Diversity as Strategy

Diversity as Strategy: IBM

There are some companies that are more committed to diversity than others. IBM is one of those companies. In 1995, IBM created task forces specifically designed to work with diverse individuals and to help the company relate to different kinds of customers - and to its own workforce. The eight IBM task forces created represented the following constituencies: Native Americans, blacks, women, white men, people with disabilities, Asian, GLBT, and Hispanics (Canas & Sondak, 2011). Each task force was asked to work together and give advice and information to IBM about what the company could do better internally and externally to retain customers and employees.

The task forces were to report back six months later (Canas & Sondak, 2011). Even though they were only required to be active for that six-month time frame, they are still in existence today because they worked so well and they wanted to continue. That speaks to the value of the task forces and the interest the people in them had in making their company better and more significant in the workplace. Diversity as a strategy can work, but there needs to be diverse ways in which that diversity is handled and addressed (Walck, 1995). In other words, because the people in the organization and the customer base are so diverse, the strategies that are used to get them together and working on common problems to find solutions for the company should also be diverse in nature.

The main purpose of the task forces - to better understand the needs of specific groups - branched out into a better understanding of humanity by virtually everyone who works at IBM. The hiring and promotion of minorities and women rose dramatically. In some cases, there was a more than 300% increase in the hiring and promotion of a particular group (Canas & Sondak, 2011). Having the task forces around was something that not everyone could get behind at first. There were skeptics in the ranks at IBM, and they believed that the task forces would not do enough to help the company. Some of them were also concerned about how a group was defined and how many groups could be created before someone stepped on the diversity issue. For example, one person asked about communist groups and whether they would be the next to be created (Canas & Sondak, 2011).

IBM carefully avoided creating groups that had anything to do with religion or politics, because that was not the focus of its inquisition. The company wanted to know, when it came to ethnic groups and minorities, what was needed in order to make people see the company as the right choice for their needs. What made them want to purchase from IBM instead of a competitor? What made them want to work for the company? These were the questions that the task forces worked to answer. When answers came, IBM evaluated those answers and started to make changes (Canas & Sondak, 2011). The company did not take every suggestion from every task force, of course, because that was not the goal of the creation of these groups. Instead, the company focused on the most common trends and the best advice when considering the value of diversity.