Mitt Romney’s performance with voters of color was epic – nine out of ten Romney voters was white on Election Day. His campaign made tons of miscalculations about just how big the black vote would be and how motivated those voters might look. Might a more diverse staff have helped?
Romney ran on his business acumen and his purported ability to find pragmatic solutions to big problems. But his failed campaign might inadvertently make a great business-school case study on the many ways diversity matters. Yes, there are lots of obvious, compelling moral and ethical reasons for making diversity an organizational goal, but there are practical, functional ones, too: Organizations with narrow fields of vision become institutionally incapable of spotting where the icebergs ahead are located. Romney’s campaign apparently didn’t even acknowledge that there might be icebergs.