summarization explanation.pdf Let's look at an example to practice: “Business Advantages of Diversity in the Workplace” by Michael D. Lee, MBA http://www.ethnoconnect.com/articles/9-business-advantages-of-diversity-in-the-work- place • I chose this article because you are a diverse group of students who will most likely work in diverse environments. It is important to have a positive attitude towards this diversity among your employees and coworkers. • At 1.5 pages, this is a short article. Therefore, your summary will be short. • Your summary should be approximately 2 paragraphs. (Each paragraph should have 5-6 sentences.) • Your summary should include an OVERVIEW of the information, but should not get overly detailed. • Only provide detailed examples where necessary. AFTER you have read the article, and determined what information you need in your summary, read my summary on the next page. Writing a Professional Summary There are two reasons that we do professional summaries in this class. First and foremost, you will likely need to summarize a meeting or article for your boss or your employees someday. Second, you will need this skill for the introduction of your final exam persuasive essay. So, how do you summarize effectively? You need to answer as many of the question words as possible: Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How Let's look at those more carefully in the context of an article: 1. WHO wrote the article? Who is it about? Who is providing the information in the article? Who is the target audience? 2. WHAT is the article about? What is the article telling you? What is the purpose of the article? 3. WHERE was the research in the article done? Where is this article referring to? 4. WHEN was the article written? When was the research in the article done? When is it referring to? 5. WHY is this article important? Why did the author write it? 6. HOW was the research in the article done? How does this affect you/your workplace? These are some of the questions you will want to answer when writing your summary. You may not be able to or need to answer all of these questions, but if this information is in the article, you need to include it in your summary. http://www.ethnoconnect.com/articles/9-business-advantages-of-diversity-in-the-work-place http://www.ethnoconnect.com/articles/9-business-advantages-of-diversity-in-the-work-place Summary of “Business Advantages of Diversity in the Workplace” by Michael D. Lee, MBA Michael D. Lee, MBA, a professional speaker and diversity consultant, cites the U.S. Office of Employment as saying that almost a third of workers in the U.S. labor force will be minorities by 2008. This increase in minorities brings distinct advantages, but some companies overlook or don't quite understand these benefits. Lee says, “Diversity needs to be seen as an integral part of the business plan, essential to successful products and increased sales.” For this reason, Lee de ...

1. summarization explanation.pdf
Let's look at an example to practice: “Business Advantages of
Diversity in the Workplace” by Michael
D. Lee, MBA http://www.ethnoconnect.com/articles/9-business-
advantages-of-diversity-in-the-work-
place
• I chose this article because you are a diverse group of students
who will most likely work in
diverse environments. It is important to have a positive attitude
towards this diversity among
your employees and coworkers.
• At 1.5 pages, this is a short article. Therefore, your summary
will be short.
• Your summary should be approximately 2 paragraphs. (Each
paragraph should have 5-6
sentences.)
• Your summary should include an OVERVIEW of the
information, but should not get overly
detailed.
• Only provide detailed examples where necessary.
AFTER you have read the article, and determined what
information you need in your summary, read
my summary on the next page.
Writing a Professional Summary

2. There are two reasons that we do professional summaries in this
class. First and foremost, you will
likely need to summarize a meeting or article for your boss or
your employees someday. Second,
you will need this skill for the introduction of your final exam
persuasive essay.
So, how do you summarize effectively? You need to answer as
many of the question words as
possible:
Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How
Let's look at those more carefully in the context of an article:
1. WHO wrote the article? Who is it about? Who is providing
the information in the article?
Who is the target audience?
2. WHAT is the article about? What is the article telling you?
What is the purpose of the
article?
3. WHERE was the research in the article done? Where is this
article referring to?
4. WHEN was the article written? When was the research in the
article done? When is it
referring to?
5. WHY is this article important? Why did the author write it?
6. HOW was the research in the article done? How does this
affect you/your workplace?
These are some of the questions you will want to answer when
writing your summary. You may
not be able to or need to answer all of these questions, but if

