Diversity Matters

Today at 10am I Tweeted (and posted to Facebook) "Two new Socialtext employees in Palo Alto today - bringing great energy!".

At 11:54 I followed up with "I just realized that one reason why I'm excited by our two new Socialtext employees is that they're both women!"

I immediately received several DMs, Facebook wall comments, emails, and other responses saying things like "yikes that last tweet could be taken out of context (possible HR issue)", or  "Should you really be saying that on Twitter?"

My first reaction was "how could that possibly be misinterpreted?"  But then I realized that there are a lot of people who see my tweets who don't know anything about my personal philosophy and/or could take a short statement out of context.  So I decided this was a good opportunity to put some clarifying context out there.

I grew up on the east coast and was raised pretty much on the Socratic method; as a result I believe that the best ideas should always win, regardless of the source.  From a leadership perspective this requires a set of things to be true:

• The company culture (and the tools and processes that support the environment) need to encourage debate and discourse
• Norms have to support and encourage debate of ideas on their merits, and discourage debate based on personalities or power - "attack the idea, not the person"
• The more diversity of experience, perspective, thinking/analysis methodology, and style of debate, the more likely the "best idea" will truly emerge
• Finally, in order to execute, everyone needs to be able to "disagree and commit"

It's the 3rd point here that's relevant today.  I am a true believer in the power and importance of diversity - not just of gender, ethnicity, age, or some other demographic variable - but of experience, business models, and analysis frameworks.  That said I have always especially appreciated the different approaches that men and women bring to analytic and problem-solving situations, and have always tried to create environments where different approaches yield better thinking and decisions.

In fact when I was going through the final discussions about my joining Socialtext as CEO back in the fall of 2007, I made it clear to the existing board members that I really wanted to recruit a woman to my board.  I was really proud when we elected Julie Hanna Farris to our board of directors in May of 2008 (http://www.socialtext.com/blog/2008/05/welcoming-julie-hanna-farris-o.html) in which I said "

I also wanted to state that I had explictly wanted to add a woman to our board - not for PR reasons - but rather because I believe that diversity benefits decision-making.  I've always believed that it's the best idea that should win, and that the best ideas usually emerge from a diverse range of inputs, models, experiences, and perspectives."

So that's the context and I hope it explains why I never even imagined that I could be misunderstood.  Still, I thank my Twitter and Facebook friends for pointing out that filling in the context helped clarify my intent.

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