How does a diverse workforce help give organizations access to world markets?
JK: It gives you a greater understanding of people. More important, if you’re expanding internationally, it gives you a bridge to other cultures. If you have people who, through friendship or kinship or cultural ties, can relate to a transnational network or ethnic group, that can open doors for you. Businesspeople can find, linked to their own workforce, the personal relationships, the cultural understandings, and the access to networks that are essential to succeed in today’s global markets. It’s not the case that this understanding always reveals common interests; sometimes it reveals deep differences that can serve as a warning flag. American companies, for instance, entered into relationships with Japanese companies in particular with the assumption that the Japanese were looking at the transaction in the same way an Anglo-Saxon would look at it. That turned out to be a tremendous mistake. They never understood that somebody might accept a very low profit margin for a long period