3. this information is in the article, you
need to include it in your summary.
http://www.ethnoconnect.com/articles/9-business-advantages-
of-diversity-in-the-work-place
http://www.ethnoconnect.com/articles/9-business-advantages-
of-diversity-in-the-work-place
Summary of “Business Advantages of Diversity in the
Workplace” by Michael D. Lee, MBA
Michael D. Lee, MBA, a professional speaker and diversity
consultant, cites the U.S. Office of
Employment as saying that almost a third of workers in the U.S.
labor force will be minorities by 2008.
This increase in minorities brings distinct advantages, but some
companies overlook or don't quite
understand these benefits. Lee says, “Diversity needs to be seen
as an integral part of the business plan,
essential to successful products and increased sales.”
For this reason, Lee describes six potential benefits that can
make American companies more
productive and profitable. These benefits are: (1) increased
creativity due to diverse problem solving
approaches; (2) increased productivity when diverse employees
pull together towards a goal; (3) new
attitudes that can be beneficial; (4) a variety of language skills
that can open new markets; (5) increased
and deeper understanding of how the U.S. fits into the global
marketplace; and (6) the development of
new processes as a result of diverse individuals working
together. Clearly, if the managers see diversity
as a positive, these can be benefits for any diverse company.

4. Here is a breakdown of how I answered the questions listed on
page 1:
Who: Michael D. Lee
What: Diversity in the workplace is a benefit
Where: The U.S./U.S. companies
When: by 2008
Why: 6 reasons
How: 6 reasons
Why Do We Get So Emotional About Brands_ - HBR.pdf
BRANDING
Why Do We Get So Emotional
About Brands?
by Andrew O'Connell
APRIL 21, 2015
Honestly, it’s puzzling that an inanimate, imaginary thing such
as a brand should seem to
have gender.
https://hbr.org/topic/branding
https://hbr.org/search?term=andrew+o%27connell
https://hbr.org/
But obviously brands do send out gender signals, and sometimes
they’re quite strong. In fact,
recent research shows that the more intense the gender signals,

5. the greater the brand value —
so not only do we readily perceive gender in brands, we like to
perceive gender in brands.
Yet lately it seems that brands have been pretty numb to the
deep changes we can all see
around us in how gender is being perceived and defined. Even
though gender is increasingly
understood to be fluid and multidimensional, brands continue to
draw power from gender
stereotypes. Think of brand imagery for cars — food —
clothing. Are brands trying to lead us
back toward comforting, old-school notions of masculinity and
femininity in a time of gender
uncertainty? Should they be leading us in that direction? Does
the word “should” even apply
to branding?
I was thinking about these questions after I found myself crying
during the Super Bowl this
year. I wasn’t crying over Malcolm Butler’s end-zone
interception or the damage that was
being inflicted on vulnerable linebacker brains, but over a little
boy who was calling “Daddy!”
for help as he struggled to put on a T-shirt. It was an ad for
Dove Men+Care (“Real Strength”),

6. and it really touched me. I untangled many a T-shirt when my
kids were little, and I guess
those moments had been buried in deep memory until the ad
came on.
Dove Men+Care, in associating masculinity with caring (and
skin-care products), is one of the
few brands that seem to be trying to play with gender
stereotypes a bit. It’s an exception that
highlights the rarity of such attempts. Mostly, brands that play
in the gender space, so to
speak, go for traditional male or female associations, and for
good financial reasons.
A team led by Theo Lieven, a researcher at the University of St.
Gallen in Switzerland,
recently showed that brands with stronger impressions of
masculine or feminine personality
have higher brand equity (defined as the difference in perceived
utility between a branded
and a similar nonbranded product). Last year the team published
a fascinating list of 140
brands, ranked by consumers’ gender impressions and brand
equity. Here’s a plotting of a few
of them:

7. http://www.superbowlcommercial2015.com/dove-mencare/
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/store/10.1002/mar.20701/asset/m
ar20701.pdf;jsessionid=6B68537A5BE2DEF289F288861BEA00
50.f02t03?v=1&t=i7hlksub&s=375d60dc8327f5c9792bd5f1c56c
17b7f6eb6a98
The findings came from 130,000 German consumers who were
asked to report their
impressions of brands’ personalities. Brands that were rated as
highly adventurous,
aggressive, brave, daring, dominant, and sturdy were classified
by the researchers as having
masculine personalities; those rated as expressing “tender
feelings” and being fragile,
graceful, sensitive, and sweet were classified as feminine.
Brand equity was measured with
responses to statements such as “It makes sense to buy this
brand instead of any other brand,
even if they are the same.”
It’s worth pointing out that the participants apparently had no
trouble understanding what
the researchers meant by brand “personalities.” Even though
brands are nothing but
collections of images and sounds and words and typefaces, most

