LEADERSHIP AND DIVERSITY
For our society to move towards a more inclusive consciousness, diversity must be explored through thought and perspective, not by race or gender.
Diversity Of Thought | Vidya Spandana
Diversity means a lot of different things
The US can only function as a healthy democracy if we find a way to diversify our social connections, if we find a way to weave together a strong social fabric that bridges ties across difference. Right now, we are moving in the opposite direction with serious consequences.
China has invested huge amounts in physical infrastructure, but neglected its human capital ... The Chinese figures (on high school performance) are not for the whole country, but only for the better schools in the richer cities.
Don't just focus on China. Reflect on the situation in schooling in both North Carolina and in the USA as well.
Being around people who are different from us makes us more creative, more diligent and harder-working.
You don't have to read these unless you wish to, but we might touch upon them in conversation
... the majority of research has been undertaken using one of three general theoretical frameworks: similarity/attraction, social categorization, or information/decision making. These approaches have been characterized by different assumptions about the role and effect of diversity and the modal way to conduct the research. Researchers in the three traditions either implicitly or explicitly accept a model that argues that group or organizational diversity can affect group processes such as social integration, communication, and conflict. Group functioning is then presumed to affect group outputs, including performance and the ability of the group to function effectively in the future ...
Given the convincing evidence that diversity can have both positive and negative effects on group functioning and performance, at least three major unanswered questions emerge. First, we need to understand in more detail how different types of diversity affect group process and performance ... A second important question concerns the nature of the conflict generated by diversity ... A third important gap in our understanding of diversity concerns how successful groups are able to leverage diversity.
What's equally tough, of course, is getting talented people to work effectively with one another. That takes trust and respect, which we as managers can't mandate; they must be earned over time. What we can do is construct an environment that nurtures trusting and respectful relationships and unleashes everyone's creativity. If we get that right, the result is a vibrant community where talented people are loyal to one another and their collective work ...
Received wisdom is that the more diverse the teams in terms of age, ethnicity, and gender, the more creative and productive they are likely to be. But having run the execution exercise around the world more than 100 times over the last 12 years, we have found no correlation between this type of diversity and performance ... (however their reseach shows) a significant correlation between high cognitive diversity and high performance ...
things we'll talk about
something to take away
Compay Segundo live at L'Olympia in Paris, France, 1999
One of my last songs was "Chan Chan," which I wrote in 1987. I played it for the first time at a club called Cristino. It's a number that has four notes, and four chords. There's very few numbers that you can sing the whole song with four notes. I've been to Santa Clara-Las Villas province and everybody up there knows it; I've been to Santiago de Cuba y and everybody there knows it too. I go by a school and when a kid sees me, he says, "Look, it's Compay Segundo," and starts singing, "I'm going from Alto Cedro to Marcané then from Cueto, I'm going to Mayarí."