So you wanna be a Chief Diversity Officer
Get the bag and whatnot.
So you wanna be a Chief Diversity Officer.
Whatever your reasons might be - money, diversity, equity, inclusion - it’s not the worst day hustle to have these days.
I mean, how could you fail at being a Chief Diversity Officer at WMI, anyway?
And even if you did fail, it wouldn’t be your fault. You could always argue that the existing power structures were racist and they prevented you from from doing the job you wanted to; it’s the best of both worlds. Plus, who’s gonna give a negative performance review to the CHIEF DIVERSITY OFFICER. A racist, that’s who.
Morality aside, let’s say you were just in it for the money. Might there be a way to generate cash flow as a Chief Diversity Officer?
Let’s take a step back.
Talk to a women executive in her fifties and she’ll tell you about the time she was a token hire. About a time when she got the offer, got the clothes, got the office, everything except for the authority to enact change. She’ll tell you that the only change they wanted to see was on the Team Page on the website.
The truth of the matter is that companies are trying to do two things when they’re hiring a Chief Diversity Officer:
Placate their existing customer base while
Minimizing impact to cash flow.
From management’s view, Diversity is a societal pressure being forced upon them. So while they’ll placate their existing customer base by hiring a Chief Diversity Officer, they’ll do it in a way that minimizes the impact to cash flow.
Furthermore, the internal cash flow systems of the company and their grandfathers will view any change initiatives as a threat to the way they're compensated. Don't expect smiles.
President, Strongman, Dictator; any one leader can be branded with any one of these labels.
-(Bertrand Russell)
Your opponents believe that your diversity initiatives and piversity initiatives; they believe you want to pervert their company’s operation. People forget that religion and race exist before the meeting begins.
Forget diversity; your job is to generate profits by leveraging sound diversity principles from evolutionary ecology.
Below is a map of Diversity as a concept that can either positively or negatively affect cash flow.
If I was applying for a Chief Diversity Officer role, this is what my cover letter would be.
The Ecology of Cash Flow
All acts of creation are generated by the sudden bisociation of previously unrelated matrices of experience. - Koestler
TL;DR A diverse group of shape rotators will combine their shapes into cash flow.
Rock ‘n Roll changed the world. Chuck Berry invented Rock ‘n Roll. Gospel singers backed everyone from Springsteen to the Stones.
Why am I telling you this?
Steve Jobs quit school in California, climbed the Himalayas, had a great time, and then came back to start the most influential company of the modern age. In fact, he created a company that crushed the competition on the basis of User Experience, not just technical leadership.
Steve learned something on his trek up the mountains. For everyone else that couldn’t make it to India, in the 60s, India came to them. Many of the sages from the East came to California and shaped the minds that shape the world as we know it today.
But again, why am I telling you this?
What if your company could experience that same renaissance without cannibalizing sales.
Professor McKinnon from the University of Toronto argued 20 years ago that society’s creations emerged from the margins of society. Today, people use the term NPCs aka Non-Playable Characters to denote cultural or ideological automatons, actors who are treating the world as a stage and playing woke Hamlet and Juliet.
Arthur Koestler argued that all acts of creation are generated by the sudden bisociation of previously unrelated matrices of experience. If you accept the idea that category theory leverages the idea that disparate domains nonetheless feature common node-edge relationships, then the only thing stopping you from innovating are the cultural automatons in your organization that can’t see the change because they aren’t the change. By introducing those human beings with knowledge of homomorphic domains, invention will ensue unfettered. Heck, if the data is sound, you can reinvigorate your cultural automatons by introducing the right homomorphically-domained individuals.
Don’t think diversity; think homomorphically-profitable.
I get it - profit vs placate. We can have that conversation.
Let’s just not bullshit each other - because that costs extra.
Appendix
Your employees don't innovate because their thinking processes have been calcified.
When employers talk about diversity, they usually talk about diversity of race, culture and gender...
...but they rarely talk about academic diversity.