8. of us — I’m assuming —
readily see personalities not only in brands but in all sorts of
inanimate things. I certainly do.
I remember, as a little guy, helping my father organize his
workbench and getting into a long
private fantasy about the 3-inch nail that was leading the army
of 2-inch nails. Humans seem
to have a susceptibility to seeing humanlike qualities in just
about everything.
And brands are part of that everything. Some of the pioneering
work on applying this idea to
brands and actually measuring their personalities was done in
the 1990s by Jennifer Aaker,
then at UCLA and now at Stanford. In subsequent decades the
thinking about brands as
humanlike entities has gone in a lot of different directions. Not
everyone agrees on the
validity of some of the ideas: A team led by Mark Avis of
Massey University in New Zealand
recently showed that people would ascribe personalities even to
rocks, rating one, for
example, as high in competence, suggesting that the
personality-assessment tool they were
using was in a sense creating brand personalities in

9. participants’ minds, rather than
measuring them.
Still, the findings on brand personality continue to pile up, and
of course they tell us more
about the workings of our own minds than about brands per se.
The study by Lieven and his
colleagues, for example, seems to say that we’re drawn to, and
most deeply touched by, age-
old gender stereotypes.
I guess that’s not surprising. Lieven says one reason for this
predilection appears to be that
it’s easier for us to quickly categorize brands that are clearly
masculine or feminine.
Stereotypes, because they require little cognitive processing, are
the brain’s comfort food.
Brands as Tools for Change
http://faculty-
gsb.stanford.edu/aaker/pdf/dimensions_of_brand_personality.pd
f
http://bear.warrington.ufl.edu/weitz/mar7786/Articles/fournier%
20(1998).pdf
http://mtq.sagepub.com/content/14/4/451
Assuming that Lieven’s work stands up over time, is the

10. implication of it that on a deep level
today’s more fluid gender definitions make many of us a bit
uncomfortable? And that we seek
stereotypes to increase our comfort? The changes in gender
perceptions and attitudes have
been pretty dramatic, not just in developed countries but
worldwide. Marketing expert Jill
Avery of Harvard Business School points out that gender today
is a “continuum rather than a
dichotomy,” and that there are lots of interpretations — more all
the time — of what
masculinity and femininity mean.
These changes can certainly be disorienting. Susan Fournier of
Boston University, an early
developer of the idea of relationships between consumers and
brands, pointed out in a
conversation that things have moved so rapidly that there are
probably significant differences
now among age cohorts in responses to gender, with older
people feeling a lot more
comfortable with stereotypical gender roles and younger people
more comfortable pushing
the boundaries.

11. Then why aren’t more brands tracking these changes in gender
definitions, perceptions, and
roles?
A few are, of course. There’s Dove Men+Care, and, as Avery
points out, certain mainstream
brands are aiming at gay and lesbian consumers, and others are
trying to capitalize on the
idea of empowering girls and women.
But by and large there isn’t much movement away from
stereotypes. As James Gentry of the
University of Nebraska and Robert Harrison of Western
Michigan University write, although
gender attitudes are in a state of flux, “portrayals of gender
roles in commercials have not
become more gender neutral.”
Which, for me, raises the question of whether brands should or
shouldn’t be used as
instruments for social change.
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2014/02/heres-a-list-of-
58-gender-options-for-facebook-users/
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/07/world/asia/chinese-
advocate-of-sexuality-opens-door-into-her-own-private-
life.html
http://curve.gettyimages.com/article/the-coming-out-of-brands
http://www.oneupweb.com/blog/9-ads-inspiring-women/

12. http://homepages.wmich.edu/~r5harris/Documents/MarketingTh
eory.pdf
Certainly it’s indisputable that they have enormous power to
affect our attitudes. Brands are
primarily instruments for making money, but they do that by
touching our emotions. As
brand messages power their way through the media landscape,
catching our eyes and ears,
they light us up emotionally. In a matter of seconds I went from
cheering over a football game
to getting choked up at the word “Daddy!” Life in the media-
saturated world can be like that
— sometimes I feel as though I’m in a state of commercially
induced hyperemotionality.
Emotions affect our attitudes and behaviors. So these brand
messages have an impact on
what we say and do. I keep thinking of a study that showed the
impact on children’s attitudes
of the Harry Potter brand: Because the books and movies show
Harry fighting intolerance
toward non-wizards, elementary-school students who identified
with the main character
showed improved attitudes toward immigrants. That’s an
example of a brand’s measurable

