Ethics | -"Diversity in the workplace"

Santiago Iñiguez, Dean of Instituto de Empresa.

Diversity is the flipside of globalisation. While globalisation entails the formation of a common knowledge and the development of cosmopolitan patterns and attitudes, it also enhances in parallel, differences and domestic identities across the board. Today, business leaders need to know how to understand and manage diversity to maximise human potential in their organisations. Diversity is sometimes understood as the embracing of some sort of moral relativism, i.e., the acceptance of all practices of any culture based on the grounds that they are supposedly rooted in the traditions of a given community. There is nothing more incongruent. Tolerance is compatible with fighting those practices that attack basic precepts of co-existance and human rights. 

Yesterday I had the opportunity to discuss these issues on the occasion of the launch of "The Management of Diversity in a Global Organisation" (FT Prentice Hall), a book written by professors Dr. Celia de Anca and Antonio Vázquez.  This event was also attended by Ms. Amparo Moraleda, CEO of  IBM (Spain, Portugal, Greece, Israel  and Turkey), one of the most preeminent women executives in Europe and a frequent speaker on diversity issues in business.

The book aims at a profound reflection on how companies keep growing by developing their diverse human capital. This is not exempt from great complexity given that the management of diversity necessitates a willingness to discern complementarities in the manner of thinking and acting, which are radically different.

Ms. Moraleda spoke of the importance of living on a day to day basis with diversity something that is lived rather than the act of playing lip service to an intellectual and abstract ideal. Following the theme of diversity she reiterated the announcement of IBM of about two weeks ago, that the company will never use genetic information as a basis for hiring someone. "The policy is believed to be the first made by a major corporation".

We still have a long way to go in the understanding and embracing of diversity, certainly, an interesting challenge for business educators.

(Dr. Celia de Anca, Amparo Moraleda (CEO IBM Southern European countries), Santiago Iñiguez)