Diversity

Next week we are having The Medici Experience in San Jose, CA. It is on September 24^th, and you can find the details here.  I am really, really excited about this project because it is fundamentally a way for us to create change on a larger scale – to help cities and regions grow. Grow ideas, opportunities and jobs. It is terrific that the city of San Jose will host the event and can see the need for innovation in driving growth.

The idea for The Medici Experience came out of my strong desire to avoid just having a whole lot of talks with panels and keynotes while the audience sits still and does little. Instead I am imagining bringing 100s (even thousands as we scale) of people together from different backgrounds and disciplines within a region and have them work together to unleash an explosion of transformational ideas related to their day-to-day efforts, and then move as far along as possible towards making the best ideas happen. All in one intense, fast and furious day.  Everywhere I’ve done this it’s been extremely successful – whether within corporations or for the public such as our event in Trinidad earlier this summer.

Anyway – hope you can join us! We are doing this for the city of San Jose and so the fee is a very reasonable $195 to get a chance to interact with others looking to innovate and a chance to hear me present some of the fundamental aspects of Medici Effect theory.

See below for some indication of the energy that will follow!

Like so many other European countries Sweden needs to tackle the realities of demography: The population is ageing and too few people work. Last year every working individual in the country supported 1.44 individuals who were not part of the workforce and that figure will continue to grow.

There is great awareness of this and in a new report from The Ministry of Finance the researchers investigate which groups that could potentially be more strongly represented on the labour market. Their conclusion is that the most important groups are:

• Young people (16-24)
• Older people (55+)
• Women
• Immigrants

My obvious reflection is that if these insights lead to actual changes we will get greater diversity in terms of age, gender, culture and ethnicity and according to The Medici Effect diversity drives innovation. Consequently the shift that is suggested in the report will not only solve the quantitative problems of demography – it will also have a qualitative impact on the economy. A greater mix will generate creativity, innovation, business and welfare and therefore I see this as another opportunity to argue that immigration is beneficial for Sweden (or for any other country).

/Kristian Ribberström

Over the last couple of weeks there has been a new wave of articles about the homogeneity of Swedish company boards. The focus this time, luckily, is not only the unfairness of it but also the negative business consequences of lack of diversity.

In one article for instance, Carina Lundberg Markow, head of Corporate Governance at Folksam (one of Sweden’s biggest insurance companies) claims that it is necessary to vitalize the boards. And vitalize means diversify. Her argument is that international competition is hard and sixty year old men are actually not very good at predicting trends in a global world where markets change fast. I’d say that is a very good argument.

Only one in five board members in the country is a woman and for the first time since 2003 the ratio is actually decreasing. It is obvious from the articles that there is a growing awareness of the benefits of diversity – not only as regards gender but aspects like age and ethnicity too. Apparently awareness of business advantages is not enough but I still believe that it is potentially a more effective argument than fairness.

/Kristian Ribberström

You often hear that gender diversity is beneficial in different ways, but the claim is not always complemented by examples that support it. Since I keep an eye out for cases where the female perspective does make a difference the FT article What is it about girls and IT? caught my attention. It is mostly based on Emma McGrattan, senior vice-president of engineering at Ingres, an open source database company and it presents some claims that are more specific than the ones you usually find. Here is a section of the long article:

Take Ms McGrattan at Ingres: if shown pieces of code, she believes she could guess whether it was written by a man or a woman, and be right "at least 80 per cent of the time".

"In general, code written by women is more straightforward and more practical – it’s clear what problem the functions are meant to solve and why. Male programmers are more likely to hide clever tricks behind complicated code and incorporate functions for the sake of it," she says.

These differences, she adds, can be complementary if blended correctly. "Where men and women work on technology projects together, you tend to get a far better, more balanced result," she says. This rule, she adds, applies to numerous projects and tasks that go on within the IT industry.

So is the industry missing out on a valuable "talent bank" of skills by failing to attract more women? Analysts at IT market research company Gartner think so. Last year, Gartner analyst Kathy Harris was lead author on a report that set out to explore the issue, drawing on extensive biological, psychological and behavioural research.

“Our review of the summary literature on gender studies revealed that a small subset of general characteristics of men versus women have been demonstrated so often that they have become de facto," she says.

Women, she found, tend to demonstrate better bilateral brain involvement in listening – in combining left-brain thinking (logic, analysis and a concern for accuracy) with right-brain thinking (aesthetics, feeling and creativity) simultaneously. This ability, she says, is highly prized by the IT sector in roles such as business analyst and team leader.

The article then goes on to describe some of the more well-known and obvious differences. It also presents some views on how this may improve the industry and where the field of IT would have been today if these differences had been acknowledged and embraced earlier. Read it – it is interesting.

/Kristian Ribberström

In a recent post I argue that the influx of Iraqi refugees to Sweden is beneficial to the country in a longer perspective; their knowledge, experience and language skills will be extremely useful as Swedish export industry need to enter into new markets. This aspect of immigration is never discussed since the short-term practical problems with integration dominate the debate about our relatively generous asylum laws.

Anyway, after I wrote that the Swedish Trade Council has identified the Middle East as one of our most important potential export markets. I just wanted to point that out since it supports my argument, doesn’t it?

/Kristian Ribberström

I wrote a post in November from Budapest where I reflected on the way Hungarian society is changing rapidly and the capital is becoming increasingly diverse. Now I am here again and I see further evidence of diversity – in my own subjective way.

