“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”.
Jesus, Sermon on the Mount, around AD 30
I have always believed and acted in treating others as I wished to be treated. I am beyond proud that my children embrace the Golden Rule as it relates to the various forms of discrimination. As I have aged and traveled around the United States and the world, I have delighted in the creativity and diversity of our species. While I feel blessed to have been born in the United States as a white cis male, we do not have a monopoly on good ideas or greatness. Just ask my wife 😉
As a leader, I became increasingly interested in how do you implement this principle at an organizational level. How do you ensure fairness and inclusion at an organizational level so as to maximize the productivity of your organization over a long period of time?
This has led to several service and leadership engagements in different organizations to explore this question. Here is a concise summary:
- While a faculty member at West Point, I volunteered to join the Diversity Committee which was the highest shared governance organization at that time exploring fairness and inclusion at the United States Military Academy. My friend Kevin Huggins joined at about the same time and together we worked to advance West Point. I served as the committee chair in 1995.
- As a member of ABET, I was asked to serve on the Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Accessibility Advisory Council. We examined these principles as they applied to computer science and related fields.
- As a member of the Advisory Council of the West Point Association of Graduates, I was asked to serve on the Diversity and Inclusion Committee. Not surprisingly, we were examining how to promote representative in the Association of Graduates that reflected all graduates.
- As a member of the technology community in Birmingham, AL, I was asked to join a women’s right’s committee. The focus of the committee was to make sure women in technology have an equal opportunity for promotion.
A couple of vignettes:
- You can tell a lot a community by how it celebrates Martin Luther King Day. Some communities don’t celebrate. For some it is low key. For others, it is the place to be and everyone wants to be there. For West Point and Atlanta, it was the place to be and everyone wanted to be there.
- Back in the 1990s, I had the opportunity to interact with a number of college students in the Northeast. It was a good conversation and enough trust was built that we discussed sexual orientation. My perspective and thinking widened dramatically based on that conversation. Having now worked with, socialized with or associated with people with a plethora of sexual orientations for decades, it has never, ever been an issue.
- In 2015, I because the Vice President for Information Technology and CIO. My team at that time was about 225 employees. I looked at the overall demographics of the organization and we looked really good across most of normal discriminators. I asked for a dashboard of subordinate units and we found one unit of 20 consisting only of white males. No females. No other ethic groups. White male was the unstated but most important criteria in hiring new employees. We fixed that and started hiring the best candidates. The team is lead by a woman, reflective of society, and the team performance has soared.
- In 2022, Eileen and I were in Aarhus, Denmark and happened across a gender museum. I didn’t know there were gender museums. The image below highlights the diversity of gender.
