I’m the CEO of a consumer retail brand group, and I’m a big believer that customer intimacy is at the heart of every successful consumer brand. One of the important parts of my job is to set a strategy for the company that gets us as close to our customer as we possibly can be. Deeply understanding your customer is one key to building long-standing customer relationships, as well as a strong and lasting brand reputation to driving long term success. I’m also a believer in diversity of teams in the workplace. I believe diversity of perspective will almost always result in solutions or strategies that are significantly better than what would result from a homogenous team.
It struck me last week that if I value diversity so much, then why is our company’s management dominated by women? When I say “dominated,” I really mean dominated. 95% of the managers in the company are women.