Category Archives: Diversity

DEI Daze

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.

Diversity, Immigration and Our Success

The faces of Emerald Packaging have changed beyond recognition from our founding. White men in shirts and ties ran the factory. They had a firm hold on management. Factory workers weren’t any different. Bookkeeping belonged to the lone woman. She could have run sales as well as or better than any male had she been given training.

Today? A woman from India holds the second most important position in the company, chief operating officer. Our prepress director immigrated from the Philippines, our printing manager left El Salvador as did our human resources director. Our head of technical sales moved from Mexico. So too our innovation director. One of our customer service agents comes from Afghanistan. Our maintenance director’s mother immigrated from Mexico. Our factory employees hail from countless different nations including Ukraine, Cambodia, Philippines, Mexico, Thailand and India to name a few.

I recall a few years ago coming into the office only to see a Hindu, Muslim and a Hmong decorating our Christmas tree. Sounds like the beginning of a good joke but reflected our diversity. Our company wouldn’t be successful today without the many minds and hands from other countries. We owe most of our quality control procedures to our chief operating officer who implemented them when she was a process control engineer. We couldn’t operate without the nimble mind of our plant manager who oversees our chaotic schedule. Our innovator led us into laser microperforation, developed our first pricing programs, and pushed us to expand into new markets. Our factory employees, like their compatriots from the 1970s, remain industry leaders.

I do think family history plays some role in my openness to other cultures. Our Irish grandparents immigrated in the 1920s, one set leaving poverty and the other civil war. My paternal grandfather had no special skills when he arrived at Ellis Island. He became a bricklayer in New York, put his kids through school, one of whom founded this company. Not much different from many of those who work here today. I also know I’m more open to women managers than my predecessors, perhaps because I worked extensively with them in a previous job.

More importantly the workforce changed and if we didn’t Emerald would not be here. Diversity defines the Bay Area. Whites make up a much smaller percentage of the labor pool, especially in manufacturing, than three decades ago. Women, immigrants, minorities have the engineering and technical skills necessary to build a successful company. If you don’t hire them ultimately you lose.

We don’t make it easy for women though. The expense of child care eats into wages. No matter what progressive men think women continue to shoulder the burden of child rearing and chores. I think this makes them more efficient with their time, accomplishing in eight or nine hours what men may take 10 hours to do. But it also sometimes distracts from the job, especially when they have to stay home with sick children.

Immigration policy has also started to gum up the works. Our country succeeds because it has opened its doors generation after generation. Slamming shut those doors or failing to put a sane system in place only weakens us. Foreigners account for a disproportionate share of start-ups and patents in Silicon Valley yet we gut the H1-B visa system that allows them to work here. Similarly not rebuilding our agricultural and manufacturing workforce with immigrants who want the jobs simply raises costs and forces companies overseas. We’d welcome underemployed factory workers from the Midwest but they won’t move. Labor mobility collapsed ten years ago and remains stuck at its lowest rate in decades.

White men continue to hold important positions in our company. We succeed because of them, too. But it’s the combination of their talents and those of many non-traditional employees who either weren’t welcomed in manufacturing or whose people hadn’t immigrated yet that drives us. I often wonder if we wouldn’t have been a more successful company if our bookkeeper had moved up the ladder. Well, her spiritual heir has. Our new plant manager, whose parents immigrated from Laos, started as a receptionist, became a customer service agent, and succeeded as our scheduler. I am thankful she’s an American.





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