IBM Defines Diversity - Kind of (my title)

Fishing is more fun, says IBM's "dean of diversity," but golf is the game of business — which is why, he explains, Big Blue has installed putting greens at some of its on-site day-care centres.

Little girls should learn to play golf so they will not grow up to be "competitively disadvantaged," Ted Childs, global vice-president of work force diversity at International Business Machines Corp., said during a recent visit to the company's Canadian headquarters.

Their mothers are getting golf lessons, too, as IBM drives its diversity initiative in a range of new directions as part of a sweeping corporate strategy aimed at increasing IBM's appeal in the marketplace.

Right down to the games children play at the day-care centres, Mr. Childs is presiding over a cultural evolution at IBM — a company that was very white, very male and very strait-laced when he joined as an affirmative-action hire in the United States 35 years ago.

He was in Toronto earlier this month to address IBM Canada Ltd.'s women-in-leadership group and the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered group. It's "pride month" and a contingent from IBM will be marching in Toronto's annual gay pride parade at the end of June.

IBM should be a place where people feel comfortable being openly gay and where women and people from minority group backgrounds have equal opportunity for promotion and advancement, said Mr. Childs, who is black. And anyone who has a problem with that need not apply at IBM, he added.

This is driven as much by market realities as it is by a desire to do the right thing, Mr. Childs said in an interview between meetings. IBM's effort to diversify the work force "has moved from being a moral imperative to being a strategic imperative."

IBM does business in 164 countries, it has operations in 73 countries and, even in its home base of the United States, there are now more than 83 million people from visible minority backgrounds. "This is a larger group than the individual country populations of Canada, Spain, France, Argentina, the United Kingdom, Italy, Egypt, South Africa....

"Do we want to do business with those countries? The answer is yes. Do we want to do business with those 83 million? The answer is yes."

Mr. Childs said IBM believes customers are more comfortable doing business with companies that look like them and can relate to their values. The composition of IBM's 300,000-plus global work force is gradually changing, although, he said, it has some distance to go before it fully reflects the population at large.

In the company's U.S. operations last year, out of the total of 19,464 officials and managers, 14,019 were men, 5,445 were women, 1,285 were black, 1,070 were from Asian backgrounds, 586 were Hispanic and 64 were native American. Women now make up almost 30 per cent of the IBM work force worldwide; 33 per cent in Canada.

However, unless more girls pursue careers in the high-tech field, IBM will be hard-pressed to recruit enough women to reduce the gender imbalance, Mr. Childs said. To this end, in partnership with local school boards, IBM now sponsors summer tech camps for girls in Grades 7 and 8 in the hopes of hooking them before they make the decision to drop math and science in high school.

It stays in touch with these girls through "e-mentors" drawn from IBM's senior-level female ranks. The tech camps and the golf lessons for children still in day care are examples, Mr. Childs said, of long-range strategy to address current problems.

Appointed to his current position in 1991, Mr. Childs established a number of task forces in 1995 to advise IBM executives on diversification strategy. There's a task force each for women, Hispanics, blacks, Asians, native Indians, disabled people, men and the gay-lesbian-bisexual-transgendered group. He also struck a task force to advise the company on work/life balance issues.

The diversity task forces, whose work is continuing, were each assigned to address three questions, Mr. Childs said. What is required to make members of their group feel welcome and valued at IBM? What measures can they take, in partnership with the company, to maximize their productivity? And what should IBM be doing externally to influence the purchasing decisions of their group?

In addition, IBM has a program that partners its executives with current or prospective customers from similar backgrounds. For instance, black IBM executives, in addition to their regular duties, call on black business contacts, Hispanics call on Hispanics.

"I have a couple of accounts," Mr. Childs said. "I made my first call last year ... a brother-to-brother call." It's a strategy that has gone over well with the customers, he said.

"We're going to see more companies owned by women or by ethnic minorities. If we get to them in their infancy and grow with them, that's how we'll grow," Mr. Childs said.

"I have a couple of accounts," Mr. Childs said. "I made my first call last year ... a brother-to-brother call." It's a strategy that has gone over well with the customers, he said.

(Now THAT IS diversity. I wonder if they pulled a white heterosexual male off that account. Does this mean that they'll only have whities calling on white accounts?)

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