The Competitive Advantage of Worforce Diversity
[00:00:00] Any negative potential consequences... looking at merits?
I do know that law firms do have to be concerned about diversity quotas, I don't know if they're necessarily quotas, but you have to be concerned about them because of the fact that their clients are diverse.
20 white guys representing a company when the company is made up of a reflection of the makeup of America which have different races and people with different points of view. And that's part of the problem. I think that a lot are faced with when they don't have a lot of diversity.
Does that mean people get in higher places that maybe they normally wouldn't, these quotas? Of course. It's like that with colleges. That's like that with law schools. It's like that in different areas of society.
And, frankly for the longest time, people were getting into schools and stuff based on connections of people that were white.
I've had the experience before, so there's a decent size company like the company that I run, but it's certainly not a major company like general motors. I've had the experience from [00:01:00] major companies that are large public companies. Everyone has to go with a group that are likely to succeed and I personally don't think at this point in my career that I was succeeding leading a major us corporation because I'm not. I couldn't compete with other people that have had experience doing that.
My only point is, I don't think there are negative consequences. I think for the direction it's trying to go, you need to understand the forces which are preventing different groups of people from succeeding.
In India, they have a percentage of people that need to be hired from different castes. They're trying to balance and govern the job. these are all positive stuff. It just depends on how law firms need to be set up to help people with a lot of these natural characteristics that I talked about today, which are DISK profiles and everything, are things that are important for people to succeed in firms.
The biggest problem I see is when people do fail and then their confidence is hurt. That happened to me. If I went to be CEO of a giant company, I might think that I should never lead a [00:02:00] company again. I wouldn't understand all the rules that went along with it.
I don't think there are negative consequences to law firms that fill diversity quotas and who's to say that their diversity hires are not all based on merit?
Multiple firms have very good diversity and everyone deserves to be there.
It's also about adding to the socio-political fabric of the firm, making it stronger. Different points of view, they're able to understand different types of clients instead of just approaching problems in one way.
Diversity is great. I've actually written a book about it. You can put that I made for free on site and in BCG. It's an interesting topic and definitely a lot of stuff going on in society, about it right now. And I think, it would be very helpful.
