Incentivizing Understanding of Customer Needs

One of the issues with diversity & inclusion discussions, is that it can often create cognitive dissonance.

One example of cognitive dissonance played out during the 1990's, at a time when I had taken to reading Parade magazine from the Sunday paper. The Time Everyone “Corrected” the World’s Smartest Woman. Marilyn Vos Savant posts the published material here: Game Show Problem .

To me, the thousands of letters Ms. Vos Savant received are an early prelude to the Internet dog-piling culture we see today. Some of the letters seem as if they could have come straight from Derailing for Dummies.

In Long Fuse, Big Bang, Haseltine discussed a behavioral conditioning box:

Inclusion and The Goal

For those of you interested in the DecolonizeSTEM discussion, please see Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein's Medium article with her Decolonising Science Reading List.

One of the things I've read these past few months, was Eli Goldratt's The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement. I have read quite a bit about Theory of Constraints over the past two years, but this was my first time reading the classic book that started it off. Some of the principals make sense, for example I am trying to "focus and finish" my reading.

However, some of what Goldratt writes about The Goal, appears to conflict with the data on Diversity & Inclusion.  Specifically:

"productivity is the act of bringing a company closer to its goal. Every action that brings a company closer to its goal is productive. Every action that does not bring a company closer to its goal is not productive." [1]

Diversity & Inclusion discussions in business, are often viewed as "a waste of time," or worse, "unproductive."

Yet the data on Diversity & Inclusion's impact on business shows that it improves performance. I wonder how much of this happened because The Goal was focused on the factory environment and production, and how much of this happened simply as a matter of assumptions.

What do you think? Would you update The Goal to reflect the data? How?

[1]  Goldratt, Eliyahu M.; Jeff Cox (2014-07-01). The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement (Kindle Locations 691-693). North River Press. Kindle Edition.

Capitalism, Misogyny, Business and Negotiation.

On Monday, this Tweet passed by:

It's not a "law of capitalism" that you pay people as little as possible — it's an excuse http://t.co/GovtG5I3t1 pic.twitter.com/kpTXiwHDwt
— Henry Blodget (@hblodget) March 23, 2015

The article it links discussed how "maximize profit" has become the goal of businesses over the past 35 years.

In fact, it reminded me of this Consulting Adult Article, "Misogyny and the Valley," particularly her description of the events at Ruckus: