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Diversity as a Strategy

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DIVERSITY AS A STRATEGY
In 1993, Lou Gerstner became CEO of IBM and made workforce diversity his strategic focus. He felt that the executive team wasn’t as diverse as the company’s customers and employees, nor the talent market. So he created task forces, comprised of different groups, to discover the differences within the groups and find ways to appeal to more customers that way. The groups included blacks, women, homosexuals and people with disabilities.
The strategy behind the diversity teams was to find ways to expand the customer base and talent pool by embracing the differences in each group. Then the groups could figure out ways to reach a broader group of customers within their constituency and expand the revenue growth thereby. They would also figure out how to encourage more of their group type to embrace studies that would lead to jobs at the company. In the women’s group, they found many girls would decide not to take non-required science and math courses and so women’s task force implemented a series of summer camps to make learning those subjects fun. Once they completed the camp, the girls were assigned a mentor for a year.
Another group that came from the task forces is the Market Development unit. This unit is responsible for supporting marketing and sales strategies geared towards various diverse segments, such as female- and minority-owned small businesses. This unit’s efforts are responsible for millions of dollars of new revenue. The more the company understood what appealed to the constituencies of the task forces, the better they could make the marketing of IBM’s product towards the various groups.
The company realized that they had to have the support of the employees also. The management was held accountable for their actions towards employees and other managers and how it affected them. They were also responsible for finding and

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