Posted on 05/18/2009 11:34:31 AM PDT by reaganaut1
Boards composed entirely of white males can damage their businesses by indulging in narrow “groupthink”, says Helen Alexander, who is nominated on Monday as the first female president of the CBI employers’ group.
Ms Alexander, senior adviser to Bain Capital, criticised the slow growth in female appointments to FTSE 100 boards, where women still occupy under 12 per cent of directorships.
In an interview with the Financial Times, she said that while “most sensible companies” were starting to take the issue seriously, “you might just be losing real talent and at an important time”.
Ms Alexander is expected to be elected to succeed Martin Broughton, chairman of British Airways, as the organisation’s president at its annual meeting on June 2 and to serve for two years.
She was chief executive of The Economist Group for 11 years before stepping down last June. She is a non-executive director at Rolls-Royce and Centrica, and chairs their remuneration committees. She previously sat on the boards of Northern Foods and BT.
Ms Alexander said her message applied to all forms of diversity, including race and social background as well as gender.
“We have seen quite a lot of examples recently of what might be termed groupthink. It is clear that teams that have diversity within them don’t result in groupthink. People come at things in a different way and organisations have to take those into account,” she said.
She disagreed with those who argue that the financial crisis could have been averted had more women been running companies – “a very dangerous route”, she said. But, she added: “The tone and range of things that are discussed [on boards] can be improved with a diverse team.”
(Excerpt) Read more at ft.com ...
She used to head the company that publishes the Economist magazine. No wonder that magazine is clueless on "diversity" and immigration.
How about initiating diversity at our universities? The 90% vote for Democrats and their causes must be brought back in line with the open and level society these folks always demand from others.
How about a little "diversity of thought" - throw in a few people who ARE NOT liberals...
Why don’t these silly people concentrate on running a good business? It doesn’t matter if you are a man or woman or green or purple as long as you are a leader.
call me wacky but here’s a crazy notion. how about hiring the most qualified people for the job instead of hiring the one who is not right for the spot based on whether it has boobs or extra pigmentation. wow. what an idea.
Gee, I thought it didn’t matter what people looked like.
Oh yeah, that was the 1960’s. Once “Civil Rights” came about, then all the sudden, it DOES matter.
I get it.
Where would you ever have gotten a darn fool idea like that one?
You from the fifties or something?
;-)
Hmmmm... taking the cue from Sweden/Norway I see - I believe (tho I could be wrong) they had an assinine law passed madating more women in the boardrooms to ensure ‘equality’.
“How about initiating diversity at our universities?”
When you can’t argue for a job on the basis of qualifications, argue for it on diversity. Diversity is the left’s way of getting good jobs for unqualified minorities and women.
Because of course all white males think exactly alike. We are not individuals, we are the Borg!
i must have heard it on a transmission from an alien civilization:)
There's no better example of “groupthink” than amongst these leftwing pinkos.
Go ahead, Alexander, diversify the boardrooms, take down the companies, and feel good about yourself as you take the South Africa model.
Isn't this insulting to women? Men are able to think a certain way, but women can not think like men. Women, at least in terms of business management, are not like men. If your business is successful and run by men, you should be leery of listening to the opinions of women, they are not able to think the way men do.
that certainly explains the refusal to ask for directions:)
Isn't this insulting to women? Men are able to think a certain way, but women can not think like men. Women, at least in terms of business management, are not like men. If your business is successful and run by men, you should be leery of listening to the opinions of women, they are not able to think the way men do.
I understand your point, but you evidently didn’t understand mine.
Our universities have professors that vote as much as 90%, for the Democrat party. Are you going to sit there and tell me that Demcorats are more qualified by 9 to 1, to be university professors?
For a good definition of “groupthink,” please refer to one or more of the following: NYT, Newsweek, Time, US News and World Report, ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS,....wherever you find ill-educated marshmallow degree holders who could do nothing useful were it not for the mainstream media.
“I understand your point, but you evidently didn’t understand mine.”
I was not disagreeing with you but I can see how you might interpret my post to mean that conservatives are unqualified. That is not what I meant. The left is only interested in diversity as a tool to replace “evil white men” with people who aren’t white men. It is simply a tool and an excuse for hiring females and minorities. Have there been any legitimate studies that prove the benefits of “diversity” in the workplace or anywhere else? Has there been any verifiable improvement anywhere that diversity has replaced “non-diversity? Of course not. We are supposed to believe it because they say so. And people did. Funny how evil white men so readily bought into the diversity gambit and let themselves be run out of millions of jobs by less qualified individuals.
We share some of the main views expressed here. I still think that our universities have become leftist cesspools of echoed destructive thought. The question is, how do we move this anti-US monopoly of thought on our University campuses back toward a more balanced situation? And beyond that, how do we crack down on the efforts to undermine and overturn our system of governance?
It seems we have come to the place in our nation, where outright advocacy to destroy our capitalist free enterprise system with it’s inherent freedoms is reasoned, and the recognition of subversion and what it will lead to is not.
We either turn this around, or wave good-bye to our way of life in the sunset.
Let’s see a peer reviewed study that shows the benefits of a diverse (as the left defines it) body of folks, be it in a boardroom, a university, a business, or a neighborhood.
Then we can talk about implementing said “diversity” if it is worth the effort.
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