2012 Dean of the Year: Harvard’s Nitin Nohria

He’s especially pleased with what he calls “the arc” of the innovations that start with leadership fundamentals, moved into a global consulting experience overseas, the entrepreneurship challenge, and integration of all that has been learned through the launch of a micro-business. “If you get it two thirds right the first year and another 60% right the second year, then you are left with much less to improve. You can get yourself in the place of continuous improvement. So I think we had big progress in year one; we will go further down a steep learning curve in year two and my hope is that in year three we will get ourselves to the place where we no longer have to do innovation in big chunks but it becomes a part of the school—similar to our first-year courses which are being changed 15% to 20% every year. We’ll get to that kind of rhythm.”

A MASHING OF OUTWARD AND INWARD RESEARCH

Of course, MBA curriculum overhauls are nothing new. They’ve occurred at one school after another for years. But it is the scale and the broadness of the innovations that make the Harvard changes noteworthy. The same is true of Nohria’s ambitions to enlist the school’s intellectual capital in an unprecedented effort around U.S. competitiveness. It was the dean who first went to HBS superstar Michael Porter and strategy professor Jan Rivkin to suggest the idea that the two tackle the issue to both understand and improve the competitiveness of the U.S.

“It felt to me that as we were thinking about internationalization and globalization we were forgetting that America is an important part of the globe,” explains Nohria.  “The turn outward, which we were doing so much of, needed to be mashed with a turn inward. It was almost as if we took for granted that we knew America, and all we needed to understand is what was happening everywhere else in the world. My view was this is not a moment to take the success and the continued success of America for granted. We have to invest in it and we have a deep stake in the continued success of America because it is hard to be a great university in a B-grade country.”

This research-led effort has deeply engaged a dozen professors at the school and involved as many as 20 members of the faculty. Their research has been informed by a global survey of nearly 10,000 Harvard Business School alumni that drew headlines all over the world. An entire issue of the Harvard Business Review also was turned over to the topic. And the school has brought the discussion off campus to well-attended alumni gatherings in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Detroit, and Charlotte, N.C.  Nohria says he will ultimately invest up to $5 million on the project.

SURVEYING HARVARD ALUMNI ON AN INTELLECTUAL ISSUE FOR THE FIRST TIME

What’s especially striking about the initiative is the way Norhia summoned the school’s varied intellectual assets to make an impact on a critical topic that has long been a victim of political rhetoric. “This is the first time we surveyed all of our alumni on an intellectual topic and we began to realize this amazing strength we have,” says Nohria.

“If you wanted to get a sample of people to find out what is going on in business, is there a better sample? It is hard to imagine what is a better sample than our alumni. We have 50,000 people out there. Every day they are making choices about whether they want to invest in America or not. Out of the 10,000 people who responded, we had 2,000 who reported on decisions that they made in the last year on location activities. I can imagine very few other samples that allow you a real window into how people are thinking about America as a destination to do business in versus other places. So we leveraged that.”

Harvard then used the survey’s results to take the debate into the field. The competitiveness forums have drawn four to five times the more typical alumni events the school sponsors. In New York, some 700 alumni came to the forum, the largest alumni gathering ever in the city. “In each case, it is trying to get local leaders who care about this topic engaged with the school and to get the message out,” he adds. “We’ll bring local business leaders to share the stage along with the faculty.

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