Mark Cuban Starts Something He Can Finish

Let me help you out and give you my thoughts on DEI
1. Diversity
Good businesses look where others don't, to find the employees that will put your business in the best possible position to succeed.
You may not agree, but I take it as a given that there are people of various… https://t.co/L00fl6ggUD

— Mark Cuban (@mcuban) January 3, 2024

So what you are saying is that when done well, DEI is a goal every company should have ? https://t.co/kD9CcgVu01

— Mark Cuban (@mcuban) January 4, 2024

The goal of every company should be to hire people that put the company in the best position to be successful. "Best" is relative to the goals.

I happen to strongly believe that if your workforce is diverse , you get a greater range of thought/ideas and a stronger… https://t.co/xyOny9CsAS

— Mark Cuban (@mcuban) January 4, 2024

If you were trying to make a stupid comment, you nailed it.

First, as an organization as a whole, yes we do.

More importantly, if you understand the value of DEI, it's not in checklists and quotas , it's in understanding how to best compete as a company.

We hire the… https://t.co/GS7t14zl9U

— Mark Cuban (@mcuban) January 4, 2024

Which is no different than what I have been saying. You expand the candidate pool and you are going to find great people that others ignore https://t.co/QwHjZOR19o

— Mark Cuban (@mcuban) January 5, 2024

"Meritocracy” too often ends up meaning “people who look/think/act like me.” Rather than looking for the best people, opponents of DEI want to associate with the people who make them most comfortable. It usually means “The people like me have merit, the people not like me, don’t.”

It’s a pernicious concept. Recently a beloved family member started railing against DEI (it had come up in conversation), and praising the superiority of meritocracy. I knew he didn’t mean it the way it sounded, that he was largely repeating knee jerk criticisms he would have, under better circumstances, rejected as thoughtless. Not 20 minutes later he was talking about his wife (who is suffering from a serious medical condition). He had recently gotten her examined by the foremost specialist in the city, because his son-in-law is a friend of the doctor’s son. I’m happy he was able to do that, but it was hardly a shining example of meritocracy. It was, in fact, the very reason why DEI is so appropriate in general (not in this example, if only because the doctor is free to see patients as he chooses). The importance of who you know still shuts out too many people. That’s the message of the story: that some people have advantages others don’t. That is a fact of life, but it has precious little to do with merit, and far more to do with the fact my niece’s husband was given several advantages by his family, as was the doctor’s son, and he and my niece all had the same advantages. That is the way of the world, but why should that system be perpetuated? And why is Mark Cuban’s defense of DEI that it is good management?

That question answers itself.  I’m not disparaging Cuban’s argument; but I begin to realize this is a question of ethics (Cuban’s argument from “social consensus”), when it should be a question of morality (an argument my family member would have understood, even as he’d understand Cuban’s, too). Are people inherently worthy, or is their worth more validly measured in their merit as employees? (DEI, after all, is about more than employee hiring practices. Ask Harvard; or maybe not. Probably not the best example, come to think of it.)

DEI is merely an effort to level the playing field. But the better argument for it is moral than some system of merit (which is only based on social consensus). But the real problem with DEI is that people see the system as a zero-sum game, and the world as operating by the rules of the theology of scarcity.