Diversity is one of the most frequently used words in the modern lexicon of business. It is often referred to as a goal, an end in itself, or simply "the right thing to do." [Yet] it may not be clear [to some] why diversity is good for business. Would Merck's chemistry group necessarily discover better molecules if it were more diverse? Does a parent care whether the medicine that saved a child's life was invented by a white chemist or a black one? Would, or even should, a shareholder care?

In  The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith observed that "every [corporation] endeavors to employ its capital so that its produce may be of greatest value.  By pursuing its own interest it frequently promotes that of society more effectually than when it really intends to promote it." It's not that we at Merck don't care about doing the right thing, but we believe, like Adam Smith, that our job is to focus on our business. Pressing for diversity, absent a business rationale, may do more harm than good.

To meet our long-term objective of earnings per share growth in the top quartile of leading health care companies, we need people who can discover and develop important new medicines and market them effectively around the world. What policies and practices can help us assemble such people? Would anyone suggest seriously that pursuing workforce homogeneity would be a smart strategy? Of course not. A homogeneous workforce would inevitably exclude some superior individuals, and it would also preclude a keener understanding of the varied customer and cultural demands of the global market. We begin, then, with the simple premise that we need to hire and develop the best people. If they achieve their full potential, Merck will succeed. We don't isolate diversity as a distinct program; instead, we include it as an integral part of our business practices and training strategy. We expect all leaders at Merck to achieve key human resources goals - including diversity - and we use those goals to judge not only an individual manager's performance but also divisional and overall corporate performance.

How do we make sure we have access to the kind of talent we need? What does it mean, in practice, to be inclusive? Consider two very different recruiting initiatives we've designed.

The first focuses on the long term. Merck has a direct stake in supporting medical and science education in a broad array of colleges and universities. To address the shortage of talented minority students who choose biomedical research as a career, Merck made a 10-year, $20 million commitment to the United Negro College Fund in 1995 to provide scholarship awards and internships.

This program will expand the pool of outstanding minority researchers available to the general scientific community. More particularly, we hope that many of them will one day join Merck Research Laboratories. In addition to our UNCF efforts, we also work with school districts near our facilities in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

The second recruiting initiative was tailored to handle a surge of new product introductions in the late 1990s. We had to hire what was at that time an unprecedented number of field representatives, and we had to do it quickly.

First, we asked the hiring managers to identify the traits, skills and behaviors most critical to job performance. We then developed a process to screen for those key competencies at various stages of candidate assessment: résumé screening, telephone evaluation and final interview. Scoring each candidate on the individual criteria gave us an objective ranking of the candidates with the highest potential.

Compared with earlier recruitment efforts, this process was more efficient and gave us a greater consistency throughout all regions of the country. And there was another effect: The people we hired were even more diverse than those we had hired as reps in the past. Diversity, in other words, was a welcome outcome of an inclusive hiring process that was based entirely on business-directed criteria.

Whether it's in the lab or the marketplace, competitive advantage in a business like ours ultimately rests on innovation. To succeed, we must bring together talented and committed people with diverse perspectives - people who can challenge one another's thinking, people who collectively approach problems from multiple points of view. We will continue, therefore, to cast the widest net in our search for talent - because it is the smart thing to do.