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Introduction

The Difference Brainpower Makes

The book you are holding in your hand or viewing on a screen is a celebration, compelling collection, and cause for optimism.

Its publication, coinciding with the tenth anniversary of the founding of the Center for Talent Innovation, celebrates our growth—from a small New York-based nonprofit focused on issues of women’s retention and acceleration, to a global think tank that is changing how we conceive of and manage high-echelon talent worldwide.

It collects, in one place, four of the many high-impact research projects the Center has conducted over the last decade. These studies embody our vision: that the full realization of brain power across the divides of gender, generation, geography, and culture is at the heart of both human flourishing and competitive success.

And because this book showcases concrete action, it provides grounds for confidence in the future. The flagship project of the Center is the Task Force for Talent Innovation. Back in 2004 this group was composed of seven companies. Today it is composed of eighty companies and organizations and is a force to be reckoned with. Task Force members include leaders from American Express, Bank of America, Bloomberg, Booz Allen Hamilton, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Cisco, Deloitte, Deutsche Bank, EMD Serono, EY, GE, Goldman Sachs, Intel, Johnson & Johnson, NBCUniversal, Time Warner, and the International Monetary Fund, among others, and they have driven transformational change. Members have worked with great energy and commitment to turn the Center’s groundbreaking research into action on the ground. Together, we’ve seeded and developed hundreds of best practices. We’ve initiated programs and policies that meet head-on some of the most intractable problems in talent management. For example, how do employers get highly qualified women back on track after they have taken a career break? (our “Off-Ramps and On-Ramps” work), and how do we finally crack that last glass ceiling for multicultural professionals? (our “Vaulting the Color Bar” and “Sponsor Effect” work). We’ve expanded our research to probe other mature economies (the U.K., Germany, and Japan) as well as the growth hubs of the emerging world (Brazil, Russia, China, and India). And by seeking to showcase our work in high-profile publications such as the Harvard Business Review, we’ve ensured that our research and action benefit not only Task Force members, but all organizations that want to get the talent equation right. Perhaps most significantly, our brand new research—“Innovation, Diversity and Market Growth,” which demonstrates precisely how the full utilization of brain power across the talent pool, unlocks innovation and drives competitive success—is creating a new case for action and strengthens our conviction that the next ten years will bring an even greater measure of progress and success.

Our Journey Over the Last Decade

When I founded the Center back in 2004 it was clear that progress had stalled for women and other minorities. Leadership continued to be remarkably homogeneous, comprising a wall of white, straight men. Earlier waves of activism, rooted in the civil rights struggle and the women’s movements, had created access and opportunity for women and other previously excluded groups, to education and jobs—but diverse individuals remained clustered in the middle and lower reaches of most companies. This failure to find a seat at decision-making tables was the challenge I sought to address. In late 2003, calling on all the connections and goodwill I had accumulated in my career, I brought together a group of remarkable leaders who shared my frustration about the lack of diversity at the top: ten business leaders from Fortune 500 companies, four nonprofit directors, two distinguished scholars, two journalists, and a vice chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

We convened at the venerable Century Club in midtown Manhattan for a lunch that stretched into five hours of impassioned discussion. With critical contributions from Cornel West and EY Senior Executive Carolyn Buck Luce, we agreed that a new wave of activism was required to get a significant number of women and people of color on track to positions of leadership. We also agreed that it was up to the private sector to provide the push as government seemed to be steadily retreating from policies that might further accelerate the progression of these groups. And we knew that no country could continue to waste so much highly qualified labor—so much brain power—and expect to prosper over the long term. By the end of the day we had conceived of a task force comprising senior executives from the world’s leading companies and organizations, allied with a newly formed think tank. The idea was that together, these newly formed entities would turn inquiry into programs, policies, and results. Shortly thereafter, in February 2004, we launched the Center for Work-Life Policy (CWLP) and its flagship project the Hidden Brain Drain Task Force, to spearhead the Center’s groundbreaking research.

