Posts Tagged ‘Supplier Diversity’
Diversity Dividends: Reducing Bias
Bias is the very human and perhaps unfair preference for or dislike of something. Its synonyms include prejudice, partiality and favoritism. At the heart of the original equal opportunity movement, laws and regulations were enacted to mitigate conscious bias in American education, employment and procurement opportunities. As SDMWVBE (Small, Disadvantaged, Minority, Women, or Veteran Business…
Read MoreInclusion 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.…
Read MoreShameless Request for Votes!
We’ve applied for a Mission Main Street℠ Grant in Chase’s program that will award twelve (12) small businesses with grants of $250,000 in January 2014. You can learn about last year’s program and listen to interviews with last year’s winners. Abator, always a WBE, knows getting certified as diversity owned can be challenging for small businesses. And…
Read MoreInclusion Dividend: Business Case
In late June, we talked a bit about The Inclusion Dividend: Why Investing in Diversity & Inclusion Pays Off by Mark Kaplan and Mason Donovan, with the intent of relating its concepts to supplier diversity; and, how it might apply to us as SDMWVBE (Small, Disadvantaged, Minority, Women or Veteran Business Enterprise) businesses. Chapter two’s…
Read MoreAccountability
We planned a series on The Inclusion Dividend, and we’ll get back to that next post — but we discovered a stunning article about the SBA’s new WOSB (women owned small business) certification that merits comment. Fierce Government reports that NASA audited their fiscal 2010 contracts awarded to self-certified WOSB firms and found that 35…
Read MoreInclusion 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…
Read MoreNOT 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…
Read MoreThoughts on Supplier Diversity
It is almost spring, that time of year when many supplier diversity systems send out emails about updating records and providing copies of recently issued or re-issued certifications, again. I’m not sure whether our targeted clients understand how disheartened a SDMWVBE (Small, Disadvantaged, Minority, Women or Veteran Business Enterprise) can become when we’ve taken great care to research and prepare presentations to show…
Read MoreGetting SMWVDBE Certified
It seems that many companies have SMWVDBE (Small, Minority, Women, Veteran, Disadvantaged Business Enterprise) certification on their minds as the new year begins. So, it makes sense to revisit what certification is all about and why a business might want to get certified. What is a certification? SMWVDBE certifications are offered by the Small Business Adminstration,…
Read MoreHow 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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