Having spent over 15 years in corporate world, I see lots of chat about diversity and CSR, but this has largely been, and remains corporate political correctness and PR which makes companies look good in the corporate world (corporate back slapping).
The reality is that birds of a feather flock together, and firms hire people who will ‘fit in’. This should come of no surprise to anyone who has seen the hiring and firing of colleagues in any business. We talk about diversity, but the reality is that it doesn’t exist, and it doesn’t exist because it doesn’t work. If you have grown up and been educated and conditioned in a way that you would fit comfortably in to the corporate culture of consultancy (obedience over creativity, meekness over rambunctiousness, diplomacy over telling the truth), you will get hired and you can make a career of it. This isn’t discrimination, it is called business culture. The same goes for basketball teams, movie productions, medical hospitals, you name it. It matters little whether you are black, mixed race, or Asian. Hiring a black employee because he is fit for the job and will fit in in just good sense. Companies shouldn’t be berated for acting in their own interests.
What some mean by diversity is forcing firms (at great cost) to hire the wrong kind of people just because they have different colour skin, to show that they’re not discriminating against different people. This is pure folly. Barack Obama became the first black president of America, but he behaved and spoke like a president, hence his election. Had he been deeply involved with black rap culture, banging on about slavery and the downtrodden black community, a 21st Century Martin Luther King if you will, can you imagine him being elected president? In this sense his culture is what matters and the colour of his skin irrelevant to him, and therefore irrelevant to the rest of us. In your article you point this very fact out. You went travelling to try to fit in to your work culture, to be more like the others. You know how it works, and took steps to be what you wanted to be.
There may be some prejudice around what you may have done in your life: not travelling around South America for example. All these recruiters are doing is looking for cultural signals that they have found the right kind of guy or girl. If the business doesn’t hire you because you have a West African forename, even though you’re prefect for the job, they are clearly not the kind of business you want be working for. Let them be, and let the more open minded ones benefit from your (slight) difference to your colleagues.
Think of business like an orchestra. All players must have the same basic training for the result to be sonorous. You need harmony and timing. Without which you’re all wasting your time. The modern demands of diversity in this example are to bring in someone with little musical training whatsoever, over those much more suited to the role, just because they come from an ethnic minority, or because society believes there should be more one-armed clarinet players in orchestras, that this is the right thing to do. The strange thing is, nobody knows why this is the right thing to do. Nobody questions it, because it is not PC to do so.
Another more brutal example is that of allowing concepts of Radical Islam (wahhabism) from a country like Saudi Arabia to be heard and to flourish in the UK. This problem is overlooked or ignored by the Islamic communities, and the result is a bloody culture clash. If we allow the pandering to political correctness, heel to radical islam and allow failures within islamic communities – e.g. Not acting in line with British culture by failing to report those in their communities who they know mean to cause us harm – it will go on to threaten our very culture, and bring our business, UK plc to the point of bankruptcy. All in the name of diversity. Diversity doesn’t look so good now, does it?
In my opinion diversity is compete nonsense, it doesn’t work, and this is why companies don’t do it. I applaud business for its common sense, and I will continue to point out the dangerous folly that is political correctness wherever I see it.
