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Fox News
07-05-2025
- Business
- Fox News
DEI is dead. Here's what should come next
Join Fox News for access to this content Plus special access to select articles and other premium content with your account - free of charge. By entering your email and pushing continue, you are agreeing to Fox News' Terms of Use and Privacy Policy, which includes our Notice of Financial Incentive. Please enter a valid email address. Having trouble? Click here. When President Lyndon Johnson's later-Vice President Hubert Humphrey championed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he exclaimed, "I will eat my hat if this leads to racial quotas." Following the meteoric rise of DEI over the past few years, Humphrey would need a new hat. Now, the DEI fad is rightly fading. The Supreme Court overturned affirmative action. Corporations jettisoned DEI upon realizing it improved neither workplace culture nor the bottom line. President Donald Trump eliminated DEI in government and is rooting out remaining discriminatory DEI practices in the private sector. But what's truly remarkable isn't DEI's demise, but the extraordinary uniformity of its adoption — uniformity that, once dismantled, will allow for a plurality of policies for hiring, promoting and retaining the right workforce, tailored to each companies' individual goals. TRUMP'S CRACKDOWN ON HARVARD, 'WOKE' COLLEGES WILL TAKE MORE THAN 100 DAYS TO LEAVE LASTING REFORM: PROFESSOR Make no mistake, the DEI orthodoxy demanded faithful allegiance to a narrow set of rules. When 2,500 CEOs signed the identical "CEO Action for Diversity & Inclusion" pledge, they committed their companies to identical practices like holding unconscious bias trainings and making "progress" on demographic metrics — regardless of how these policies might affect their specific businesses. LGBTQ+ organizations like the Human Rights Campaign established scoring systems that effectively required companies to offer employees identical transgender medical benefits packages to earn a coveted "100% rating" — practices that in any other context might raise antitrust concerns. This conformity defied business logic. No company would adopt identical marketing strategies or pricing models as their competitors — yet somehow, they embraced identical approaches to what's arguably their most crucial asset: their employees. Chief Talent Officers and HR departments responsible for implementing, and now dismantling, DEI efforts should be leaders in what follows — a flourishing of new ideas and methods to identify and retain the best and brightest employees based on their skills and cultural fit. This ability to innovate should be welcome. The DEI movement stifled innovation in human resource departments. Every company says they want to attract great employees and build a winning culture. Corporate executives know engaged employees are the difference between top and bottom quartile performing companies. Yet 73% of publicly traded U.S. companies adopted increasingly rigid DEI commitments. Companies as diverse as SalesForce, Target, Coca-Cola and Bank of America implemented hiring quotas, exclusive race-based access programs, and/or implicit bias training under the DEI banner. No other department saw the mass adoption of the same ideology. There are thousands of methods for sales teams to increase revenue. ABC — Always Be Closing. SPIN Selling — Situation, Problem, Implication and Need-payoff. PLG - Product Led Growth, etc. Marketing departments also have endless ways to reach new customers. Three C's – Company, Customer, Competitor. Four P's – Product, Price, Place, Promotion. Five M's – Mission, Money, Message, Media and Measurement. Financiers are always dreaming up new and exotic ways to value companies (remember WeWork's "Community Adjusted EBITDA" metric?); in their eyes, GAAP is not a standard to be met, but a challenge to be overcome. Yet HR departments across the nation got stuck with the same-old DEI. Now market observers are asking what comes next. But the question isn't "what single approach replaces DEI?" but rather "why should there be a singular approach?" There's good reason to be skeptical of replacing one universal mandate with another. Consider what happens when central planning ends in any sector: innovation flourishes. When the government broke up AT&T's monopoly in the 1980s, telecommunications transformed from a stagnant utility to the dynamic foundation of the digital economy. When the government deregulated the airlines in the 1970s, air travel became within reach of middle-class Americans. The end of DEI's monopoly on talent strategy promises a similar renaissance, so long as companies are willing to experiment to find the right approach to meet their unique needs. CLICK HERE FOR MORE FOX NEWS OPINION Forward-thinking companies are already taking the plunge. Some tech companies are adopting MEI – Merit, Excellence, Intelligence. Maybe police and fire departments want to adopt BRAVE – Bold, Reliable, Accountable, Vigilant, Empathetic. Healthcare workers could adopt CARE – Compassionate, Adaptable, Respectful, Empowered. Construction companies could recruit for STEEL – Skilled, Trustworthy, Efficient, Enduring, Leaders. There are endless opportunities for companies to clearly articulate who is a good fit for their organization. This isn't abandoning workplace diversity — it's enabling its most meaningful form. Research has consistently shown that cognitive diversity — that is, differences in how people think, rather than how they look — increases innovation, creativity and problem-solving. Companies that cultivate this deeper form of diversity will be positioned to outperform. There will also be greater diversity in hiring approaches more broadly. Some companies may focus on recruiting overlooked talent from Appalachia or first-generation college students. Others might emphasize retention and internal development. Some may adopt high-churn models that rapidly test talent on the job. A few might maintain their grip on their race- and gender-focused DEI policies — albeit with increased legal risk. Companies will experiment, and the free market will decide who wins. This approach mirrors