Bowen, William G.; Bok, Derek; and Burkhart, Glenda. “A Report Card on Diverstiy: Lessons for Business from Higher Education,” Harvard Business Review, Jan/Feb 1999: 139-49.

The Shape of the River (Princeton Univ. Press, 1998) was inspired by Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi. The image of the river is central to our story about the flow of talent - particularly of talented black men and women - through the country’s system of higher education and on into the marketplace and the larger society. The winding river with its twists and turns and its rapids and slow channels, is a far more helpful way to think about the process of nurturing talent than the more pervasively used “pipeline” metaphor, with its misleading connotation of a smooth, well-defined, and well-understood passage…The riverboat pilots on the Mississippi had to know every depth, snag, and shoal of the river. They had to understand how the bend they were navigating at any moment fit into the shape of the 1,200 mile river. (p. 140)