Member-only story
What I mean by the headline is: diversity is a very emotional topic at the individual level within the platform/social economy. Videos go viral of people speaking passionately about it, crying, talking about how it’s a moral imperative. People dedicate their entire Instagram personal brand to DEI. Hashtags become “revolutions” of the moment. There is a lot of emotional intensity and labor around diversity right now, especially since Floyd, but even before that. General social justice reform movements, some of which are performative wokeness, and some of which are real.
Now, you get into a tricky space trying to figure out the role of companies in all this. Companies employ people, so they provide a platform and an income and thus a way of life to individuals, and so they should wade into these things, but a lot of companies have 5–7 true decision-makers, and they are almost always privileged white males in their 50s and 60s, and this stuff is in the “nice to have” bucket, not the “need to have” bucket. In their minds, a need to have is a “Q4 go-to-market strategy.” That’s imperative. That’s something you call 25 meetings about. Diversity on the board or in the plant? Eh, can you send me a deck and I’ll look when I have time?
