A group of 30 masters of business administration students gathered Wednesday afternoon to hear Eddie Moore Jr. discuss diversity in America.

Moore, owner of America Moore, a research and consulting firm, said he prefers to use the term “Cultural Competency” instead of diversity.

“Cultural competency is about social skills,” said Moore, who is also director of intercultural life at Central College in Pella.

Tony Brownlee, MBA student and organizer of Moore’s discussion, said he invited Moore to speak at Iowa State.

“There is more to life than just business,” he said.

Moore said cultural competency is essential to be prepared for the business world. For example, if a student were to go through high school and college with no computer skills, they would not be as prepared when entering the workplace, he said.

“I think about diversity from that perspective. When I look across America and when I look across the world, it does not look [culturally] like Iowa,” he said.

Cultural competency is about knowing how to interact instead of being politically correct, Moore said.

“When I look at the 21st century workplace, being successful is not about knowing the right words to use and not about saying the right things,” he said. “It’s about working together and building relationships.”

Part of building relationships is understanding where people come from, Moore said.

“We don’t choose where we grow up,” he said. “And where we grow up depends on the social skills we learn. It’s conditioning. You’re getting skills to deal with people.”

Brownlee said diversity is important to students and the cultural competency concept provided another angle to view it.

In dealing with people, many times the “answer is the same, it’s just expressed differently,” Moore said.

For example, he said the answer most people give to a simple math equation like two plus two is four. If looked at with an open mind and perspective, Moore said two plus two could also equal one plus three or two squared, depending on what angle each person is coming from.

In Moore’s own experience, church was something that he had to see differently once he came to Iowa.

“Pella has a huge number of churches, like 40,” he said. “But not a single one of them was like the church I went to [in Florida]. I just had to accept that it was still church, just presented in a different way.”

Seeking new information and advancing is also important to cultural competency, Moore said.

“You should be ashamed of yourselves if you plan on living in America in the same way your parents and grandparents did,” he said.