TOP
50 DIVERSITY
2010
2UNDERSTANDING LOCAL CULTURES
How do you understand “diversity” issues
in countries where you do business?
QUESTION A
Rita Taylor-Nash ENTERPRISE DIVERSITY & INCLUSION SERVICES, DVP, HEALTH CARE SERVICE CORP. (NO. 20 IN THE DIVERSITYINC TOP 50) “Engagement is a key. If you look at the self- awareness that we went hrough here in the United States in discov- ering our own [diversity] issues, it may not be that they fully know their own diversity issues. The whole self-discovery may be a joint effort. It’s not the U.S. model going and ask- ing, but there is some partnership. It’s not always the U.S. interlocutories that have to take the lead. It could be the part of the self-discovery, self-awareness, encouraging them to talk among themselves and take the lead for them- selves about whatever their particular issues may be.” y d l i d k t
Why
They
CARE
Niloufar Molavi CHIEF DIVERSITY OFFICER, PRICEWATERHOUSECOOPERS (NO. 6 IN THE DIVERSITYINC TOP 50) “It goes to the definition of diversity, which from a global perspective is very different. I learned many, many years ago when I was working with a client and the client came to me and said, ‘I hate to do this to you but we’re going to have to fire you from our account in Nigeria.’ I said, ‘We’ve been working with you for 25 years in Nigeria and we kept a very good relationship. What happened? What did we do wrong? How can I fix this?’ He said, ‘You didn’t do anything wrong and there is no way you can fix this.’ He said that the partner who was erving this client was from a different tribe than their tax partners are in Nigeria. We looked around and all of our tax partners were from that same tribe, so we didn’t really have the diversity needed to maintain this client.”
Wilson Dunnington
JCPENNEY
“The difference in what diversity
means sometimes to inter-
national people, they don’t
understand today that we are
talking about diversity. They still
go back to our old baggage of
what we used to define diversity
as. They sometimes struggle
with: ‘Why do you guys have the
right to talk about diversity to us
when you guys have the problem
bigger than we do?’ and that’s
why they say, ‘We don’t have that
problem.’ But they do have it from
an inclusion standpoint. Sometimes
the word ‘diversity’ in itself can be
a block in the sense of how you
look at it. I don’t work there but I
do have a lot of friends that are
international, and when they talk
about diversity, they think that it’s
back in the ’60s and the ’50s in
the sense of the way it came about
in America. That’s not what we’re
talking about today, but if you don’t
get them to where you’re at today,
they don’t see it.”
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110 DiversityInc
