Diversity and inclusion

For a serious article on the importance of actual diversity, as opposed to the professional-managerial class’ performative virtue signalling about it, see “diversity”.

The Human Resources military-industrial complex →Go uptown You’ve all got the same trousers. The instrument (the “telescreen”, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely. Index: Click ᐅ to expand: HR Tell me more Sign up for our newsletter — or just get in touch: for ½ a weekly 🍺 you get to consult JC. Ask about it here.

There is surely an ever-present, crushing irony in the fact that the most monotonous, robotic, cliché-laden, straight-out-of-central-casting, phoned-in, ditch-water dull patter in all of the modern business discourse — and stone the crows, that’s quite some bar to overcome — is uttered in the name of diversity and inclusion.

Actual diversity in an organisation’s workforce is vital for risk and opportunity management in the complex environments that any self-respecting organisation should be looking to stick itself in the middle of.

Oddly, current management dogma, while long on platitudes curated from the random word generators in the D&I inspectorate — see above— seems hell bent on identifying and systematically rooting out actual diversity, through devices like the law firm panel — get legal advice if you must, but only from this mandated set of firms, all of whom provide more or less identical service from carefully filtered Russell group graduates, who also populate your legal department; the playbook — welcome, young proverbial school-leaver from Bucharest (D&I kerching!): Now, follow these simple instructions and for God's sake don’t improvise or bring any of your own idiosyncratic perspectives to bear on the issue; and most galling off all, the AI reg tech solution — a.k.a. the algorithm, which must be the dictionary definition of homogenous, Having not even a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant cultural framework, as spiritually bankrupt as that may be, to bring to bear on your confidentiality agreement but no cultural framework at all.

Diversity — real diversity — is not a box to be ticked. It may be the difference between survival and extinction when that existential crisis arrives unbidden. Best not leave it, therefore, to well-meaning virtue signallers in HR.

See also

• (Actual) diversity
• Diversity paradox
• Middle management
• Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
• Parkinson’s law