How Diversity Fuels Creativity: Lessons for the Next Era of Travel Brands

In early November Skift hosted its first Design the Future event, an afternoon of discussions with leaders in the design and creativity space. As part of this, we're posting extracts of these conversations. 

Host: Robert Rosenthal, author, speaker, and journalist

Guest: Aaron Walton, CEO of Walton Isaacson

Diversity means harnessing the power of disruption. Differences are disruptive, and that’s the key to innovation — disrupting the status quo or predictable, said Walton Isaacson CEO Aaron Walton. The travel industry, like the entire world, has had a major wake-up call this year when it comes to diversity, but Walton said the industry needs to see diversity is more than just the look of a company: “The eye should be able to be see diversity, but what’s probably just as important is how it sounds,” he added. “The sound of diversity is the sound of the status quo smashing into a million pieces and someone rearranging those in ways nobody thought about before.”