Concepts and Experience of

The “Valuing Diversity and Ethics” Workshops

at Levi Strauss and Company

Marvin T. Brown

            What does ethics have to do with diversity?  Before I became involved in Levi Strauss and Company’s (LS&CO.’s) “Valuing Diversity and Ethics” workshops, I had a rather narrow answer to this question, because I had a narrow view of diversity.  I tended to equate diversity with discussions about such issues as racism, and sexism.  Diversity was an “issue” that business ethics needed to address.  I usually did this in my business ethics courses by including a section on affirmative action and sexual harassment in United States. From my work as an external consultant and facilitator at Levi’s, I have learned that diversity is much more than one of several ethical issues.  Ethics and diversity, in fact, have a multi-dimensional relationship that affects not only what issues we consider, but also the very process of engaging in ethical reflection. 

            Diversity, of course, has had different meanings for different people.  So has ethics, for that matter.  This commentary on LS&CO.’s Valuing Diversity and Ethics training program explores how they can gain meaning from and through each other.

An Overview of the Valuing Diversity and Ethics Workshop      

            The Valuing Diversity and Ethics workshops are four day programs, usually for about eighty employees.  The participants come from different departments such as sales, marketing, accounting, operations, and human relations; and from all over the United States, as well as from Asia, Europe, and South America.  Many are supervisors or managers of small groups or teams.  They come to these workshops in part because they know that they belong to a company that values ethics and diversity – a company building a global culture – and in part because their managers ask them.  During the four days, the employees attend a series of modules, usually in a group of about twenty with two facilitators, and sometimes in a plenary session for everyone.  The following outline displays the program’s major themes. 

Day One

Theme 1         Importance of Ethics and Diversity at Levi’s

Theme 2:        Basic Components of Dialogue

Theme 3:        The Ethics Decision Making Model

Day Two

Theme 1:        Practice Using the Ethics Decision Making Model

Theme 2:        Understanding Racism and Engaging in Dialogue

Day Three

Theme 1:        Understanding Prejudice in the Workplace

            Theme 2:        Learning about Collusion

            Theme 3         Understanding Cultural Differences

            Theme 4         A Self-Directed Media Museum on Diversity and Ethics

Day Four

Theme 1         The Differently-Abled

Theme 2         Diversity in Teams

Theme 3         Developing Personal Action Plans

            Several things happen as participants move through the four days.  They increase their awareness of the significance of ethics and diversity for the contemporary workplace.  They learn skills to engage in ethical decision making when faced with controversial issues.  They also learn skills to address various forms of devaluing others that shut people down or exclude them from full participation.  Most of these goals are similar to other training programs in ethics or in diversity.  Unlike most of them, however, this program has combined these goals.

Connecting Ethics and Diversity

  How should we connect ethics and diversity?  If we see ethics as making judgments and diversity as honoring differences, then any connection between them may seem tenuous at best.  People involved in diversity training have certainly heard more than once:  “It is not a question of right or wrong, but of accepting differences.”  Ethics, on the other hand, facilitates the discernment of what is right and wrong.  So it seems that they take almost opposite stances toward conflict and disagreement.  From my involvement in the Valuing Diversity and Ethics program, I believe that this view of ethics and diversity is not the final word, even though it is not so easy to escape.  How we move beyond it depends on our capacity to entertain multiple connections between ethics and diversity.  We have discovered three different ways we can link them together: by commitment to principles, by the exploration of assumptions, and by engaging in a type of dialogue that balances advocacy and inquiry.  These different connections are interdependent and build on each other.  To show this developmental and accumulative process, we will begin with a description of how ethical principles are used at Levi’s, because this sets the tone for approaching both ethics and diversity throughout the company.

Using Principles to Connect Ethics and Diversity

           Levi Strauss and Company has a long tradition of ethical practices and reflection, which Robert Haas presents elsewhere in this volume.  At one of our workshops, an LS&CO. senior manager aptly expressed Levi’s general approach to ethics by telling the participants about a meeting on business ethics with other corporate managers.  While others at the table had their two or three inch thick ethics manuals in front of them, he had only three pages:  the LS & Co. Aspiration Statement, Code of Ethics, and a list of Ethical Principles.  When his turn came to tell about the ethics program at LS&CO., he held up the three pages.  He said that his company relied on their employees, not on piles of rules and regulations, to ensure that decisions throughout the company were in line with company values.  The contrast between the image of the pile of regulations and the image of the three pieces of paper was not lost on the participants.

