The following article is condensed from the New York Times--enjoy!
Looking Ahead Behind the Ivy
By ADAM BRYANT
The pace of change in business is quickening, and business schools are scrambling to keep up. A
number of prominent B-schools, the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and
Harvard Business School among them, have rethought their programs and are making changes to
reflect the increasingly global scope of business and to improve students’ leadership and
teamwork skills. Some schools are asking students to wrestle with questions about the ethical
lapses that contributed to the financial crisis. Nitin Nohria, new dean of Harvard Business School
and co-author of “Paths to Power: How Insiders and Outsiders Shaped American Business
Leadership,” discussed the new courses, and the goals and thinking behind them.
You’ve added some new components to the Harvard Business School curriculum. Can you
describe them?
We decided there were three issues in particular that we need to focus more on in our curriculum.
One is leadership, in particular to develop emotional intelligence and to investigate more deeply
the purpose of leadership. A second theme is globalization, and the need to educate the next
generation of business leaders to be far more savvy about what is going on around the world. And
a third theme is that we need our students to be better at integrating everything they are learning,
particularly to develop an entrepreneurial imagination.
So we have introduced to our first-year curriculum a course that will encourage students to work
on a series of tasks in teams of six or eight people. They’ll focus on the basics of leadership, of
what it means to be effective in the context of a small team, and to really cultivate their emotional
intelligence and learn how others perceive them. All of our students will go abroad, too, to some
emerging market and think about a new product or service that a company can introduce in that
emerging market. And we’re going to ask them to create, very quickly, a small startup to test an
idea that they have.
On your point about emotional intelligence — being smart about your own emotions and the
emotions of others — some people might argue that you either have it or you don’t.
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You can’t transform a person to become a leader by the end of two years. Our goal is to give
students a concentrated opportunity to think about the challenges of leadership in a wide variety
of ways. We hope to give people a starter kit for thinking about decision-making and the
complexity of decision-making, and that students will learn a lot about what makes an effective
team and how other people relate to them.
You’ve also said that you were hoping to provide a greater focus on things like ethics and even
issues of character. Can you mold character?
One of the greatest myths is that character is like a trait — you’re either a person of good
character or you’re a person of bad character, and there’s little opportunity for the development of
character over the course of one’s life. In fact, research demonstrates that character is something
one has to work at forming and developing over the course of our lives, just as we focus on
developing our judgment.
Some people are able to measure up to new responsibilities and challenges and pressures, and
some people are not. And this is not so much because they were good or bad people, but because
the pressure they were under either brought out their best selves or brought out their worst
selves, and we all have both those selves in us.
So what we are trying to do is to allow our students to develop moral humility. We can expose
them to the wide variety of pressures that they will face over the course of their careers. We give
them 30 cases to show them the wide variety of ways in which good people were led astray
because of the pressures that came from their cultures or from bosses, or how they themselves
have used incentives in ways to sometimes promote, unwittingly, wrongdoing either by
themselves or others.
And just being a good person doesn’t assure you of the fact that you’ll always make morally sound
decisions. We saw that in the economic crisis.
When you have a system in which it feels like the pressures for short-term returns are
extraordinary and the gains from doing things in the short run are amazing, then sometimes
people can act in ways that they look back and say: “Boy, we took on unnecessary risks. We acted
in ways that we’re not that proud of. Some of us may have even been tempted into doing bad
things.”
We’re going to hopefully show students that when they’re put under pressure and they have to
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work with small teams, they may behave in ways that they don’t feel proud of or good about. They
could be short with other people. They may cut corners. They begin to recognize that as confident
as they feel about their character coming in, it’s something that’s still a work in progress, and they
will have to focus on investing and developing it throughout their lives.
Part of what we’re now trying to do in our curriculum is to make sure that this is a very explicit
conversation that we have with our students.
These teams are a rare setting in which the consequences of giving feedback to each other is not
quite the same as the consequences they will experience when they go to work, where people are
much more reticent about giving honest feedback for fear of what it might mean.
Can I ask, on the topic of leadership, about you in your new role as dean? What are some of the
things you’ve learned or that surprised you?
It’s interesting you should mention that. Mike Porter, Jay Lorsch and I wrote a Harvard Business
Review article titled “Seven Surprises for New C.E.O.’s.” The three of us also have been teaching a
workshop for many years, with Bill George, for new C.E.O.’s.
It was one thing to write about these surprises based upon the experience of others, and to
understand them intellectually, but it was another thing to experience them myself. It’s very
difficult, for example, to now be the person where you feel like you are the one who has to make
decisions. In fact, the more decisions you make personally, the less effective you are. You really
have to create conditions in which other people can make effective decisions. The demands that
are placed upon your time are incessant. I’ve had to develop the capacity to switch every halfhour
or 45 minutes to a completely different topic. The need for that extraordinary mental discipline
has stunned me, and I still keep learning how to do that better.
What else has surprised you about your new role?
The sense that anything I say is much more important than anything I said in the past. It’s like
my I.Q. has gone up 20 points and I speak with a megaphone even when I whisper. That’s
something I’m still getting used to.
This interview was edited and condensed.