Diversity has always been a hot topic in the HR community, and for my money, the best way to get people into the diversity "tent" is to expand the focus of what diversity is.  Say diversity, and most people naturally gravitate to race, gender and national orgin, usually in that order. 

There's a lot of gunpowder in those areas, so my view is the best way to bring people to the table on diversity is by focusing not only on those elements, but also the thousands of other ways people are diverse.  Did you grow up rural or metro?  From a one or two parent home?  Did you like Van Halen better with David Lee Roth or Sammy Hagar?  Broaden the focus, get everyone nodding (not nodding off), and pretty soon you can talk about the divisive stuff without everyone getting defensive.

A couple of weeks ago, I riffed that the best brainstorming occurs when you bring the freaks to the table - the outsiders or outliers in your firm to whom you don't talk as much, who don't share your same interests.  That's where the best ideas and thought building as a team occurs - when you bring the odd birds to the table.

Sadly, with the ecomony going the way it is, it's probably time to talk about diversity and layoffs.  Not because you are going to get sued, but rather because, similar to the brainstorming argument, you need diversity to innovate in the future.  If a company goes through layoffs and everyone who stays is like you, it's going to be hard to be innovative.

From Bob Sutton's Work Matters:

"I was also reminded of another lesson about layoffs  from an email exchange I've been having with Bill Burnett, over at Superinnovator. A downturn can be an opportunity to get rid of incompetent people and, of course, destructive a**holes.  But beware of the evils of using layoffs as a reason to expel everyone in your organization who does not act, think, and look like everyone else -- beware that most of us are prone to hold an overly narrow image of a "good employee." 

As I show in Weird Ideas that Work, since we human-beings have powerful and positive emotional reactions to people who are "just like us," and equally powerful negative reactions to people who are "different," the hiring process in most organizations acts to "bring in the clones." Or as Harvard's Rosabeth Moss Kanter famously put it her classic Men and Women of the Corporation, organizations engage in "homosocial reproduction." 

The same psychological forces that cause leaders to bring in the clones during the hiring process can also cause them to (unwittingly)get rid of the people who think differently than everyone else and perhaps are prone to constructive argument.  So a risk of the layoff process in many organizations is that it drives out the variation and diversity so essential to innovation in every organization.  Take a close look at the people you are keeping versus those you are cutting. Are you unwittingly protecting the clones, those people just like your favorite person -- yourself?"

The hardest part in ensuring you don't engage in homosocial reproduction?  Rationalization that someone who's pretty much just like you brings more value than someone you have nothing in common with, but who's more productive.  It's called organizational nearsightedness...