I feel like the smartest thing for a corporation to do when asked about DEI is just to be like “in this economy, we’re focused on the fundamentals of our business”.
Like it or not, DEI is a huge culture war issue. Unless your customer base is almost exclusively on one side, you’re gonna end up alienating a huge portion of them.
Plus it’s not like you get some huge benefit from pushing DEI anyway. The people who like DEI have mostly realized that 99/100 times when a company says they are doing DEI it’s a cynical ploy. That McKinsey study that was supposed to prove DEI is better for business performance has been largely debunked. ESG funds are in full retreat, with many of them struggling to justify their own existence.
If Tractor Supply respectfully demurred when asked to implement DEI in the first place, I’m sure the outrage would be virtually non-existent. Instead they’re in this bud light situation where they’re at risk of alienating both liberals and conservatives.
This article basically says correlation isn’t causation. It doesn’t mean DEI is bad for business. The article also doesn’t definitively say McKinsey is wrong. Like I said, it’s just saying that you can’t cause profits by forcing diversity (correlation not causation).
The issue is that you can’t change a corporate culture just by making one hire and naming them VP of DEI. Cultural change takes years (and is the subject of a nauseating amount of HBR articles, which illustrates how many companies fail at cultural change).
I feel like the smartest thing for a corporation to do when asked about DEI is just to be like “in this economy, we’re focused on the fundamentals of our business”.
Like it or not, DEI is a huge culture war issue. Unless your customer base is almost exclusively on one side, you’re gonna end up alienating a huge portion of them.
Plus it’s not like you get some huge benefit from pushing DEI anyway. The people who like DEI have mostly realized that 99/100 times when a company says they are doing DEI it’s a cynical ploy. That McKinsey study that was supposed to prove DEI is better for business performance has been largely debunked. ESG funds are in full retreat, with many of them struggling to justify their own existence.
If Tractor Supply respectfully demurred when asked to implement DEI in the first place, I’m sure the outrage would be virtually non-existent. Instead they’re in this bud light situation where they’re at risk of alienating both liberals and conservatives.
Source on McKinsey’s research being debunked?
https://www.wsj.com/finance/investing/diversity-was-supposed-to-make-us-rich-not-so-much-39da6a23
This article basically says correlation isn’t causation. It doesn’t mean DEI is bad for business. The article also doesn’t definitively say McKinsey is wrong. Like I said, it’s just saying that you can’t cause profits by forcing diversity (correlation not causation).
The issue is that you can’t change a corporate culture just by making one hire and naming them VP of DEI. Cultural change takes years (and is the subject of a nauseating amount of HBR articles, which illustrates how many companies fail at cultural change).
Lol why do I ever bother. The only reason people like you ask for sources is so you can nitpick them.