Reflections on workplace diversity.

Cultivating workplace diversity is the right thing to do. It's the right thing ethically, and the right thing for employees, for customers, and for business. Speech to the Diversity Network, Calgary, October 28, 1996.

I'd like to begin my remarks with a story. A number of years ago we hired an employee as a teller in one of our branches. A few weeks after this individual began work, he was called into the branch manager's office for a discussion.

The manager was a good boss and a good mentor; and he wanted to tell the employee the facts of life about working for the bank. He told him not to expect to rise too far in the organization. When the young man asked why, the manager replied:

"You've got an accent." You weren't born in Canada. And you're not Anglo-Saxon. Basically, you've got the wrong name and the wrong background for advancement." He went on to say that the best the employee could hope for was to some day become a branch manager.

I was that young employee.

The irony is, that at the time I was considered an example of the bank's progressive hiring practices. Somehow, the significance of this honor eluded me. In the space of a few moments, I had been banished to a wilderness of diminished expectations -- all because of my name, the way I spoke, and my country of origin.

That was my first encounter with what today we call "organizational culture" -- that unconscious, unspoken, unexamined set of assumptions and beliefs that shape the life of an institution.

Back then, this culture often assumed a particularly crude and insidious from -because of its obvious unfairness and discriminatory overtones. And it wasn't confined just to CIBC. It was the reality throughout much of corporate Canada.

We'll never know how many talented, creative, productive people were denied the opportunity to realize their full potential during this era. I was fortunate. The sixties arrived. Attitudes changed. Corporations began to change many unfair hiring and promotion practices. And there was more opportunity for more people with talent and drive.

That's one experience that shaped my views on diversity -- knowing what it's like to be on the outside, having to overcome obstacles which others don't, simply because you're different.

My second formative experience took place in the early 1970s.

I had just been assigned to the Far East and was in Japan with my wife. One day we decided to see a movie. Since neither of us were fluent in Japanese, we chose a film in English, with Japanese subtitles. There was a long line-up at the theater, but eventually we got to the cashier and I asked for two tickets. She refused to sell them to me and motioned for us to step aside. I repeated my request -- and again she refused.

I was furious at what seemed to be a clear case of discrimination -- aimed at us because we were foreigners.

At this point a young Japanese man, who spoke English, approached us to explain what was going on. He said it was common in his country for people to stand in theaters once all the seats had been sold out. The cashier knew this wasn't the custom in the West. So she was telling us to wait and she'd provide tickets for a later showing with available seating.

Naturally, I was embarrassed. I had rashly attributed mean motives to someone who was trying to treat us with empathy and respect. But my Western culture and upbringing prevented me from seeing that.

This time, I was the problem.

That one incident taught me how deeply embedded, in all of us, our cultural assumptions are -- and how easily they can distort perception and become barriers to communication. As Anafs Nin has observed, "We don't see things as they are; we see things as we are."

And so it is with institutions. While Canadian corporations no longer endorse overt discrimination, their cultures still allow more …