Cultural diversity, colourful future
Prof Richard Scase is one of the UK’s most authoritative business forecasters. Tonight he gives the keynote address at Birmingham Professional DiverCity’s fourth annual lecture where he will tell his audience that Birmingham is ideally placed to harness and develop its huge pool of talent – but must fully embrace diversity if it is to do so.

Birmingham, with its highly diverse population, is in a prime position to realise the huge business opportunities of the 21st century. The increasing number of professional business services means that, because of the huge cultural diversity within the city, it very much has the opportunity to encourage companies in the Birmingham area to be outward and international-looking and therefore potentially to realise the huge opportunities in a restructured modern economy.

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And people from a diverse background, from communities and families who have come from very diverse experiences, have a common mindset and outlook which should encourage innovation, creativity and experimentation which, in turn, really should encourage the prosperity of business in Birmingham, more so than any other city in the UK – with the possible exception of London. In other words, the city really can lead the way on these issues.

Let me give you a practical example of what I’m talking about – what I’d call the football model. If you look at Arsenal or Chelsea, here are two of our leading soccer teams which have thrived on cultural diversity. Premiership clubs, and the Premiership in general, has blossomed by injecting a huge capability of diverse cultural talents into their clubs. Just look at the way our so-called best clubs operated 20 years ago – or even ten years ago. English football was assumed to be the best, there was a common assertion that English managers were generally of a higher quality and the best around, and if you look at what the outcome of that sort of approach is, then you can sum it up in one word – mediocrity.

It wasn’t until the Premiership clubs "internationalised" themselves and recognised the potential that comes from recruiting talent from other cultural backgrounds that you get much improved performances.

You can apply the same thought process to other industries too – if you look at the music business and the fashion industry, at which Britain is traditionally very good, there is what I would categorise as having a high degree of internationalisation and a high degree of diversity.

And don’t forget, it’s pretty widely recognised that the real growth this century is going to be India and China and also, to a certain extent, Brazil and Russia.

When you couple all of this with the robust statistics offered in terms of Birmingham’s changing demography, then you begin to see the potential within the city.

Birmingham is set to have a black and ethnic majority in the make-up of its population by 2010. If one looks at the data, in particular on start-up businesses and entrepreneurship, it is twice or even three times as high amongst black communities, Asian communities, Pakistani and Indian communities than it is amongst the white community.

As far as I’m concerned the future in terms of sustainable communities is heavily dependent on encouraging local entrepreneurship. Therefore Birmingham is in a very good position to develop the potential and the opportunities that are there. But if companies want to exploit these opportunities, they must stop behaving like “white men’s clubs”. If we agree that the potential is all there, the issue becomes how we realise that potential.

The problem is that there are too many companies and business advisers who, although they are committed to economic regeneration, also operate from the blinkered mindset of the football manager of 15 or 20 years ago, and are reminiscent in their outlook of the middle-aged white men’s club.

They see everything from their narrow focused perspective and they think of opportunities and encouraging talent according to things like getting traditional qualifications and going through traditional methods of schooling. They think that their businesses have to be run in a certain way, and that leadership can only be exercised by people with a particular kind of background and experience.

What you have, therefore, are closed minds, which have as an outcome the inability to identify creative potential and talent, because it often appears in a non-conventional, non-traditional way.

In my book, Kitchen Sink to Boardroom Table, we look at women from different black and minority ethnic backgrounds in Birmingham. We found people who had suffered terrible deprivation and hardship but had gone on to being very successful in their careers.

You can imagine these women applying for a job only for their application to be put straight into the bin on the grounds that they weren’t qualified. Therefore lots of talent in Birmingham and the wider UK is being ignored simply because we define talent by reference to our blinkered mindset assumptions, which I think are pretty irrelevant. To revert back to my reference to the fashion and music industry, talent is based very much on non-academic criteria – what is really important is what you achieve and what you do. There is a danger, therefore, that companies can become over-cautious in their recruitment policies, and in being cautious they disregard a lot of talent in the Birmingham area – talent which could actually be very good for their business.

So diversity issues will come ever higher up the business agenda, because if you look at Birmingham’s changing demographics, where are professional services organisations going to get their talent from in the future?

It seems to me either they are going to have to get their talent locally, and to become more welcoming, and to develop a much more diverse employee profile – or they are going to have to face up to huge skills shortages.

What is therefore needed for the future prosperity of Birmingham is a whole-hearted, combined, joined-up approach by the education sector, universities, employers, employers’ associations and training agencies to make sure that the talent within Birmingham – by which I mean everyone from women whose children have grown up to white young men in their late 20s who realise they didn’t take full advantage of the opportunities they had in the education system, through to black unemployed graduates – is brought under the corporate umbrella.

All this will contribute to Birmingham’s successful, dynamic future. And companies have a job to do to make themselves appealing.

Firms can get involved with schools, take part in mentoring projects, enhance their profile, and help breakdown the barriers put in front of young people – that they wouldn’t be welcome or accepted – and this particularly applies to black and minority ethnic communities. There is a whole agenda of engagement, public relations activities, and mentoring to be addressed.

On the line here is business prosperity and the city’s prosperity, and to make that work we have to embrace diversity – it is a "bottom line" issue. Birmingham needs to be an inter-cultural city, not a multi-cultural city – multiculturalism creates barriers. Inter-culturalism, encouraging the socialisation of citizens of different origins, helps break barriers down. Birmingham is leading the way on a UK level in debating and dealing with diversity. Let’s make sure the embrace from business is big enough and warm enough to ensure the city’s contribution to UK PLC continues to go from strength to strength. n Professor Scase’s new book, Global Remix – New Business Opportunities, is published this week by Kogan Page. n Birmingham Professional DiverCity’s fourth annual lecture – Countdown to 2010 – is being held at The Adrian Boult Hall, UCE Birmingham Conservatoire, tonight from 5.30 pm to 9.00 pm. All details can be found at www.birminghamdivercity.co.uk.