Over the last few weeks, the attack on diversity initiatives has grown increasingly absurd. In the fervor to scrub race from U.S. government web pages, Jackie Robinson, black soldiers who fought in the Civil War and the Navajo Code Breakers mistakenly disappeared. The black head of the Joint Chiefs got canned, and the white female heads of the Navy and Coast Guard suffered similar fates. The message dovetailed off the words of Darren Beattie, the recently appointed undersecretary for public diplomacy who last year wrote: “Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work.”
Oddly, I’ve been saying the exact opposite for years, based on actual experience. The leadership of our company is a extraordinary mix of brown males and females, immigrants, and white men and women. I know the place works because of that. We promote the person best suited to the job, who has the blend of technical skills and personality to handle the challenges they’ll face, while showing promise to move up to the next level.
Take our scheduling director. She’s first generation Laotian, started as the receptionist, moved into customer service and then took over scheduling. Somehow, and I don’t know exactly how, she keeps a 200,000 square foot factory running 24/7, 362 days with minimal downtime while handling one customer crisis after another. The white men who’ve tried the job want nothing to do with it. So what ? I have a proven leader who works around the clock and gets stuff done. That she’s a Hmong woman doesn’t enter into the equation.
Or does it? Is it possible that culture shapes the person? Immigrant and first gen women seem driven in a way their co-workers aren’t, including me. My head spins with what they get done in a day, including taking on and unraveling incredibly complex issues. There’s just a get-to-it spirit that drives the best of them, in the way us second generation types rarely muster. My first gen Director of Human Resources, for example, took the almost unheard of step for an HR executive of earning her MBA (while caring for a newborn, I must add). Growing up without often proves a great motivator. I can point to my own first gen father — a white male — as a great illustration. It’s just that we don’t have many European immigrants anymore. These days most are brown. Either way, I’m lucky to have them.
Research backs up my intuition. Back in 2019 the consultancy McKinsey & Co. found that companies in the top quartile for gender diversity boasted profits 25% higher than the laggards in the bottom quarter. Ethnic diversity proved even more decisive, with the gap widening to 36%. The Harvard Business Review attributes such success to the way diverse teams challenge each other to think more broadly thanks to differing life experiences. They tend to make more factual decisions because preconceptions are more likely to get challenged, again thanks to different perspectives.
I’m not saying DEI programs didn’t get a little silly in some cases, if not worse. The problem comes when company’s build quotas and limit searches, instead of creating a culture where any gender or color can thrive. There’s no doubt we owe a debt to the ground breakers, people like the baseball great Jackie Robinson, who broke the color barrier enduring racist chants and insults from players, while building one of the most impressive resumes in the sport. His success showed what we had missed not including blacks at the highest levels. So why even consider taking down his web page?
The Administration itself undercuts its own arguments. Women dot its upper echelons, including chief of staff to the president, head of the Department of Homeland Security, and Attorney General. Why are they not DEI hires but Vice President Kamela Harris was, according to then candidate Trump? Why don’t black soldiers in the Civil War, who faced execution or slavery if captured, deserve mention for the ruthless bravery they exhibited?
I’m not sure where the anger about diversity comes from. I suspect, as Mr. Beattie suggests, it’s a backlash from white men, who feel passed over for positions they think they deserve. Whether they do or not. It ain’t easy to give up first position. I’ve seen it in my own company, where white males are more critical of brown and female department heads than they are of their counterparts. It isn’t uncommon for unpopular decisions to get pushed on them, and then their answers roundly criticized, another little fact noticed by the Financial Times. Still, we come together, put stuff behind us and make our company hum.
Ultimately I worry that the vilification of DEI will undercut the legitimacy of nontraditional leaders. I’m concerned the hostile environment will grow so strong that they’ll end up stepping down or taking demotions. That would be a mistake, as the research shows. Think of what we lose. After all, who will have the guts to steal home base?*
*Picture of Jackie Robinson famously stealing home in the 1955 World Series, a feat he accomplished 19 times in his career, which prior to his inclusion rarely happened. { read more }
Our country gradually but steadily has moved to war footing to battle an unseen enemy, a virus. Around the world countries have begun to close borders, shutter businesses, demand citizens stay indoors when not working, not cluster in groups and so on. Our government, slow on the uptake but increasingly less so, has invoked a 1950s law that empowers President Trump to force industry where possible to vastly increase production of wartime supplies needed by the medical community, including masks, gowns, and respirators very much like President Franklin Roosevelt did as we moved into war against Nazi Germany.
Back then though, private citizens did their bit. They bought war bonds to help finance the struggle. They recycled materials in short supply like paper. Neighborhoods held scrap drives collecting copper and brass, often in the form of pots and pans, for use making artillery shells. Families saved fat drippings from cooking to make soap at government request. There were numerous other sacrifices including the draft, curfews, deferment of wage increases, and acceptance of higher taxes.
Now our time has come. We must stop hoarding goods and make sure we buy only what we need so that our neighbors have what they need. We should collect and turn over to hospitals items doctors and nurses desperately need like N95 masks, expected to be in short supply within weeks. Latex gloves fall into this category as well, as does hand sanitizer. We need to protect our troops or we will lose this war. Instead of individuals and companies showing up at local hospitals perhaps cities can organize the collection of these items. Until such time though we have to do the task ourselves. Collecting fat drippings may be necessary again to increase the soap supply. Submitting to shelter-in-place despite our peripatetic culture will become our version of the curfew.
For those of us in higher income brackets we have a responsibility to our nation. The President will likely sign a $1 trillion stimulus package to help the millions of workers who have quickly tumbled into unemployment as businesses have closed. Given the already swollen deficit we will have no choice but to buy bonds and submit to higher taxes to finance the program, or those programs surely to come. Underwriting some form of national health care for those who catch the disease will be our only way to cover the cost of care and ensure public health given the breadth and length of the coming war.
I’ve only begun to think about this but am taking the first steps forward. Emerald Packaging has donated our small corporate stash of N95 masks to a local hospital. We’ve switched to an isopropyl alcohol solution as a sanitizer which we have plenty of thanks to our use of it to tone inks. We’ve increased our costs by hiring dedicated employees to disinfect surfaces in order to keep workers safe. We’re covering Covid-19 tests and urgent care visits related to the disease, likely another hit to profits. We’ve emphasized to employees that we must wash and sanitize our hands and workstations to make sure we stay open given that we are part of a wartime production system, providing the packaging required to ensure food safety. And at home we definitely opted not to hoard and we’re constantly washing our hands to prevent spreading the disease.
Within the company we’re also thinking about how we can help wartime production. Sure we’re pulling out the stops to provide the packaging needed to protect the food supply. But we’re also brainstorming how to convert equipment to produce plastic gloves and single use sheets to cover tabletops, where the virus can live for up to 72 hours. We won’t be huge producers, but we can do our part.
What’s missing is coordination from the top. So far the country isn’t of one mind when it comes to shelter-in-place, business closures, and so on. President Trump needs to get us all on the same page. Government — local or national — hasn’t emphasized enough that we shouldn’t hoard nor has it called for those of us who have items in short supply like masks to turn them over. We have little time to role out a war effort. The enemy is at our gates. If our leaders need inspiration they need only look to Roosevelt or Churchill.
I know we can do this. We can survive higher taxes and curfews and rationing. We can forgo goods needed for the war effort. We can work longer hours when needed and defer the increased earnings or part of our salaries to finance the struggle. Every generation faces its challenges, but few face a social apocalypse equal to the one we turn towards. Hardship, weariness and suffering await us. But with those comes victory. So donate those masks….now.