13. impact on attitudes, achieved through touching the emotions.
Given brands’ power to effect this kind of change, shouldn’t
they be deployed to alter our
social attitudes? Brands are enormously, almost inconceivably
effective at changing minds —
yet for the most part, companies do nothing with them but trot
them out to amuse us,
reinforce stereotypes, and rake in the money. How are we ever
going to evolve that way?
Gentry and Harrison are fine with using the “should” word when
it comes to brands’ gender
representations. For example, media portrayals of fathers, they
write in the journal Marketing
Theory, should encourage men to become more active in
parenting, rather than “sustain the
more distant perspective from the past.”
But if you say “should,” you’ve got to be careful about what
comes before and after it. Who
should do what? Which decision makers at which levels of
companies or society should
deploy brands in service of which values? If you try to answer
those questions you start re-
creating the discussions that happen around censorship tables in

14. repressive countries
throughout the world. Maybe better to keep brands safely
focused on making money and
Why Do We Get So Emotional About Brands?
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jasp.12279/abstract
leave the attitude adjusting for other spheres of society. If
gender attitudes are going to
continue to undergo change, it’s going to happen regardless of
anything brands have to say
about it.
Dove Men+Care’s brand managers see themselves not as
altering consumers’ attitudes but as
just trying to keep up with changes that are already well
underway. The brand’s research
revealed that “only 7% of men today can relate to depictions of
masculinity they see in
media,” Unilever marketing director Jennifer Bremner told me
in an email. So there was an
evident opportunity to provide images of a caring form of
masculinity ”that men today feel
are absent from the media landscape.”

15. The Power of Androgyny
I don’t know whether this is a signal of changing attitudes, or
whether it just shows how deep
the mysteries of the subject really are, but a more recent study
that Lieven participated in
both reinforces the notion that strong gender impressions
increase brand equity and
questions the either-or nature of consumers’ conceptions of
gender.
This time the researchers measured attitudes toward specific
products — shoes, eyeglasses,
and perfume bottles — whose aesthetic elements were modified
to suggest masculinity
and/or femininity. Participants responded to such features as
dark color as being masculine
and curvy shape as feminine. I say “and/or” because some of the
products had both kinds of
features — for example, some of the glasses were dark and
curvy — and the researchers
labeled these as “androgynous” products. The participants were
also asked to say how they
felt about the items (recording their “affective attitudes”) and
were questioned about the
products’ aesthetic value and perceived functionality. They

16. were also asked about purchase
intent.
On all four measures, the androgynous products— those that
were above the median in both
femininity and masculinity — beat out those that were highly
feminine, highly masculine,
and undifferentiated (that is, with low gender impressions).
Again, we’re in disputed territory here. Fournier says sure,
people in a lab setting will
cheerfully rate brands as having more or less gender, but
“gender as a social category must
have meaning and significance to the brand” to really matter for
marketers.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/mar.20789/abstract
Nevertheless, Lieven says an even newer study looking at
attitudes in 10 different countries
produced “remarkable results” that validated the androgyny
findings (the newest research is
currently under review at an academic journal), so evidently
there’s something measurable
going on in the gender-sensitive part of consumers’ minds when

17. it comes to responses to a
broad spectrum of brands — not just those that position
themselves to be about gender.
Lieven and I had an email chat about his research. Worldwide,
one of the strongest brands
out there is Apple, which Lieven classifies as androgynous —
it’s both strongly masculine
(think of its computing power) and feminine (think of its sleek
designs). Evolutionary
psychology seems to say that consumers’ feelings about brand
gender have something to do
with sexual attraction — that the mating urge underlies our
positive feelings about strongly
gendered brands. But as Lieven points out, his latest results
about the power of androgynous
brands suggest that other factors may be in play too — maybe
“it is not a mere question of
mating,” he says.
Gender, after all, applies as much to mothers and fathers as to
potential mates. Maybe our
responses to femininity and masculinity are equally rooted in
our feelings toward parental
figures. It’s possible, for example, that in rating Disney high on
androgyny, consumers are

