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.