I think you should bite the bullet on this one: those officers he describes are excellent resources for the heads of other departments with the accountability t

I think you should bite the bullet on this one: those officers he describes are excellent resources for the heads of other departments with the accountability to use as a resource, but they aren't unilaterally setting policy for the entire org., nor dictating specific rules to the rank and file. A Chief Diversity Officer could be useful in a similar capacity, e.g. a CFO decides that the company's charitable contributions should better reflect modern sensibilities, or when a head of HR wants to know how to recruit a more diverse pool, or when a CMO wants to brand-target better. But the Chief Diversity Officer isn't running his own parallel competing initiatives.