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Keys to the Corner Office

May 29, 2015

On those rare Sunday mornings when I’m not traveling for one reason or another, my routine is a very early walk during which I purchase the Sunday New York Times.

Reading the Sunday Times has a routine as well: first the Travel section, next Business, then Opinion; and after that, national news and sports and theater in no particular order. And I always read the top of page 2 of the Business section, a regular Q and A by Adam Bryant who features successful businessmen and women. It’s called “Corner Office.”

Week after week, the people profiled will credit the extracurricular activities of their formal education for launching their successful careers. For example ...


  • The chief executive of Bluemercury cited volleyball.


  • The chief executive of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt cited “clubs and sports in high school.”


  • The chief executive of the Hogan Lovells law firm was captain of his high school football team and president of the student council.

Obviously, there are many individuals who participated in those school activities and did not ascend to chief executive status, just as many other CEOs earned the keys to their corner office without participation in school athletics and activities.

But it has been difficult for me to miss how routine it is for the “Corner Office” to make the same connection I do – that outside the classroom school sports and activities are linked both anecdotally and statistically to leadership in later life pursuits.

The Good Old Days?

June 12, 2012

In the 1950s, high school football crowds were often larger than today, and schools’ quirky gyms were never more packed with partisans.  Local newspapers (more numerous then) and radio stations (far fewer then) never gave school sports a greater percentage of column inches or air time than in the 1950s.  Therefore, one might pick a school year in the mid 1950s as the peak of prominence for school sports in America. 

That would be true if you were a boy, and a boy who played one of the few sports sponsored by schools compared to the diverse offerings of 50 to 60 years later.  However, if you were a girl, and even for many boys, there wasn’t much in the way of school sports in which to participate in the so-called heyday, the “good old days,” of high school sports.

If we judge the effectiveness of school sports programs more on the basis of participation than game night attendance, then today’s programs – where many more students participate in a wider variety of activities – are a much healthier and much more educationally sound enterprise than five or six decades ago.  And actually, there are also more spectators today; they’re just dispersed over more venues, sports and levels of teams today than in the 1950s.

More students in a wider variety of sports, supported by more spectators.  By these measures, a better program today than existed a half-century ago.