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Let's get on the same page for diversity

By ROBERT TRIGAUX
Published October 28, 2007

It will be seven years next month since I wrote about the plight of Reginald Harmon, a black employee at Home Depot in Port Richey who sued the company after finding a hangman's noose pinned to a backroom bulletin board.

Harmon settled with the company and, I hope, has gone on to better experiences. I thought he was an exception at the start of a new millennium. Now I am not sure.

What does this have to do with corporate diversity in late 2007? I am distracted by a rush of news that feels like it belongs more to the days before the civil rights era 50 years ago. The Jena 6 incident. An aging Nobel Prize winner who this month declared people of African descent are less intelligent. The decision by leading Republican candidates to skip last month's presidential debate, which took place at a historically black college and focused on issues of particular importance to minority voters.

And the nooses.

In Jena, La., a noose appeared after black students sat under a tree that was supposed to be for "whites only." Then a noose was hung on the door of an African-American professor teaching at, of all places, Columbia University in New York.

Here in Pinellas County, front-page stories tell of plans to favor "neighborhood schools" close to students' homes. It is also the de facto end to school integration.

I raise these issues in a publication about corporate diversity because we are watching a preview of some major challenges looming before the business community.

Corporate diversity, while far from perfect, is making significant strides. Many have embraced the conviction that we all - people of different races, gender, religions and lifestyles, people with disabilities, people young and old - will be smarter, faster, more innovative and ultimately more competitive if we pool our different skills and insights in a global game of business that's clearly getting tougher.

But corporate diversity can't gain much momentum if we're heading sideways. It seems silly to be praising the virtues of different people pooling their efforts in business while we witness a new cycle of old intimidation and reargue segregated education.

Even the Wall Street Journal started a tempest with an opinion piece on Aug. 16 with the headline "The Death of Diversity" and remarks that "corporations everywhere have force-marched middle managers into training sessions led by diversity trainers." The article cites new work by Harvard's Robert Putnam, author of the Bowling Alone bestseller, and says people in ethnically diverse settings "don't want to have much of anything to do with each other."

A counterargument appears at DiversityInc, a Web site and magazine focused on diversity matters. If diversity is examined more broadly, Putnam notes that most studies of work groups find "diversity fosters creativity" and "produces much better, faster problem-solving."

That's one of many bottom-line reasons more corporations are creating positions with titles like "chief diversity officer."

In the Winning the Talent War blog at Harvard Business Online, economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett discusses why the "chief diversity officer" is gaining popularity. "A few years back, these chief diversity officer positions didn't exist. Today they're firmly established in the executive suite across a range of Fortune 500 companies," Hewlett says.

"If you define the global talent pipeline as all those individuals around the world who have at least a college degree, only 17 percent of this pipeline comprises white males - everyone else is either female or a multicultural person. Increasingly talent management is diversity management."

Sounds like a wakeup call to me.

-- Robert Trigaux can be reached at trigaux@sptimes.com or 727 893-8405.

[Last modified October 25, 2007, 14:16:14]