DEI Was Never About Profitability
The claims from business giants like McKinsey and Mark Cuban have been proven wrong—and in the process reveal their real concerns.
I published my latest article for The American Conservative this morning, please read and share:
I wrote a long X thread promoting it. That thread has 500+ likes in under an hour, so I am optimistic that it will get at least a few thousand:
Maybe Elon Musk or Mark Cuban will be baited into replying. When I first tweeted out a link to this new research earlier this month (before turning it into a long-form article today), I managed to farm an Elon reply.
C’mon Elon, take my new bait.
This should not come as a surprise to anyone. I’m on the board of the Business Department at a nearby university. These studies from consulting agencies, purporting to show a correlation between DEI and increased productivity and profits, are frequently invoked by other members. I had to point out to them that the axes on the graphs in the studies aren’t even labeled..
Any honest DEI professional or advocate is clear that McKinsey’s studies are highly flawed.
And, the result of their misdirection is that people perpetuate gobbledygook in the name of credibility.
It’s actually done the opposite. DEI has been reduced to grievance and the perception that representation is equivalent to lower quality and people being hired because of a single aspect of one’s identity—most frequently racial.
It’s not. And, such foolish reductionism advanced by so-called DEI experts is ultimately harmful and limits what DEI is and can be for organizations and institutions: any input that creates the conditions for people to thrive and for organizations to create immense value toward the fulfillment of purpose.