18. implicitly saying that the brand is both mother-like and father-
like, perhaps in creating safe,
comforting theme parks that also provide adventure.
The androgyny research is clearly a work in progress. Maybe
what Lieven and his colleagues
are tapping into is our very complex feelings about how and to
what extent brands — those
inanimate, imaginary things — seem to “feel” about us. Do they
care about us? If so, do they
care in such a way as to make us feel attractive? In some cases,
brands’ form of caring makes
us feel empowered. In others it makes us feel comforted and
protected, like the parent who
reaches out a strong hand and helps us get that T-shirt over our
heads.
Andrew O’Connell, an editor with the Harvard Business Review
Group, is the author of Stats and Curiosities from
Harvard Business Review.
Related Topics: GENDER
This article is about BRANDING
FOLLOW THIS TOPIC

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20. Refugees in the Mediterranean.docx
Refugees in the Mediterranean
• Who – 700 refugees, 28 rescued refugees, Frontex (EU border
control agency) and Leggeri (Frontex Exec Dir.), Italian Coast
Guard, sub-saharan migrants,
• What – boat capsizes, more refugees are dying this year than
before
• When – Yesterday
• Why/How – Too many people on the boats/decreased numbers
of boats, worse weather, war/unrest, decreased maritime patrol
Refugees in the Mediterranean_ The worst yet_ _ The
Economist.pdf
4/20/2015 Refugees in the Mediterranean: The worst yet? | The
Economist
http://www.economist.com/node/21648896/print 1/2
Refugees in the Mediterranean
All latest updates
The worst yet?
Another boat capsizes between Libya and Italy as Europe debate
s migration policy
Apr 19th 2015 | ROME | Europe
WHETHER it was the Mediterranean's deadliest
refugee drowning in decades remains to be seen.
But it was certainly terrible, and its political
effects could spread far. One of the survivors of a

21. refugee boat that capsized late on the night of
April 18th in the waters between Libya and the
Italian island of Lampedusa said that at least 700
people had been on board. Just 28 have been
rescued so far. That would make it by far the worst maritime
disaster in the Mediterranean since
the second world war.
On April 19th the Italian coast guard sounded a cautionary note
on the casualty figures. The boat
was just 20 metres long, and while it may have been
transporting hundreds of people, it is
doubtful whether even the ruthless people-smugglers who
dispatch migrants from the Libyan
coast could force 700 aboard a vessel of that size. By early
afternoon, with 24 bodies recovered,
the coast guard said the number of dead might need to be
recalculated.
What is beyond doubt, though, is that the migrants crossing the
Mediterranean to Europe
(http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2015/03/asylum
-seekers) are dying this year
at an unprecedented rate. According to figures released by the
Italian interior ministry after the
latest disaster, 23,556 people have entered Italy irregularly by
sea since January 1st. That is not a
big increase over 2014, when the figure for the same period was
20,800. But the death toll,
according to the International Organisation for Migration
(IOM), has leapt almost tenfold. Even
before the latest calamity it stood at 954.
Why? Apart from worse weather, humanitarian aid officials
point to two factors. One is the
suspension last October of Italy’s Mare Nostrum search-and-

22. rescue mission
(http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21612152-rich-
countries-must-take-more-
http://www.economist.com/
http://www.economist.com/sections/europe
http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2015/03/asylum-
seekers
http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21612152-rich-
countries-must-take-more-migration-burden-europes-huddled-
masses
4/20/2015 Refugees in the Mediterranean: The worst yet? | The
Economist
http://www.economist.com/node/21648896/print 2/2
migration-burden-europes-huddled-masses) . It was replaced by
Operation Triton, run by the
EU’s border control agency, Frontex, which has a much
narrower remit to patrol Italy’s
territorial waters and a budget of less than a third that of Mare
Nostrum.
The second factor is that the smugglers are cramming more and
more people on ever more
vulnerable craft as they run short of boats. Twice this year,
armed smugglers have forcibly taken
back boats used to transport migrants and asylum-seekers after
their passengers were rescued
by other vessels—a sure sign that the boats are becoming more
valuable. In the second incident,
which took place last Monday, the smugglers fired shots in the
air before recovering a wooden
craft about 60 nautical miles (111km) from the Libyan coast.

