National Network for Equitable Library Service

Organizations need innovation, and there is a powerful source right under their noses. Scholar and consultant David C. Thomas says the same forces of globalization that have created today’s superheated competitive environment have also provided a potential hidden advantage: the multiculturals in your midst. Thomas cites extensive research and examples showing that multiculturals—people who have deep experience in more than one culture—have developed skills and abilities that organizations can leverage in the service of innovation. They have a broader worldview. Having to integrate different cultural values has forced them to develop more complex ways of thinking and makes them better able to see new patterns and connections. Their heightened empathy, the result of learning to adapt to sometimes wildly different locations, customs, and beliefs, helps them build support for their ideas and work effectively on the teams that implement those ideas. This book makes a powerful business case for recognizing and cultivating a new dimension of diversity—the diversity within individuals! Thomas looks at how people express their multicultural identities and how to establish the organizational conditions under which multiculturals can flourish, and he shows how even the most monocultural among us can achieve the advantages of a multicultural mind.