Mock Trials and Diverse Teams

I judged a collegiate mock trial competition yesterday at the Anderson School of Management,  UCLA.  

I had the great good pleasure of watching Berkeley's and UCLA's teams mix it up -- both astonishingly talented and UCLA's a recent National Champion.  

I'm hoping that these talented students' rhetorical, critical thinking, performing arts and persuasion skills will be put to beneficial use in a future with fewer and fewer actual trials for anyone to try.  

Not only were these young people ridiculously impressive, each team was a self-selected meritocracy blind to gender, race, and nationality in all ways other than personal style -- which is what trial advocacy is all about -- style.  

Of course we have monumental civil rights advocate, Martin Luther King, Jr. largely to thank for this.  The man whose holiday it is today.

We Have Much Work to Do

I know there's much work to do, particularly since I mediate, from time to time, employment discrimination cases.  We shouldn't forget the distance we have travelled nor rest on some presumed laurels for our efforts.  

As late as the early nineties, Columbia Law School Professor Patricia J. Williams in her groundbreaking legal memoir The Alchemy of Race and Rights had this to say about the impetus for her book.  

I don't know how to find something to write about in the panic of this deadly world.  There is more in the news than even my depression can consume.  Then I see it.  A concise, modular, yet totally engaging item on the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour: Harvard Law School cannot find one black woman on the entire planet who is good enough to teach there, because we're all too stupid.  (Well, that's not precisely what was said.  It was more like they couldn't find anyone smart enough.  To be fair, what Associate Dean Louis Kaplow actually said was that Harvard would have to "lower its standards," which of course Harvard simply cannot do.)

"We have gone so far beyond that," I am thinking, before Professor Williams reminds me that I do not need to be race conscious because society doesn't define me by the color of my skin.  

A man with whom I used to work once told me that I made too much of my race.  "After all," he said, "I don't even think of you as black."  Yet sometime later, when another black woman became engaged in an ultimately unsuccessful tenure battle, he confided to me that he wished the school could find more blacks like me.  I felt myself slip in and and out of shadow, as I became nonblack for purposes of inclusion and black for purposes of exclusion; I felt the boundaries of my very body manipulated, casually inscribed by definitional demarcations that did not refer to me.

I leave this with you to ponder; to imagine yourself so "casually inscribed."  Because negotiation is all about anticipating your negotiating partner's strategy.  And you can't anticipate without being able to see things from the "other's" point of view.  So empathy is a fundamental negotiation skill.

Why is Diversity Important in Business?  

On the issue "why diversity" I once again take guidance from Kellogg School of Management's Leigh L. Thompson.  

What are the key advantages of having teams composed of diverse members?  There are several compelling reasons.

• Expanded talent pool:  First and foremost, the company that does not tolerate or promote diversity has access to a smaller amount of corporate talent -- the less diversity, the less likelihood of recruiting and maintaining talented individuals.
• Multiple viewpoints:  Diverse (or heterogeneous) teams are more likely to come up with creative solutions and solve problems more accurately than are homogeneous teams . . . Heterogeneous groups are more effective than are homogeneous groups at solving complex problems.  Groups whose charter members are ethnically diverse socialize newcomers more readily than groups with all Anglo founders.
• Better decision making:  Diverse decision-making teams make better decisions than teams that lack diversity.  For example, all-male or male-dominated teams make decisions that are overaggressive.
• Competitive Advantage:  The key reason why diversity is so advantageous is that by sampling from a larger pool of potential team members, teams increase their competitive advantage.  That is, nondiverse teams have a smaller talent pool to recruit from, which can only hurt their performance.

Leigh L. Thompson, Making the Team, A Guide for Managers (2d ed. 2004) at 81.

And really, America without diversity is like America without New Orleans.  It's America without jazz or the blues and who really wants to live in that America anyway?