Supplier Diversity: Food for Thought by Kenton Clarke by Kenton Clarke For starters, let me share a brief definition about supplier diversity for those who may be unfamiliar with the term. “Supplier diversity is a business program amongst Fortune 1000 companies that encourages the use of privately-held companies owned by historically under-utilized businesses when purchasing goods/services.” Over the last two years, layoffs, program elimination and the overall economy have caused setbacks within supplier diversity programs. Today, there are indications that these setbacks have leveled off and appear to be on an upward trend. During this era, we have seen hiring
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Fortune 500 Diversity Procurement by Kenton Clarke Since the early 1950s, companies that supply the Federal government with goods and services have been required by law to have a supplier diversity program or initiative and to appoint a supplier diversity professional to manage the program. While these efforts typically began as token initiatives to meet the regulatory requirements, many large American companies have now developed world-class programs that provide substantial opportunity to historically under-represented groups and businesses. Unfortunately, there has been a distressing tendency in recent years for big corporations to measure the success of their supplier diversity programs by
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By Sondra Thiederman, Ph.D. The very fact that the title of this article links the subject of unconscious bias with a diagnostic machine and even a vegetable sure says something about the innovative work researchers are doing in this important field of study. I’m thinking, in particular, here of Susan Fiske, a social psychologist at Princeton University. Dr. Fiske and her colleagues built their research on earlier studies that measured the effect on the brain when white subjects viewed black faces. These studies found that, when the faces were seen, the wariness center of the brain (the amygdala) would spike.
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The Contribution of Supplier Diversity to Competitive Advantage Leonard Greenhalgh | Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth Michael Robinson | IBM Corporation Introduction Many leading corporations have sophisticated supplier diversity programs. These exist when there is strong support from visionary senior managers who see the strategic advantage of ensuring long-term supply chain excellence. In the absence of such vision, the focus is on the next quarterly accounting report: In that context, the procurement function is judged on achievement of short-term savings and the supplier diversity function is dismissed as superfluous and a target for budget-cuts. In this article, we show
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