Author: Stephanie Denning / Source: Forbes
The Met Gala, held this past Monday, is always a nice way to start the week. It happily breaks up the monotony of a Monday. The Met Gala, while officially a fundraiser for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, is unofficially a very expensive costume party that offers the rest of us fodder about who wore what that following Tuesday.
This year though, Tuesday morning fodder was not about who wore what, but instead about who showed up with whom. Announced hours before the event, Elon Musk appeared as the date of Grimes, a musician who I embarrassingly admit I had never heard of. While athletes, models, and actresses intermingle seamlessly, an Elon Musk guest appearance raised a lot of business eyebrows. The only person who didn’t appear to feel awkward about it was Musk himself.
In light of the facetious feud earlier this week between Musk and Warren Buffett over who could run a more successful candy operation, it seemed to be right in keeping with Musk’s personality. And it was another reminder of how rare it is to find a CEO with so much personality.
The Uniformity In Business Today
Businesses today are so uniform, a fact that has come to the fore amidst the MeToo movement and the emerging discussions on diversity. Bigger, older corporations are especially susceptible to this phenomenon as they try to enforce uniformity across employees. If you have ever undergone a corporate employee evaluation, it doesn’t take long for you to realize they are essentially sculpting employees to become increasingly alike. It inevitably breeds regression to the mean.
The longer you stay, the more you become like everyone else in the organization, a prospect that can be terrifying. A diversion from the mean is rarely celebrated. But why is there such a stigma around it? An organization’s desire to cling to uniformity is at the ultimate detriment of that organization.Older, larger corporations and businesses are often cited as the primary culprits of uniformity in the workplace. But they are not the only ones prone to this line of thinking. Startups like to believe that they promote diversity. It might be true in that they have a more relaxed culture, but not a more diverse one. If you’ve spent time at more than one startup you know there is usually one predominant culture. There is usually one predominant culture in the same way that a fraternity has a predominant culture: it isn’t any more inclusive than a corporation. Perhaps the…
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