The article cherry-picks a few interesting statistics to support their theory, but that does not make the argument conclusive .... or even very compelling. Let's examine the statistics they use:

"when diverse teams make a business decision, they outperform individual decision makers up to 87% of the time." Ummm .... duh? A group of qualified people can generally out think a single individual every time. Of real pertinence here would be a study pitting diverse groups against homogenous groups.

"Companies with more diverse management teams reported having 19% higher revenue due to innovation." No argument from me - willingness to hire diverse people probably indicates an open mind, and prioritizing results above other factors. It may also reflect access to more diverse pools of potential employees. But does this tidbit indicate that the diversity causes the innovation, rather than the company atmosphere? In other words: is diversity a cause, or an effect of something else?

"Companies in the top quartile for gender diversity on executive teams are 21% more likely to experience greater profitability." Curious that they didn't offer a complete linear comparison ... are companies in the bottom quartile 21% more likely to experience greater losses? Again, the underlying cause is not readily apparent based on one tiny snippet of a fact, especially when they don't even bother to show all of the data.

Not surprisingly, the best way to run a company is to hire the best people for the job, not the best type of people (male, female, white, black, hispanic, etc). Hiring a diverse candidate when a better performing candidate is available, is valuing superficial features over ability and character. Didn't that used to be called racism and sexism?

I believe as Dr. Peterson does that diversity of thought is far more important than diversity of immutable characteristics. We see this in the social media space. Groupthink actually hurts performance.

I suppose immutable characteristic diversity could be a proxy for trait differences, though after 15 years in HR administering such assessments, I don’t think it’s an exact match by any means. I bring more diversity being an ENTJ that I do being female. HOW I think & HOW I approach problems is much more important. As the terminated VP of Diversity for Apple Denise Young Smith (a black woman) said:

“There can be 12 white, blue-eyed, blond men in a room and they’re going to be diverse too because they’re going to bring a different life experience and life perspective to the conversation,” the inaugural diversity chief said.

“Diversity is the human experience,” she said, according to Quartz. “I get a little bit frustrated when diversity or the term diversity is tagged to the people of color, or the women, or the LGBT.”

I agree with her 100% after 15 years in the field. And she was ousted for this type of honesty after 2 decades with the company.

Diversity of thought and ideas is a benefit to any endeavor. Diversity of color or sex is irrelevant

It depends on WHY it’s “Diverse”.
Having worked many jobs in the Greater NYC Area,

I have experienced “Diversity” as a Corporate Culture in which the Diversity was due to hiring the best people available for the job regardless of any other aspect. These companies were great to work in and there was never any friction outside of perhaps over competitiveness.

I have experienced “Diversity” that was a “Political Requirement” under one form or other of “Affirmative Action”. These companies were miserable and generally performed poorly as those people who were hired due to “Affirmative Action” quotas were frequently not well qualified and were completely aware of why they were hired. An employee or co-worker who feels that they are “protected” in their position not only performs poorly and as though they’re doing someone a “favor” but they also tend to feel free to agitate and cause dissent.

Personally, I left at least 3 companies that were victims of “Affirmative Action” simply because of obvious disunity and lack of harmony which I considered to be potentially harmful to my own productivity and career.

I think diversity is absolutely crucial for most businesses to be profitable. My last job at a manufacturer was evidence of this. We had salesman, secretaries, machinists, mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, welders, electronics techs, IT techs, drafters, copy clerks, a videographer, a webmaster, purchasing agents, stockroom & shipping clerks, and wrench turners. If everyone in the company had been an IT tech, we wouldn't have gotten any machines built or sold. Did it matter what color skin those people had or what sex they were? Pffft. If there were a least important qualification for getting the job done, those would rank several notches below it.

