April 27th, 2007
Next week I will be in Atlanta for the Summit on Leading Diversity. It looks to be a pretty good lineup:
- Ted Childs, former VP, Global Workforce Diversity, IBM
- Brad Cohen , author of Front of the Class: How Tourette Syndrome Made Me the Teacher I Never Had
- Johnnetta Cole, President of Bennett College
- Irshad Manji, author of The Trouble with Islam and award winning TV personality
- Samantha Tan , World Café Host
- Blair Underwood, actor, director, producer
Skill-Building Learning Tracks
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Track 1 – Diversity Essentials: Everything You Need to Build, Manage, and Sustain a Successful Diversity Program
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Track 2 -The Next Decade of Talent Management: Opportunities, Challenges, and Solutions
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Track 3 -Enhanced Leadership Skills: Connecting Diversity to Business Performance
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Track 4 – Business Simulations: Applying Diversity Management Competencies to Top Line Growth Strategy
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Track 5 – Being a Global Company: Increasing Organizational Effectiveness through Cross-Cultural Competence
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Track 6 – Understanding Key Diversity Issues: The Pathway to an Inclusive Work Environment
I am looking forward to going back to Atlanta, I always enjoy visiting the city. I am also looking foward to the conference, but my expectations are not terribly high. In all honesty I have been consistently underwhelmed by local, regional and national diversity conferences that I have attended. I hope that this one will be the exception. I have attended many workshops, presentations and conferences over the past five years and I just am not seeing / hearing the new ideas, tools and strategies that I am looking for. There are always some great speakers and I enjoy the networking, so I am not saying that any of the events I have attended have been a waste of time, I just do not know that the discipline of Organizational Diversity and Inclusion work is evolving. I know that there are a lot of new ideas and strategies coming out of the Human Capital and Talent Management fields, and that some of them are applicable to diversity and inclusion work. I am just wondering why there does not seem to be new ideas and strategies coming out of the diversity domain. Maybe I am attending the wrong type of events or maybe I am looking for the wrong things. At any rate, I am hoping to come home from Atlanta with some new tools. I will let you know.