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Ben Verwaayen’s (CEO of Alcatel-Lucent) take on diversity – Umesh Ramakrishnan.
I spent last week in Europe meeting various CEOs on the continent. As always, I found the conversations to be stimulating and thought provoking. One particular meeting sticks out in my mind. I met with Ben in his office in Paris. He was talking about the various ways he was meeting the many challenges of leading a global behemoth like Alcatel-Lucent. One particular topic was diversity. He felt that enough lip service had been paid to this issue. He wanted to have an impact on the leadership of his company. So, he assembled eighteen of his top leaders in a conference room and told them that there were to be no questions or comments in the meeting. He then proceeded to show them eighteen slides. Each slide had a picture of an attendee of this meeting and the number of years they had worked for Alcatel-Lucent. Click, click, click. He went through all eighteen slides and thanked them for attending. Nothing else was said. Later he sent them all a message saying he’d like to meet with each one of them in a couple of months and go through a similar presentation about each one of their direct reports. Just a photograph, name and number of years with the company. Ben believes that he left a lasting impression on his leadership team. He believes that they will take swift action to improve the diversity of their teams. The idea is not just to inject people of different backgrounds into the company but to ensure that they were drawing from the largest pool of available resources world-wide. He said, “Talent has no passport, color or background.” Powerful stuff. Sure left an impact on me. I’d bet it will leave one on the organization too.