            If a company has only a set of principles to guide decisions, then it must rely on the decision makers to connect the principles to specific actions or proposals.  For example, a manager may face the question of whether or not to give an employee another chance after she or he has made a mistake.  Suppose she decides to follow the ethical principle of “respect for others”; does this principle tell her what she should do?  Not necessarily.  Her actual decision will depend on a number of factors. “Respecting others” could support forgiving or not forgiving the employee.  The principle, in other words, does not tell her concretely what to do, but it does guide whatever action she chooses.  It probably does tell her some things she should not do, such as to ignore different views of what happened or to use the person as an example for other employees.  In any case, her concrete decision will depend not only on ethical principles, but also on observations of the situation and assumptions about such themes as forgiveness, responsibility and control in the workplace.  Those involved in the situation must always fill in the gap between principles and actions, for only they have access to the necessary resources to make a concrete decision.  We will examine shortly how they can discover and use these resources.  For now, we only want to emphasize that while the principles provide the guidelines for making decisions, they do not make the decisions. 

            For employees and teams who must make decisions, of course, the company’s ethical principles give them precisely what they need: the company’s commitments.  At this level of commitment, one also finds the first and clearest connection between ethics and diversity.  Such principles as “Respect for Others,” “Fairness,” and “Compassion” make a strong claim for the honoring of differences.

            Diversity awareness also has a long tradition at LS&CO., a tradition that finds expression in the company’s Aspirations Statement:  “We have committed to taking full advantage of the rich backgrounds and abilities of all our people and to promote a greater diversity in positions of influence.  Differing points of view will be sought; diversity will be valued and honestly rewarded, not suppressed.”  The final phrase in this statement, that diversity will be “honestly rewarded, not suppressed,” points to the two sides of valuing diversity.  On the one hand, valuing diversity induces people to work together so that everyone is encouraged to contribute to the company’s goals through her or his own distinctive way of being.  On the other hand, it also leads them to identify and address group or individual behavioral patterns that prevent this from occurring; that is, behaviors that suppress others.  Diversity, in other words, needs to address both what prevents and what enhances the honoring of differences.  At the level of an “aspiration,” diversity appears much like an ethical principle: it guides our decision making and our interactions with each other.

            In many cases, people’s commitment to such principles as respect and compassion motivates and challenges them to work through the difficult issues of privilege, power, and prejudice in our society.  At the same time, if we limit the connection between ethics and diversity to the level of principles, we face the danger of judging every disagreement about diversity as a disagreement about ethical principles. Making such judgments, however, seem to belie one of the goals of diversity training; the honoring of differences.  Consider the following piece that a senior manager read at one of our workshops:

If I do not want what you want, please try not to tell me that my want is wrong.

Or, if I believe other than you, at least pause before you correct my view.

Or if my emotion is less than yours, or more, given the same circumstances, try not to ask me to feel more strongly or weakly.

Or yet if I act, or fail to act, in the manner of your design for action, let me be.

I do not, for the moment at least, ask you to understand me.  That will come only when you are willing to give up changing me into a copy of you.

I may be your spouse, your parent, your offspring, your friend, or your colleague.  If you will allow me any of my own wants, or emotions, or beliefs, or actions, then you open yourself, so that some day these ways of mine might not seem so wrong, and might finally appear to you as right - for me.  To put up with me is the first step to understanding me.  Not that you embrace my ways as right for you, but that you are no longer irritated or disappointed with me for my seeming waywardness.  And in understanding me you might come to prize my differences from you, and, far from seeking to change me, preserve and even nurture those differences.

            On the one hand, probably all of us would like others to approach us with the stance this piece embodies.  On the other hand, we need to ask what kind of ethics such a stance can embrace.  Perhaps it could embrace an ethics that limits itself to principles, such as the principle of “Respect for Others.”  As we just said, however, ethics involves making concrete decisions, which involves moving beyond principles into the continual interaction between principles and situations.  While principles may move us to care about ethics and diversity, this level of discourse alone does not allow us to deal adequately with the conflicts and disagreements that we experience every day in the workplace.

            If we want to use ethics and diversity to address these situations, we need to look for connections beyond the level of principle.  At the initial planning for the Valuing Diversity and Ethics program, we began such a search and found that both ethics and diversity have at least one foot in our world views or assumptions.

