Merit is the only survivable approach for organizations that intend to survive both intense competition and change. When I was a manager I needed to know what my reports were good at and I tried to know what they liked doing so that I could try and assign them tasks that they were good at and at least liked a little. Yes, as possible I would try to get them to grow their skills and try new activities, but they had to be at least competent and preferably proficient in their assignments.
But the identification of skills and the pursuit of merit requires honesty and critical judgement, not kindness and mercy. My dauther who is now a civil engineer started college wanting to do a dual major of electrical and mechanical engineering so that she could do medical prosthetics - except she did not like circuits or non-inertial reference frames. So she switched to civil engineering - structures - where she deals with earthquake loading with dynamic body forces (another way of handling non-inertial reference frames). But she changed her career choice in response to relative weakness / aptitude. My son was going to do engineering until he hit Integral Calculus for Engineers, which he got a C in, so he switched his career path to Business and now does data security. But honesty about his relative strengths and weaknesses caused him to change his career choices. You need to make these choices intelligently and early.
I did not concern myself with DEI in any way in my guidance to them, it was irrelevant. My questions concerned strengths, weaknesses, and interests, and how they mapped to requirements of different career paths that they could choose among.
Yes, the concepts of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion give one absolutely no insight into how an individual can succeed. That should tell you that it is also useless in giving insight into how a society or institution can succeed.
Yes, I will write more about this in another article, but the post-modernist assumption that there is no material reality (or at least human cannot understand it enough) was a key step from Marxist materialism. It is my belief that the Post-modernists were trying to explain why Marx’s predictions of the working class achieving a revolutionary consciousness were incorrect.
Diversity is a good thing. Organizations should strive to invite cognitive diversity as this should result in better decision making (less group think). The problem with DEI initiatives is that by focusing on cookie-cutter categories of people, which also tends to emphasize only outward appearances, the result is often less cognitive diversity. Long term, it will make these organization less effective as they will tend to be increasingly subject to group-think and be very error-prone. I suspect that many American Universities are already at this point.
Merit is the only survivable approach for organizations that intend to survive both intense competition and change. When I was a manager I needed to know what my reports were good at and I tried to know what they liked doing so that I could try and assign them tasks that they were good at and at least liked a little. Yes, as possible I would try to get them to grow their skills and try new activities, but they had to be at least competent and preferably proficient in their assignments.
But the identification of skills and the pursuit of merit requires honesty and critical judgement, not kindness and mercy. My dauther who is now a civil engineer started college wanting to do a dual major of electrical and mechanical engineering so that she could do medical prosthetics - except she did not like circuits or non-inertial reference frames. So she switched to civil engineering - structures - where she deals with earthquake loading with dynamic body forces (another way of handling non-inertial reference frames). But she changed her career choice in response to relative weakness / aptitude. My son was going to do engineering until he hit Integral Calculus for Engineers, which he got a C in, so he switched his career path to Business and now does data security. But honesty about his relative strengths and weaknesses caused him to change his career choices. You need to make these choices intelligently and early.
I did not concern myself with DEI in any way in my guidance to them, it was irrelevant. My questions concerned strengths, weaknesses, and interests, and how they mapped to requirements of different career paths that they could choose among.
Yes, the concepts of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion give one absolutely no insight into how an individual can succeed. That should tell you that it is also useless in giving insight into how a society or institution can succeed.
DEI latches onto situations where there is no intense competition and change and where individual underperformance isn't immediately catastrophic.
1) Government
2) Natural Monopolies and Oligopolies
3) Mature Companies with a "moat"
The thing is that describes an awful large chunk of our economy (probably over 50%).
DEI is just a more in your face version of the old Affirmative Action deal with blacks. More clients making greater demands.
In your view, is there a role of post modernism and a flawed view about reality as a progenitor for the DEI ideas?
Yes, I will write more about this in another article, but the post-modernist assumption that there is no material reality (or at least human cannot understand it enough) was a key step from Marxist materialism. It is my belief that the Post-modernists were trying to explain why Marx’s predictions of the working class achieving a revolutionary consciousness were incorrect.
Diversity is a good thing. Organizations should strive to invite cognitive diversity as this should result in better decision making (less group think). The problem with DEI initiatives is that by focusing on cookie-cutter categories of people, which also tends to emphasize only outward appearances, the result is often less cognitive diversity. Long term, it will make these organization less effective as they will tend to be increasingly subject to group-think and be very error-prone. I suspect that many American Universities are already at this point.