America's greatest economic success stories. When soldiers returned from World War II, President Harry Truman didn't send them all to dig ditches. They became entrepreneurs, factory workers, artists and inventors — and unleashed the greatest economic boom in American history. Similarly, as companies are freed from DEI's rigid orthodoxy, they can develop individual approaches to building workforces that they believe will maximize their chances for future success. CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP The DEI movement stifled innovation in human resource departments. Every company says they want to attract great employees and build a winning culture. Companies will of course have to apply metrics to their chosen strategies to evaluate performance, but individuals should be recruited and promoted based on whatever race- and gender-neutral criteria their company has set. This will lead to better employee fit, lower turnover and improved corporate performance. It will also make good on the Civil Rights Act's promise to eliminate discrimination, while rendering race and gender quotas a relic of the past. Even Hubert Humphrey would take off his hat to that. CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM ANSON FRERICKS
Forbes
01-04-2025
- Automotive
- Forbes
The United States Does For Housing What Singapore Had For Cars
There is a great article in the New York Times about Singapore's policy on cars which makes it prohibitively expensive to own and drive a car. I thought it would be a great interesting to take the article and roughly replace the word 'car' in the article with the word 'housing' and 'Singapore' with 'the United States.' Reading the article with the lens of housing falls into the category of Hubert Humphrey's ad deriding the idea of Spiro Agnew as Vice President as 'it would be funny if weren't so serious.' The article, titled, Why Driving in Singapore is 'Like Wearing a Rolex, is replete with opportunities to call out the similarities with how we handle housing in the United States. It starts with the headline itself. Why Housing in the United States is 'Like Wearing a Rolex.' Here's a really good language swap from the article. Here's the original paragraph. 'Singapore, an island city-state that is smaller than New York City, charges drivers thousands of dollars just for the right to buy a vehicle. The price of the permits, which were introduced in 1990 to limit pollution and congestion, rises with a car's value.' Here's my Mad Lib version. 'New York, an island city that is bigger than Singapore, charges people who need housing thousands of dollars just for the right to buy or rent a home. The price of the permits, and zoning which was introduced in 1920s to limit greed and profiteering, rises with a home or apartment's value.' There's even the hard luck story so common in housing stories in the United States. There's the story of Joy Fang who bought an old Hyundai three years ago for $58,000, 'nearly twice the price the pre-permit price of a new model of that sedan.' Shocking. I'm not even going to link to one of the thousands of stories that highlight how much a person or family is spending on renting a home or buying one. Here's the Times about Fang's car. 'Each month the couple pays about $1,400, or more than 10 percent of their household budget, for the car, the permit, and other expenses like road taxes, fuel and parking. To offset the cost, they cut back on eating out and traveling.' Here's my version, doctored up for housing in the United States. 'Each month the couple pays about $4,400, or more than 30 percent of their household budget, for the house, the zoning permits, and other expenses like property taxes, other taxes, and parking. To offset the cost, they cut back on eating out and traveling.' But here's the big difference between the hassle of owning and driving a car in Singapore and housing in the United States: in Singapore there are substitutes. Another subject in the Times story says, 'We're not sitting in traffic for two or three hours just to get to work.' The resident of Singapore articulates that 'having an efficient public transport system also makes it easier for Singaporeans to not use a car, and he takes it himself when he needs to go downtown.' There is no substitute for housing. If a public policy taxes and regulates a commodity to the point that it is far too painful to buy and own it, but offers alternatives, then people will likely give up the commodity. In the case of Singapore, the Times story notes, 'There is little reason for many Singaporeans to own a car. Most residents rely on an expanding and affordable public transportation system that stretches across the island. Even long journeys cost less than 2.50 Singapore dollars, or about $2, and ride-hailing platforms such as Grab are plentiful.' The substitute for owning a home in the United States is renting, but what is the substitute for renting? There isn't one. When poor people are pressed because housing is too expensive, they're faced with the same challenge Fang describes, cutting back on other necessities or trying to effectively manage limited cash flow. To me, it is clear, Singapore decided to constrain the ownership and operating of a car for policy reasons – climate change, infrastructure savings etc. – but it also created an off ramp (pun intended) for people to find alternatives to owning and operating a car. Zoning and other regulations, taxes, fees, and fines for housing in the United States function just like the limits on car ownership in Singapore, except that public policy here has failed to provide any alternatives. Instead, if we follow the analogy, we create limits on owning and renting a home, then we limit the supply of subsidized alternatives with even more regulation making the cost of Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) housing, for example, prohibitive too. Imagine if Singapore did what it has done with cars but limited ridership of public transit, produced very routes, and created waiting lists for a trip. Whatever one thinks of Singapore's policy, applying it to housing through zoning and regulation is misguided at best and at worst, a cruel punishment for people who earn less money.
