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Jens Heycke's avatar

Thank you for this article. Earlier this year, I analyzed the "landmark" Herrick and McKinsey studies, which allegedly established that diversity made businesses more profitable. The Herrick study alone had over 1800 academic citations.

https://jensheycke.substack.com/p/dei-studies-that-prove-nothing

It was complete garbage: due to an amateur-hour coding error, companies for which sales were unknown were coded as $88,888,888,888! And that was just the beginning. Yet it was widely praised and cited for nearly a decade -- until some more conscientious researchers exposed its flaws.

When researchers believe so strongly in a particular cause and wish for a particular outcome so much, objective studies are elusive.

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Frank Lee's avatar

I have a long corporate career where I have been responsible for overseeing all the projects of the company. My project managers form project teams made up of key resources that are the knowledge experts representing the key functional stakeholders to the change that would take place from the outcomes of the project.

Superficial diversity, the type that is pushed by the left and has been politically weaponized as DEI, part of the toxic and parasitic mind virus of Theory, is not only useless, it is destructive in terms of achieving the best project performance. Because nothing matters more in the makeup of the project team resources than does the individual capabilities of those individuals. The same is true for functional work teams.

Diversity in this case is a strength only when being defined as diversity of roles, but only too if the team selected covers are subject matter domains required. Pursuing goals of diversity of race, gender, sexual orientation, etc., is worthless and disruptive. It is sub-optimizing because it replaces the need to carefully select based on merit.

The whole can be greater than the sum of its parts with respect to collaborative work, but not when the group dynamic is upset with a mismatch of capability levels because of superficial diversity criteria in selecting resources.

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