This month’s World Cup win by Germany unveils a startling societal contradiction: While diverse soccer teams win more games for their adoring fans, anti-immigrant attitudes are on the rise in Western Europe.
To become the powerhouse of world football, Germany poured more than $1 billion into football during the past decade after recognising that to succeed, German soccer needed greater social and ethnic diversity.
The proof of the principle that diversity delivers results is in the World Cup-shaped pudding bowl that German players held aloft in Rio.
The diversity principle applies in many areas beyond sport. Throughout history, diversity has been a powerful hidden driver fuelling the economic advances of our nation and the world.
Diversity unleashes richly creative problem-solving upon complex social and economic challenges.
For example, in April 2009, when urgent action was required as the global economy teetered on the brink, G20 leaders responded with a historic $1.1 trillion global stimulus package, a coordinated strategy to save jobs, businesses and economies.
This partnership produced a direct stimulus package that embraced six continents and covered 85 per cent of the global economy, including the G8 and the rising titans of Asia.
Its framework approach was better tailored for local scenarios than blunt textbook models of enforced austerity.
Debate still rages on about what ‘enabled’ this unprecedented outbreak of collaboration. For me, the answer is simple – diversity fought back against the Great Recession.
So, as Australia prepares to host this year’s G20 Leaders Summit in Brisbane in November – with its B20 curtain raiser this week – the question of how to sustain the post-GFC recovery from the Great Recession will be front of mind.
As we did in April 2009, we should leverage diversity.
For the world to embrace diversity once more, perhaps we should hold a D20 conference – which is more than a nice rhyme with the G20 and B20 – because diversity and inclusion are essential ingredients to create real and sustainable economic prosperity.
A D20 forum would leverage the existing common fabric of societies and then strengthen it by explicitly embedding and acknowledging difference within it.
McKinsey estimates that opening up of the US labour market to women in the 1970s grew their economy by an additional one third. In Australia, Goldman Sachs has estimated that lifting workforce participation by women to the same level as men would increase the size of Australia’s economy by 13 per cent – adding $195 billion to GDP in real terms!
Credit Suisse research shows that executive boards containing both men and women have outperformed all-male boards by 26 per cent during the past six years.
Multicultural managers also make a huge contribution to business success. A study conducted at L’Oreal last year showed how the unique features of multicultural teams ensured more creativity, greater sharing of complex knowledge across locations, contexts and cultures and better management of product development teams and global innovation.
On top of that, the diversity of youth has meant that the top 20 technology companies have created nearly $2 trillion of value in the past 15 years – companies founded almost entirely by people under the age of 25.
This demonstrates precisely why a D20 is needed.
The risk here is doing nothing, sitting on the sidelines rather than stepping forward to collaborate, to seize the opportunities that present.
Don’t worry about definitional debates, the core idea will forever remain true: Different flowers always make a more beautiful and robust bouquet.
In the words of inspirational US author, poet, dancer, actress and singer Maya Angelou, who died in May, “in diversity there is beauty and there is strength”.
Pottinger Joint CEO Cassandra Kelly spoke on infrastructure financing at the Sydney B20 summit, on, July 17, as part of ANZ CEO Mike Smith’s Financing Growth Taskforce on how to improve global financial regulation to support economic growth. She also spoke at the ACCI’s B20-related event, Women’s Empowerment Principles: Equality Means Business on, July 16.