by Dan Perkins
On
March 22, 2005, Microsoft Corporation
announced the election to its board of Dina Dublon,
51, retired executive vice president and
chief financial officer of JPMorgan
Chase - an appointment that increases
the size of the board from
nine to 10 members.
Dublon
will serve on the board’s audit
committee; and in a company release,
Microsoft chairman Bill Gates
said, “Dina’s extensive financial and
accounting expertise will add to the
board’s strengths in those areas.
We’re very pleased to have her join us.”
|
Microsoft's Board of
Directors |
|
William H. Gates,
Microsoft chairman and
chief software architect |
|
Steven A. Ballmer,
Microsoft chief
executive officer |
|
James I. Cash Jr.,
Ph.D., former James
E. Robison professor of
business administration
at the Harvard Business
School |
|
Raymond V. Gilmartin,
chairman, president and
chief executive officer
of Merck & Co. Inc. |
|
Ann McLaughlin
Korologos, chairman
emeritus of The Aspen
Institute and senior
adviser with Benedetto,
Gartland & Co. Inc. |
|
David F. Marquardt,
general partner at
August Capital |
|
Charles H. Noski,
former vice chairman of
AT&T Corp. |
|
Dr. Helmut Panke,
chairman of the board of
management at BMW AG |
|
Jon A. Shirley,
former president and
chief operating officer
of Microsoft |
|
Dina Dublon,
retired executive vice
president and chief
financial officer of
JPMorgan Chase |
|
While at JPMorgan
Chase, Dublon was responsible for the
company's global financial management
and reporting, corporate treasury,
investor relations and taxes.
She was also integral to the
structuring and negotiation of the
mergers of Chemical Bank with
Manufacturers Hanover, Chase,
JPMorgan and Bank One.
Prior to
joining Chemical Bank, she worked for
the Harvard Business School as a
research associate and previously at
Bank Hapoalim in Israel.
The
Microsoft appointment is not Dublon's first
corporate board appointment.
She is also a corporate director of
Accenture and a trustee of Carnegie
Mellon University.
Although
her financial expertise has garnered
corporate attention, Dublon is
also respected as an advocate of
diversity and women's issues. She
sits on the boards of several
organizations that champion women's
issues, including Global Fund for
Women, the Women’s Commission for
Refugee Women & Children and
WorldLinks.
The day
after Dublon's appointment to Microsoft's
board was announced, she spoke on the
importance of championing diversity to an
audience at the World Bank in
Washington, DC. She shared
insights gained over her career and from
JPMorgan Chase's attempts to
institutionalize diversity management.
As head of
JPMorgan Chase’s finance group, Dublon
chaired the diversity council that
served her
division. She explained that JPMorgan
Chase not only formed diversity
councils for each of its major
divisions, but also a corporate council
that set diversity policy for the entire
organization. Dublon served on
that council for two years prior to
retiring.
“Good
organizations demand openness,
honesty and facts,” she said before
outlining several steps to enable organizations
to achieve greater diversity
including:
supporting awareness-training;
offering employees career
development opportunities; and
providing flexible work
arrangements.
She
added that organizations can become
diversity champions by setting explicit policies and
demanding accountability at all levels.
Dublon
told her audience that
companies pursue diversity precisely
because inclusive work environments
support their business objectives.
But an inclusive work
environment is not a well defined
destination for Dublon.
Instead, she sees it more as a path for
progress and improvement.
Throughout her presentation she
stressed the need to hold managers
accountable; and she underscored
that point by noting that
significant progress was achieved at JPMorgan Chase
only after divisions’
diversity scorecards were posted on
the company’s intranet site for all
to see.
“Leadership is a matter of choice,
not just a matter of chance,”
declared Dublon. “You just can’t be
an observer of a situation and hope
for it to change. You need to act.”
She
concluded by affirming her belief in
the potential of every individual
to be an agent of change. “The
ultimate responsibility for driving
change lies with each of us, whether
it is as individuals within our own
personal spheres, or as
professionals within our
organizations, or as citizens in our
communities,” said Dublon.
Upon
hearing such remarks, one
can only imagine the changes Dublon
might advance as a member of
Microsoft’s board.
The
End
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Three Lessons
Dina Dublon Shared
from JPMorgan
Chase's Quest for Diversity
|
|
Dina Dublon, retired
executive vice
president and chief
financial officer of
JPMorgan Chase,
identified three
initiatives that can
help organizations
achieve a more
inclusive and
representative work
environment.
They are as follows: |
|
1. |
Gather the facts,
expand the dialog
and make the facts
public to increase
transparency. |
| |
“Numbers help to
make a hard-hitting
case about barriers
to advancement,”
said Dublon during
her talk at the
World Bank.
To help obtain
numbers, she said managers in
various divisions
at JPMorgan
Chase were required
to report the
demographics of
their staffs.
But facts alone do
not promote change;
and Dublon was quick
to note that "change
requires dialog." To
promote dialog, JPMorgan Chase
formed
task forces comprised of
senior management
and representatives
from various
demographic groups
within the
organization.
These task forces allowed
representatives from
the various demographic
groups to raise
issues in a way that
would have been
difficult
otherwise. They addressed
difficult topics
such as the numbers
of diverse groups
within the pipeline
for management and
executive positions;
and the bottlenecks
to advancement for each demographic
group. Dublon
recalled that
bottlenecks occurred
much further down
the organizational
structure for
employs of color
than for white
women.
In terms of
gathering data,
JPMorgan Chase also adopted
a systematic
approach to
analyzing
information obtained
during exit
interviews –
information that
helped identify the reasons
why employees,
especially minorities, left the
company. |
|
2. |
Hold Managers
Accountable for
Corporate Policies,
Track Results, and
Track the Results
Publicly |
| |
According to Dublon,
JPMorgan Chase
developed
performance matrices
from opinion surveys
that measured
employee attitudes
on a variety of
subjects, including
developments within
the organization.
Divisions were
ranked by
percentiles to
reveal how well they
performed relative
to one another in
conforming to
company policies on
diversity.
Employees were able
to see which
divisions were
better and which
were weaker. “We
learned that posting
the information
publicly created a
huge amount of peer
pressure among
executive
management,” said
Dublon who concluded
that in the end, the
sharing of
information
contributed to
greater dialog and
diversity within the
organization. |
|
3. |
Be a Champion: Care
about change in a
public way. |
| |
Establishing and
maintaining
diversity within
organizations
requires leadership;
and Dublon
challenged her World
Bank audience to
become advocates of
diversity within
their spheres of
influence.
“Personally mentor
and sponsor
individuals from
under-represented
groups. Be honest
with your feedback,”
she added, noting
that feedback
provided to people
of color is often
less constructive
than feedback
provided to
others in an
organization. Dublon said the
disparity in
feedback tends to
reflect a lack of
comfort on the part
of managers with
subordinates who are
people of color.
The solution,
according to Dublon,
is to break through
"the unease of
talking about
sensitive issues in
public settings."
She noted that the
way leaders speak
sends powerful
messages to others. Dublon encouraged
her audience to
become leaders by
supporting employee
groups as they work
through their
issues. She
concluded that
positive engagement
is a company’s "best
retention tool." |
|
Note: Special
thanks to Noemi Perez of The Caraway
Group for providing information for this
article.
