Big Step for Women, Small Step for Industry’s Mankind

Shout out to NPD, who was featured in our Information Industry Headines this week as it named its long-time president, Karyn Schoenbart, CEO. She’s accomplished, has served the company well, and NPD demonstrated a great practice — succession planning.

This same week, Clarivate appointed three new executives. All individuals that I respect, but I do wish they’d have taken the opportunity to add more diversity to their 13-person executive team, which has only 3 women and what now looks to be 11 executives of Caucasian persuasion.

Our industry can and must do better than that. We are formalizing the tracking we did in our ‘back of the envelope’ blog post looking at the industry’s top players and adding this to our scorecard metrics. I am not saying diverse teams do better or worse though there are plenty of metrics out there supporting that. I’m saying that our industry’s leadership ideally matches our customer’s make-up and right now we do not mirror who we serve. I’m not going to get carpy about this. As far as I’m concerned, may the best man or woman win. I’ve never been a proponent of affirmative action and haven’t thought it too big a deal, but when I looked around during Outsell’s 10th Anniversary Signature Event and realized the top companies were largely not led by an equal mix of women and men, it gave me pause.

I believe it’s important for us to rise to the occasion and ask more boards to appoint female CEOs. And I’d like more CEOs to Join Tim and Jim. Thankfully, this week Clarivate appointed visionary and accomplished executive Annette Thomas to its board. One big step for a woman, one small step for our industry’s mankind. More like this please.

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