"Local or Federal: Best Way to Fix Americas Ills" Group

In my experience i've only worked for 2 companies that hired intentionally for diversity, 1 a large local corporation early '90s, the other smaller & privately owned early 2000s. The diversity was in sexual orientation & in both cases they were highly entitled, had chips on their shoulders & generally disrupted the unity of both operations by changing the dynamic to politically correct & paranoid environments.

I was recruited out of the first company to run a privately owned operation where i was able to change the applications to exclude race & sex (the names were normally good indications of the sex anyway) to focus on qualifications. We were successful in putting together & maintaining a great staff & from scoping out the competition found out that their turnovers were higher & many of them were getting applicants intentionally seeking employment with politically correct companies where they felt they would have a leg up.

This was in a medium size market where affirmative action & diversity were mainly taking hold in bigger corporations & hadn't trickled down yet by practice or regulation in the first example, and the second one just flat out made no sense. Diversity in ethnicity was already present & working fine.

I can see these practices in sales, marketing & product (retail, real estate, etc) oriented companies where diversity can help appeal to ever wider & diverse markets, but implimenting for political reasons can upset the apple cart by causing resentment & paranoia among the rank & file, and a lack of trust & cohesiveness in any environment is ultimately cancerous.

Sorry. I offer no studies or stats to back this up.

I believe someone, my memory fails me, said, there are three kinds of lies; white lies, damn lies, and statistics.

I would suggest if it happens organically it is probably very productive but if it is artificially forced is likely to be detrimental.

If the concept is based on race or gender then no. Neither of those two things makes a person more or less qualified. It should be based on experience, talent, innovation, work ethic and character. It’s about what you produce rather what your collective identity is. Diversity of ideas is critical for any business, it’s the root of problem solving and capturing greater market share. I’d like to see how they measured the claim that more ethnic groups create better better business diversity based on gender and race.

If I'm not wrong, Jordan Peterson said once that for example 'agreeableness' is a 'risk' factor sometimes and can lower the probability of progress in companies. As women generally tend to score 'higher' on 'agreeableness', women in high position who are very high on agreeableness, might be a risk (for the company to improve (more/better)). But this is more about someone's performance, character, ... I have worked in different companies where women were at the top and I experienced more 'legal problems (read: not following the law on working place, contract, education, etc )' there than in companies where men were at the top. Does that mean that gender is a risk? No, everything depends on one's intelligence, knowlegde, charachter, etc. I believe that many people are put on the wrong job and because of this limiting a company's progress. If you put the right person for the job, no matters someones belive, religion, education, etc., the company can flourish.

I’m not convinced, would like to see the numbers

If a country’s government, businesses and industries recruit to sex, colour and minority group quotas it’s productivity is going to fall. To my mind there’s no other direction that it can take in the long run - if you don’t have the best people in the job you don’t have the best govt, business or industry.

I think we’re seeing this ‘dumbing down’ most obviously in politics - the number of women in western governments who are just so, so stupid - America has AOC, Australia has Sarah Hansen-Young, amongst others. The ignorance and apparent lack of basic knowledge that has often been on display in the public arena is telling; why were these women recruited by their parties? They’re the first to cry Sexist! at the slightest criticism; Australia’s first female prime minister, Julia Gillard pulled that stunt while in office and still does when she and Hillary Clinton hold conventions together. How convenient if you don’t want to acknowledge your failures? But this blame-shifting is a fair indication of the mechanisms behind their selection/election in my view.

A diversity of approaches helps resolve problems. I don't think that necessarily means a diversity of EEOC categories.

Forbes' assertion about diversity equating to profitability reminds me of a classic example taught in statistics classes.

Folklore in Germany is that a stork building a nest on your chimney will ensure fertility for your house. In the 1930s a headline trumpeted statistical proof for the folklore. People hosting storks had more babies! Magic was true!

The truth was that people WANTING large families would build nesting platforms on their chimneys. Storks built nests on the platforms because it was easier. I imagine the parents did other things that actually increased their family size. They became a classic example of a self selecting population in statistics classes ever since.

