When President Lyndon Johnson’s later-Vice President Hubert Humphrey championed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he exclaimed, “I will eat my hat if this leads to racial quotas.” Following the meteoric rise of DEI over the past few years, Humphrey would need a new hat.
Now, the DEI fad is rightly fading. The Supreme Court overturned affirmative action. Corporations jettisoned DEI upon realizing it improved neither workplace culture nor the bottom line. President Donald Trump eliminated DEI in government and is rooting out remaining discriminatory DEI practices in the private sector.
But what’s truly remarkable isn’t DEI’s demise, but the extraordinary uniformity of its adoption — uniformity that, once dismantled, will allow for a plurality of policies for hiring, promoting and retaining the right workforce, tailored to each companies’ individual goals.
Make no mistake, the DEI orthodoxy demanded faithful allegiance to a narrow set of rules. When 2,500 CEOs signed the identical “CEO Action for Diversity & Inclusion” pledge, they committed their companies to identical practices like holding unconscious bias trainings and making “progress” on demographic metrics — regardless of how these policies might affect their specific businesses.
LGBTQ+ organizations like the Human Rights Campaign established scoring systems that effectively required companies to offer employees identical transgender medical benefits packages to earn a coveted “100% rating” — practices that in any other context might raise antitrust concerns.
This conformity defied business logic. No company would adopt identical marketing strategies or pricing models as their competitors — yet somehow, they embraced identical approaches to what’s arguably their most crucial asset: their employees.
Chief Talent Officers and HR departments responsible for implementing, and now dismantling, DEI efforts should be leaders in what follows — a flourishing of new ideas and methods to identify and retain the best and brightest employees based on their skills and cultural fit.
This ability to innovate should be welcome. The DEI movement stifled innovation in human resource departments. Every company says they want to attract great employees and build a winning culture. Corporate executives know engaged employees are the difference between top and bottom quartile performing companies.
Yet 73% of publicly traded U.S. companies adopted increasingly rigid DEI commitments. Companies as diverse as SalesForce, Target, Coca-Cola and Bank of America implemented hiring quotas, exclusive race-based access programs, and/or implicit bias training under the DEI banner.
No other department saw the mass adoption of the same ideology. There are thousands of methods for sales teams to increase revenue. ABC — Always Be Closing. SPIN Selling — Situation, Problem, Implication and Need-payoff. PLG – Product Led Growth, etc.
Marketing departments also have endless ways to reach new customers. Three C’s – Company, Customer, Competitor. Four P’s – Product, Price, Place, Promotion. Five M’s – Mission, Money, Message, Media and Measurement.
Financiers are always dreaming up new and exotic ways to value companies (remember WeWork’s “Community Adjusted EBITDA” metric?); in their eyes, GAAP is not a standard to be met, but a challenge to be overcome. Yet HR departments across the nation got stuck with the same-old DEI.
Now market observers are asking what comes next. But the question isn’t “what single approach replaces DEI?” but rather “why should there be a singular approach?”
There’s good reason to be skeptical of replacing one universal mandate with another. Consider what happens when central planning ends in any sector: innovation flourishes. When the government broke up AT&T’s monopoly in the 1980s, telecommunications transformed from a stagnant utility to the dynamic foundation of the digital economy. When the government deregulated the airlines in the 1970s, air travel became within reach of middle-class Americans.
The end of DEI’s monopoly on talent strategy promises a similar renaissance, so long as companies are willing to experiment to find the right approach to meet their unique needs.
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Forward-thinking companies are already taking the plunge. Some tech companies are adopting MEI – Merit, Excellence, Intelligence. Maybe police and fire departments want to adopt BRAVE – Bold, Reliable, Accountable, Vigilant, Empathetic. Healthcare workers could adopt CARE – Compassionate, Adaptable, Respectful, Empowered. Construction companies could recruit for STEEL – Skilled, Trustworthy, Efficient, Enduring, Leaders. There are endless opportunities for companies to clearly articulate who is a good fit for their organization.
This isn’t abandoning workplace diversity — it’s enabling its most meaningful form. Research has consistently shown that cognitive diversity — that is, differences in how people think, rather than how they look — increases innovation, creativity and problem-solving. Companies that cultivate this deeper form of diversity will be positioned to outperform.
There will also be greater diversity in hiring approaches more broadly. Some companies may focus on recruiting overlooked talent from Appalachia or first-generation college students. Others might emphasize retention and internal development. Some may adopt high-churn models that rapidly test talent on the job. A few might maintain their grip on their race- and gender-focused DEI policies — albeit with increased legal risk. Companies will experiment, and the free market will decide who wins.
This approach mirrors America’s greatest economic success stories. When soldiers returned from World War II, President Harry Truman didn’t send them all to dig ditches. They became entrepreneurs, factory workers, artists and inventors — and unleashed the greatest economic boom in American history. Similarly, as companies are freed from DEI’s rigid orthodoxy, they can develop individual approaches to building workforces that they believe will maximize their chances for future success.
Companies will of course have to apply metrics to their chosen strategies to evaluate performance, but individuals should be recruited and promoted based on whatever race- and gender-neutral criteria their company has set. This will lead to better employee fit, lower turnover and improved corporate performance. It will also make good on the Civil Rights Act’s promise to eliminate discrimination, while rendering race and gender quotas a relic of the past.
Even Hubert Humphrey would take off his hat to that.
