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Toto Wolff is taking his F1 experience to Harvard Business School
You can call Mercedes Team Principal Toto Wolff a lot of things.
Including Adjunct Professor.
Wolff and Mercedes announced on Tuesday that the team boss was appointed an Executive Fellow at the Harvard Business School. Wolff will serve as a guest lecturer alongside Professor Anita Elberse. Beginning in January the two will team up to teach a course titled “Mercedes F1: Leading a High-Performance Team.”
The announcement follows Wolff’s previous experience with Professor Elberse. The Harvard professor followed Wolff and Mercedes during the 2021 season, gaining behind-the-scenes access to the operation of a Formula 1 team. The result of that access was a Harvard Business School case study titled ”Toto Wolff and the Mercedes Formula One Team,” and Wolff appeared as a guest lecturer in March of 2022 alongside Elberse.
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The pair then collaborated on an article for Harvard Business Review titled “Number One in Formula One,” where Professor Elberse distilled some of Wolff’s lessons on management. It began with this passage about Wolff and Mercedes:
While working on this project, I learned a great deal about the winning culture that characterizes the Mercedes team. In what follows, I have distilled my observations into six lessons for leaders hoping to cultivate their own winning teams, whether in sports or other realms. During my research I also came to understand how Wolff, with his mindset, values, and actions, shapes the culture at Mercedes. In fact, it was fascinating to discover how much his leadership traits map onto the culture he has fostered. There is a powerful message here for every leader—what you say and do comes to define the organization you lead—and so I aim, too, to highlight those connections.
Wolff had this to say about the course, which is aimed at first- and second-year MBA students. “I feel very honored and privileged to continue working with the incredibly bright young minds at Harvard”, outlined Wolff in the announcement. “Whenever I step on campus, I am inspired by the students’ curiosity and ambition, and I leave energized by the special learning environment they create together with the brilliant faculty.”
The announcement comes as Mercedes is hoping to close the gap to Red Bull and, frankly, Aston Martin at the top of the F1 Constructors’ Standings. Mercedes came away with double points in last weekend’s Azerbaijan Grand Prix, but the team was hoping for more after bringing some upgrades to Baku. “Today was not a thriller,” said Wolff following Sunday’s Grand Prix. “There was very little overtaking even with a big pace difference. We headed into a sub optimum set-up direction during FP1 and by the time we realised it was too late, and the car was in parc fermé conditions. It’s the same for everyone though under this format.”
“The pace in free air today looked similar between ourselves, the Ferraris and the Aston Martins,” he added. “It was hard to tell who was ultimately quicker though, because with the difficulty of overtaking you are stuck where you are stuck. The Red Bulls meanwhile sailed away into the sunset on merit. If we can get the platform right though, I think we can close that gap this year. It’s not about adding points of downforce, more giving the drivers a car that they have confidence in.”
If Mercedes can deliver on that challenge, Professor Wolff will have quite a story to teach this winter.
