Inclusion as renewal: throwing open the windows

Democracies know the problem of survival. Presidents do not reign forever. Parliaments dissolve. The ballot box is not merely an instrument of fairness; it is a safeguard against decay. Without turnover, power calcifies, curdling into oligarchy, into dynasties of dust. Renewal is what keeps the air from going stale.

But in the corporate world? No such safeguard exists. Captains of industry appoint heirs in their own image - men and women who look like them, think like them, travel the same corridors, attend the same schools, drink in the same clubs. Money follows the grooves it has always followed. Portraits fade, stories ossify, cobwebs creep across the frame. No window is ever opened.

And so we arrive at the illusion: the glossy brochures, the poster walls of smiling interns. Diversity, Equity, Inclusion - DEI, the corporate catechism. But too often it is representation without rotation, a pipeline without passage. At the top - the place where decisions harden into destiny - the same faces stare back. Progress dressed up as permanence.

Here is the sharper claim: inclusion is not charity, not virtue, not even fairness. It is a structural necessity. It is the corporate substitute for elections. The only mechanism that forces new air into sealed rooms, new voices into tired conversations. Without it, the boardroom becomes an echo chamber - self-reinforcing, airless, and slowly choking on its own past.

Boards that treat DEI as corporate social responsibility have missed the point. They are not running a philanthropy; they are stewarding survival. Their duty is to prevent capital from being captured by yesterday’s networks, to prevent innovation from being strangled by yesterday’s hierarchies. Inclusion is governance’s version of a term limit. It shatters the spell of sameness. It insists that tomorrow has a seat at the table.

Because a business that fails to refresh itself does not simply grow old - it grows blind. It cannot see the markets forming just beyond its vision. It clings to the safety of incumbents until the ground shifts beneath them, and then it falls - stunned, bewildered, and too late. Renewal is not benevolence. Renewal is survival.

Democracies throw open the windows with elections. In business, inclusion must play that role. Not as virtue, but as ventilation.