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Pastimes : My House -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lazarus_Long who wrote (6968)	4/16/2003 1:52:06 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 7689

I am persuaded by my personal experience. When I first broke into management, I had a staff of computer programmers. Not much diversity there. Everyone thought alike. That's good in some ways because it's more efficient if everyone is automatically on the same page. But it reduces the capacity of the group to deal with novel problems, or to deal with old problems in a novel way. Later, when I was a management consultant, my group went off on a retreat and did the ubiquitous Myers Briggs temperament typing. Fully half the group were INTJ, like me. In the overall population, INTJs are one percent. We were more effective later when we "took affirmative action" to round out the group. I'm persuaded that any team is more effective if you have a mix of people with different skill sets and different perspectives. If your extended family is all lawyers, who is there on the team to give comfort to the ill or to fix the plumbing? If you live in a retirement community and have no contact with young people, you lose a lot of creativity. There's no one to program the VCR. If I were stranded on a desert island after a shipwreck, I sure hope it would be with a variety of people. Of course there are situations where efficiency is crucial so homogeneity is an advantage. In general application, though, diversity in organizations provides more options for success. There is strength in diversity, in my experience...