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Sir Ken Robinson says diversity is "about recognising talent and ability on relevant grounds, and not dismissing it on irrelevant grounds." Sir Nicholas Montagu says it means "enabling everyone in an organisation to develop to the maximum of her or his potential and inclination." Members of the London Business Forum got the chance to hear both men discuss and debate these perspectives. And by the end of the event all were agreed that, no matter how you define diversity, every modern organisation should have a strategy to encourage it for bottom-line reasons, as well as the obvious goal of mutual respect between workmates.

Robinson - an adviser to companies and the UK government on creativity, innovation and human resources - was the joker of the pair. Within the first five minutes of his speech he'd managed to describe an event in Las Vegas at which he was introduced by "extreme jugglers" hurling chainsaws at one another and "three beautiful girl dancers in chamois-leather bikinis, who at the climax of their chanting ran backstage and dragged me into the middle of the stage and threw confetti all over me." He said he mentioned this for a variety of reasons but mainly to thank Steve Chamberlain, Events Director at the London Business Forum, for his introduction. "Although it was okay, you know, frankly I've had better. That's all I'm saying."

In between the laugh-out-loud anecdotes, he addressed some fundamental questions, such as the differing meaning of diversity around the world. "In America, it's still largely I think focused on ethnicity," he said. "In parts of Europe, people have big issues around gender." Expanding on the latter of these points, he mentioned a recent trip to Switzerland during which he found that women are still largely expected to quit work once they've had children. "Consequently, there is no network of support for children who want to work in that part of Europe," he pointed out. Worse still, he said, was the horrible discrimination against the disabled he has witnessed in parts of China.

There are two essential elements to diversity, as Robinson sees it: individual differences over which we have no control, such as race, gender or disability; and cultural differences such as nationality, religion and lifestyle choices. The main problem with the latter is that different social groups often take very different things for granted. Consider the number of human senses, he suggested. We in the West have been taught since childhood that there are five: touch, taste, sight, smell and hearing. However, when Kathryn Geurts, author of Culture and the Senses went to live with a remote tribe in Africa, she found they did not make the same distinctions. For them, the most important sense was balance.

"Now balance is a real sense," Robinson argued. "If it's messed up we can't function. You know if you've been out drinking the effect on your sense of humanity, and how you revert to the primeval swamp." Physiologists would now say we have about 15 additional senses such as hunger and temperature, he pointed out. "So, if we take [the five senses] for granted because they're so obvious, what else do we take for granted, when it comes to things like religious belief, forms of perception, social value and so on?"

An organisational diversity strategy should include "not just principles but actions," and should promote "not just tolerance but respect," Robinson stressed. "The reason for doing this apart from it being ethical," he said, "is that the world requires you to do it if you have any intention to remain in business for any length of time." Society will only become more diverse in the future, as technology continues to make the world smaller and major global demographic shifts play out.

"The population of the earth in 1800 was one billion. In 1970, it was three billion. In the year 2000, it was six billion. So picture the curve," he said. "The population of the earth doubled in 30 years. And it's headed towards nine billion we think if it continues on the present path. But it's not happening evenly around the planet. The real growth is in the so-called developing world, especially Asia, and Africa and the Middle East. [Meanwhile,] the birth rate is declining in the established economies. In the West, especially in Europe and in America, the population is not sustainable by birth rate."

In other words, if Europe wishes to continue growing economically then it will need massive immigration from Asia, the Middle-East or Africa, just as the US will need massive immigration from South America. Also, Robinson pointed out, the gay, lesbian and bi-sexual communities are properly asserting their right to self-identity and to self-realisation in the West, thereby increasing the diversity of society even further.

In response, he suggested, businesses will increasingly need to use diversity to:

• engage new clients and markets;
• develop new products and services that require tailoring to those clients and markets;
• improve their talent and knowledge base through recruitment from minority groups, and from untapped target markets; and
• encourage innovation, which is largely the result of differing perspectives converging in a mutually beneficial way.

He concluded: "You simply cannot respond to the increasingly diverse culture of which we're a part with a community that is... mono-cultural."

Sir Nicholas Montagu took to the stage with an attitude that was more serious than Robinson's but arguably more impassioned too. He strutted about and gesticulated vigorously as he described his various public-sector roles, and how he put diversity at the heart of everything he did. Montagu was chairman of the Inland Revenue, an organisation of 83,000 people, and Permanent Secretary Champion for Diversity across the whole civil service. Commenting on the former role, he said: "Collecting over a trillion pounds a year is quite a lot of business. Not to mention paying out £30bn. Diversity is a non-optional, intrinsic part of that business."

Montagu argued there are two complementary diversity strategies that every organisation must pursue and that cannot be separated: "On the internal side, making sure that your own people reflect and understand the communities they serve, while being unimpeded from progressing; and on the external side, understanding and meeting your customers' needs and aspirations."

Showing respect at all times to all people was the key to success, he argued. "If somebody says to me of a colleague 'I don't think I know her,' and I say 'Yes you do, she's the fat girl that sits by the door...' That is, in its way, as offensive as calling me a Yid because I'm Jewish. In other words, it is not respecting people for what they are and for what they bring to the organisation." Similarly, he said, "in a Bangladesh community in the West Midlands, the tax inspector's concentration on small family-owned businesses can seem awfully like racism if you don't understand what is going on."

Montagu emphasised that in a large organisation it was important for leaders at all levels to help promote the overall diversity strategy. He said that as head of Inland Revenue he made about 70 speeches a year and that he reiterated the importance of diversity in every one. "It's a great deal better to bore people, than to have them think that for one moment that you've lost interest," he suggested. "[Otherwise,] it's very easy for the rear-gunners in an organization to say 'Yeah, we always told you it was flavour of the month, we knew he wouldn't keep on with it.'"

However, he was "equivocal" about setting targets for recruitment from under-represented groups. "On the one hand, I think targets are a useful tool for a diversity strategy, because if you don't meet them, you need to ask yourself some fairly awkward questions," he said. "Why aren't we attracting the female applicants? Why aren't members of minorities getting through to our management grades? Is it because our processes are discriminatory or is it because the management grades they don't want to be part of. So that is the plus of the targets. But I think the minus, and this is where I say I speak as somebody who is a civil servant, is the danger of box-ticking... The moment [your diversity strategy] becomes an add-on, you have lost diversity as a business imperative."

Montagu suggested it was better, in a large organisation, to give the responsibility for diversity not to HR managers but to divisional managing directors. This way, he said, diversity cannot be regarded as a mere adjunct to the business. HR should be on hand to provide expertise to help disseminate and promote the strategy, but the buck should not stop with them as far as implementation was concerned. A successful diversity strategy, he argued, is one that is embedded "in the business, in the objectives, in everything."