Using Assumptions to Connect Ethics and Diversity

            In August 1994, human resource managers from North and South America, Europe, and Asia, as well as external consultants in ethics and diversity were invited to a four day “Global Initiative on Values & Strategy Forum.”  Many of the participants had worked in some of the previous LS&Co. ethics, diversity and leadership training programs that the company had offered since 1991.  They shared with those of us who were new to the company what ethics and diversity looked like at Levi’s.  Toni Wilson, the manager of the training program, asked all of us to stretch our imagination to forge a new vision of ethics and diversity from a global perspective.  We began to explore the possibility of a connection at the level of assumptions. Although the importance of assumptions had been implicit in previous ethics programs at Levi’s, they were not an explicit part of a decision making process.  At the same time, I had developed an ethical decision making process that had a place for assumptions, but I had not connected diversity to ethics.  So by combining LS&CO.’s experiences in ethics and diversity with the ethical decision making process that I had first developed in my book on organizational ethics, Working Ethics, and later in my workbook, The Ethical Process, we were able to make explicit the role of assumptions for both of them.  A key to this development was sorting out the different levels of discourse in making decisions.   

The Ethical Decision Making Model

            People often imagine ethical decision making as a process of relating actions to the values or ethical principle that support them.  This view, however, tends to ignore two other aspects of making decisions that are just as important; namely, our observations about what is happening or is likely to happen, and our assumptions about how things usually happen.  A complete picture of the decision making process includes four different levels of discourse. Each one raises a different question and gives a different answer.  Our proposals ask the question, “What should we do?” and answer with a specific course of action.  Observations ask the question, “Why should we do that?” and answer by describing the situation.  Our values ask the question, “Why is this important?” and answer by expressing our general beliefs.  And finally, our assumptions ask the question “Why do you think this will work?” and answer by expressing our world view or cultural perception of reality.

            As we move through the observations, values, principles, and assumptions that support different proposals, we find that most of our disagreements originate from different assumptions.  At this level of discourse we find our different cultural perspectives, social visions, and even religious beliefs, or in other words, our diversity.  Especially when we take a global perspective, disagreements often have their origin in different cultural perspectives or assumptions about how the world works.

            To adapt this four-fold model of ethical decision making to the Valuing Diversity and Ethics program, we added a fifth level of discourse:  the LS&CO. Ethical Principles: Honesty, Promise-keeping, Fairness, Respect for Others, Compassion, and Integrity.  This addition provided a clear normative standard that every decision at Levi’s had to meet.  For a decision to be acceptable at Levi’s, it must find support in the principles, and it must not violate any of them.  In other words, these principles serve as normative guidelines for what we can and cannot do.

            The ethical decision making process does not begin, however, with the analysis of principles, but rather with disagreements on controversial issues.  The process was designed for team members who must make a decision and yet disagree about what they should do.  It invites the members to state their different proposals and then to begin an inquiry into the observations and values on which they relied when stating their proposals.  The next steps involve applying LS&CO. ethical principles; and discovering the different assumptions that each side would have to make in order to agree with the other side; They finally develop a new proposal from the resources they have been able to generate.  This new proposal is then tested to see if it causes undue harm to any of the stakeholders or affected groups.

            In our workshops, we first “walk-through” the ethical decision making process with the participants and then let them use the process with issues from their workplaces.  To observe the various steps in the process, we can use the following case: Suppose you belong to a group of people in a United States company who must decide whether to develop a policy that encourages female employees to apply for company positions in foreign countries.  There is general agreement that in these countries they will encounter more forms of male chauvinism and sexual harassment, than they would encounter at home.  Some people want to encourage them and others do not.  To bring together all the resources in the room, we need to explore the reasons for both views.  We start with a proposal:

Step 1: Make a Proposal:  (What should we do?)

“I think we should encourage women to apply for foreign positions.”

Step 2: Identify Your Observation:  (Why should we do it?)   

“Because we observe that promotions usually go to those who have practical knowledge of our foreign markets.”

Step 3: State the Value:  (Why is this the right thing to do?)

“We believe that women should have the same opportunities for promotion as men.”

Step 4: Align the LS&CO. Ethical Principles:  (Which LS&CO. Ethical Principles are reflected in the Proposal?)

“Fairness,” “Respect for Others,” and “Integrity.”

Step 5: Explore The Alternative View:  (What are their key Observations, Values, and LS & CO Ethical Principles?)

Alternative Proposal:  “We should not encourage women to apply for foreign assignments.”

