You do a lot of poking!
Poking is fun!
I would point out ('cause I'm a pointer not a poker) that McKinsey just kinda made up the "diversity is good for business" line to sell DEI trainings to businesses.
Entirely plausible, but far from the whole picture at hand, even if so. With that said, handwaving aside...
Oh, no problem. I'm sure if you paid enough money a consulting company could give you the report you want.
You do realize that the exact same can be said of the efforts to discredit McKinsey, if you're going to try to go there? Especially if we happened to live in a country where there are entrenched interests and groups of people with a strong history of actively working to disempower minorities and concentrate power and wealth into fewer and fewer hands. Oh, wait, we do happen to live in such a country. As noted, it's entirely plausible that McKinsey's work is flawed, but maybe consider what interests are being impacted by whatever thing is in question before jumping blindly to swallow something you think sounds nice.
And I don't mean the diversity of experience / skill which is obviously useful. But that diversity of skin color or sexual proclivities clearly has no bearing on merit.
More specifically, the removal of skin color and sexual proclivities from being improperly included as disqualifiers has merit, all on it's own. Frankly, that has been a decidedly positive effect produced by the rise of DEI. Further, if one's trying to market products to some demographic, it does tend to be rather helpful to include people from said demographic in the conversation.
If it were true that "DEI boosts the bottom line," how could companies possibly have been profitable before the DEI discrimnation was imposed?
That's a weird question. Easily. Boosting the bottom line is a rather different concept from being profitable, period. They're related, sure, but not at all the same thing.
How can Samsung or LG make so much $$$ with such a homogenous workforce? And where are all these new billion-dollar startups with DEI owners/founders?
Again, weird questions. It's to the point where it's hard to tell what strange confusion is required to produce them.
DEI is a luxury that already profitable companies engage in for public relations.
A lot of companies did rather obviously have PR motives for playing up DEI stuff. Duh. Most of them benefited from that PR move, too, by the look of it. Those that didn't seem to mostly be those with significant easily riled up right-wing customer bases.
Once that starts to cut into profit, DEI is on the chopping block.
Hmm? I'm reminded of an acquaintance I made a while ago. They were hired as a safety compliance inspector at a company to make sure that all the rules were being followed so that the company wouldn't have to pay any fines when visited. By their telling, they did an amazing job at that. So good that the inspection deemed that the company wouldn't need to be inspected for something like a decade. As a "reward," the company immediately fired him, because they wouldn't need to worry about inspections for quite a while.
DEI on the chopping block isn't really much different in fundamental concept. The "DEI" policies put into place don't necessarily need much maintenance, which limits the incentives to retain said professionals in the face of cost cutting initiatives, even if the leaders think that it's worthwhile to keep the policies.
They seem to be assuming causation when they observe a correlation. If diversity is a side effect of other factors which make a company successful, then efforts to produce diversity purely for the sake of diversity will not actually help performance.
Indeed, that first point there, if it is just resting on that alone, would be correlation = causation. Really, really obviously so, which immediately leads to the question of why presumably intelligent, business-savvy people would be convinced by it if that's actually all there is to it.
To poke at Forbes for a bit more of the surrounding stuff, as it also includes reference to McKinsey, though -
One More Time: Why Diversity Leads To Better Team Performance
Are there any studies which show that DEI measures actually improve the performance of a company? I don't think there are.
Directly for profits? That's obviously not an especially easy demand. DEI is fundamentally about more indirect benefits to the company, after all.
For example -
In 2021, 66 percent of global full-time employees admitted that fostering inclusion and a sense of belonging was the most valued outcome of Diversity, Equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs at their workplace. Another effect of DEI programs, mentioned by 65 percent of the survey respondents, was that they contributed to fair compensation at work.
A more attractive and retentive company culture does have obvious benefits for employers, as a general matter. How that translates to profits is something that tends to be far harder to specifically quantify, though, it's widely understood to be decidedly positive. Separating the DEI part of the equation, specifically, even from the rest of the efforts made for that overall purpose rather seems like it would be inviting various accusations, either way, before getting to attempts to specifically quantify the effects on revenue.