It is well accepted today that diversity is very important in business and in not-for-profit organisations. Lack of diversity can lead to groupthink, and groupthink leads to failure. The well known Challenger disaster was traced back to groupthink where nobody stood up to a bad decision made by NASA’s top brass, even though there had been previous failures of the “O” ring which led to the disaster.
It is well accepted wisdom now, even within the hallowed walls of Harvard Business School, that diversity leads to better decision making.
Diversity comes in many guises - gender, race, nationality, sexual orientation, age and abilities.
Rotary, as we know, has a membership problem in the Western World having been a bit of a laggard organisation when it came to diversity. Women were only allowed into Rotary in 1989 after a Club took a case as far as the Supreme Court. Our own Club did not have a woman president until 2005. The jokes about Rotary being “male, pale and stale” do have an element of truth. This is not meant as a criticism but rather as a pointer to where we need to do a lot better.
So, what are we as a Rotary Club doing - apart from being very glad to welcome our newest female Rotarians - to expand our horizons and attract a diverse range of people to our Club? We have already had presentations from the Japanese community and the Maori community and will, hopefully, have presentations from the Filipino community and the Brazilian community before the end of the year.
We will also be having a historic LGBT/Rotary information exchange evening on April 10th, and on May 29th we will have Kate Wilkinson talking to us about the importance of diversity in the workplace.
Hopefully, by the end of the year we will have spread the Rotary message well beyond our usual circles and will be welcoming a wide range of new members.
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