I have read an article about how Amazon is expected to outgrow Wal-Mart. It is interesting to see how Amazon has benefited by overcoming their bias towards traditional practices and giving importance to diversity and how Wal-Mart has suffered with low growth and lawsuits due to their organization’s culture.
The growth of Amazon has been extraordinary in the recent years. Currently, Amazon has been busy with many projects, exploring new areas and participating in the market shift looking for all possible opportunities. Amazon has realized early that dynamic markets require diversity in approach, vision and thinking, and have overcome their bias which was critical for their success. Amazon has increased its employment by 45% last year and has transformed into more than an online book retailer.
With the information available in this article, it is clearly evident that diversity in the company’s culture, vision, approach and thinking has been an important part of Amazon’s success story. Diversity helps Organizations benefit with higher creativity in decision making, better understanding and service to customers, more satisfied workforce, higher stock prices, lower litigation expenses and all together a improved company performance. Amazon has clearly experienced these benefits as mentioned in detail in the article.
On the other side we have Wal-Mart which has been experiencing low growth. Wal-Mart has recently faced a lawsuit from former female workers. This lawsuit was regarding the company’s discrimination against female workers and how it awarded compensations and promotions. It is also learnt that the company’s culture has a big influence on managers’ decisions.
I would not say that Wal-Mart has been losing on their growth only because of their diversity issues. But looking at their problems like stagnation of growth and lawsuits regarding gender differences, earning gaps and glass ceiling, it is directly indicating that there are a lot of diversity issues which need to be addressed. Looking at how organizations are benefited from being diverse, Wal-Mart has to use this lawsuit as a wakeup call and start looking at being open to diversity in all aspects of their business.
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