Читать книгу Harness the Power of the Purse: Winning Women Investors - Andrea Turner Moffitt - Страница 8

Foreword

In 2013, the Center for Talent Innovation made an extraordinary step forward: we quantified the effect of diversity on bottom-lines.

We’d long understood, as had many global leaders in our Task Force, that a workforce diversified by gender, generation, geography, ethnicity, and sexual orientation was good for business. Leaders knew that having sales and marketing folks who “looked like the market” helped the firm connect to that market. We took this much further and posited that having people in R&D who represented target markets might similarly offer a competitive edge: who better to identify unmet needs and market opportunities among underserved populations than members of those populations? Research by social scientist Scott Page had affirmed the wisdom of crowds; Page showed mathematically that diversity trumps ability when it comes to solving thorny problems or predicting outcomes. If so, could we show that diverse teams were more innovative than homogeneous teams? And that diverse companies enjoyed, as a result of their innovation, greater market share?

Bringing our own diverse team to the endeavor, we embarked on a two-year research quest. We surveyed 1,800 college-educated professionals in the US, 700 of whom worked for multinational companies. We interviewed some 60 executives and innovators. We held focus groups with team leaders across industry sectors. And we generated 35 case studies of innovation that had derived from diverse teams. What we found, intriguingly, was that innovation depended on having two kinds of workforce diversity: inherent (inborn, immutable traits such as gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation) and acquired (a sensitivity to difference gained through experience). Inherent diversity, as we had hypothesized, helped ensure that teams tasked with identifying unmet needs and innovating for them had the end-user insight they needed to succeed. Acquired diversity turned out to be highly correlated with inclusive leader behaviors, behaviors that unlocked the contribution of every team member and tapped everyone’s toolkit to create the “speak-up culture” so critical to sustained problem-solving. We were able to show that companies with leadership manifesting both inherent and acquired diversity (what we termed “2D Diversity®”) measurably outperformed companies that lacked it in terms of both innovation and market growth. Employees at these companies were 75% more likely than employees at non-diverse companies to say that their ideas were developed and implemented. They were 45% more likely to report that their firm’s market share grew over the previous year and 70% more likely to report that the firm had captured a new market.

Our findings, which we published in a report entitled Innovation, Diversity, and Market Growth, caused a sensation. Harvard Business Review published our research, as did the Stanford Social Innovation Review. Our quest had culminated in the Holy Grail: a robust business case demonstrating that diversity unlocks innovation and growth.

Andrea Turner Moffitt was quick to perceive its implications in finance. As a former banker, a female professional, and a proactive investor, Andrea knew firsthand how poorly the industry connected with women, both in terms of its female talent and also with its female clientele. She was eager to apply our research to her field, to explore how inclusive leadership and our insights into acquired diversity could help advisors discover new ways to work with women, both as colleagues and as clients.

A wealth of industry data suggested that women comprised an enormous purse, with control of some $20 trillion of assets worldwide. Yet from Andrea’s personal and professional work, it was apparent that most of that money lay on the table. Women weren’t leveraging their wealth because wealth advisors ignored them or misunderstood their needs and wants.

As a research organization dedicated to helping women fulfill their leadership potential and to helping Fortune 500 companies better leverage female talent, CTI had its work cut out for itself: We would measure the disconnect globally. We would quantify the US purse (the amount of unleveraged wealth held by women). And on the strength of our findings from “Innovation, Diversity and Market Growth,” we would map a way forward that would benefit both the industry and the women it employed and served.

Thus was born our Power of the Purse research stream. Under Andrea’s leadership, we published Harnessing the Power of the Purse: Female Investors and Global Opportunities for Growth, the first in a series which has grown to encompass women in healthcare and is soon to study women in technology. It’s a call to action but, more importantly, a blueprint for industry-wide change. We’ve provided advisors with a new toolkit of behaviors and tactics that will close the gap with the new market segments we identify. Andrea’s familiarity with the industry and commitment to helping women take control of their wealth has infused this blueprint with invaluable energy and expertise. I am enormously pleased to have collaborated on this research and, with her, to share it.

—Sylvia Ann Hewlett, Founder and CEO, Center for Talent Innovation