2012 Dean of the Year: Harvard’s Nitin Nohria

Harvard Business School Dean Nitin Nohria (Photo by Susan Young. Courtesy of Harvard Business School)

WILL NOW TACKLE WOMEN AND LEADERSHIP AND HEALTHCARE

“We are still on a learning curve on this one, too. If you say the ultimate goal line is, ‘Have we produced action to restore U.S. competitiveness?’ I don’t think we have made as much progress as I would have liked on that count. But if you were to ask, ‘Are many more people informed on this topic and are they inspired to take action?’ I think we have accomplished that in a way that we have rarely have tried. And it gives us hope.”

No less crucial, perhaps, is how the project has encouraged research and work among faculty across many disciplines. “The strength of our school is that we can bring a systemic view on problems,” Nohria points out. “That is what we teach our students. If you just learn to think about a problem from the standpoint of finance, that is an incomplete view because you also need to understand how this will impact the human side of the organization. In the same way, we think the U.S. competitiveness conversation has too often been narrowed into a discussion that just reflects macro policy but it is not just that. It is (Professor) David Moss saying there is something deeply broken about democracy in America. It’s about our K-through-12 education system. It’s people asking about fiscal discipline and the fiscal cliff. It’s others talking about our financial system and asking in what ways is it strong and in what ways has it become hijacked.”

The success of the project has led Nohria to turn the school’s next research focus on women and leadership in conjunction with this year’s 50th anniversary of the first female MBA students at Harvard. A third issue to get similar treatment is healthcare innovation, the subject of a recently convened forum on campus between HBS and Harvard Medical School.

HALF OF THE HBS CASES WRITTEN IN 2012 WERE GLOBAL

Another priority was making the school more international. Nohria inherited the school’s seven research centers in Shanghai, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Mumbai, Paris, Buenos Aires, and Silicon Valley that have been used to help faculty do more global research and to globalize the MBA curriculum. In the last year, 50% of the roughly 250 case studies written at Harvard have been global, up from less than 5% a decade ago.

“I take no credit for that,” concedes Nohria. “That is the amazing legacy I have inherited from my predecessors. We remain committed to that strategy. We don’t want to build campuses. We will lead with a large intellectual footprint as opposed to a physical footprint. But now we are starting to use the research centers not merely to bring knowledge in or support our faculty as they were doing research outside. We are now trying to get these centers to support students going to FIELD. We are using these relationships to create more active engagement in the region by students. We are doing a little executive education, again with the goal of not trying to make that some revenue-enhancing move but because it is the best way of knowing what is going on in that country.

“You can teach people about China in Boston and they will accept anything you say because they don’t know China. But if you are forced to teach an aspect of China in China, then you know that it’s real. If those people tell you this is not the way it actually works, you know you’ve got it wrong. We are trying to do some exec ed mostly to put more discipline in our own thinking and to continue to form relationships with local companies that might be FIELD companies or become case sites where we see innovation occurring.”

CONFRONTING SOME TOUGH ISSUES ON CAMPUS

Arguably, the more challenging issue has been one that Nohria put on the table early: inclusion. His interest in the topic occurred before he became dean when the Women’s Student Association discovered that proportionally more men than women receive academic honors at Harvard and that has been the case for many years (see Why Men Outperform Women at HBS). Nohria called for a study of the issue and of student culture generally to get to the bottom of the problem.

“We wondered whether this was happening because we are engaging in some rare form of affirmative action, that the quality of the women we were admitting was not good,” says Nohria. “That turns out to be absolutely not true. Whether you measure by test scores, GPA, the quality of work experience, whatever metric you can think of, the quality of our men and women are comparable. But we tested that. We didn’t say that as a matter of faith.

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