Effective Business Communication
-Wholehearted conversations that transform
Diversity is more than racial, gender, age, or ethnic make up of a group. Diversity is more a matter of divergence in thought. It has the potential to broaden perspectives and enhance creative decision making capacity. However, that potential is not realized as often as should be the case. Continue reading »
In the current marketplace, a lack of diversity is not good for business. The most progressive companies will be successful because they recognize and harness the power of diversity to their work forces and in their products and services, thereby appealing to an increasingly diverse customer base. Continue reading »
In my last post we established that inclusion makes change easier and helps accelerate it. Many times leaders don’t include enough people in the planning and design of the process of change because they think it’s too messy and time consuming.
In reality, you will lose a lot more time, and risk failure if you don’t include enough people in the process. Today I’m sharing 7 specific behaviors you can easily learn and apply to defeat exclusion and make change easier. Continue reading »
The second obstacle to change I mentioned in my April 24 post is Exclusion. Today we are going to see how the simple idea of inclusion changes everything.
I believe one of the reasons so many change efforts are failing is because we are trying to make 21th century changes with a 20th century mindset. We are in a different era of Globalization, where the Internet is a way of life. Continue reading »
The New York Times published on July 18 an article by Steve Lohr about how focused diverse thinking can become a competitive advantage for an organization. He is talking about "open innovation," which has been variously described as crowdsourcing, the wisdom of crowds, collective intelligence and peer production.
After analyzing recent research he concludes that "open-innovation models succeed only when carefully designed for a particular task and when the incentives are tailored to attract the most effective collaborators." He contends that "Open-innovation models are adopted to overcome the constraints of corporate hierarchies. But successful projects are typically hybrids of ideas flowing from a decentralized crowd and a hierarchy winnowing and making decisions."
It would be impossible to ignore all the press about the possibility of Judge Sonia Sotomayor becoming a Supreme Court judge. I don’t want to go into the politics of this, or talk about the pros and cons of her nomination. Nevertheless, reading different viewpoints reminded me once more of why diversity enriches decision making.
