Sam Jones
Data Morphosis
Headquarters: London, England
Education: The University of Salford
First Job: Paper round in Salford at 6 a.m. every day of the week
What I’m Reading: The Godfather by Mario Puzo
My Philosophy: You only fail when you stop.
Challenging the status quo
Diversity and inclusion is a subject that is very close to my heart. I’ve always believed that you shouldn’t need a business case to treat people equally.
But last year I realised that many CEOs and executive boards don’t share my belief. For many, unless D&I aligns to targets attached to dollars and cents, it’s either a community or social issue, or a box-ticking reporting exercise.
I found this sort of outdated attitude incredibly frustrating.
I believed that viewing your people data in the context of business performance could reveal that diversity was actually a huge commercial opportunity.
Most business divisions had access to best-in-class tools to do their jobs. Meanwhile, HR and D&I had to track and measure the impact of innovative programs in as best they could, through a series of complex workarounds involving multiple spreadsheets, databases and kitchen sinks.
Why was it so complicated? Why did it take so long? Why hadn’t anyone found a solution?
Every business maintained that people were their most important asset. If people were truly at the heart of your business, why weren’t HR and D&I given world- class tools to do their job even better and more efficiently?
I decided to turn my frustration into inspiration— and I created Gender Gap™.
Whilst there was widely held belief that it was critical to be able to measure the true business impact of D&I, no other piece of software brought D&I and business data together and enabled their correlation. Gender Gap™ takes unconsolidated people data and transforms it into a visual format, ready for rapid analysis and correlation with business data. It enables D&I practitioners to guide business leaders, and measure the impact of initiatives against hard business numbers.
Creating Gender Gap™ took a massive leap of faith. I like to challenge the status quo—so I took the leap.
I’m glad I did. Gender Gap™ has been very well received by CEOs, board members, and global heads of HR and D&I— many of whom I owe a debt of gratitude for their invaluable feedback and advice.
I turned my frustration with the D&I status quo into a solution that fundamentally changed my business. Now I challenge fellow business leaders to make that same leap of faith!
