Sylvia Hewlett: I'd been very involved in the talent wars right across the world, lived and worked in poor countries. I see myself as a bit of an international expert in those areas.
Sylvia Ann Hewlett, the founding President of the Center for Work-Life Policy, here in New York, which is a think tank.
Card: How Companies Can Learn to Leverage Diversity.
Sylvia Hewlett: I don't think it's obvious to leaders that this is a must-have. Everyone sees it as a nice-to-have, it's clearly a good adornment, particularly in good times. So making the business case for why this has to be done now, even in the midst of the global recession, actually needs a pretty complicated argument. To go down the list and to spell out why it is an urgent priority now, I think the first thing I would stress is the tremendous demographic shifts out there in the world.
Let me make it very vivid. If you take the global talent pipeline, everyone in the world that has at least a bachelors degree, only 17% of that pipeline these days comprises white men. 83% of every qualified labor pool around the world is actually female or multicultural. And therefore, just on share efficiency grounds, you're not going to be able to recruit the brightest and the best to lean on the richest pool of talent, if you tend to rely on white guys to lead you into the future. So the demographic changes I think make it a very urgent problem.
Another new factor, there's a lot of research on the efficacy of teams. It turns out diverse work teams encompassing gender diversity, racial diversity, age diversity make much better decisions and are much more innovative than homogeneous teams.
If you try to design a product these days relying on a bunch of Caucasian men who all grew up in Greenwich, the odds are you would end up with a very narrow kind of conception as to what might be useful out there. So the new world, particularly the London Business School has done a lot of new work on address the innovation and efficiency of teams, and how diversity makes a huge difference.
Another factor and perhaps I'll stop at three, although there are many out there, is what's happened to the face of the consumer/client. And again this is leaning on Tom Peter's work; he shows is that 83% of consumer decisions these days are made by women. The consumer is not king, the consumer's queen.
Discuss
robert knight on June 5, 2009, 10:46 PM
Sylvia Hewlett makes the business case for diversity: 83% of the talent pool are not white males. Don’t just rely on “a bunch of Caucasian men who grew up in Greenwich,” she says. Here, here!
Joe Gillis on June 11, 2009, 6:03 PM
If there’s anything that government and the financial industry have taught us, it is that a bunch of old white men making decisions in an isolated board room is a flawed process. I’d even go as far as to say that the need for workplace diversity may have never been more important, but I’m not entirely convinced that employers have caught on quite yet. Perhaps NYTimes.com’s slideshow of Google’s multi-cultural work force can help get the point across to some of those old white guys from Greenwich.
soccer on June 11, 2009, 6:30 PM
I don’t think diversity at the expense of performance is the answer. Sylvia simply contends that only hiring white men from Greenwich means that you are missing out on the best and the brightest. Companies need to find the best people, be they white, black, asian or from whatever cultural background.
Roberta Reynolds on June 16, 2009, 11:07 AM
This lady talks about “gender diversity, racial diversity, age diversity” — I love it.
colin day on June 20, 2009, 12:05 AM
This issue is one that will never be resolved. As a nation we need to be sure that all people are provided with an equal opportunity to succeed. Affirmative Action was created to make sure minority groups were not denied that right. This was the right thing to do.
We need to continue to protect people from discrimination that was legally sanctioned for centuries. Yes, we are making up for the wrongs of the past. I’m a white man and I suport it 100%, because I know that I was brought up with every advantage in life, and I think it’s right to give a person who hasn’t had it so easy some extra help in trying to secure decent employment.
Hewlett has it right here. A work place with a high degree of diversity truly reflects the make up of our society, and helps in bringing about greater understanding between races as they get to know each other as human beings, not as a color or a member of a race.
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