In 2012, the think tank was renamed the Center for Talent Innovation and the original task force became the Task Force for Talent Innovation. Those name changes were inspired by a need to align our brands, but also by a desire to signal the vastly increased scope, span, and impact of the Center and its Task Force. Our initial discussion about women in the U.S. has grown into a global conversation about how to accelerate the progress of all the underleveraged streams of talent in the global workforce: women, yes, but also people of color, LGBTs, and local talent in emerging markets—employees who have largely been left out of talent conversations and not sufficiently included in progression models.

Today, our work impacts six million employees in 192 countries. Our influence has been felt from Bangalore to Beijing, from Tokyo to Rio de Janeiro, from Frankfurt to London, and many points in between. Our findings, insights, and agendas for action have been featured in the mainstream press as well as blue-chip business publications around the world—The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Sunday Times of London, The Guardian, Veja, The Times of India, South China Morning Post, The Economist, BusinessWeek and Forbes. We’ve appeared on Today, ABC World News, NBC Nightly News, and National Public Radio. Our online presence ranges from a featured blog with Harvard Business Online to regular posts on The Daily Beast and The Huffington Post. And our research resonates not just among talent managers and human resources specialists but with a wider audience. Articles have appeared in glossy magazines such as Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan, MORE, and Grazia and in online media outlets such as Quartz and Slate.

Our Commitment to Data-Driven, Actionable Research

We have always valued rigorous research and put a premium on constructive action. We learned our lesson early on. Just four days before that pivotal meeting at the Century Club ten years ago, The New York Times Magazine published a cover story called “The Opt-Out Revolution.” To the dismay of many thousands of working women, this widely read article made the case that the workplace was not rejecting qualified women; rather, qualified women were rejecting the workplace—and leaving in droves. Despite the fact that this piece was based on interviews with just eight female Princeton graduates it garnered traction and did damage to prospects for female progress. In particular, it provided ready justification for employers reluctant to develop and promote women to positions of leadership. At the Century that day, my lunch companions and I were in fervent agreement on the need to introduce robust and rigorous research into the national conversation.

We therefore kicked off our work at the Center with a large-scale, data-rich study of the career paths of well-qualified women employed in a range of sectors across the economy. Our findings were derived not from a handful of anecdotes but from a nationally representative sample. We were able to demonstrate conclusively that women weren’t throwing in the towel. Those that off-ramped took short career breaks (less than three years) and the vast majority were eager to get back on track. They both needed and wanted a second shot at paid employment. Our commitment to constructive action meant we were careful to showcase solutions to the on-ramping challenge and worked with Task Force companies to develop programs that helped women get back to work.

Our research since has yielded 11 articles for the Harvard Business Review, four groundbreaking books for the Harvard Business Review Press, twenty-three in-depth research reports (four of which are featured in this book) and over 250 new best practices. We could not be more pleased that this body of work has both advanced the dialogue around talent management and led to policies and programs that have improved the prospects and accelerated the progress of women and other previously excluded employees.

Four Critical Selections

 Off-Ramps and On-Ramps Revisited updates our 2005 research on women’s nonlinear career paths. This 2010 study again finds that approximately a third of highly qualified women take an off-ramp—voluntarily leaving their jobs for a period of time. A further third take a scenic route—working flextime or part-time for a number of years. In all, nearly three-quarters of accomplished women have interrupted, or nonlinear careers and fail to follow the smooth linear arc that is typical of successful male careers. For this they pay a heavy price in lost earnings and foregone promotion. Both the 2005 and 2010 studies find that almost three-fourths of those who take an off-ramp want to get back on track—but unfortunately, only 40% of these women succeed in finding full-time, mainstream positions. These studies carry profound implications for today’s female workforce: off-ramps and on-ramps are with us in good times (2005) and bad (2010), and employers who fail to rise to the challenge and provide better on-ramps for them will waste the brain power of a significant proportion of the highly credentialed female talent pool.

 Vaulting the Color Bar documents the lingering bias that keeps too many African Americans, Hispanics, and Asians stalled several layers below the C-suite, despite their abundance of ambition and talent. In addition to quantifying the cost of underutilizing this tranche of talent, the study reveals how a lack of advocacy—of sponsorship—keeps the best and brightest professionals of color from taking their rightful places in top management. And yet amid this story of missed opportunity, there is good news: organizations that embrace sponsorship can significantly boost engagement, retention, and promotion rates among people of color.

