At New Normal, Radical Shift, we are delighted to have been involved in advising the Chartered Management Institute as they prepare a series of blogs and other initiatives around the theme of the future of management, launching this month. An excerpt of the first piece, covering diversity, follows:
For decades now, diversity has been on the management agenda, but the terms of reference have been political and legal: affirmative action, equal rights legislation, quotas. In the case of gender, it is often lamented that, despite decades of anti-discrimination legislation, women’s pay still lags behind. Men, and specifically white men, are still dominant in the upper echelons of corporations and government in western economies. A staggering 83 per cent of delegates at this year’s Davos meeting of world leaders were male.
Perhaps, however, the problem is that diversity has rarely been addressed properly as a business issue, and that politicians and lawyers have framed the debate. Talk of quotas and equal opportunities can sound like special pleading or inverse discrimination; an agenda that is unappealing to a commercially focused senior manager – of any background. Business needs to seize this as a business issue.
For the full article, click here.
