Human Capital Briefs

In 1981, Peter Drucker delivered a lecture at New York University. He offered provocative prescriptions for coping in a world in which “the real challenge is to decide what you are doing” in the face of tremendous “technological change or market change.”

After years of hearing that it was impossible to restructure jobs to make them more doable, guess what? When Goldman Sachs discovered it couldn’t attract and retain the most promising recruits with pay and perks alone, it woke up to the idea that you can actually restructure the way work is done.

Much has been written about boards and diversity, especially diversity that is readily perceptible: gender or race, for example. We ourselves have explored gender diversity, in our global surveys of corporate directors in scores of interviews with board members across the globe.

This week Stone, a senior writer at Bloomberg Businessweek, published The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon. I talked with Stone about the evolution of Bezos as a decision-maker. Some excerpts from our conversation.

The Dilbert creator talks with HBR senior editor Dan McGinn. For more, read his book How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life.

Last week, an executive who was on the verge of being promoted to head his large global publicly traded company asked for my advice on how to be effective as a brand new CEO. I gave him a list and he was so appreciative that I was motivated to write a blog about it.

There’s no question that the legal industry is going through upheaval. Law schools are shuttering and powerful old firms have fallen. Only those firms that can change quickly enough to meet their clients’ increasing demands for greater value will survive.

One founder pushed aside in the early days of the company, his name scrubbed from its founding story. Another ousted from the CEO role by a co-founder, former boss, and seed investor. This is the origin story of Twitter.