In the early 1970s, our late Co-Founder, Merlin G. Pope, Jr., was a Ph.D. student at Yale University. Merlin commuted from New Haven, CT to Cincinnati, OH to work as an external consultant at Procter & Gamble while pursuing his doctorate degree.
At that time, most companies were doing what was required of them by law—i.e., recruiting and hiring Black employees. Like many leaders who were responding to Affirmative Action, the head of P&G’s Engineering Division asked: “So, how do we make this work after we hire Black engineers?”
It didn’t take long before several visionary Division Leaders realized that they needed to provide some type of racial awareness training for their managers and employees.
In 1976, Merlin co-founded Behavioral Science Applications, Inc. Shortly thereafter, he created the first business case for diversity & inclusion, which examined racial/ethnic diversity and the average annual productivity increase. His work at P&G contributed to his doctoral dissertation research at Yale, which compared how long it took new-hire White vs Black engineers to be ‘earning their keep plus $1.00.’ Our patented process, Consulting Pairs®, was born from that research.