Preface

We wrote this book because we believe in the power of diversity. Although some organizational leaders believe that they have seen and experienced the positive elements of diversity, virtually all have been practicing what we call diversity in a box. Unleashing the real potential of diversity offers performance benefits that are an order of magnitude more than most organizations have ever accomplished and many of us have ever seen.

Through traditionally restrictive policies, practices, and structures, many organizations put a blanket over people, smothering much of their diversity. We believe organizations that remove the blanket and support human diversity will be the big winners in the twenty-first century.

Many people believe that diversity is a problem that takes enormous energy to manage, address, and deal with, and that sameness is so much easier. After all, it takes work to be part of a diverse organization or team. Phil Wilson, a former executive with Oracle, had an opposite point of view. He believed that it takes more energy to keep the blanket on human diversity than to unleash it, and it takes a lot of work to maintain and deny that diversity. Diversity is natural, and any effort to stifle it takes more work than enabling it.

The real work for organizations in search of higher performance and greater success ought to be supporting diversity and aligning it for a common purpose. The real challenge for organizations is to remove that blanket.

We believe organizations are strengthened by a diversity of perspectives, nationalities, and backgrounds. We believe that all groups possess the inherent potential of diversity, but to truly leverage it you need inclusion.

How much of themselves are people allowed and enabled to contribute?

How are their different perspectives, talents, skills, and styles allowed and enabled to interact to create enhanced results?

This book represents what we have learned from our work over the past 30 years with a wide range of clients in a broad range of industries, from long-established manufacturing and service organizations to entrepreneurial start-ups, from Fortune 50 multinationals to non-profit foundations, from city and county governments to school districts, colleges and universities, and from individual coaching sessions to small-scale educational events to 100,000-person system-wide interventions.

Over time, what has emerged from The Kaleel Jamison Consulting Group, Inc. work is a methodology for change and creating organizational breakthroughs. This book is our effort to capture the insights, experiences, frameworks, and interventions from our decades of real-world, real-organization experiences.

Many attempts at making diversity work inside organizations have failed. We wrote this book—to help create an image of what real success can look like. In this book, we talk about what could be—what is available to organizations if they allow and enable themselves to flourish, to grow, and to come together and do their best work.

In our work with clients and in our service as directors on the boards of Ben and Jerry’s, the Institute for Development Research, the National Training Laboratories, the Organization Development Network, the Social Venture Network, the American Society for Training and Development, and others, we have seen glimpses of what unleashing the power of diversity can do. We have seen it, we have touched it, and we have seen how much individuals, teams, and organizations have gained from it. It is hard to describe the potential we see, but we will try. It is the difference between black-and-white TV, color TV, and high-definition TV. When we had only black-and-white TV, most of us were satisfied. It was the invention of the century. We saw new and wonderful things. How could there be more? How could it get any better? But then color TV opened our eyes to a new reality—a new and truer view of the world. And now we have high-definition TV—multi-dimensional images, not flat people in a flat world. The world and people are more dynamic and wondrous than the earlier TV screens portrayed.

Organizations have been operating in a black-and-white TV world. They have been utilizing just one or, at most, a couple of the dimensions of humankind. They do not see or leverage the multidimensional diversity of humankind. They let only some people in the game and require most to conform to a very narrow bandwidth of behavior. People are more than that, and organizations need more than that, especially if they hope to be successful in the future. We are not saying, “Anything goes!” Far from it. We are simply saying that there is plenty of room to expand the bandwidth of appreciated and valued behaviors and styles, with an ever-present eye on whether the bandwidth serves the mission and strategies of the organization. We believe greater success awaits organizations that widen their range.

We know from experience that people have more to give than many organizations allow. In the black-and-white TV world we entered as employees in the 1960s, many people saw only a young African American man from the inner city of Philadelphia and a black college called Lincoln, and a young Jewish woman from Queens, New York, who attended Queens College. They saw a couple of dimensions and rated us on them. Many did not see the high-definition reality and potential that now has us leading a 100-plus-person consulting firm considered by many as the preeminent firm in the area of strategic culture change as it relates to leveraging diversity and inclusion. They could not imagine that those two individuals would consult to many of the Who’s Who in corporate America.

Our point is that we are not exceptions. In fact, we see ourselves as normal. We are just two examples of the potential that awaits all of us if we leverage the diversity of humankind and include all people in our problem-solving and pursuit of opportunities.

We are optimistic about the future when we reflect on how little of what people have to offer, individually and collectively, has actually been leveraged by organizations. Yes, society and technology have accomplished a great deal, but we have so much further that we can go. Many organizations have achieved significant success using only a fraction of their collective experience, knowledge, and potential. We think all of us have been building, creating, and accomplishing with one hand bound behind our backs.

We believe that freeing that hand will create greatness beyond our imagination.

A note about the case studies: The examples in this book are all based on fact and experience. Details have been changed to maintain confidentiality and anonymity of organizations and individuals. In virtually all instances, the case examples do not represent isolated incidents. They were chosen because they illustrate patterns we have seen repeated consistently or solutions that have been successful in several organizations.