Case Interview Daniel Fisher

For my Final Project in my Anthropologie course I had the privilege to interview Daniel Fisher who is the Senior Account Manager for Client Services at IMG Live. He has and MBA from Georgia State University in Sport Management Economics. He allowed me to interview him over the phone since he lives in Atlanta Georgia and I am in Texas. I was able to record the interview using a Call Recorder app on my phone so I could recall direct quotes for this project. Since his graduation in 2014, he has worked with two marketing agencies and served as a voice for major brands in their sports marketing pursuits. He has developed the ability to network and maximize the value of a partnership and increase consumer impressions for major brands with teams

From simply observing sport organizations and reading a few statistics online it is easy to see the sports industry, similar to engineering, is a male-dominant field. There are important strides being taken to encourage gender equality because diversity is not just an issue of equity but of creativity, productivity and quality. Diversity is a driving factor for high quality results and the male to female ratio is slowly changing in both engineering and the sports industry. In the article How Diversity Makes Us Smarter, Katherine Phillips states: “Decades of research by organizational scientists, psychologists, sociologists, economists and demographers show that socially diverse groups (that is, those with a diversity of race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation) are more innovative than homogeneous groups”. This is because people from different backgrounds bring new information, opinions and perspectives to the table. Although the number of females in the sports industry and engineering today has greatly increased, it is still surprisingly low. To what extent do companies strive to achieve diversity though? The interesting topic brought up following our discussion of diversity (or lack thereof) is that since he works in the sports industry he has hit a sort of glass ceiling because he is a man. The typical “victim” of the glass ceiling or gender bias

Whether it is conscious or unconscious, gender bias should not play a role in a company’s decision making. Ultimately being gender bias towards either gender can hurt both of them- and your business. Companies should take a more holistic approach to the task of creating a diverse work environment. Instead of hiring people because they are a minority, the new hire should earn the job based on their qualifications and job fit. A possible solution is examining candidates resumes without their names so unconscious bias does not affect who is chosen to move forward. Diversity is a quality any successful industry has but it should not stoop to unethical methods to achieving it. My interview with Daniel Fisher helped me realize that not only woman experience these situations and that I should strive to work for a company that does not consider a person’s gender when making decisions but their credentials and