Why I Left

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I believe for most publicly traded corporations, supplier diversity is a lip service situation that they use for marketing purposes. They have figured out loop holes to the rules. If all they have to report is the amount of money they have spent, and the number is over $1 billion, they can claim a certain status, but when the total procurement is $100B, $1B isn’t nearly as impressive as it sounds.

Another workaround is the consolidation method, sometimes referred to as a value-added program. The diverse supplier is a direct 1st Tier supplier that takes over the vendor management of a specific area, such as staffing services or logistics. The corporation pays them and subsequently reports that money as spend dollars. Then, the supplier sources everything else from the corporation’s original supplier base for a service fee. Millions of dollars can be transitioned out of the major supplier category into the diverse category with a simple change in the supply chain

In some cases corporations have outsourced entire business units from manufacturing to testing to packaging and delivery to a large MBEs. There are no requirements for the diverse company to share the contract and the corporation again claims all the money spent as diverse spend.

These are perfectly legal and legitimate practices, and you can’t blame the corporations, especially when the direction comes from executives and board chairs that often have no connection to why diversity is important enough to risk shareholder value to achieve.

People work to what they are held accountable to achieve. If the only metric on the table is a dollar amount or a percentage, they will find the easiest and least expensive method to meet the goal. Change comes is if the metrics are expanded so that using a single supplier to achieve a 30% report number isn’t enough.

Maybe having Corporations to report on the number of suppliers utilized or to include executive workforce in the equation may help, I don’t have the answers. I just know I walked away because I couldn’t encourage suppliers to go to conferences, shake hands and trade business cards with the hopes of a chance that may never be realized.

I still have the same passion, only now I am directing towards young people achieving their dreams in the music industry, because I love a challenge.