looks like a nice bit of marketing from McKinsey. Huge companies that work on global markets with clearly recognizable brands are naturally more diverse (sourcing people from all over the world) and also care about their public image enough to increase their diversity in management positions. Of course this doesn't mean at all that by increasing diversity your performance will improve, the causal arrow goes in the opposite direction.
JamesBarney 6y ago
I'm super suspicious of research like that for a couple of reasons. One it would it be impossible to publish research that came to the opposite conclusion. Imagine seeing a headline that said "replacing female and black executive leadership with old white dudes increases profit" by McKinsey. Second the magnitude of the impact seems insane. This seems larger than the difference most studies find between good leadership and average leadership. And while I wouldn't be surprised if diverse leadership is marginally better than non-diverse leadership I would be surprised if it's larger than the difference between average and good. Three they're pulling from many different countries which could potentially create huge confounds. In general "research" that comes out of a place like McKinsey and Bane is pretty suspect but something like this is even more. Even if none of the other problems are real they still don't establish causation. It could easily be the case that diverse candidates are harder to find, so more competitive/better firms are able to better attract them. I think diversity is great and there are lots of great reasons to increase it but I doubt the impact on profitability would be anything beyond marginal.
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  The issue a non-diverse team will hit is getting blind-sided by lack of perspective on emerging phenomena. Given that aspect, I don't find it surprising that the benefits from a diverse team could exceed the benefits between the difference in average and good leadership. Both an average and a good leader will drown the same army if they lead them into a swamp because they've never seen a swamp before.
  - usaar333 6y ago
    Agreed, but there's conflation in these reports between cognitive diversity and demographic diversity.
  - JamesBarney 6y ago
    A blue collar factory worker, a harvard grad management consultant, and a business researcher who are all white males try to reduce car part inventory through logistical innovation. A black woman, a white man, and Asian woman who all graduated from Harvard and worked for McKinsey try to reduce car part inventory through logistical innovation. I wouldn't be surprised if the more diverse group came up with a better solution. To take your contrived example regional diversity will have a much larger impact on making sure someone has encountered a swamp than racial diversity. I think it's easy to overestimate the effect of racial diversity and underestimate the effect of other types of diversities on problem solving style because one is so easy to see.
    - shadowgovt 6y ago
      No disagreement here, but if we're talking non-contrived examples, actual facial recognition cameras for video conferencing have gotten all the way to sold on store shelves with an inability to recognize black faces. I think it's fair to assume that had there been at least one black individual in the development pipeline, the company that made that camera would have avoided an embarrassing mistake.
- Nasrudith 6y ago
  I wonder if the effect works backward - excellence attracts the best and remaining on top requires assimilating the best from all sources. Diversity essentially is a side effect of their paradigms and world views in terms of openness to new things and experimentalism. On a related note successful Empires become more diverse over time - one of the few virtues of Imperialism and they need the edge to expand further while the most xenophobic ones tend to be shorter lived or more limited in their success. One insulting but true observation about national flags flown by white supremacists is that they are all flags of losers (Nazi Germany, Confederacy, Rhodesia).
deleted 6y ago
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Udik 6y ago

> There is research that shows that companies with diverse leadership and staff financially outperform the average Ah, that looks like a nice bit of marketing from McKinsey. Huge companies that work on global markets with clearly recognizable brands are naturally more diverse (sourcing people from all over the world) and also care about their public image enough to increase their diversity in management positions. Of course this doesn't mean at all that by increasing diversity your performance will improve, the causal arrow goes in the opposite direction.

JamesBarney 6y ago

I'm super suspicious of research like that for a couple of reasons. One it would it be impossible to publish research that came to the opposite conclusion. Imagine seeing a headline that said "replacing female and black executive leadership with old white dudes increases profit" by McKinsey. Second the magnitude of the impact seems insane. This seems larger than the difference most studies find between good leadership and average leadership. And while I wouldn't be surprised if diverse leadership is marginally better than non-diverse leadership I would be surprised if it's larger than the difference between average and good. Three they're pulling from many different countries which could potentially create huge confounds. In general "research" that comes out of a place like McKinsey and Bane is pretty suspect but something like this is even more. Even if none of the other problems are real they still don't establish causation. It could easily be the case that diverse candidates are harder to find, so more competitive/better firms are able to better attract them. I think diversity is great and there are lots of great reasons to increase it but I doubt the impact on profitability would be anything beyond marginal.

shadowgovt 6y ago
The issue a non-diverse team will hit is getting blind-sided by lack of perspective on emerging phenomena. Given that aspect, I don't find it surprising that the benefits from a diverse team could exceed the benefits between the difference in average and good leadership. Both an average and a good leader will drown the same army if they lead them into a swamp because they've never seen a swamp before.
- usaar333 6y ago
  Agreed, but there's conflation in these reports between cognitive diversity and demographic diversity.
- JamesBarney 6y ago
  A blue collar factory worker, a harvard grad management consultant, and a business researcher who are all white males try to reduce car part inventory through logistical innovation. A black woman, a white man, and Asian woman who all graduated from Harvard and worked for McKinsey try to reduce car part inventory through logistical innovation. I wouldn't be surprised if the more diverse group came up with a better solution. To take your contrived example regional diversity will have a much larger impact on making sure someone has encountered a swamp than racial diversity. I think it's easy to overestimate the effect of racial diversity and underestimate the effect of other types of diversities on problem solving style because one is so easy to see.
  - shadowgovt 6y ago
    No disagreement here, but if we're talking non-contrived examples, actual facial recognition cameras for video conferencing have gotten all the way to sold on store shelves with an inability to recognize black faces. I think it's fair to assume that had there been at least one black individual in the development pipeline, the company that made that camera would have avoided an embarrassing mistake.
Nasrudith 6y ago
I wonder if the effect works backward - excellence attracts the best and remaining on top requires assimilating the best from all sources. Diversity essentially is a side effect of their paradigms and world views in terms of openness to new things and experimentalism. On a related note successful Empires become more diverse over time - one of the few virtues of Imperialism and they need the edge to expand further while the most xenophobic ones tend to be shorter lived or more limited in their success. One insulting but true observation about national flags flown by white supremacists is that they are all flags of losers (Nazi Germany, Confederacy, Rhodesia).

deleted 6y ago

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