23. Frontex’s executive director, Fabrice Leggeri, said last month
that “anywhere between 500,000
to a million people" were ready to leave from Libya. That would
not be surprising: Libya has
lapsed into anarchy (http://www.economist.com/news/middle-
east-and-africa/21644195-
descent-jihadist-chaos-forcing-neighbours-act-libyas-new-
agony) since the overthrow of Colonel
Muammar Qaddafi in 2011. It has become an especially hellish
place for sub-Saharan migrants,
who report being robbed, kidnapped and confined to detention
centres, where men are often
beaten and women raped. But the shortage of boats suggests that
a decreasing proportion of
those wanting to leave for Europe will be able to do so—and
those who do will face an
increasingly perilous journey.
What to do? The European Union’s response
(http://www.economist.com/news/international/21636041-rich-
world-being-asked-do-more-
those-fleeing-syria-and-iraq-rattling-tin) so far has been
remarkably languid. The latest disaster
may at last spur it into action. Mr Leggeri has asked for more
resources from the EU. And the
leaders of member states may now be prepared to consider a
wider remit for Operation Triton. It
would be foolish to imagine that the migrants and asylum-
seekers will stop coming. In lawless
Libya and in the migrants' countries of origin—Syria, Eritrea,
Somalia, Mali—the factors pushing
them to gamble their lives on a sea crossing to Italy are still in
place.
http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21612152-rich-

24. countries-must-take-more-migration-burden-europes-huddled-
masses
http://www.economist.com/news/middle-east-and-
africa/21644195-descent-jihadist-chaos-forcing-neighbours-act-
libyas-new-agony
http://www.economist.com/news/international/21636041-rich-
world-being-asked-do-more-those-fleeing-syria-and-iraq-
rattling-tin
summarization explanation (1).pdf
Let's look at an example to practice: “Business Advantages of
Diversity in the Workplace” by Michael
D. Lee, MBA http://www.ethnoconnect.com/articles/9-business-
advantages-of-diversity-in-the-work-
place
• I chose this article because you are a diverse group of students
who will most likely work in
diverse environments. It is important to have a positive attitude
towards this diversity among
your employees and coworkers.
• At 1.5 pages, this is a short article. Therefore, your summary
will be short.
• Your summary should be approximately 2 paragraphs. (Each
paragraph should have 5-6
sentences.)
• Your summary should include an OVERVIEW of the
information, but should not get overly
detailed.
• Only provide detailed examples where necessary.

25. AFTER you have read the article, and determined what
information you need in your summary, read
my summary on the next page.
Writing a Professional Summary
There are two reasons that we do professional summaries in this
class. First and foremost, you will
likely need to summarize a meeting or article for your boss or
your employees someday. Second,
you will need this skill for the introduction of your final exam
persuasive essay.
So, how do you summarize effectively? You need to answer as
many of the question words as
possible:
Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How
Let's look at those more carefully in the context of an article:
1. WHO wrote the article? Who is it about? Who is providing
the information in the article?
Who is the target audience?
2. WHAT is the article about? What is the article telling you?
What is the purpose of the
article?
3. WHERE was the research in the article done? Where is this
article referring to?
4. WHEN was the article written? When was the research in the
article done? When is it
referring to?
5. WHY is this article important? Why did the author write it?

26. 6. HOW was the research in the article done? How does this
affect you/your workplace?
These are some of the questions you will want to answer when
writing your summary. You may
not be able to or need to answer all of these questions, but if
this information is in the article, you
need to include it in your summary.
http://www.ethnoconnect.com/articles/9-business-advantages-
of-diversity-in-the-work-place
http://www.ethnoconnect.com/articles/9-business-advantages-
of-diversity-in-the-work-place
Summary of “Business Advantages of Diversity in the
Workplace” by Michael D. Lee, MBA
Michael D. Lee, MBA, a professional speaker and diversity
consultant, cites the U.S. Office of
Employment as saying that almost a third of workers in the U.S.
labor force will be minorities by 2008.
This increase in minorities brings distinct advantages, but some
companies overlook or don't quite
understand these benefits. Lee says, “Diversity needs to be seen
as an integral part of the business plan,
essential to successful products and increased sales.”
For this reason, Lee describes six potential benefits that can
make American companies more
productive and profitable. These benefits are: (1) increased
creativity due to diverse problem solving
approaches; (2) increased productivity when diverse employees
pull together towards a goal; (3) new
attitudes that can be beneficial; (4) a variety of language skills
that can open new markets; (5) increased

27. and deeper understanding of how the U.S. fits into the global
marketplace; and (6) the development of
new processes as a result of diverse individuals working
together. Clearly, if the managers see diversity
as a positive, these can be benefits for any diverse company.
Here is a breakdown of how I answered the questions listed on
page 1:
Who: Michael D. Lee
What: Diversity in the workplace is a benefit
Where: The U.S./U.S. companies
When: by 2008
Why: 6 reasons
How: 6 reasons