Talent Series: The Adversity Advantage

New ways of thinking

Last week, I was asked by a startup founder, “How does a lack of diversity impact how we do business?” This question has wider implications on how we do business generally whether in startups or not. The answers pretty simple, if most of your employees are a single race, middle class and from privileged backgrounds, they know a ton about others from similar backgrounds to them and therefore know how to serve that customer segment well. However they do not possess the experience to understand/ relate to customers from a less privileged background. The more diverse backgrounds = more ideas from different perspectives = more solutions = more awesome services/ products. For example, with the rise of the sharing economy, magic moments for Uber customers are:

• The feeling that you can order a ride at a tap of a button and it arrives in less than 5 mins
• The feeling that you didn’t even have to pay for the ride when you leave (because its all cashless)
• Book a cheap ride around town (e.g. Uber pool in San Francisco for $7 car pool with other commuters) — Eureka!

Minor as it may sound but these features listed above is something people from less privileged backgrounds totally dig whilst those more financially able don’t really care about the price or the feeling but more the convenience. Hence, when Uber (kinda copied Lyft) introduced Uber X and Uber Pool they found product/ market fit and started scaling.

Let’s take the example of Linkedin, Richard Branson, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg along with the founders of Dropbox and Wordpress all dropped out of College. Linkedin would claim there profile is incomplete because College qualifications are missing. This bias in design is based on the UX designers who designed this Gamification feature but didn’t really have a representative sample pool from society to provide a diverse enough range of backgrounds. Therefore this prompt from the Product team is flawed as a result. Cases like these show us the importance of a diversity of thought and hypothesis testing. It would be great to create work environments and places where differences are expected and respected, where the founding teams and investors are as diverse as the employees, and where Diversity is seen as a competitive advantage not simply a quota or topic for discussion.

“Diversity helps open up a narrow view into a collectively broader view of use cases, customer needs and versatile forward thinking”

What’s changed in the last 20 years?

The major change in the last 20 years is the introduction of the internet to the consumer. What this means to be blunt is that the playing field is becoming more level and diversity becomes a true differentiator. 20 years ago if you went to a Redbrick uni, got straight A’s and your father worked at Goldman’s, you were pretty much set up for success in the corporate world, and recruiters at Goldman knew that too. They had a model that worked and that’s what mattered……this model has now been disrupted!

Nowadays, a dude from Tottenham could be the first of his family to go to university, let’s say Brunel, get a 2:1, fill his skills gap through courses on Udemy, Khan Acadmey and learning from Youtube, network and learn about different careers and markets from Eventbrite and Meetup, connect and maintain a network on Linkedin and Twitter, walk into a C-Suite meeting and have specific knowledge on growing audiences online and the advantages of diversity, create a platform through working with developers on Upwork, sell products on Amazon, Etsy and eBay, and essentially show that he is ‘more than his CV!’. Enabling the dude to work for prestigious corporates, startups, VC’s and travel and work in over 30 countries in 5 years which he probably couldn’t have done if he was born just 20 years earlier. The internet has essentially become the new revolution and wider society from education to the public sector are still playing catch up and figuring out the art of the possible.

What is exciting now, are the possibilities of what lies ahead, no longer will we see people have 20 year careers in a single company, how will companies prepare for training and investing in talent who leave within 1–5 years? With the growing interest in startups, how will companies adapt to attract and retain talent? With the rise of entrepreneurship, how many young people will go at it alone and focus on niche freelancing, consulting and small business opportunities themselves? These are all challenges that breed opportunities for us to change the status quo and use this diversity of options as an advantage to create more purposeful stories as recruiters, corporates, startups and individuals.

Let’s not look alike, let’s not think alike, let’s be different and think differently!

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