Harvard Business Review May/June 2022

THESE DAYS MANAGERS face a lot of challenges: supply chain issues, inflationary pressures, the lingering pandemic. Lately they’ve encountered an additional global threat: the Great Resignation. In the United States, which has a workforce of approximately 160 million, about 4 million people have been quitting their jobs each month—the highest quit rate on record. The cover story in this issue offers a deceptively simple solution: Design work that people love. The article is adapted from a newly released book by Marcus Buckingham, who has a history of offering provocative ideas about how people can collaborate better. In 2015 he and Ashley Goodall wrote another cover story for us, “Reinventing Performance Management,” which sparked a widespread rethinking of the way companies conduct annual reviews. Buckingham’s 2019 book, Nine Lies About Work (also written…

As a Black executive with decades of experience in corporate America, James White deeply understands the importance of diversity and inclusion in organizations. After the murders of George Floyd and others and the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic, he was compelled to share what he has learned. Those events “exposed a dark underbelly of business rooted in exploitation and oppression,” he says. “I wanted to provide a playbook for creating anti-racist cultures.” The result was the book Anti-Racist Leadership, written with his daughter Krista White, from which his article in this issue is drawn. A graduate of Leiden University with a degree in organizational psychology, Wieke Scholten began her career conducting behavioral analyses of interactions between surgeons and nurses in operating rooms. After the Great Recession, her attention turned to banking.…

New Research and Emerging Insights IT’S BEEN dubbed the Great Resignation: Nearly 20 million Americans left their jobs in 2021, and the trend is spreading to Western Europe, Asia, and beyond. Yet even as employers scramble to fill open positions, millions of capable candidates struggle merely to be considered. Why such a disconnect—and how can companies bridge it? A study by Harvard Business School and Accenture finds a major reason for the gap: the near-ubiquitous use of automated hiring platforms, which systematically screen out large numbers of job seekers who might well fit the bill were their résumés ever to reach hiring managers’ desks. Applicants with unconventional backgrounds—such as caregivers, veterans, immigrants, people with physical and mental challenges, and the previously incarcerated—are especially prone to being “hidden” from prospective employers by the…

TEWFIK: People familiar with impostor syndrome tend to think that it’s uniformly harmful. To be sure, the belief that you’re not as competent as others think you are could certainly make you anxious and lower your self-esteem. But there’s an upside too. My research shows that experiencing this phenomenon can make you more adept at relationships, which is a key ingredient in career success. In one study doctors in training who had more-frequent impostor thoughts were significantly better at handling sensitive interactions with patients, which led those patients to give them higher interpersonal-skill ratings. In another study job candidates primed to have more impostor thoughts asked more questions during informal preinterview chats and as a result were viewed by hiring managers as having better people skills. Essentially, impostor thoughts make…

TWELVE YEARS AGO, in 2010, my private equity firm, New Mountain Capital, acquired a little-known Wisconsin software company, RedPrairie, for $565 million. In September 2021 we sold that same company, now named Blue Yonder, to Panasonic at a total value of $8.5 billion. About $5.7 billion of the gain had come from organic growth, not acquisitions. That success wasn’t driven by some stroke of luck, technology breakthrough, or new product. Rather, it was the result of continual investment and improvement in the company’s management, strategy, and governance—the same approach that best-in-class private-equity firms have employed for years across dozens of industries and thousands of companies. By explaining how New Mountain transformed Blue Yonder, I hope to show exactly how private equity firms create value for businesses and for the economy and…

OVER THE PAST decade, Novartis has invested heavily in digital transformation. As the Swiss pharmaceutical giant moved its technology infrastructure to the cloud and invested in data platforms and data integration, it recruited AI specialists and data scientists to build machine-learning models and deploy them throughout the firm. But even as the technical teams grew, managers from across the business—sales, supply chain, HR, finance, and marketing—weren’t embracing the newly available information, nor were they thinking much about how data could enhance their teams’ work. At the same time, the data scientists had little visibility into the business units and could not easily integrate data into day-to-day operations. As a result, the investments resulted in only occasional successes (in some aspects of the R&D process, for example) while many pilots and…