Today’s high profile example comes from Heinekin. Back in the day, I enjoyed drinking both Heinekin and Heinekin Light. Those were probably among the first six packs I ever purchased. My tastes evolved quickly and I soon stopped drinking Green Beer except on major holidays like Saint Patrick’s Day. However, I continued to get a kick out of their sensationally silly commercials during UEFA Champions League soccer games. Recently, the Heinekin marketing department seems to have moved on from soccer nonsense based on this article that suggests the beer company is now producing thoughtful content for our times (at least according to those who feel commercials represent some important barometer about society).
Then… this happened.
The response was predictable – tweets, articles, posts, you name it, everyone in a mad rush to win the latest round of Spot The Racist. I gave brief consideration to how this commercial fit into my framework but I quickly realized that it didn’t fit at all. My premise was that an individual can say racist things as a sad consequence of failing at humor but a company is incapable of failing at humor in this way. At Heineken, I imagine humor is manufactured just like anything else at a large company. First, someone has an idea. Then, this idea is subjected to a long process involving committees, meetings, and discussions. Finally, there is a QA step, or something like it, and maybe the product makes it onto some bigwig's desk who makes a final decision about whether it will make it into the light of day.
This means that over the long process of turning this idea into a commercial, some unknown but presumably significant number of people looked it over and gave their feedback. Any one of these people could have said ‘we cannot run this ad, unless we’re racists’. If someone had brought this simple fact into the discussion, it would have been incredibly difficult for others who may have felt the same way to remain silent. This didn't happen, for whatever reason, and that's why the commercial happened. These hypothetical people who failed to raise the issue weren't trying to be funny - they just didn't point out that the commercial might be a problem (or failed to point it out to the right people). In fact, this extended, deliberate process is almost entirely the opposite of my framework because when an individual says something racist in a futile attempt at humor, the individual never sits on the comment for months at a time - it comes flying right out in the briefest moment of misguided impulse.
My above conclusion, nice and neat as it is, doesn't clearly state what I feel is an important fact, so here it is - Heineken isn't a racist company. Or perhaps, I should say that this ad doesn't state anything conclusive about whether Heineken is a racist company. All it demonstrates is that Heineken is a huge company, one full of people who apparently cannot identify a problematic product in its pipeline. This is hardly a case of blatant racism but rather one of significant incompetence, and such incompetence at the corporate level is pretty frequent from my point of view. Isn't this why the helmet football league still has a team called the Redskins?
I have this thought pretty regularly these days - what is commonly ascribed to negative intent is often better explained as incompetence. And to take it a step further, it seems like most large organizations are bound to succumb to mass incompetence at some point or another. If incompetence is preordained, what should these large organizations do? I've got a wild idea - how about achieving some diversity in hiring results? It isn't a massive stretch to think that this commercial likely came out of a room with very little racial diversity (1). Quite frankly, I'm struggling to come up with many other viable explanations. It’s not like the CEOs of these companies come into work every day and announce that the goal is to hire one token minority a year – it’s more like the company isn’t talented enough to overcome the bias prevalent in recruiting and therefore ends up with the same type of people it hired the last time. It is, I suppose, just like any other negative outcome for a large organization - yet another manifestation of incompetence.
Footnotes / speculation...
0. I guess drinking too many Heinekens is also an explanation?
When I wrote the post about how I thought a lot of racist moments were explainable by someone’s failed attempt at humor, I should have emphasized the key word – someone. The framework applies to individuals, not multinational beer corporations. The interval between a person’s idea and that person’s mouth can be as short as a millisecond. Even if an individual carefully considers his or her words, it seems entirely natural to me that such an individual might fail to recognize an interpretation of an idea that will come off as insensitive. And if humor is involved, forget it. The rewards for being considered funny are so high and the shelf life of comedy so short that I’m certain unfunny people making inadvertently racist comments in their clumsy attempts at humor will long remain the cost of an ever-integrating and globalizing world. A company doesn't have this excuse - it takes so long to do anything that letting something 'slip' is hardly an acceptable explanation for this sort of error.
I've heard lately that the evidence of diverse teams producing 'better outcomes' is considered flimsy in certain very well regarded circles. I can see why this might be the case. It's hard enough to measure work as it is - how could someone measure performance by a 'diverse' team and compare it against a team of lesser diversity? Where is the control group? And yet, I can't help but think that it's examples like this that prove the point. Sure, maybe for a company like Heineken most of their work is completed equally well regardless of a given team or department's diversity. But I have a feeling this one PR blunder undid a lot of good work. It's possible the fiasco led some once loyal customers to boycott its products for life. It might be the case that the evidence of diversity leading to better work is flimsy, but I think it's hard to gather clear evidence about the types of blunders such teams might naturally avoid.
