Top Five Harvard Business School Stories of 2021
We look back at the top five stories of 2021.
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03 Dec 2021  

We take a look back at the top five HBS feature articles of 2021.

Saying “Race” Out Loud: Leading Conversations on Diversity in HBS Classrooms

As an organizational behavior scholar, diversity and identity expert, and an assistant professor of management at University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, Dr. Stephanie Creary has become a recognized thought leader in navigating the complexities of race and diversity in organizations. She also holds some key Harvard Business School specialized knowledge: Nearly 15 years ago, Creary was an HBS research associate, writing cases for Professor David Thomas (now president of Morehouse College) and working with other faculty around the school. Never did she imagine that one day she would return to the HBS campus to guide faculty on discussing race in their cases and classrooms. Read more about Stephanie Creary.

Playing the Long Game: How Dean Datar Came to be at HBS

Photo by Evgenia Eliseeva.

It’s January 1984, and Srikant Datar, new to the faculty at Carnegie Mellon University, is navigating his first snowstorm—and first winter—amid a warren of snow-laden highways in Pittsburgh. He and his wife, Swati, had arrived from Stanford days earlier, and his car had just been delivered to the meeting point necessitated by multiple street closures. His taxi driver departed, the delivery truck drove off, and he realized he had no idea how to get home. He drove a few blocks to get his bearings, and stopped on a small side street to look at street signs and consult his map. After several walks up and down to check cross streets, he was examining his map in the car when a man emerged from a nearby house. “Is everything ok?” he asked with a knock on the car window. Datar replied that he was new to town and hopelessly lost. “No problem,” said the stranger. “Your house isn’t far, but it’s a tricky route. Follow my car, and when you know with certainty that you can get home, honk three times and I’ll head back.” And he did. “To this day I have no idea who this person was, I have no idea where he lived, but that act of kindness and generosity is one that I remember and try to emulate each day,” said Datar. Read more about Dean Datar.

HBS Partners with OneTen Initiative

As part of Harvard Business School’s ongoing efforts towards advancing racial equity and diversity, the School has signed on as the first academic partner to the OneTen Initiative, a coalition of leading executives and organizations committed to hiring one million Black individuals over the next 10 years into jobs with family-sustaining wages and opportunities for advancement. Read more about the partnership.

Up Close: Live Online Classrooms

Professor Stefan Thomke is teaching his case on the rise and fall of Sony. He stands in front of the class and asks a student to elaborate on her answer to what had gone wrong with the once unrivalled technology, entertainment, and media conglomerate. “They couldn’t adapt to digital demands and to the introduction of the iPod,” she says. Thomke nods, walks to the board to jot down her response, and asks the student to explain why Sony couldn’t adapt. Read more about the live online classrooms.

Baker Library's Latest Collection: Little Black Library

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When Cathy Chukwulebe (MBA 2021) set up a plastic bin with books about antiracism and the Black experience in the Harvard Business School Schwartz Pavilion in the summer of 2020, she never imagined that the collection would grow to sites across the country, much less to HBS’s own Baker Library. Read more about the library.

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