Zuckerberg cancelling DEI is a grim day for work

ALSO: the unexpected consequence of AI? Corporate tax is going to be the battleground

I used to work in a huge tech organisation, and it was an unspoken truth that our London office didn’t look the city we were working in. London is a brilliantly diverse city - with people from all around the world. But if you stepped inside the doors to our office it was exclusively white & middle class. Yes, there were some French people, loads of Americans, maybe a a few Italians but it was just the same profile of people from different rich countries.

I was one a handful of people who had regional accents. The company was proud of only hiring from elite universities & had a referral policy that encouraged them to bring their friends in. There were genuinely more people who had connections to royalty than there were black colleagues.

But there were consequences of this lack of diversity. Being blunt there was no empathy for customers, no understanding of people less fortunate. It was presumed that other companies would come to our offices to meet us - it was good of us to see them, after all. It had an impact on the psyche of the organisation and it became more ingrained the longer people worked there. It was presumed inside the organisation that other companies would come to our offices to meet us. It goes without saying that the senior leaders were all white men, which meant that when it came to questions like, say, should we more flexible in how we work, decisions were made based on the perspective of people who didn’t do school drop-offs. We spent four weeks a year at week long offsites abroad, creating domestic mayhem for anyone who had a personal life with responsibilities.

Let’s not unlearn all of this. Having different takes on life is important for better decision making, surely we’re not re-litigating that?

Last Friday Facebook/Meta cancelled all of its DEI programs. They will no longer have a leader focussed on diversity, it won't have any representation goals designed to reduce workforce imbalances and it immediately ended efforts to source supplies from 'diverse-owned suppliers' in the regions it serves. In the future if the senior leadership of his firm are all male, or all white then that’s fine with Mark Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg summarised his new argument by telling Joe Rogan that most companies need more masculine energy: ‘having a culture that celebrates the aggression a bit more has its own merits that are really positive’. He brought an MMA boss (who was filmed hitting his wife in a nightclub 2 years ago) to be a Meta board member.

There is a powerful counter-cultural message here. People are trying to tell you that fairness and balance is the enermy. When major news stories have broken in the US over the last year there has been an attempt to blame the DEI movement. The Baltimore bridge gets destroyed by a wayward tanker and a politician blames diversity hires, a Presidential candidate gets shot and someone steps upsaying it’s because we no longer hire big strong men. A door falls off a plane and it’s because of woke. This week the LA fires have had multiple drivebys as commentators tried to lay responsibility on equality initiatives.

This is an attempt to pull the wool over your eyes. DEI initiatives are an attempt to overcome the historic disadvantages that some groups have suffered from in society. The backlash suggests some easy alternate logic: we used to hire the best people and now we hire tokenistic candidates to signal that we’re good people.

This regressive argument his isn’t focussed on getting the best people and creating the best organisations, it’s designed to win tribal arguments that aren’t interested in evidence or data.

Not only do I think this disinterest in diversity is objectively wrong, the attempt to perform a 180 switch is just mendacious. Zuckerberg was either lying to you about what he believed last year or he’s lying to you today. By either measure he’s a liar.

Let the lesson be to all of us that when billionaire oligarchs announce something to us, ignore it. They’re just telling us what we think we want to hear. There are better leaders than this, let’s not make the mistake of copying this misguided approach.

(I put this out early because of Zuckerberg. Back again mid-week next week)

• A petition of WPP employees against the 4 day office has hit over 6000 signatures. Someone at the firm told me that most managers were ignoring the mandate as it wasn’t supported by divisional managers (who were most focussed on retaining top talent)

• Want to present better? I loved Marcus Brown (performance artist/presentation maestro) talking with Neil Perkins - fabulous

  

• I’ve given it a shout out before but the Artificial Intelligence podcast is an outstanding way to say up-to-date on the latest developments in the field. This week’s episode was outstanding. The TLDR is that the leading firms strongly believe we will reach Artificial General Intelligence in 2025/6 and Artificial Super Intelligence in 2027 (meaning machines are better than humans at many tasks.) Blah blah blah, you’ve heard all this. But what I loved this week is that they finally highlighted the big societal question that this poses - that the economy will soon need to consider raising the majority of taxation from organisations rather than individuals. (The tweet below is from an OpenAI employee raising it in a personal capacity).

This feels to me like a huge issue that might be 5 or 6 years away and barely anyone in politics is discussing. European politicians might choose to wait for Trump to depart before they tackle this one.

• Buried in this report about EY employees being fired is the revelation that the firm regularly has executives attend two simultaneous client meetings

• Looking for some evidence to beat the looming dread? These companies innovate without office mandates