Extreme Diversity

During the past decade, most corporations have made considerable efforts to become more efficient, or better. Frenzied global competition and the recent economic downturn have revealed that efficiency efforts have limitations, and corporations must also become different. That difference is their capacity to innovate. Innovation is based on a continuous stream of new and fresh ideas that come from a diverse cadre of employees. Corporations historically have believed that a uniform workforce promotes harmony, unity, and efficiency, and have relied on homosocial reproduction and innovation antibodies to maintain the traditional corporate trajectory. This paper contends that the scope of diversity present in a corporation’s employee base and the volume of valuable innovative ideas bubbling up from inside the company are correlated. In order to more fully leverage the broad expertise of an intentionally diverse workforce, organizations may wish to consider reorganization, refocusing compensation from individuals to teams, and expanding institutional learning programs. To effectively lead an appropriately diverse organization, executives must provide clear objectives supported by simple metrics, encourage employees to focus their extraordinary capabilities on customers and on worthwhile experiments to ascertain customer needs, and to channel and productively use creative abrasion that naturally occurs between talented people to propel corporate innovation.