I work for a big energy company. I'm an engineer and a supervisor. Just had to sit through a long training on the goals we have as a company to try to spend a certain amount of our budget every year with "diverse suppliers". Oh don't know what that is? Let me explain...

If you need to purchase pipe to put it in the ground for a project for natural gas, instead of looking for the best company to buy pipe from we need to look for a supplier that has a diverse enough workforce. You need valves, fittings, etc from company A. Sorry, they don't have enough women or minorities working at that company so you'll have to purchase the lesser quality and more expensive stuff at company B since they have a diverse enough workforce.

Hmmm, so let me get this straight. Instead of operating the company efficiently, allowing us to do more with our budget and do it better, we're hamstringing ourselves with diversity? Sounds great. What could go wrong? What's really stupid about this is our supplier companies can't compete when we're picking the winners and losers. And all this time, the "diverse" company is going to be falsely attributing their success to being diverse, congratulating themselves on how open minded they all are instead of their ability to supply a superior product at a competitive price. So stupid...