Success Quote by Vernon Jordan

Jordan’s line has the clipped, boardroom pragmatism of someone who’s watched lofty commitments evaporate the moment they collide with quarterly pressure. By yoking “diversity” to “sales,” he strips away the comforting fiction that inclusion happens because leaders are enlightened. It happens, he implies, when it is priced in.

The specific intent is partly instructional and partly accusatory: if you want change inside large institutions, treat it like any other non-negotiable business target. The phrase “make a diversity number” is doing double duty. On one hand, it’s a tactical endorsement of metrics and accountability in executive compensation, the only language many C-suites reliably understand. On the other, it’s a critique of how corporate America often requires moral issues to be translated into incentives before it will move. The bonus becomes the honesty test.

The subtext is thornier: measuring diversity risks turning people into KPIs, inviting tokenism, box-checking, and “pipeline” excuses. Jordan doesn’t deny that danger; he’s signaling that the alternative - voluntary good intentions - has historically produced PR campaigns, not power shifts. The blunt parallel to sales also exposes how companies already accept that human behavior follows incentives; they just prefer not to admit it when the topic is equity.

Context matters. Coming out of decades when “diversity” was more slogan than strategy, Jordan is advocating a hard lever inside corporate governance. He’s not romanticizing corporate virtue. He’s demanding corporate discipline.