A Better, More Diverse Senior Executive Service in 2050

Forbes Insights in 2011 conducted a comprehensive survey of more than 300senior executives from geographically diverse companies that had revenues ofat least $500 million and went up to more than $20 billion. Their findings wereinstructive: 85 percent of executives agreed (48 percent strongly and 37 somewhatagreed) that a “diverse and inclusive workforce brings the different perspectivesthat a company needs to power its innovation strategy.” The larger the company,the more likely executives agreed: Of those companies with $10 billion or more inannual revenues, 56 percent strongly agreed diversity drives innovation. 15Similarly, a 2006 study published in American Sociological Review by scholarsAlexandra Kalev, Frank Dobbin, and Erin Kelly looked at more than 700 privatesectororganizations from 1971–2002. The study found that establishing responsibilityfor diversity through “structures that embed accountability, authority, andexpertise … are the most effective means of increasing the proportions of whitewomen, black women, and black men in private sector management.” 16Then there’s the work done by Scott E. Page, the Leonid Hurwicz CollegiateProfessor of Complex Systems, Political Science, and Economics at the Universityof Michigan, director of the Center for the Study of Complex Systems, and a contributorto Center for American Progress’ Science Progress. Page researches theimpact of diversity on systems and performance. He characterizes diversity as the“differences in how people see, categorize, understand and go about improving theworld.” 17 His focus is cognitive diversity but he believes “there’s certainly a lot ofevidence that people’s identity groups—ethnic, racial, sexual, age—matter when itcomes to diversity in thinking.” 18These cognitive differences, he says, help organizational performance becausepeople from different backgrounds have different “tools” or “varying ways of lookingat problems.” 19 Page argues that “the sum of these tools is far more powerfulin organizations with diversity than in ones where everyone has gone to the sameschools, been trained in the same mold and thinks in almost identical ways.” 20A 2005 report by the Government Accountability Office similarly found that“diversity management makes good business sense that enhances productivity andinnovation.” 21 The report found that a range of government and academic studiesdemonstrates that diversity can “contribute to the achievement of improvedindividual and organizational performance.” 2215 Center for American Progress | A Better, More Diverse Senior Executive Service in 2050