IBM's strategic approach to diversity | Technological buzz

Outgoing IBM CEO Ginni Rometty gave a compelling talk to IBM Think last week on how the company is strategically striving to foster diversity. I only know of another company, Cisco, that takes a truly holistic and strategic view of the problem, which translates into a large positive impact.

The reason I can only name two companies is that most take a tactical approach. The government has also acted tactically with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, so there has been no lasting progress.

I was thinking about this when a great example of tactical vs non-tactical thinking appeared on the news. strategically. The Lincoln Project, a Republican-backed effort to vote for the President, released an announcement called
"Mourning in America", and at first a few thousand people saw it. Then the president saw it and reacted with
a rant on Twitter.

What happened next proved
Streisand effect and the problem of tactical thinking, which
made the video viral.

This is a clear example of the inherent danger of tactical vs strategic thinking, which in this case has led the President to promote an effort to withdraw it. However, the difference is not always measured in negative effects. In the context of IBM's diversity effort, strategic thinking has resulted in a remarkable positive outcome.

I will share my thoughts on the efforts of the company and finish with my product of the week: the Microsoft Surface Book 3, or the exact antithesis of the Apple iPad Pro.

Tactical or strategic thinking

A few decades ago, I was interviewing for a job I hadn't obtained, and the hiring manager, I'm sure he thought he was brilliant, started to ask me about strategic thinking. It was especially important for the company. What fascinated me, aside from the fact that the guy was violent like hell, was that even though he tried to present himself as an expert strategist, he couldn't probably not spell the word.

Strategic thinking is the only skill that can define an analyst. If you know chess, or better yet, the board game Go, which is very popular in Asia, it is easier to understand what it means to think strategically. With chess and go, you have to look to the future and develop multiple responses for each expected result.

A tactical thinker is a counterpuncher. Tactical thinkers tend to be reactive, but they often hurt themselves because they don't think about the consequences of what they plan to do.

The President against The Lincoln Project

The president is fast and is known to be a powerful cutter, but he does not think strategically. He saw the ad, which was explicitly positioned for him to see and get angry. When he attacked the ad, his visibility increased massively. The announcement is well done and shows what is probably the strongest argument to convince viewers to vote for their opponent.

The president's goal was to discredit the ad by personally attacking the creators. Instead, more people have seen it and may have concluded that it was doing the wrong job. The creators of the ad don't run for election, so attacking them personally doesn't seem to do anything to discredit the ad. In contrast, the president's tweets allowed more people to see him.

A better approach would have been to seek the credibility of the ad, given that
PolitiFact has qualified one of its main allegations as false. Tactical thinkers tend to lack depth to respond well to such problems, as many former politicians have shown.

Another example of tactical thinking in the media last week was
5 year old boy who tried to go to California to buy a car. Children usually cannot think strategically, otherwise the child would have realized that he probably would not get Lamborghini, but would find it difficult to sit for about a week. (Even if I have to admit, the effort has been impressive.)

Not thinking strategically can have negative consequences that are exactly the opposite of its goal.

Strategic thinking and diversity

Diversity is a complex problem. It starts in primary school when girls are withdrawn from STEM courses and when minorities receive poor education. The result is a small recruitment pool for women and minorities, which makes it difficult to achieve diversity, particularly in technological fields.

The tactical approach, which the EEOC has done, has been to set quotas and force diversity without addressing the problem of education. A push to fill the quotas despite a lack of adequate training led people to get jobs for which they were not qualified, reinforcing the mistaken belief that the groups they represented could not do these jobs well. jobs.

It also meant that women and minorities viewed their peers as rivals, not as siblings fighting alongside them. Rather than breaking the glass ceiling, the EEOC approach tended to strengthen it. In addition, the wage gap has worsened by justifying the wage gap. Under these conditions, women and minorities are often less successful not because of their gender or race, but because they are poorly trained and counseled.

You could say that the #MeToo movement made the situation worse. Some executives are now afraid to eat lunch or guide women effectively because of fears of facing an unfounded sexual harassment complaint that could end their careers.

In a climate which demands women who are still believers and who does not respect the guarantees of due process, the right thing to do is to avoid women, which goes against the problem of the diversity. What happened to Brett Kavanaugh was wrong. What happens to Joe Biden is now wrong.