Observation:  “Because in such a hostile environment, they will probably become frustrated and dissatisfied with their work.”

Value: “We believe that all employees should be placed in positions where they can express their own skills and talents and be satisfied with their performance.”

LS&CO. Ethical Principles:  “Honesty,” “Respect for Others,” “Promise Keeping,”

Step 6: Uncovering Assumptions:  (What assumptions support the alternative        proposal?  What assumptions support my proposal? or What would one view have to assume to agree with the other side?)

“To agree with not encouraging women to apply for foreign `positions, I would have to assume that the work environment has a determining influence on a person’s performance.”

“To agree with encouraging women to apply, I would have to assume that people can perform at their best in any work environment.”

Step 7: Best Option:  (What is the best solution?)

“I still think that we should encourage women to apply for foreign             positions, and we should make sure that we have done everything reasonable to create a supportive environment for them.”

Step 8: Consequence analysis:  (Who may be negatively impacted?  How can I modify my solution to minimize harm to others?)

“The primary groups impacted in this case are US women employees, foreign clients, women in the foreign country, and investors. It seems possible that negative harm may come to local women if we carry our Western culture into their environment in such a way that shows disrespect for them.  So we could modify our proposal to include them in our discussions on how to create a supportive work environment for female employees.”

Teams that move through the complete process, from the first to the last step, receive several benefits.  The different observations, values, and assumptions they gather increase the group’s resources for making a better decision.  As people learn more of the reasons behind each person’s position, they also increase their appreciation for each other’s perspective.  And finally, they can be fairly confident that they have made the best decision possible because they have examined all the available resources.

Analysis of Assumptions

            Step 6 in the process examines different assumptions.  Many of our assumptions are taken-for-granted notions of how things work that we have received from childhood.  Paradoxically, sometimes we can see other’s assumptions much better than we can see our own.  In our workshops, we try to use this insight by helping participants use the alternative view’s assumption as a mirror in which they can see their own assumptions.  To facilitate this, we ask the participants what they would have to assume to agree with the alternative view.  Once they have developed such an assumption, we then say that since they do not agree with that view, and therefore probably do not hold that assumption, what do they assume?  In this way they are able to examine their own assumptions from the other’s point of view.

            The assumptions expressed in the case we just reviewed refer to different notions of the relationship between individuals and their work environment.  In our workshops, we look at such differences as cultural differences.  The difference in this case, for example, parallels a general difference between Western cultures that see the individual apart from the group, and Eastern cultures that see the individual as a part of the group.  We sometimes find similar differences between men and women, or between different ethnic cultures in United States.  So what?  So, if we are facing cultural differences, then we must decide how we will respond to them.  Can we honor each other’s ways of being in the world, and still work together to discover the most appropriate action or policy?

            If we disagree about what to do, and we discover that the disagreement reflects our diversity, and we cannot develop a consensus on any option, then what should we do?  As with the connection between ethics and diversity at the level of principle, we again face the difficulty of putting ethics and diversity together.  This time, if we want to emphasize the importance of honoring diversity, we could simply enjoy learning about each other’s assumptions about how things work.  If we were to try to make the “right decision,” at this point, however, we would need to figure out how one set of assumptions could somehow outweigh the other, or how one set of values or principles could have priority over others.  What should we do if we want to give equal emphasis to both diversity and ethics?  We have found we must rely on the process of dialogue to move us through this apparent conflict between honoring differences and resolving disagreements.

Using Dialogue to Connect Ethics and Diversity.

            As we have seen, the ethical process begins when people disagree about what they should do.  If everyone agrees, they just do it without wondering why.  Only when someone voices disagreement do people have a chance to think about their choices.  For disagreement to be productive, however, the participants must join together, rather than fight each other, to find the best course of action.  They can only engage in this sort of process if they move away from debating who is right and wrong and move toward a dialogue about what they can learn together.  In The Ethical Process, I make the following distinctions between dialogue and debate:

            In contrast to debate, dialogue creates a unity of purpose in finding the best answer even when people disagree.  This does not mean, of course, that they will necessarily come to an agreement, but it does mean that they will have contributed to the outcome.

            To enter into dialogue with others who disagree with us, we need to see them as sure of their position as we are of ours.  Do you agree that “most people do what they think is right considering the world they think they live in”?  If so, then disagreement with others is not so much a conflict between right and wrong, as a conflict between right and right.  (You know you are “really” right, of course, but then so does your partner.)  To decide how two, or more than two, “right answers” relate to each other, one must examine the reasons – observations, values, and assumptions – that support them.  As team members explore these reasons, they will notice the strengths and weaknesses of their respective “right answers.”

