The Business Case for Disagreement

Eric Smith opens most conversations the same way: by asking who is at the table. Then he asks who is not.

That question is the foundation of his consulting firm, Inclusivity LLC, which he describes as a full-service firm with a cultural competence lens. The work centers on intersectionality — understanding how different identities, perspectives, and experiences overlap and what happens to an organization when those differences are either welcomed or ignored.

The business case, he will tell you, is not complicated. Diversity plus genuine inclusion creates a context for innovation.

When people can bring their full selves to a problem, you get perspectives that challenge assumptions, catch blind spots, and push outcomes beyond what a room full of like-minded people would ever reach on their own.

He illustrates it with a client story. A local advertising organization had been targeting its coupon marketing almost exclusively toward white, middle-aged women. Not because the data said that was the right audience. Because that was who they were comfortable with, who they imagined when they pictured their customer. Eric helped them see that the behavior they were marketing to — clipping coupons, looking for deals — was not exclusive to one demographic. When they opened their approach, the results followed. New segments engaged. Revenue grew. And the marketing became more culturally relevant, which meant more people actually felt it was meant for them.

The work is not always that clean or quick. But the pattern holds: when organizations stop assuming they know who their audience is and start actually asking, things change.

This is not a soft argument. McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, and Catalyst have all documented it with data that has remained consistent over years of research. Organizations with genuine diversity in leadership and decision-making outperform those without it. Not marginally. Significantly. The evidence is not contested. The resistance is cultural, political, and often just comfortable inertia.

Eric has been doing this work, in one form or another, for forty years. He started before the vocabulary existed for it. He is still doing it now because the need has not gone away — it has, in some ways, gotten more acute. And he is not interested in waiting for the conditions to be easier before continuing.

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