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Diversity as a Strategy

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In 1993 the American iconic company IBM hired a new turnaround CEO named Lou Gerstner. In this Harvard Business Review article entitled Diversity as Strategy, Harvard Professor David A. Thomas writes about an aspect of Gerstner’s strategy is really a story about people, starting with the diversity of people within IBM, and the positive replication into their global markets. These markets include customers, employees, and the search for new talent to recruit. Gerstner realized that an organization the size of IBM must embrace diversity, to not only influence people, but as a strategy to open the doors to new opportunities both internally and externally.

Gerstner launched a Diversity Task Force initiative with the goal, “to uncover and understand the differences among the groups and find ways to appeal to a broader set of employees and customers” (Thomas, 2004. Pg. 1). Gerstner explained that it was more than just about the talent pool, and that it was a market based issue. Realizing the diversity in the markets, and IBM’s need to expand in the markets, would require the people representing IBM to be as diverse and multi-culture oriented as the markets.

The first usable takeaway from the articles emphasis on culture change is the idea of Constructive Disruption. It’s an interesting approach to how IBM, and most employers really, approached employee management issues. Companies had become very careful at not distinguishing differences among groups of diversity to remove any possible indication of discrimination. Now in this initiative IBM was creating focus groups of diversity groups to understand what was important to each group and develop organizational behaviors that supported these points, and removed obstacles that prevented progression. Instead of smoothing and blending into one corporate persona, IBM was doing the opposite by emphasizing and

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