            For dialogue to happen, participants need to recognize each other as different.  If I see the other as the same as myself, then I will speak as though I were speaking to myself.  I might as well speak to myself.  Only when I see the other as another person with her or his own opinions and perspectives, talents and needs, experiences and wisdom, do I have the opportunity to learn more from that person than I already know.

            When I move into dialogue with someone who is different, then I have the opportunity to see myself not only through my eyes, but also through the eyes of another.  We all experience this type of learning when we visit other cultures, or even other families.  Most of us learn about ourselves more through differences than we do through similarities.  When we consider the power dimension of our relationships, it seems even more true that those with power and privilege learn more from others who are different from them than from those who are similar.  White people, for example,  will probably not learn as much about what it means to be white from other white people as they will learn from people of color.  In essence, to engage in dialogue, we must value diversity, and to value diversity we must engage in dialogue with others.

Four Components of Dialogue

            In the training program, the first theme we explore is dialogue, because we have learned how central it is to both ethics and diversity.  Much of the exploration involves understanding and applying four different dialogical practices: suspension of judgment, listening, assumption identification, and inquiry and reflection.  The suspension of judgment does not mean that I do not make judgments.  We all do that.  It does mean that I move my judgment off to the side, or bracket it, so that I can listen to others.  Suspension of judgment, in other words, is a requirement for listening.  Listening may appear easy, and yet, to actually listen means that we take in something that we do not know, that we do not control, and that we do not have.  It means, in other words, honoring the otherness of the speaker.  As we begin listening with an awareness of differences, we can also become aware of our immediate responses to another.  Perhaps we can even see how our taken-for-granted assumptions about other persons or situations control our responses.  Identifying these assumptions is the third component of dialogue.  Inquiry and reflection is the fourth.  Inquiry and reflection refers to a continual process of asking questions to learn more than we know, and of using the answers to reflect upon our previous understanding of ourselves and others.  For this to occur, people need to ask questions of inquiry rather than questions of judgment.  When I ask a question of judgment, I already know the answer and want to see if the other person is right or wrong.  When I ask questions of inquiry, I ask questions to learn what I do not know.  As I ask such questions, I also learn more about assumptions. 

            We have already seen how identification of assumptions belongs to the ethical decision making process and how assumptions bring together ethics and diversity.  What dialogue adds to this connection is a process that embraces both making and suspending judgments.  In the workshops, we speak of this as the balancing of inquiry and advocacy.

Balancing Of Inquiry and Advocacy

            As we have said, we begin the ethical decision making process by advocating a position or stating a proposal.  The dialogical process then invites us to change our stance from that of an advocate to an inquirer.  The “suspension of judgment,” for example, allows us to move from advocating a position to inquiring into the reasons for all the positions in the room, including our own.  We ask questions about the implicit values and assumptions that lie behind each person’s proposal.  We imagine what we would have to assume to agree with another view, or what we would have to assume to change our mind.  Once we have completed this inquiry, we try to create a modified proposal that takes into account the best resources in the room.  We come to know the “best” resources as we listen to and learn from each person’s perceptions, knowledge, and thoughts about an issue.

            By balancing advocacy and inquiry, the dialogical process creates the bond or unity that allows us to explore both our disagreements and our differences.  This exploration can become a learning process that opens up new possibilities.  To understand these possibilities, we need to endorse the ambiguity that is inherent in ethics and in diversity.

Acknowledging Ambiguity  

            “Ambiguity” is not a term currently used as a key concept in Levi’s Valuing Diversity and Ethics program, and yet the program does move us in the direction of appreciating ambiguity.  The significance of ambiguity is perhaps easier to acknowledge in working with diversity than with ethics, but it belongs to both.  At one of the early training workshops, we were asked to partner with someone we would not usually select.  An African American woman came immediately to me and asked to be my partner.  When we were asked to share with each other the reason for our choice, she said that she selected me because I looked like the white males in her office whom she considered racist.  Her remark flustered me, because I felt that she had seen me as just another white male.  I think I saw her as another African American woman.  We were both relying on our assumptions, although she was probably clearer about hers than I was about mine.  After this beginning, we shared our own particular experiences of living in the United States.  Soon we were able to see each other as particular individuals.  Our dialogue not only allowed us to move beyond our initial perceptions, it also allowed us to live with our “multiple” identities.

