Arnold Donald on purposefully engineering diversity

What this conversation is about

Arnold Donald was President and CEO of Carnival Corporation when he spoke with Glenn Llopis for a Forbes series on leading inclusion as a growth strategy. Glenn had just come from a conversation with a chief strategy officer who treated the subject as a compliance exercise and a cost center. Donald’s reaction was one word, twice: wow.

What follows is one of the most operational conversations in this archive. Donald does not argue for difference on principle. He argues for it as the only way he knows to keep innovating, and then he explains, step by step, how he made it work across a group of very different brands.

The interview was conducted for Glenn’s six-part Forbes series, Inclusion as a Growth Strategy. Donald appears in Part 2: Leadership in the Age of Personalization, Part 3: Inclusive Hiring and Inclusive Working and Part 5: All Employers Are in the Business of Health.

Growth needs innovation, and innovation needs difference

His logic runs in a straight line. Communities thrive when businesses thrive. Businesses sustain success through innovation. Innovation, by definition, is thinking outside the box, and that is diversity of thinking, which is far more likely when the people themselves are different in background, experience, nationality and gender.

But difference alone produces nothing. It needs a common objective and work processes that let people who are not alike actually work together. That, he says, is the inclusion part:

"Every voice has to be heard. Everybody has to feel that they have an equal chance of being recognized or rewarded for contribution and so on." — Arnold Donald

A homogeneous group can come up with a brilliant solution once, he allows. What it cannot do is sustain that over time. He has seen the alternative work at scale, and he describes the result in the plainest terms:

"It's like because we bought into it and behave that way, we transform the industry." — Arnold Donald

Culture fit as a code word

When Glenn asked how peers can operationalize this, Donald gave the line that has outlived the interview:

"You have to purposefully engineer diversity." — Arnold Donald

People naturally cluster with people like themselves, he says. There is nothing evil about it; it is a tendency, and in business you have to interrupt it. The interruption starts with hearing what the organization is really saying when it rejects someone:

"As soon as people say things like, well, they don't fit our norm. They don't fit our culture... that's code for we don't really want anybody different." — Arnold Donald

Mostly this is unintentional, and it works for a while. Then someone builds the thing that blows the company out of the water.

Protect the disruptor, and change the box

The person who does not fit is often the one who takes the most time and causes the most friction. Donald’s point is that this person is usually the asset:

"Often that is your disruptor. That's the person challenging the status quo." — Arnold Donald

Push them out every time they become inconvenient and inclusion is finished, whatever the policy says. The same applies to hiring. He has put people into roles where others objected that the candidate had not checked every box, had never run a business of that size, had never worked in the area. That, he says, is not the criteria. The criteria is whether you believe they can do it and what else they bring:

"If you wait for the perfect candidate, you’re never going to have diversity because the diverse people haven't had a chance to do it yet." — Arnold Donald

Glenn, closing the interview, made the same argument from the other side:

"They may not meet the box of criteria, but why can't you change the box?" — Glenn Llopis

Donald is equally clear about where this begins. Training classes at the bottom of the organization will not get you there on their own. You start at the top.

From bonding to incentives

The second half is the part most organizations skip: getting people to experience each other. Donald describes bringing teams together and starting with questions that have nothing to do with work. Five years from now, what does success look like for you and your family? Almost everyone has an answer, and however differently people define family, the aspiration is common ground. Once people find what they share, the differences become interesting rather than threatening. Only then does he move to the business questions: what does success look like for your part of the company, for you professionally, and for the whole enterprise.

That is how a common objective gets built rather than announced. Silos come down the same way. Donald says he fights the instinct to centralize, because his brands serve genuinely different communities and centralizing washes that out. What he wants instead is communication, coordination and collaboration owned by the leaders themselves: one shared research tool instead of nine, purchasing done together, best practices moving between brands.

Then he changed what they were paid for. Brand leaders helped define what success looked like for the corporation, and their incentives became half their own brand and half the results of the whole company, with the percentages changing but never disappearing further down the organization. His comment on why that worked is not really about money at all:

"Money matters, but what matters more is what people feel you're expecting and what your value is." — Arnold Donald

Asked how long it took, he is candid: a few months to get it started, and years later still not all the way there. His closing thought was about why he bothers. He wants the communities his business touches to be better off than they were, for his kids and grandkids as much as for anyone else.