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When Carol Dweck was a graduate student, in the early 1970s, she began studying how children cope with failure — and she quickly realized that “cope” was the wrong word. “Some didn’t just cope –they relished it,” she says. “For some people, failure is the end of the world — but for others, it’s this exciting new opportunity.” Dweck, now a psychology professor at Stanford, spent the next several decades studying this dichotomy, which she originally described using the clunky academic monikers “fixed mindset entity theory” and “incremental theory.” By the early 2000s, while writing a mass-market book on the topic, she’d come up with more-appealing labels. She now refers to people who view talent as a quality they either possess or lack as having a “fixed mindset.” People with a “growth mindset,” in contrast, enjoy challenges, strive to learn, and consistently see potential to develop new skills. Dweck’s framework has had a significant impact: Her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, published in 2006, has sold more than 800,000 copies, and the concept of a growth mindset has come to permeate fields such as education and sports training.

Now Dweck is extending her work on mindset beyond individuals — and the extension has important implications for managers. Can an organization, like an individual, have a fixed or a growth mindset? If so, what are the effects on the organization and its employees? Since 2010 Dweck and three colleagues — Mary Murphy, Jennifer Chatman, and Laura Kray — have collaborated with the consulting firm Senn Delaney to answer those questions.

To explore company mindsets, the researchers asked a diverse sample of employees at seven Fortune 1000 companies about the extent to which they agreed with various statements—for example, “When it comes to being successful, this company seems to believe that people have a certain amount of talent, and they really can’t do much to change it.” High levels of agreement suggested that the organization had a predominantly fixed mindset; low levels suggested a growth mindset. The researchers then conducted surveys to try to understand how the prevailing organizational mindset influenced workers’ satisfaction, perceptions of the organizational culture, levels of collaboration, innovation, and ethical behavior, and how it affected supervisors’ views of employees.

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Harvard Business Review began in 1922 as a magazine for Harvard Business School. Founded under the auspices of Dean Wallace Donham, HBR was meant to be more than just a typical school publication. “The paper [HBR] is intended to be the highest type of business journal that we can make it, and for use by the student and the business man. It is not a school paper,” Donham wrote. Initially, HBR‘s focus was on macroeconomic trends, as well as on important developments within specific industries.

Following World War II, HBR emphasized the cutting-edge management techniques that were developed in large corporations, like General Motors, during that time period. Over the next three decades, the magazine continued to refine its focus on general management issues that affect business leaders, billing itself as the “magazine for decision makers.” Prominent articles published during this period include “Marketing Myopia” by Theodore Levitt and “Barriers and Gateways to Communication” by Carl R. Rogers and Fritz J. Roethlisberger.

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