Wherever I travel I have the habit of making reflections on how internationally "connected" a certain situation is. I know it sounds a bit weird but it is fun and it will give you some kind of unscientific index on how affected the place or situation is by globalization. This is an example of how it works: When I was visiting Frans in the US earlier this spring I was standing in a shop on Manhattan thinking to myself: Here I am – a Swede in New York, buying an Italian bag from a Russian shopkeeper as a gift for my Hungarian girlfriend. Several nations "involved" in that single purchase. And that is not because New York is a extreme city – you can easily see similar "chains" in places that are not nearly as big or multicultural. That is just the way modern society works.

In Hungary some ten or fifteen years ago, however, it wasn’t like that. The reflection chain would be something like: Here I am – a Swede in Budapest. And that was it. Possibly with the addition drinking Danish beer (which isn’t very exotic to a west-coast Swede.) Now – in 2008 – things are different. Being unable to stop this behaviour, I was thinking while having dinner the other night: Here I am  – a Swede in Budapest, drinking Mexican beer in a Persian restaurant while we are being entertained by a Turkish belly dancer (which is very exotic to a west-coast Swede) and trying to figure out if the people at the other table are from India or Pakistan. Budapest really has changed.

And here is the thing: Everytime I manage to make a "long chain" I am in a situation where I spend money – and where other people spend money. In other words there seems to be some kind of correlation between mixed national perspectives and entrepreneurship. Maybe these overlapping layers of diverse national experiences and skills automatically provide a divergence of ideas – and divergent thinking is what generates innovation. If that is true these longer chains I reflect upon is a sign of fertile soil for what we could call business creativity. Furthermore – an idea that is conventional in one place may be vital and even innovative elsewhere; a Persian restaurant will undoubtedly have less competition and higher profile in Budapest than in Teheran.

Well, this is not research – just thoughts. And I am just a Swede in Budapest. Spending my American money.

/Kristian Ribberström

In his speech at The Medici Summit Omar Hijazi, CEO of Dubai-based Tejari, pointed out that many emerging markets are underestimated by Europe and the USA. In the Middle East, Asia, Africa and South America the power to consume as well as produce is growing rapidly and very soon this will have a huge impact on the “old” industrialized countries. The general awareness of this development is surprisingly low in this part of the world.

I was reminded of this when I read an interview (Swedish) in Dagens Nyheter with Ulf Berg, CEO of the Swedish Trade Council. Berg shares Hijazi’s insight and he is very critical of the way Swedish companies are missing export opportunities simply because they lack knowledge of the emerging markets. Or, as he puts it: The problem is not the view people around the world have of Sweden – the problem is the view people in Sweden of the rest of the world. Berg believes that Swedes are too isolated and mostly associate these countries with cheap labour and low-cost production. The global development over the last ten years hasn’t affected Swedish trade much which may be a fatal mistake since the economy depends heavily on export.

I see a very strong connection to cultural diversity in the workforce here and my argument is this: One of the greatest potential benefits of diversity in a country’s workforce is that it mirrors the population, the cultures and the languages of the world – and the world is the export market. This benefit is hardly ever acknowledged.

Let me explain it with an example: Swedish immigration policies are relatively generous – partly for humanitarian reasons but also for demographic reasons. But when immigration is discussed it is mostly in the context of problems that need to be solved. One such case is a town called Södertälje. With some 80,000 people it has become the destination of 5% of all the Iraqi refugees that come to Europe. This means that Södertälje accepts more Iraqi refugees than the USA and Canada together and today there are about 100,000 people of Iraqi origin in Sweden. Because of this situation Anders Lago, the top politician in Södertälje, was invited to speak at the Congress in Washington last week. In his speech Lago acknowledged that immigrants are needed and welcome in Sweden but that responsibility for Iraqi refugees must be more evenly distributed; immigration has become a burden in his town.

However, since we are missing export opportunities because we lack knowledge of the world around us we need to look at immigration in a new way and in a longer perspective. I understand that successful integration is hard to achieve in Södertälje, but the questions we must ask ourselves are the following: Is it good or bad for Sweden to have 100,000 Iraqis in the workforce who speak Arabic and other languages? Is it good or bad to be able to harness the experiences of 100,000 people who have knowledge of traditions, tastes and values in a part of the world where we need to do business in the future? The answers to these questions are quite obvious. I think the conditions for integration would be greatly improved if this perspective was included in the discussion.

/Kristian Ribberström

It has been more than a year since I heard about the Burqini the first time and it has been more than six months since I wrote a post about it. I like the story of the Burqini since it is such a great example of creativity at the intersection of cultures and I often use it to describe the mechanisms that make diversity and mixed cultural perspectives drive innovation.

Over the last months I have realized that the online discussion about this product has been gaining momentum. Opinions about it can be read on blogs about Islam, lifestyle, fashion, integration, politics, sports – you name it. In this media flow a couple of articles from Holland and Sweden caught my attention; it seems that the Burqini is actually being used in these countries and that it has made many Muslim women visit swimming pools and shores in a way that they didn’t do before. This too has caused debate – people react when they see things they haven’t seen before. Many swimming pools have rules about what you are permitted to wear in the water and often it is unclear how the Burqini should be treated in this respect. As I have mentioned before the debate on multiculturalism is continuous in European countries and the integration of Islam is far from friction free.

But friction is an inevitable part of the process that makes diversity drive innovation. If the Burqini makes people come to places where they wouldn’t have gone without it and mix with people they wouldn’t otherwise have met it may be a slow but effective tool for integration. And integration, naturally, makes it far easier to leverage diversity for innovation. Remember – it was such a mix of cultures that created the Burqini in the first place. Wouldn’t it be nice if this Lebanese-Australian invention could catalyze new diversity-driven innovation?

/Kristian Ribberström