We’re into the dog days of summer and I’m just back from vacation, so here are some interesting workforce odds and ends worth catching up on:

• Should the government mandate diversity in the boardroom? Yes, it may sound like the latest from the Obama administration, but it’s actually happening in Scandinavia, according to NPR.org. “In Norway, gender diversity in the boardroom isn’t just a nice idea, it’s the law,” the story says. “The boards of all publicly traded and public limited companies in Norway must have at least 40 percent female representation.”

The law has teeth in it too.

“Companies that fail to comply can, in theory, be shut down,” NPR notes. “So far, all are complying and none has been closed. But there is sharp disagreement in Norway over whether quotas have really changed the status quo.” And, many are skeptical that the mandate has actually had much impact. “While few in Norway want to go back to the status quo, many are questioning whether the state can really mandate corporate diversity,” the story adds.

Of course, there is a lot of back and forth in Norway from experts who think this is a good thing to those who don’t believe the mandate has had much of an impact. But here’s my view having worked in a corporate culture that made diversity a priority: Without a big push from leadership at the top, diversity in the workforce just doesn’t happen.

• Everyone knows that it’s a tough time for workers in the Big, Bad Recession, but who knew that porn workers would also be struggling? According to the Los Angeles Times, “the adult entertainment business, centered in [Southern California’s] San Fernando Valley, has weathered several recessions since it took off with the advent of home video in the 1980s. But this time the industry is not dealing with just a weakened economy. A growing abundance of free content on the Internet is undercutting consumers’ willingness to pay for porn, and with it the ability of many workers to earn a living in the business.”

The story quotes one porn actress who has seen her annual income drop from $150,000 to $50,000 annually, but as the Times notes, “the effects of the downturn have been felt most severely by the thousands of [behind-the-scenes] people who work in the adult entertainment business. Kelly Labanco doesn’t need industry estimates to know what’s happening. The makeup artist, who has worked in porn for five years, is landing half as many jobs as she did a year ago and has seen her pay drop from a high of $250 an hour to less than $100.”

I know; it’s hard to feel sorry for someone making around $100 per hour, but it just goes to show you that when it comes to the Big, Bad Recession, no industry or group of workers is immune.

• Here’s another recession-driven workforce trend: Desperate people are willing to take previously unpleasant and unacceptable jobs, according to an Associated Press story in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. “People who have been out of work for months are lining up for jobs at places they once considered unthinkable: slaughterhouses, sewage plants, prisons,” the story says.

“I have to just shut my mouth because I can’t do anything about it,” said Nichole McRoberts of Sedalia, Missouri, who says she pictured more for herself at age 30 than working in a poultry plant, cutting diseased or damaged flesh off chicken carcasses that speed by on an assembly line.

Yes, that sounds like terrible work, but given that nearly an additional 250,000 lost their jobs in July, in this economy even a bad job is far better than having no job at all.

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I was home over the Memorial Day weekend, bored and not feeling well, so I found myself flipping around the TV and doing something I never, ever do: settling in to watch the Indianapolis 500. The race also reminded me of a management lesson well worth remembering—sometimes, it’s OK to blow your cool.

What kept me involved was the jockeying for the lead position, the occasional crash and the ongoing saga of Danica Patrick as she battled to stay near the race leaders. Patrick gets a lot of press because A) she’s a moderately successful woman competing in a sport that is overwhelmingly dominated (and populated) by men, and B) she’s pretty hot.

Patrick kept battling and stayed around eighth or ninth position until disaster hit with less than 30 laps to go—her car got clipped coming out of the pits by another car, driven by Ryan Briscoe, when he tried to get going again after his pit stop. I felt bad for Patrick because I had been rooting for her to finish the race (a big accomplishment in and of itself), but what amazed me was her reaction to the crash—she got mad and wanted a piece of the guy who carelessly knocked her out of the race.

