COMPANIES FOR
DIVERSITY
WHY YOU NEED
DIVERSITY
TO BE
COMPETITIVE
Case Studies From The 2007 DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for Diversity®
BY JENNIFER MILLMAN ILLUSTRATION BY EDDIE GUY
KeyCorp President,
Chairman and CEO Henry
Meyer III remembers sitting in
his Harvard Business School
classroom in the late 1970s,
eagerly waiting for his professor to invite him to share
his solution to a case the
class had been assigned.
Meyer was sure he had the most viable
response. Then several of his classmates began
presenting. By the time it was Meyer’s turn, he
was considerably less optimistic.
“At one point in that one-hour period, I
actually remember thinking, ‘Did they read
the same case I did?’ because they focused on
different words, different solutions,” says
Meyer, an econometrics major. An Air Force
retiree said, “Squash the competition.” An
orchestra member wanted to “grow the pie.”
A marketing major talked about strategy, and
Meyer, of course, had the cash-flow answer.
“It was an awakening,” says Meyer, whose
company’s subsidiary, KeyBank, is No. 31 in
The 2007 DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for
Diversity. “I never would’ve come up with the
answers they did, not just because of gender or
racial diversity, but also business and geographic
diversity. In the end, the class came up with a
little bit of this and a little bit of that, but we’d
never have the ‘this’ or the ‘that’ unless we had
tremendous diversity of opinion.”
Put simply, diversity leads to better decisions. “There is no answer to most issues,” says
Meyer, but there are a number of appropriate
solutions. To design the most effective solutions with the greatest impact requires a comprehensive understanding of the population
for which they are intended. And that population is changing.
