RACONTEUR - July 25, 2017 

Diversity has become a business buzzword in recent times, with numerous C-suite executives viewing it as simply a tick-box exercise, alas. And yet a growing welter of evidence suggests the manifold advantages of utilizing diverse supply chains - engaging suppliers from ethnic, racial and gender minorities - are too significant to be ignored.

 

In the UK there is much work to be done in this area, however, and in truth, when it comes to encouraging such a progressive approach, most of the world is some way behind pioneers in the United States. Indeed, the very idea of supplier diversity was triggered by the epochal American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

 

It is little coincidence that on March 5, 1969, less than a year after the Civil Rights Act, popularly known as the Fair Housing Act, President Richard Nixon, who had taken office only six weeks earlier, signed the game-changing Executive Order 11458 that stipulated government agencies and their contractors should partner up with minority-owned companies.

It soon became apparent that to prevent fraud, rigorous third-party certification was required; hence the National Minority Supplier Development Council (NMSDC) was formed in 1971 to determine which organizations qualified for minority business enterprise (MBE) status.

In the subsequent four-and-a-half decades, a cluster of other national units have been established in the US to foster growth for diverse business types and address the needs of various affinity groups, including women, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals, and those with disabilities.

 

And now, even though the NMSDC, which aims to "support and facilitate MBE integration into corporate and public sector supply chains" by matching in excess of 12,000 certified MBEs to its "vast network of corporate members who wish to purchase their products, services and solutions", has the likes of Apple, Google, Amazon, Walmart and more than 300 more top corporate organizations on its books, there remains a frustratingly backward-looking attitude at boardroom level, according to Joset Wright-Lacy, president of the organization.