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524 companies, 17 years, one boardroom answer
Do women make boardrooms cautious or creative? 17 years of data says both, with a twist. Also today: Gen Z takes on 'Dead Poets Society,' and 10 tiny drummers.
Greg Sullivan
September 02, 2026 • Est. Reading Time: 4 minutes
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“It was obvious that he was a man who marched through life to the rhythms of some drum I would never hear.”
― Hunter S. Thompson
In this issue of The Daily GOOD, researchers tracked 524 companies for 17 years to settle the great debate about women in the boardroom. Then a Gen X mom shows her kids 'Dead Poets Society' with unexpected results, and 10 tiny drummers make one teacher joyfully lose his mind.
Society
Risk-averse or radical? The great boardroom debate just got an answer.
For years, the research on women corporate directors has told two totally contradictory stories. Some studies said they make companies cautious. Others said they make companies more creative. So a team of researchers tracked 524 companies over 17 years, using patents as a proxy for big, expensive bets on the future, to figure out which camp was right.
The answer: both. In this breakdown by Stephen J. Smulowitz, one of the researchers behind the study, the pattern flips depending on performance, which might explain why counterintuitive workplace research keeps proving everyone half-right. But one finding shocked the researchers so much it upended their own predictions, and it involves what happens when a company is staring down bankruptcy.
Pretty in purple, dangerous in practice. GOOD reader Sharon Snow captured this surreal sky as Hurricane Lala approached. The name may sound playful, but the storm had other plans.”We had 27 hours with no power and the hottest blackest night of my life but we got off easy compared to our Hawaii Island neighbors.”
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Walt Whitman wrote "O Captain! My Captain!" as an elegy for whom?The poem that stands on desks was written for a fallen leader. |
And what did we learn?
In yesterday's issue, we shared a heartbroken weatherman's off-script confession on live TV.
And we asked what's your primary weather source? The winner: a weather app and blind faith, with 53.8% of the vote.
My trusty TV meteorologist (30.0%)
A weather app and blind faith (53.8%)
Looking out the window (11.3%)
My knees never lie (5.0%)
The comments also revealed a category I didn't think to offer: the trusty TV meteorologist, on the app. Loyalty, with push notifications.
Culture | Courtesy of Upworthy
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Robin Williams played inspiring English teacher John Keating in "Dead Poets Society." | ||
I showed my Gen Z kids ‘Dead Poets Society’ and their angry reactions to it floored me | ||
“Inspiring” apparently means different things to Gen X and Gen Z. | ||
By Annie Reneau | ||
As a Gen X parent of Gen Z teens and young adults, I’m used to cringing at things from 80s and 90s movies that haven’t aged well. However, a beloved film from my youth that I thought they’d love, “Dead Poets Society,” sparked some unexpectedly negative responses in my kids, shining a spotlight on generational differences I didn’t even know existed. | ||
I probably watched “Dead Poets Society” a dozen or more times as a teen and young adult, always finding it aesthetically beautiful, tragically sad, and profoundly inspiring. That film was one of the reasons I decided to become an English teacher, inspired as I was by Robin Williams’ portrayal of the passionately unconventional English teacher, John Keating. | ||
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Music
The internet just crowned its new favorite music teacher
You might read about ten kids under ten on ten drum kits and think somebody is describing a special sort of hell. It would be a fair guess, but wildly wrong. As Mark Wales reports, these young drummers hammer out Måneskin's "Beggin'" in dead-on unison, and the person stealing the show never touches a drum.
Dubai-based instructor Patrick Abdo conducts the whole thing like a man possessed, air drumming, flailing, and radiating the kind of belief in his students that great teachers seem to have in endless supply. His dream, according to his bio, is to build a "School of Rock" for the Middle East. Based on this footage, he's well on his way.
It's the rare viral clip where the music is only half the story, because what people can't stop watching is what mentorship looks like when someone means it. The research on what that does for a kid is even better than the video.
On September 2, 1969, a machine bolted to the wall of a Chemical Bank branch in Rockville Centre, New York, handed a customer cash with no human being involved, and America got its first ATM. The bank advertised it with a promise that has aged remarkably well: our bank will open at 9 a.m. and never close again.
Don Wetzel was an executive at a Texas company that made automated baggage handlers, and while waiting to get cash before a trip, he realized that almost everything tellers did all day was hand people their own money back. He went to his engineers and asked them to build a teller that never took a lunch break. The result was christened the Docuteller, which is a name only a committee could love.
The tricky part was not the cash, it was proving the customer was the customer. The team's solution was the magnetic stripe, which is still on the back of the plastic in your wallet. There are now roughly two million of these machines worldwide, all descended from one impatient man in a bank line.
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I was mesmerized by this glorious vision of nature. So captivating I had to go take a Zyrtec!
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Until tomorrow, keep your favorite classics away from your kids. It’s just not worth the risk!