DiversityInc - November/December 2008

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CEO Leadership CEO Does the Following:

and moral thing to do rather than because it makes business sense.

100%

86% 86%

84%

80% 74%

60%

39%

40%

30% 30%

20%

0%

Signs off on Signs off on Meets Has personal management goals and regularly quote about compensation achievements with diversity on to diversity for supplier ERGs the web site

diversity

versations with either of them, I find myself challenged because of the backgrounds and experiences they’ve had. It’s really good to talk to them about strategy and plans and know that they instantaneously get it.

32.5%

Michelle Gadsden-Williams of Novartis: A fear that I have is that diversity will be diluted and that people will see it as one “nice-to-have” initiative and they won’t see it as a separate entity.

DiversityInc Top 50

Bottom Quarter of 352

DiversityInc Top 50

Participants

GOLD-STAR ANSWER

Paschall: We recently had our global business chairs in with our top 200 leadership, and Mr. Bill Marriott said it’s one word: culture. He talked about his parents founding the company and the belief system that if you take care of your employees, they’ll take care of your customers.

Hamilton: Michael Ward is our CEO and he lives it. He has just in the last few years given $3 million of his own personal money to a shelter for battered women and children. He has given $1 million to the oldest historically Black college in Florida, Edward Waters College, and he gives $100,000 through the company and $1 million of his own wealth to wounded soldiers through the Wounded Warriors Project because we want to have a program to rehabilitate and employ injured troops.

Robert Crumpton of Monsanto Co.: We’re at a place where we’re past the business case for diversity and inclusion. If you go back to that route, it may look like compliance or something you do because “It’s the right thing to do.” When you think about our global economy and how food touches different parts of the world, that’s a pretty key area, but so is diversity talent and its need to be integrated. I don’t think that diversity needs to reside under social accountability.

Nolan: I’m lock-step with our CEO so that we are sharing the same vision, and I continue to bring him food from the street so that he has a sense of what’s going on.

Bucherati: Neville Isdell and Muhtar Kent, our incoming CEO, are global citizens. They’ve lived and worked all over the world; they get it as part of the DNA—that makes things very easy for us at Coca-Cola because we’re never selling anything to our senior leadership, because they get it. When I go to have con-

Hughes: Our board holds our CEO accountable for very specific metrics, and those metrics are then cascaded down to our partners or senior executives in our business, and then that’s cascaded down to our senior managers and then to our managers.

Michelle Gadsden-Williams:

The question is how we keep this

Allen Thomas of Deloitte LLP: We need to have clarity. There are different things behind corporate social responsibility than just diversity. With diversity, the case work is clear and we need to continue to push. What we do in our company is try to understand where those things are intermingled and make sure that the leaders of those two particular areas talk. We don’t say that everything should be under the same kind of bucket—you have to appeal to different people in different ways, and the more that you get one answer, the more that one of those things is going to be lost.