When companies become successful they hire human resources managers who put equal opportunity procedures in place to comply with government regulations. They become a self selecting population.

Almost every day we hear someone say the following; "diversity is our strength" or "diversity is what makes America great". I want someone - anyone who makes remarks like this to support their remarks with discussion about the differences between corelative and causal relationships regarding racial and cultural diversity and to use real and hard data to support whichever side of the question they wish to defend. I want them to point to hard data derived from truly scientific and objective studies that inquire along lines of anthropology, social science, psychology and social psychology that take a very large data set and filter for things like unity vs disharmony in business culture; productivity and profitability vs substandard performance in business culture; progress and innovation in medical and in technological development vs static or non-productive use of time and money in those fields of research and development. I want to know if it is true that the racially/culturally blended workforce or research team is demonstrably more productive, more innovative, more creative than a team that is more or less homogeneous in the makeup of its team members.

I think companies that are more established, spend more time and effort to achieve diversity. Therefore I believe it is their success that drives diversity rather than the other way around. Success is driven by smart people regardless of race or any other Factor.

The problem lies in that most when they hear the word Diversity they think of skin color and gender. Its diversity of thought that drives better results. You can have an all black male business team that drives better results than a mix race/gender business team because their backgrounds and interests are different.

Racial or background diversity can lend itself to more diversity in thought as it is possible that diversity in background/environment to lend itself to a greater variety of ways to think about things.

However, it does not guarantee more diversity in thought or even that the members of a various team will be able to see the same problem in ways that is conducive towards finding a solution.

If your goal was to produce a team that was more "productive" but not necessarily creative, you'd actually be better off having a very monolithic team composition in terms of histories and background as they would be more likely to agree and move forward with ideas that they can similarly relate to.

If you want a more creative team, greater diversity of past experience is the best way to achieve this. Skin color and background and ethnicity, however, are characteristics that are only loosely correlated with diversity in past experience. You'd be better off hiring people from a variety of SES (low through high income childhoods), a diversity of educational interests and/or study, a diversity population densities/cultures (different countries, rural/urban) and otherwise if creativity fostering was your true concern. In other words, diversity of thought is far more important or rather a much more direct way of achieving this.

However, since race may only loosely correlate to different past experiences and diversity thereof, it may be a poor indicator of fostering diversity of thought. Additionally, even with better creativity, having a group that is too culturally diverse may create so much discord within the group at the best way to approach a problem that crucial productivity inefficiencies may outweigh the benefit of potentially greater creativity. This is why if your goal is diversity of thought, you may also want to incentivize group performance above individual performance in your company, in addition to hiring "diversely".

It is even possible, given the nature of your company, that hiring from a particular thought process/school of thought/background, and excluding all others, would actually be beneficial. It depends on the customer base and the nature of the business. This is why companies should have full discretion as to how they discriminate for hiring purposes, and the state should have no investment in it. It can greatly harm productivity and business viability in many circumstances.

Ultimately, it is up to competition between businesses and hiring policies to decide the best approaches in a particular industry. Making it up to the state makes the process arbitrary and capricious, and perhaps even harms minorities by making them much more of a potential suing/legal liability by simply being hired.

If you hire and fire based on education skill and job performance the company will be deverse and better off based on the people interested in the job area. Not hiring on diversity alone

A new video from Studio Brule' (one of my favorite You tube channels) about this very topic. In this 13 minute video you will see and hear the best possible argument against hiring and promoting based upon anything other than competence and merit.

I am a paralegal. Diversity isn't something that happens in the legal field. You have the Orcas (judges), the sharks (attorneys), and the small fishes (paralegals and legal assistants).

Purely identity diversity is goofy and brings limited good to the table. At best it does bring a varied cultural perspective. Now I do believe diversity of talents, experiences, personality types, perspectives can enhance the overall team. If anything, if you have a room of Type A personalities, they'll kill each other eventually.

Hire on dersesity see what it gets you.

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