Art & Creativity Quote by Malcolm Forbes

Forbes packages a complicated social bargain in a slogan that sounds like a mission statement and lands like a dare. “Diversity” here isn’t framed as charity or moral penance; it’s treated as a skill, “the art,” something you practice, refine, even monetize. Coming from Malcolm Forbes - a publisher who turned business journalism into a glossy lifestyle brand - that word choice matters. He’s selling a managerial ideal: difference as productive capacity, not just demographic variety.

The phrase “thinking independently together” is the clever hinge. Independence is the prized American virtue, the thing employers claim to want, the thing institutions quietly sand down. Togetherness is the corporate necessity: coordination, cohesion, a single direction. Putting them side by side creates friction, and the line’s charm is that it refuses to resolve it. It implies diversity isn’t peaceful coexistence; it’s a disciplined form of disagreement that still ships the product.

Subtext: Forbes is implicitly critiquing groupthink without sounding combative. He offers diversity as the sanctioned outlet for dissent - a way to legitimize different viewpoints while keeping everyone in the room. It also carries a soft warning: diversity is hard. An “art” suggests judgment, tact, and constant adjustment, not a checkbox.

Contextually, this reads as late-20th-century boardroom liberalism: pluralism justified by performance. In that frame, the most radical part isn’t “diversity”; it’s the insistence that independence can coexist with solidarity, if you treat it as a craft rather than a quota.