Have the senior management ranks at cable operators gotten more diverse over the last year?
At this juncture, I can’t say that I’ve seen a lot of progress. I know that Comcast has put senior VPs in the marketing arena and elsewhere, like Marvin Davis. I’m not aware of any new senior hires at Time Warner. I’d have to wait to assess the results of our latest employment survey to be more definitive. “When it comes to the senior level, SVP and above, that’s where we have a lot of work to do,” says NAMIC’s Kathy Johnson. Diversity advocates cite Verizon and AT&T as model organizations for their workplace diversity and multicultural marketing. What are they doing right? Verizon and AT&T have great reputations for having diversity in their senior management ranks–management with decision-making capacity. They have affinity groups [in the workplace representing] different ethnicities, like African-American, Hispanic and Asian. Those groups come together regularly to express their concerns, similar to the diversity council model a lot of companies in our industry have. That’s a proce