“Briscoe clipped Patrick’s car as she was leaving pit road with 29 laps left last Sunday, inflicting enough damage to take both drivers out of the race,” wrote columnist Richard Durrett in the Dallas Morning News. “A frustrated Patrick jumped out of her car and briskly walked toward Briscoe’s pit stall, taking her gloves off as she went as if planning to send a stern message when she arrived. But security steered her clear.”

It was a pretty riveting scene because, clearly, Patrick wanted to do a lot more than just thank Briscoe for being a competitor in the race. As the Morning News columnist noted, “Patrick’s 80 or so steps down pit road are the lasting image of Sunday’s race, no offense to winner Scott Dixon. Imagine the memories if she’d actually reached Briscoe. … Regardless, the incident has fans split into two camps when it comes to Patrick: She’s either a chronic complainer or a consummate competitor.”

Or, it could be something else—that Patrick consciously and deliberately used her anger as a management tool to send a message to Briscoe, and everyone else in the race world, that she is not just a hot babe who can drive a little, but a tough, skilled competitor who wants to win just as badly as anyone else.

I’ve written before about unorthodox management practices such as “Verbal Abuse as a Workforce Strategy” and getting rid of your best and most productive workers to save money, but this is very different from that. Blowing your cool and getting angry, on occasion, especially if it is done in a very focused and specific way, can pay big benefits for a manager. To wit:

1. It gets everyone’s immediate attention;
2. It crystalizes an issue in people’s minds as something of unique significance and great importance;
3. It draws a line in the sand about what you will tolerate, and what you won’t; and,
4. It sends long-lasting ripples through the workforce about how deeply you care about the work at hand.

I’ve used this technique on occasion, and I have to say, it made my point to the workforce far better than a memo or a meeting ever could have done. My guess is that is what Danica Patrick had in mind as well. Although she may have been frustrated at being knocked out of the Indy 500 by a careless competitor, her angry walk down pit row was more about sending a larger message than it was about getting in Ryan Briscoe’s face. And from my perspective, blowing her cool was a useful and worthwhile management tool.

Here are some survey results guaranteed to get people talking: Although organizations believe workplace diversity is important, only 30 percent can define what diversity is.

These findings are in the latest research report released this week by the Society for Human Resource Management. The “State of Workforce Diversity Management” report, done in conjunction with the American Institute for Managing Diversity Inc., is an in-depth look at the status of diversity in today’s workplace. You can find it here on the SHRM Web site, but you need to be a SHRM member to get behind the registration wall to read the report.

The survey findings aren’t all that surprising, but really, is it that hard to define diversity?  It’s true that the definition is changing (and becoming broader and more inclusive) , but one would think that if organizations believe diversity is important, they could also figure out just what it is.

We’ve written a quite a bit here at Workforce Management about what companies are doing to foster diversity. The work at Toyota and the diversification efforts at Denny’s are just two examples. But the big issue for most organizations trying to become more diverse is pretty simple: Can you link diversity to better business results?

This is the classic business dilemma—can you prove that your initiative is producing results? Are you willing to invest time and resources to demonstrate it? It’s probably why diversity efforts haven’t been more successful. If the business case for diversity could be more accurately measured and quantified, more organizations would not only embrace it, but would zero in and make diversity a bottom-line priority.

The SHRM workforce diversity study made this same point. When both HR professionals and diversity practitioners were asked an open-ended question about changes that could help foster greater diversity in the workplace, both groups had the same top response: a greater emphasis on the relationship between diversity and business results.

One contributor to the survey, Frank McCloskey, vice president of diversity at Georgia Power, had some pretty strong words about this. “The field is stuck, with little innovation in how we are tracking diversity,” he said. “There is lack of discipline and understanding of what diversity means beyond race and gender or how success is being defined, or not being defined, by most corporate diversity and inclusion initiatives.”

Anyone who dares to say that there’s a lack of strong, measurable business metrics for diversity efforts usually gets taken to task for it. But I can’t recall anyone actually producing something that showed the connection between diversity and bottom-line business results.

I wish they would. Maybe if someone did, diversity could become more of a strategic business practice and less of an elusive goal that, for most organizations, always seems just out of our reach.