Harvard Business Review November/December 2022

A FEW YEARS ago I interviewed Meg Whitman, then the CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise. We had a wide-ranging discussion, but one comment of hers stood out: “I had played a lot of sports as a girl, so I knew how to be part of a team.” I often think about whether experience with team sports helps build leadership skills. I’ve played quite a bit of baseball and softball in my life, and for me it has been a learning ground for team dynamics. As Whitman put it, “The ‘all for one, one for all’ approach, led by a coach, was part of how I learned to lead.” There are, of course, many effective leaders who don’t have any such experience. But can sports provide takeaways for them as well? Harvard Business…

Many companies call on Ella F. Washington, an organizational psychologist at Georgetown University and a diversity strategist, to ensure that they are instituting best practices regarding DEI. But focusing only on best practices is the wrong approach, she says. In this article, adapted from her book The Necessary Journey (Harvard Business Review Press, 2022), Washington outlines the five stages organizations typically move through. “When companies understand where exactly they are on the journey, they can focus their energies on the right activities, making their DEI efforts more successful,” she says. 92 The Five Stages of DEI Maturity Steven Rogelberg, an organizational psychologist at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, enjoys studying underexplored workplace issues—especially those that affect employees’ experience and leaders’ success. Much of his research focuses on workplace meetings. (Adam…

TWO-PLUS YEARS INTO the pandemic, many leaders worry that remote and hybrid work are undermining their organizations’ culture. Their concerns aren’t entirely misplaced: A 2022 global study by the research and advisory firm Gartner found that just 25% of remote or hybrid knowledge workers feel connected to their company’s culture. But forcing employees back to the office is risky, as CEOs including Elon Musk and Jamie Dimon have discovered firsthand. Companies should take another tack. “I find it ironic when leaders say they need to bring workers back to the office because of culture,” says Alexia Cambon, a research director in Gartner’s HR practice and a principal author of the study. “They’re going to get the opposite of what they hope for. Instead of viewing hybrid work as a disruption to…

Over the course of the pandemic, almost all the 6,500 global associates of Acushnet—the parent company of golf brands Titleist and FootJoy—were told not to come in to work, and manufacturing shut down. The decision to focus on health and safety was easy, says chief people officer Brendan Reidy. Determining how and when people should return was much harder. Reidy spoke with HBR about how Acushnet’s strong culture embraces hybrid work arrangements. Edited excerpts of the conversation follow. How did you decide when to reopen? Shortly after the shutdown, we experienced a huge uplift in business as people flocked to outdoor recreation. The question became: How do we keep our associates safe while meeting our customers’ growing needs? Our manufacturing operations reopened in accordance with local and state guidelines and when we…

Each year thousands of tech start-ups are bought by large companies often motivated by the prospect of gaining key technical and managerial talent. A new study finds that this may not pan out. The researchers compiled a list of all U.S. companies that bought or merged with VC-backed firms from 1995 to 2010. They constructed a data set of more than 30 million publicly posted résumés and identified more than 60,000 people who were employed by one of the start-ups at the time of its acquisition. They then constructed a control group: employees hired organically by the parent firm the same year and closely resembling their acquired counterparts on several dimensions, including job role, rank, and experience. An analysis post-acquisition showed that organically hired employees left their new firms, on average,…

VC-backed start-ups account for more than 40% of all IPOs in the United States. A new study reveals an important fact about their investors: In many cases they attended the same university as one or more of the companies’ founders did. The researchers gathered information on the founding teams of every U.S.-based company that had an early-stage investment deal listed by PitchBook (a firm that tracks entrepreneurial financing) from 2002 to 2020. The data included the education history of company founders and investors and details about funding rounds and IPOs. The researchers also gathered information on the 550 largest U.S. universities represented in the PitchBook data, including location, enrollment, and average SAT score of admitted freshmen (a proxy for academic quality). Their analysis showed that in more than a third of…