Diversity

Diversity in the Ecological Soup
Originally uploaded by jurvetson

So I came back "home" quite content from the last hour of the diversity lecture we had today for the whole day. Content yes, because I think the presenter did quite a good job, but with a strange feeling about the whole thing.
She did point out one or two things which I thought were worth remembering.

1. Novartis calls its diversity program "respect".
2. After all, it should be common sense.
3. If you want a company to have flexible times, the first ones to adopt that should be the top leaders. Role modelling. (a bit unrelated with the above, but still interesting)

I like the first one. Because that is the conclusion to which I have come long ago. Managing diversity is not a big problem for me, I humbly believe. The main reasons are probably my family and the country I come from, Brazil.
The second one is actually why the first one is good.

In the afternoon I was not able to see the first 2 hours of class because of a meeting with the cliente where the client never showed up, but the hour I was there I had a better opportunity to debate a bit more with the speaker, as only one third of the class remained. And I came back home content.

But then I saw that the feed to Chris' blog had been updated, and there he rants about how useless this session has been. And he reminds me of the even more useless session by the French guy before, which I had deleted from my memory. And now I am not that content anymore, Chris does have good points.

Maybe they have allocated too much time on this. Maybe we take this for granted. The class is so diverse, that, if we were not able to cope with diversity, we wouldn't have survived the midterm exams. But maybe the insistence in this subject is just that: insistence. To remind us that there are many places and organizations where rights which are taken for granted in the Western-Anglo-American-European part of the world simply don't exist. And when you are faced in this situation, what will you do? I guess they have just been provoking us, Chris.