You can teach someone with basic smarts to be smarter; you can't teach cultural fit or personality. But you also want someone who has a passion to win; someone that is all in.
Mellody HobsonRead
Diverse perspectives lead to a better outcome. There's so much data, when you look at the math, in terms of the investor returns and the shareholder value that gets created from more diverse boards.
Interpretation
Embracing diversity enhances decision-making and financial performance.
This quote emphasizes the importance of diverse perspectives in leadership, particularly within corporate boards. Mellody Hobson argues that when boards include a variety of voices, it leads to improved outcomes in terms of investor returns and shareholder value, highlighting that diversity is not just a moral choice but a strategic advantage in business.
In practice
In a corporate meeting discussing strategic initiatives, one might say, 'As Mellody Hobson suggests, diverse perspectives lead to a better outcome, so we should include voices from different departments.'
You can teach someone with basic smarts to be smarter; you can't teach cultural fit or personality. But you also want someone who has a passion to win; someone that is all in.
Observe your environment. Invite people into your life that don't look like you or think like you
Black women have a kind of advantage over white women in the workplace. They go in prepared to face some discrimination, so when it happens, they aren't shocked.
I can't tell you how many resumes we get from business schools across the country from black women and black men and Hispanic women, men, etcetera, who say I'm interested in working for your company because they can see someone at the top who looks like them.
The way I go about it is that we should all be inviting people into our lives who don't look like us, speak like us and don't come from where we come from.
Now, race is one of those topics in America that makes people extraordinarily uncomfortable. You bring it up at a dinner party or in a workplace environment, it is literally the conversational equivalent of touching the third rail.
Although most executives pay lip service to the idea of hiring for cultural fit, few have the courage or discipline to make it the primary criteria for bringing someone into the company.
Stand for people. Not a product or service or metric or number. If we stand for real, living, breathing people, we will change the world.
Most managers were trained to be the thing they most despise - bureaucrats.
A manager is responsible for the application and performance of knowledge.
The most important measure of how good a game I played was how much better I’d made my teammates play.
Being a woman in control of a company - even a small private company, as ours was then - was so singular and surprising in those days that I necessarily stood out. In 1963, and for the first several years of my working life, my situation was certainly unique.
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