Managing diversity

Diversity as we saw in the last publication is how the people are different and how it is important for the proper functioning of the society and in a higher scale, the world.

This diversity must be managed by the people in order to achieve competitive advantages; it is a matter of the managers of an organization (even an enterprise or a country) to use the diversity as a weapon for making better the organization and for developing advantages that means a plus for the process that they develop.

The diversity could be a problem for an organization because it could mean problems of communication and miss understandings between the members, but if this diversity is well managed, it could be an opportunity to learn for the organization and the individuals, and also an advantage for making the things better.

An example of this is when in a company you find people from all over the world. There is an obstacle and is the difficult communication but there is an advantage and is the knowledge brought from all over the world and at the end, the advantage is so significant that is better to try to pass through the obstacle in order to get all the good things of having differences inside the company.

But differences aren´t only when working with people from other countries, also inside a country you can find several differences that could mean an advantage for the people that is willing to mange those and take them to a god way for making the process and the activities better.

By managing the diversity you could find some potential benefits such as:

1. Higher creativity in decision-making

2. Better understanding and serving of customers

3. More satisfied workforce

4. Higher stock prices

5. Lower litigation expenses

6. Higher company performance

(According to the slides presented in class)

Bibliography:

1. Presentation made by the teacher Ms. Cristina Robledo Ardila.

2. http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diversidad_Cultural

3. Diversity as strategy. Mr. David A. Thomas

taken from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qusp7A8u3Mw

Answer

Diversity could be considered as a source of competitive advantages because of all the opportunities it gives for the people that can managed it.

It is a matter of the higher managers to include all the diversity inside the company and create politics for integration that could take the company to a better place in the competence scenario, “The CEO and other top executives must be passionate about and create a culture of inclusion.” (Slater et al. 2008).

IBM is a company that can reflects how the diversity is helpful for a company, they are incorporating all the diversity and creating value from it, the head managers are creating groups in order to take an advantage from the diversity and make the connivance easier inside the company. The CEO “Insisted that the task force [groups of workers which focus on 8 diversity groups] effort create a link between IBM's diversity goals and its business goals - that this would be good business, not good philanthropy.” (Thomas, 2004)

The strategy for adapting all the diversity in the company is really working for IBM, and is one of the sources of the well known success of the company, its head managers are looking for ways of making easier to adapt all the different people into the process of the company and in the sway they are generation value from the diversity.

This kind of strategies are very useful for the nowadays enterprises because of the changes of the world that make the companies be in constant change and accepting differences is a good way of been prepared for the change.

Bibliography:

1. Slater, Stanley F., Weigand, Robert A., Zweilein, Thomas J., 2008. “The business case for commitment to diversity”. Business Horizons 51: 201-209.

2. homas, David A., 2004. “Diversity as Strategy”, Harvard Business Review, September 2004, 98-108.