 The X-Factor explores the unique gifts and special plight of Generation X-ers whose career progress has both been blocked by Boomers and threatened by leapfrogging Gen Y-ers. Our rich data show the great strengths of X-ers: they are well qualified, enormously driven, and have serious entrepreneurial capabilities. However, in addition to facing blocked career paths, they feel burdened by the demands of extreme jobs and an increasingly extreme parenting model. Under constant stress and tired of waiting in the wings, nearly half are considering quitting their corporate jobs. More than a third of them already have one foot out the door, saying they will leave their employer sometime over the next three years—just when they will be needed most.

 The Power of “Out” quantifies the cost to companies when lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) employees hide their sexual orientation because they do not consider it “safe” to come out at work. Our research demonstrates that “being in the closet” is in nobody’s interest. It is bad for LGBT employees (increasing isolation and alienation) and it’s bad for employers (lowering rates of productivity and increasing flight risk). In short, being “out” is good for human flourishing but also good for the bottom line. This is a tremendously important set of findings given that nearly half of LGBT employees in the large-scale survey that underlies this study do not choose be “out” at work—it’s just too risky. The costs to employers are enormous—and documented in this study. All too many companies fail to welcome LGBT talent—and end up losing some of their most able and ambitious employees.

Going Global

Since the beginning I’ve been committed to a global talent conversation rather than one that is U.S.-centric. However, over the last few years, with the addition to the Task Force of multinational companies headquartered in Europe and Asia (BP and Genpact are good examples), we’ve been able to extend our reach to a number of both developed and developing countries around the world. For example, we’ve explored Off-Ramps and On-Ramps in Japan and Germany, and examined how to win the war for talent in Brazil, Russia China, and India. Going forward we have plans to expand our global footprint. We’re taking a fresh look at women’s ambition in the U.S., the U.K., Germany, India, China, and Brazil, and we’re developing a much-needed blueprint for Global Executives that draws upon our recent work on Executive Presence as well as Innovation, Diversity and Market Growth. We’re mapping the formidable opportunities that women’s new spending power (we call it “The Power of the Purse”) has unleashed in financial services and the healthcare industry across the world, and we’re taking our LGBT work, “The Power of Out,” to four continents. With this enlargement of scope and span, one thing will remain constant: We’ll continue to provide robust, rigorous research that helps companies and organizations harness the most powerful competitive differentiator they have at their disposal—the brain power of their people.

A Brand New Case for Action

When we published “Innovation, Diversity and Market Growth” (IDM) in September of 2013 I knew that we had produced a seminal study, one which was a fitting culmination of our first ten year journey. At the heart of this work is our discovery of a quantifiable “diversity dividend.” Trained as an economist, I have always believed that leaders will embrace diversity only if there is an airtight business case to support it. Our IDM research deepens a previously existing business case and makes it thoroughly convincing.

In recent years an array of eminent thinkers—Scott Page, Frans Johansson, and James Surowiecki among others—have demonstrated concrete connection between diversity and business performance. In addition, smart leaders in many cutting-edge businesses have recognized that reaching increasingly diverse consumers and clients requires talent that mirrors those markets. But our study goes beyond tenuous correlations and obvious market matching to the heart of the matter. With input from 1,800 managers and executives, dozens of team leaders tasked with driving innovation, and forty case studies across a range of industries, we show precisely how diversity unlocks innovation and propels market growth. We show which two dimensions of diversity matter most, and, most importantly how 2D DiversitySM allows companies to expand market share and turbocharge new markets. We’re able to both quantify a “diversity dividend” and demonstrate how the absence of 2D DiversitySM creates a chokehold in the innovation process and a drag on growth. This seminal research was showcased in the December 2013 issue of Harvard Business Review and it provides powerful new ammunition for why we need diversity at decision-making tables.

Over the last ten years the Center and its Task Force have created a treasure trove of research and best practices. Whether you are an employer or an employee, take the lessons collected here and put them to good use. And stay tuned. Our work is rich and impact-filled and we plan on doing a whole lot more.