I’ve been reading or listening to a number of interesting things this week and wanted to share some of that here.

I’ve found several interesting blogs (including a couple that I reblogged earlier today) on topics related to my work.  There are some wonderfully creative and insightful people out there involved in user-experience and user-interface design, Agile software development, and product management and if these things interest you as well I encourage you to check out some of the things I’ve tweeted or blogged about recently.

I have also been both reading about and listening to more on the topic of diversity and inclusion.  With this as a central theme for my company in 2015 there are a number of folks talking about these topics and sharing links with each other to articles, TED talks, and other sources of information.  Here are a few of the things I’ve come across in the past week:

• Diversity at Facebook: http://bit.ly/1CjKmoc
• The Inclusion Imperative: http://bit.ly/1DyeLfE
• The Listening Bias: http://bit.ly/1B6PQyR
• Can Prejudice Ever be a Good Thing: http://bit.ly/1pyVeTG

And here are some key insights I gleaned from them:

• It’s not about lowering the bar but about widening the funnel for finding top candidates
• Diversity and inclusion must be values not just compliance issues
• Sometimes we need ‘misfits’ rather than ‘culture fits’
• We have to be committed to really listening if we are going to learn from each other

These are complex topics and I find it valuable to listen to lots of points of view.  I hope you find some of this interesting as well, since in truth it’s not that simple.