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| Best Practices |
Diverse Approaches
Suzanne McGee
03/01/2005
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Most recently, the board wanted to enhance its marketing expertise, and ended up with a list of both men and women. The board nominated—and shareholders elected—Kathi Seifert, former executive vice president of Kimberly-Clark.
Johnston admits that this was not simply serendipity at work. During the 28 years he spent as an executive at General Electric, in particular his years overseeing GE’s medical products business in Europe, he grew to value diversity of all kinds. In Europe, he recalls, “we had men and women from 30 or 40 different countries working for that group; there wasn’t anyone, customer or supplier, who we couldn’t talk to in any language. We connected better with customers and developed better products because we had diverse viewpoints.” Eighty-five percent of Albertsons’ customers are women, making the gender breakdown an issue for Johnston at all levels of the company, right up to the boardroom. “Women have insights into our customers that no man can match, frankly,” Johnston says. Women, he argues, know how women shop, from how they react to product displays to the route they take through a store.Nouveau Networking
Minority groups argue there are solid business reasons for increasing representation of women and minority groups in the boardroom. HACR’s Martinez notes that, according to federal government data, Hispanics own 40 percent of all minority-run small businesses in the United States. “From a market perspective, any company that isn’t pursuing [the Hispanic] market in any way they can isn’t being responsible to its shareholders,” he argues. “And to pursue that market, you need someone who understands it right at the boardroom table.”
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