The tech industry’s diversity issues won’t improve overnight, but it took HP just 11 months to show demonstrable progress.

Making diversity a business priority is paying dividends for the Silicon Valley tech firm in the form of free publicity.

When Hewlett Packard split into two companies a couple of years ago under the leadership of CEO Meg Whitman, markets were lamenting the decline and end of the personal computer.

Many expected HP to just hang around for a while as its PC business dried up before finally selling whatever technology it had left to a rival.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the end of the PC market, Mercury News reported in August. During the last year, HP has reported four consecutive quarters of year-over-year sales growth.

HP didn’t just find a way to grow. It is setting the standard for diversity in Silicon Valley with a full-force commitment to a diverse and inclusive culture, according to Diversity Journal.

HP is recognized for having the most diverse board of directors of any tech company in the U.S. — almost 40 percent female and 23 percent underrepresented minorities, according to a February 2017 report:

In just 11months, HP has created one of the most diverse boards in corporate America, diversified its workforce, increased women at the executive level, called for improved diversity across the legal profession and put out a worldwide message to employees, partners, suppliers and customers that HP is accountable for driving progress for a diverse and inclusive culture.

“Diversity is embedded into everything we do. Everyone at every level is accountable for HP’s diverse and inclusive culture,” said Chief Diversity Officer Lesley Slaton Brown.

With strong buy-in from the top, HP’s Chief Marketing Officer Antonio Lucio has taken an aggressive and public stance on diversity and inclusion.

Lucio this week was named Diversity Champion Winner at the PR Council’s Seventh Annual Diversity Distinction in PR Awards.

Lucio is credited with helping kick-start HP’s D&I efforts with its board of directors. Under his leadership, HP Inc. has become one of the top tech companies with women and minorities in executive positions. Women represent 37 percent of HP’s total workforce. Within 12 months at HP Inc., Antonio increased women leaders in marketing roles from 20 percent to 50 percent and women at the executive level by 4 percent.

An HP campaign called Reinvent Mindsets addresses not just race, but gender and LGBT bias. The company looks at a diverse workforce as a very good business decision, The Drum reported:

“We really wanted to raise awareness of the ingrained biases that exist in the hiring process within the industry. In particular, in the tech industry,” said Slaton Brown. “We felt like it was time for us to really go beyond just talking about it and put action to words.”

Action is a key component. Progress is another. It’s clear that the tech industry’s diversity issues won’t improve overnight, but the excuse that it’s a pipeline issue, that there aren’t enough candidates of color that meet the requirements is, by and large, not exactly true, said Dr. Maya Beasley, co-founder and principal at Washington, D.C.-based T10 Group, a diversity consultancy.

In February, HP Inc.’s chief legal officer Kim Rivera sent a letter to the company’s outside law firms demanding that they put diverse attorneys to work on HP’s legal matters, or risk losing some income.

The HP directive said law firms must either name a diverse attorney — a minority, woman, LGBT person or someone with a disability — to be HP’s relationship partner on assignments, or they must have at least one woman and one minority attorney on HP’s legal team, with each performing or managing at least 10 percent of billable hours. Alternately, the firm can meet the requirement by assigning one minority woman to the team, with her handling at least 10 percent of the billable hours.

Failure to comply could cost law firms up to 10 percent of their legal bills in the name of a “diversity holdback,” Rivera wrote.

In an email interview, Rivera told Law360 that HP ultimately wants its outside law firms to more closely mirror the diversity of the broader population and that it’s already seeing firms make good progress in meeting its staffing requirements.

“We expect that as we hold law firms accountable there will be an increase both in the diversity of the teams providing us service as well as the firms overall,” she wrote.

The new policy may be the first of its kind. It also might be a sign of things to come.

In 2014, the Atlanta-based nonprofit Rainbow PUSH met with HP at its shareholder meeting to talk about its numbers.

“We challenged them — and the tech industry — to confront the virtual exclusion of women and people of color in the tech industry,” Rev. Jackson said at the time. Jackson is the founder of Rainbow PUSH. “HP committed to make demonstrable strides in expanding diversity and inclusion.”