Dec 15, 2020
Welcome to the second episode of our Skydeck mini-series “Out of the Valley.” Today’s episode starts in Jakarta, Indonesia, in the late 2000s.
The city looked nothing like Silicon Valley in those days. There were very few VC-backed startups and not much of an entrepreneurial ecosystem. It was what author and...
Sep 14, 2020
In the wake of the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles in 1992, Willie Woods (MBA 1993) was part of a group of HBS students who traveled to the city with their Competition and Strategy professor Michael Porter. The group thought it would be a good opportunity to take some of Porter’s ideas about what makes a nation...
Aug 4, 2020
In mid-June, weeks after protests against racial injustice spread globally, the Leadership Now Project—founded in 2017 by HBS alumni to fix American democracy—released the Business for Racial Equity Pledge. Spearheaded by six Black HBS alumni, the pledge asks business leaders to promise that they will...
Jun 8, 2020
Angela Ruggiero is cofounder and CEO of the market research firm the Sports Innovation Lab, and when we spoke in May, it was the week after the Bundesliga—Germany’s premier soccer league—began to play without fans in the stands. Outside, that is, of some cardboard facsimiles of fans that were purchased as part of...
May 18, 2020
The COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting Era of Zoom has physically changed the way we work. But according to Rachel Greenwald (MBA 1993), some of the core tenets of interpersonal communication that were important in the office remain just as important in our new digital workspaces—we just need to adjust our...