Geek Strong

If you’ve been reading our posts, it may be apparent we’re readers (for some of us, books are the drug of choice).  So what do quirky actress Felicia Day [author of You’re Never Weird on the Internet (almost)] and social scientist Brené Brown [author of Rising Strong] have of interest to SDMWVLGBTBE (Small, Disadvantaged/Disabled, Minority,…

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Intentional Diversity

We started this blog five years ago, with a sense of continuing hope that remains strong despite recent and recurring public incidents of violent bigotry. Last year we published multiple entries about The Inclusion Dividend: Why Investing in Diversity & Inclusion Pays Off by Mark Kaplan and Mason Donovan. The theme of these entries centered…

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What’s In Store for 2015?

Happy, happy, merry, merry and all of that holiday jazz with Best Wishes for 2015 from all of us at Abator and GetDiversityCertified.com. A famous Dickens’ character says “May I have some more, please”? That’s what we want – more diversity in the workplace and market place. And, if recent news articles are any indication,…

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Size Standards Revised!

Claiming Small Business Status? It is important to know that there are sizing rules and regulations that you must use to determine whether or not your business is considered small. And, the definition of small depends on your business’s industry based on NAICS (North American Industry Classification System) codes. At the federal level, being classified as…

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Colorful Arms

Spending some time on Facebook last week, I saw that a photographer friend had re-posted a photograph that really caught my attention: This reminded me that supplier diversity has its roots in the equal opportunity legislation of the late 1960s and early 1970s that we’ve written about in the past. In 1971, federal agencies were directed to…

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Certification Alphabet Soup (or fun with acronyms)

In the world of diversity certifications there are many acronyms, some more familiar than others. This alphabet soup contains WBE, MBE, DBE, SBE, VBE, DSBE, HUB, LGBT and that’s only half of them. Some of the abbreviations are shared by government and third-party certifiers (MBE, WBE) and others are specific to the Federal government (8(a),…

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Inclusion Dividends: Taking the Initiative

During the summer, we talked about The Inclusion Dividend: Why Investing in Diversity & Inclusion Pays Off by Mark Kaplan and Mason Donovan, intending to relate the book’s concepts to supplier diversity and how we SDMWVBE (Small, Disadvantaged, Minority, Women, or Veteran Business Enterprise) businesses might be able to incorporate this information in our organizations.…

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Inclusion Dividends

Just finished reading The Inclusion Dividend: Why Investing in Diversity & Inclusion Pays Off by Mark Kaplan and Mason Donovan.  It is a well written commentary about the history and contemporary aspects of diversity and inclusion (DI) from a human resources and organizational perspective.  I highly recommend it to all of us who care about…

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NOT One Size Fits All

There may be just one disadvantaged certification program based on the memorandum of understanding between the United States Department of Transportation and the Small Business Administration, but it would be inaccurate to say the program is standardized … each state can have completely different forms, interpretations and requirements. You can think of it as 52…

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How Long Does It Take?

Last week we fielded three calls about getting diversity certified, and while each caller had very specific questions they all had one in common — how long will it take me to get certified?   These calls come from business owners who want to get certified for a particular reason; usually because an opportunity they want…

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