            As a white male, I need to be aware of white privilege and power and of the systemic dynamics of inclusion and exclusion that tend to work in my favor and against many others in my country.  I also need to be aware of myself as a particular person.  To be present at these workshops, I have found that I cannot slip into one or the other identity, but need to live in between my group and individual identities.  Living in this “in-between” is what I mean by ambiguity.

            Ambiguity is not only important for individuals, but also for groups.  Ambiguity allows the dialogical process to facilitate learning.  As long as everything is clearly up or down, in or out, we cannot entertain differences and disagreements, or discover more than we knew before, or change our perceptions of others and of ourselves.  Since the ethical process is just as dependent on learning as is diversity, ambiguity is also important for ethics.

            There is a notion of ethics, of course, that sees ambiguity as a problem.  This is an ethic that searches for clear knowledge of the right thing to do.  To return to our previous example of whether to forgive someone for making a mistake, such a person would take a stand on the “issue,” by saying that people must be accountable for their actions.  That would probably mean that the employee should be fired.  In terms of the four different levels of discourse, this approach disregards the differences between proposals and values, ignores different observations, and remains unconscious of assumptions.  As you can imagine, this stance does not allow a dialogue with others that includes the suspension of judgment or the balancing of advocacy and inquiry.  If they could separate their proposals from their values or principles, and stand on their principles, rather than on their proposals, then they could listen to different observations and explore different assumptions.  In other words, if they allowed some ambiguity about their “rightness,” they could become receptive to new information and knowledge.  If everyone on a team allowed this type of ambiguity, they could work together to find the option that would take advantage of all the resources in the room.

The Resources are in the Room

            To make the best decision possible, teams need to consist of people who have different ideas about what to do, and because of these different ideas, provide different observations, values, and assumptions to the group.  These differences increase the group’s resources.  For these resources to be available to the whole group, however, everyone must become engaged in co-creating an environment that values each person’s differences.

             In many cases, regrettably, we do not find this environment at work.  Some people remain unaware of the background that influences what they say and its impact on others.  Others remain silent or silenced and do not contribute to the group.  One can make a fairly safe bet that a team’s performance decreases in direct proportion to the number of its members who must fit someone else’s norm in order to be seen.

            Valuing diversity means valuing everyone’s differences, even one’s own.  It means preventing anyone from being shut down by others, by patterns of communication and interaction, or by mindlessness.  It also means that whoever in the group or team knows what needs to be said has the support to say it.  Ethics, too, depends on the speaker who can say what needs to be said.

            Ethics and diversity have their closest connection at the level of dialogue because dialogue has the potential to uncover the resources in the room.  Diversity ensures that everyone has the opportunity to give his or her contribution in a safe context; without fear.  The process of ethical decision makes these resources available to all.  It sorts out the different aspects of the process and facilitates the discovery of implicit values and assumptions on which people rely when they share their opinions.  If we connect ethics and diversity through a creative dialogical process, then we can discover how our different assumptions, observations, and values offer significant resources for making decisions that will align themselves with the company’s ethical principles.  In this way, we can affirm all three connections between ethics and diversity: held together by dialogue, grounded in assumptions, and protected by principles.

I wish to express my gratitude to the co-facilitators of the Valuing Diversity and Ethics program, and especially to Toni Wilson, who was LS&CO.’s Ethics Initiative Manager when this program started, for their contributions in developing the connections between ethics and diversity. Although I continue to serve as an external faculty and consultant in this program, my remarks represent only my interpretation, which I hope will encourage further dialogue on the value of diversity and ethics in the global corporation.

see Elsie Y. Cross et.al.  The Promise of Diversity: Over 40 Voices Discuss Strategies for Eliminating Discrimination in Organizations.  New York: Irwin Professional Publishing, 1994.

author unknown

Marvin T. Brown Working Ethics: Strategies for Decision Making and Organizational Responsibility.  San Francisco, Calif.: Jossey-Bass, 1990, and The Ethical Process: A Strategy for Making Good Decisions.  Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996.  (Self-published in 1993)

Fons Trompenaars Riding The Waves of Culture: Understanding Diversity in Global Business. New York: Irwin Professional Publishing, 1994.

The Ethical Process, p. 46

Glenna Gerard and Linda Ellinore, “Reflection on Guidelines and Building Blocks for Dialogue,” Laguna Hills, CA. The Dialogue Group, 1993.