Category: Career in the Collaborative Age

There is actually a business case for diversity. Beyond the impression that diversity in a team or a business creates value by making various points of view available and opening more markets, the results are demonstrated. In the post ‘The Business Case For Diversity In The Workplace‘, a number of studies are quoted.

“In one study, sociologist Cedric Herring found that companies with the highest levels of racial diversity had, on average, 15 times more sales revenue than those with the lowest levels of racial diversity.

Herring found that for every percentage increase in the rate of racial or gender diversity, there was an increase in sales revenues of approximately 9 and 3 percent, respectively.

A study at the Kellogg School of Management found that diverse teams outperform homogeneous ones because the presence of group members unlike yourself causes you to think differently.

In a Catalyst report called The Bottom Line: Corporate Performance and Women’s Representation on Boards, researchers found that Fortune 500 companies with the highest representation of women board directors performed better financially than those with the lowest representation of women on their board of directors.

And [..] McKinsey found that diverse companies perform at least 35% better than their homogeneous counterparts.”

The case seems to be made… even recruiting a diverse team requires us to have the discipline to overcome our natural preferences!

Hat tip to Tim Berry’s blog for the reference.

“In the early 20th century, big companies were synonymous with efficiency. In the late 20th century they were synonymous with inefficiency.” writes Paul Graham in his post ‘Refragmentation‘.

This is of course a bit simplified, however it fits with the historic trend of outsourcing and contracting a lot of the value chain out of the main industrial conglomerates into networks of suppliers and contractors, and the emergence of loose networks of small entities that prove to be more flexible and resilient than large organizations.

At the same time to be successful in large endeavors and projects, large organizations are still needed to leverage the appropriate financing and create the local conditions of low complexity and alignment that are necessary to make these endeavors successful.

It is difficult to combine the flexibility of networks of small, relatively independent entities with the coherence and leverage that are necessary for large endeavors. There is no fixed recipe, however that is probably quite the form of organization that will be the future in the Collaborative Age. We need to find the right approaches, and that is certainly one the challenges I encounter on a regular basis in my consulting activities.