Neither case will be confirmed by a court, however, people are ready to believe that the two men are guilty, not only before a trial, but instead of a trial. While you can actually harm someone with this approach, it also destroys confidence in the system, which tends to make things worse for the group you are trying to protect. It is now probably much more difficult for a woman to get a job with a politician.

The best approach from IBM

What Ginni Rometty was talking about is that instead of imposing quotas, IBM has focused on providing free STEM education and training advanced to those who needed it. For many technical jobs, titles are not required. You need skills and if you can help women and minorities acquire these skills, the pool of potentially qualified candidates increases.

You can then choose on merit instead of tactically trading skills against the candidate's gender or race.

IBM's programs are P-Tech (Elementary STEM) and Open P-Tech (Advanced Skills), and it may be worth checking out something to do with children at home.

With qualified recruiting, a business performs better and the dominant workforce begins to see that women and minorities can perform well, building confidence in the process and enhancing the value of the goal of diversity.

Of course, this takes longer and certainly requires more resources. However, it is a much better solution than forced adjustment which has led many ill-trained employees to occupy space and prevent the advancement of minority pairs who could compete for their unique position.

In conclusion: learn to think strategically

I once had a meeting with one of the top executives of what was then the most powerful company in the segment. He had just received a devastating judgment from a major regulator, and the executive's plan was to annoy anyone who tried to profit from the decision.

I simply asked him what he thought the regulatory agency would do then. I hadn't thought of it until then. He reconsidered his answer, and the company ultimately turned this downside into one of its biggest advantages.

The easiest way is to practice asking, "And then what?" If you do what you plan, how will people react, and what do you do next? You can
consider this example. The defendant did not like the judge's opinion and said it, converting a bond of $ 5,000 into a bond of $ 10,000 plus 30 days in prison, all because ; she did not first ask "and then?" And I discovered the hard way that the answer to this unspoken question can bite your butt.

The Surface line was created to counter what Apple saw as a massive threat to replace PCs with iPads. It was not the first time that a defense strategy had produced a decent product. The Xbox was created because Microsoft thought the PlayStation was on a similar PC replacement path.

The Zune and Microsoft phones had similar origin stories with much less successful results. The difference between success and failure was generally the quality of execution and the level of funding compared to the funding requirement. The Xbox and Surface worked well and are adequately funded, unlike the Zune and Microsoft phones.

The original Surface, like the Zune and Microsoft phones, was a redesign of the tablet. Still, it was a decent product that was wrapped in important marketing, and it struck before the iPad became dominant, greatly reducing the need for funding.

Over time, the lines have evolved,
Surface go 2 It looks more like an iPad with its recent update, and the Surface Book becomes the most different. I'm focusing on the best 15 inch line
Surface Book 3 because that's all that the iPad Pro is not.

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This product has been my favorite in the Surface range because in its 15 inch form it has powerful Nvidia graphics, one of the most powerful processors from Intel, the most iconic design in the range , the longest battery life and playability.

It's not cheap, and it doesn't support 5G, but I haven't seen anything done to that yet, so it's not a deciding factor yet. It has a single removable tablet with an estimated autonomy of four hours, which is low. However, in its complete configuration, it has an estimated autonomy of 17 hours, which is much more respectable.

The ideal customer for this product is someone who needs a lot of performance in the field, needs the removable shelf to display the work or avoid having to carry a separate tablet and wants a platform form of mobile game.

I have found the tablet functionality most useful when I want to share something I am looking at and do not want to lift and move the whole laptop; I can only charge or slide the tablet.

While I still think Surface Notebook is the product that best suits the way most of us work, Surface Book is the most innovative and spectacular entry in the Surface line, and now in its third version is my product of the week.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ECT News Network.

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Rob Enderle He has been a columnist for ECT News Network since 2003. His areas of interest include AI, autonomous driving, drones, personal technology, emerging technologies, regulation, litigation, M&E and technology in politics. He holds an MBA in human resources, marketing and IT. He is also a certified management accountant. Enderle is currently President and Senior Analyst of the
Enderle Group , a consulting company serving the technology industry. He was previously a senior researcher at the Giga Information Group and Forrester.
Email Rob.