When Will They Ever Learn?
by Miki Saxon
I was going to call this post “How to Make Money,” but then I remembered the lyrics from Peter, Paul and Mary’s hit song and decided it was a much better title.
After all, diversity of all kinds is a war and it’s one being lost in companies every day, whether they are old line industries or the supposed meritocracies of the tech world.
And not just diversity in the form of race and gender, but in terms of management.
Funny how so many companies that don’t “get” the need for a great culture that spawns a happy, therefore productive and innovative, workforce also don’t get diversity in fact.
They all get happy and diverse in theory and in talk, but unfortunately theory and talk frequently never make it to fact.
The facts, however, speak for themselves.
Analyzing the performance of Fortune’s “100 Best Companies to Work for in America” over a 28-year period, the author found that these firms generated higher yearly stock returns than comparable companies not on the list. They also systematically beat financial analysts’ earnings estimates, an indication that job satisfaction is an important variable that the market does not fully value. –strategy+ business (free registration required)
And the real numbers of the future carry their own warning.
The figures highlight the rapid growth in the Hispanic and Asian populations, both of which have surged by more than 40 percent since 2000. Hispanics were 16.7 percent of the population in July 2011 and Asians were 4.8 percent. The black population has grown 12.9 percent since 2000 and makes up 12.3 percent of the nation. Non-Hispanic whites rose only 1.5 percent from 2000 to 2011, slower than the national growth of 9.7 percent, and are now 63.4 percent of the population.
It also turns out that hiring those pesky females in senior positions and putting them on your board pays off handsomely.
Over the past six years, companies with at least some female board representation outperformed those with no women on the board in terms of share price performance, according to the latest study by the Credit Suisse Research Institute. —Credit Suisse
But the stats I really love come from Dr Genevieve Bell, a Social Scientist/Anthropologist at Intel Corporation.
So it turns out if you want to find out what the future looks like, you should be asking women. And just before you think that means you should be asking 18-year-old women, it actually turns out the majority of technology users are women in their 40s, 50s and 60s. So if you wanted to know what the future looks like, those turn out to be the heaviest users of the most successful and most popular technologies on the planet as we speak.
So for all those stuck in the command & control past or believe, as Carl’s and TV advertisers do, that the world actually turns on 18-34 years old males I suggest you update your prejudices and get with the program.
Flickr image credit: Tanja Föhr
