From Civil Rights to Cultural Diversity
Question: do large organizations value individuality and identity?
Culture, as Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary defines
it, is "The integrated pattern of human behavior
that includes thought, speech, action, and artifacts and
depends on man's capacity for learning and transmitting
knowledge to succeeding generations. . . . The informal
cultural elements of a business [are] "the way we
do things around here." Every business . . . has
a culture. . . . Whether weak or strong, culture
has a powerful influence throughout an organization; it
affects practically everything -- from who gets promoted
and what decisions are made, to how employees dress and
what sports they play. . . . We hope to instill in our
readers a new law of business life: In Culture There is
Strength. -- Terrance E. Deal and Allen A. Kennedy
"Right from the start," said [a former CEO of
Procter & Gamble], "William Procter and James
Gamble realized that the interests of the organization
and its employees were inseparable. That has never
been forgotten." Poorer-performing companies often
have strong cultures, too, but dysfunctional ones.
They are usually focused on internal politics rather than
on the customer, or they focus on "the numbers"
rather than on the product and the people who make and
sell it. The top companies, on the other hand, always
seem to recognize what the companies that set only financial
targets don't know or don't deem important. The
excellent companies seem to understand that every man
seeks meaning (not just the top fifty who are "in
the bonus pool)". -- Thomas J. Peters and Robert
H. Waterman, Jr.
The people who make up the population of the organization
. . . are different from one another. They
are also similar in some respects, and there are no doubt
many lessons to be learned from their experiences, but
it is their differences with which we are . . .
concerned..
Some
of the differences are easy to identify, for they are
visible right on the surface: individuals are male or
female, young or old, white or minority. Other differences
are not so easy to see: education level, lifestyle,
goals and ambitions, sexual orientation, personal values
and belief systems involving loyalty to authority, commitment
to the organization's vision, ways of thinking, and respect
(or fear) for new ideas. Within any one organization,
you might find representatives of several of these groups:
some who are inclined to push against authority, some
who are very cautious with change, some with an entrepreneurial,
'loner' style, some who flourish in a team setting.
And you would probably see women and men of several different
races and ethnic groups: white, black, Asian, Hispanic,
native American. This mix is termed "diversity."
-- R. Roosevelt Thomas, Beyond Race and Gender
Assignments:
COUPLAND,
Shampoo Planet (cont)
Jill NELSON, Voluntary Slavery: My Authentic Negro Experience,
p 3-101.
Jan
18
Diversity and Efficiency
Questions:
Are diversity and efficiency in conflict? How are
they negotiated?
I
was tired of living in an apartment, cutting my own
hair, wearing the same turquoise ultrasuede dress.
I was sick of committing class suicide in the name of
righteousness. I finally took to heart the words
of evangelist Reverend Ike: "The only thing I have
to say about poor people is don't be one of them."
I go to work at the Post not simply for the money,
but for the power. Even though it is the mid Eighties
and I might be ten years too late, I am finally going
to try to "change the system from within."
-- Jill Nelson
Surrounded by the advisers he recruited from Wall Street
investment banks, Clinton essentially adopted a financial-market
strategy for governing, hoping that deficit reduction
would reassure investors and that they would reward
the economy with lower interest rates. His budgets
did make significant progress on reducing the federal
deficit, but he got no credit from the rich folks or
Republicans. They hate him because he raised income
taxes on the top brackets. -- William Greider
Assignments:
Jill
NELSON, Volunteer Slavery: pp. 102-end.
