Harvard Business School Dean Nitin Nohria’s 2017 Report To Alumni

Doctoral Programs

In the Doctoral Programs, a faculty committee spent the last year reviewing the curriculum and has proposed a series of enhancements to the requirements for doctoral degrees. Our aim is to train our doctoral students to be scholars whose research is rigorous and has a distinctive, practical edge. With this in mind, we will ask doctoral students to take at least two courses from the elective curriculum of the MBA Program to ensure they can connect with the concerns of managers. We also will seek to provide a range of opportunities for them to develop as teachers.

It’s worth pausing to note that we have about 135 doctoral students at any time at various stages of their education. More than 1,000 doctoral students trained at HBS have taken positions—including leadership positions—at academic institutions around the world. Additionally, a good number have joined the HBS faculty, whether upon graduation or once they have gained experience elsewhere. Our impact on management education through these placements is significant.

Executive Education

Following a multiyear investment in Executive Education that resulted in wonderful new teaching, gathering, and living spaces, the most recent of which is the spectacular Chao Center, we are looking across our portfolio of programs for opportunities that serve important needs of executives, engage the faculty, and strengthen the economic model of the School. Executive Education, given the relatively shorter length of programs, is an arena where we can innovate rapidly: trying out new ideas, testing new approaches, and tailoring the curriculum to specific situations. Participants gain early exposure to emerging and path-breaking research. And for the junior faculty in particular, the ability to engage with practitioners early in their career is an invaluable developmental opportunity.

Last year, for example, we taught 1,650 executives across our comprehensive leadership programs (the Advanced Management Program for senior managers who are being developed to join the C-suite, the General Management Program for managers who are getting ready to assume a major divisional responsibility, the Program for Leadership Development for high-potential middle managers, and the Owner/President Management Program for managers of firms in which they are the owners). We introduced eight new focused programs, each grounded in ongoing faculty research in specific areas (e.g., driving digital strategies and behavioral economics). These reflect our constant effort to renew our portfolio of roughly 70 focused programs that range from three to six days in length and collectively attracted 4,310 participants last year. Custom programs that help companies develop their senior talent and mobilize them to drive important strategic priorities last year engaged more than 4,200 participants. For the faculty, these custom programs represent an opportunity to work closely with companies and learn how their ideas can be applied to specific management situations. We continue to pursue selected global programs, including a recently launched senior executive leadership program in India.

HBX

Finally, HBX, our online learning platform, hit an important milestone this summer of 10,000 learners. In addition to CORe (our credential program on the fundamentals of business) and Disruptive Strategy (an HBX Certificate Course), we added three new courses to the pipeline: Leading with Finance (launched fall 2016) and Negotiation Mastery and Decision Making (both expected 2017). All are achieving remarkably high completion rates and Net Promoter Scores, and we remain impressed by the passion and engagement of these online participants. HBX Live, our virtual classroom, now is being used across a wider array of audiences, including with alumni, and we piloted this year both a fully online short program (six sessions) entitled “Managing Your Career” and a faculty-led research seminar.

From its launch three years ago, HBX has become a successful start-up. Our goal now is to scale-up: to educate many more learners annually (through B2C and B2B channels), to develop a mobile platform with compelling short-form content so that learners can access HBX on devices that are ubiquitous in their lives, and, given our significant investment in the platform during this time, to make HBX cash-flow positive by 2019. We will need to mobilize our entire community in the coming year to realize these goals, and we are asking everyone—including alumni—to reach out to individuals and firms they know to encourage them to take an HBX course.

Our ultimate vision is to begin to integrate these pedagogical strands—case, field, and digital methods of learning—into even more transformational educational experiences across all our programs. Such integration has shown early promise. CORe, with its self-paced learning and cohort experience, turns out to be an ideal vehicle for new MBA students without a background in business or economics to learn business fundamentals, for example. This year, more than half of all entering MBA students (including many who weren’t required to do so) completed all or some portion of the program. In the professional development arena, we see tremendous potential in blending on-campus, online, and immersive experiences that draw on the expertise we have developed across Executive Education, HBX, Harvard Business Publishing, and the field method. Truly, no other school in the world is poised to leverage this array of learning methods better or to extend the notion of leadership education as a lifelong process. Harvard Business School has long been a pioneer in business education, and we continue to stoke this path-breaking spirit.

To strengthen the core of our educational programs, we will focus in the coming year on evaluating what we teach in addition to how we teach. As one of the few business schools that still insists on a required curriculum in both our MBA and comprehensive Executive Education programs, we need to ensure it is as relevant as it needs to be at a time when areas like machine learning, artificial intelligence, and data analytics are becoming increasingly important. Are we teaching students enduring and important ideas, concepts, frameworks, and tools, while simultaneously introducing them to forward-looking ideas and practices? How can we be clearer about what students can expect to learn, the leadership capabilities they will gain, and the lifelong benefits they will enjoy by studying at HBS? Additionally, how might we more rigorously assess and demonstrate that we deliver what we promise? These all are questions we plan to study and answer.

INTELLECTUAL AMBITION

From its very founding, thought leadership has been as important to the mission of Harvard Business School as its educational programs. Today, HBS faculty members are continuing this intellectual ambition, carrying out comparative case-based field research, conducting large-scale statistical analysis, undertaking longitudinal studies, developing new theoretical models, and launching laboratory and field experiments to study a wide range of management problems.

As the methodologies have broadened, so, too, have the relevant disciplines: economics, psychology, sociology, engineering, and applied sciences all are lenses through which issues are studied in today’s business arena. Finally, our faculty increasingly are finding benefit in a wider range of collaborations, whether with postdoctoral fellows or with colleagues at HBS, Harvard University, and academic institutions around the world.

We find ourselves at a point where learning how to fully support the evolving research interests of our faculty is both complex and crucial. One example is the burgeoning interest in field-based experiments: more than two dozen faculty members are working with individuals, companies, foundations, and governmental agencies to more precisely understand causal mechanisms and interventions that will yield desired outcomes. This style of research requires new models of funding, as the resources involved typically far exceed our internally-provided research budgets (picture field experiments in emerging markets that test the efficacy of mobile phone interventions to improve financial and health literacy, or experiments that mobilize communities of problem solvers to tackle innovation challenges presented by organizations like NASA). To support this research we’ll also need to develop new types of teaming and co-working spaces. It is deeply exciting work that can have wide-ranging, real-world impact—precisely the kind of intellectual ambition we want to nurture at HBS.

In addition to supporting the work of individual faculty members, we continue to invest in interdisciplinary projects and initiatives that enable us to collectively pursue larger research topics and questions. The U.S. Competitiveness Project, for instance, now in its fifth year, has published evidence and arguments from its annual alumni-wide survey that the U.S. economy is doing half its job: while it is enabling firms to compete effectively in the global economy, it is failing to deliver increasing levels of prosperity to the average citizen. The report highlights the importance of addressing the political polarization that has led to gridlock in the U.S. federal government, simplifying the tax code, investing in infrastructure, and improving the skills of our workforce, while continuing to strengthen the institutional matrix of higher education, innovation and entrepreneurship, and deep capital markets that enables the U.S. economy to be the most dynamic and adaptive in the world.

Other multifaculty projects include understanding the behavioral and institutional foundations of our financial system so that we can better monitor its ongoing health, creating a value-based healthcare system that delivers better patient outcomes at lower costs, understanding the drivers and consequences of economic inequality, and addressing the organizational and managerial bottlenecks that can accelerate the advance of precision medicine. Each of these projects, and others in development, are guided by our aspiration to focus our intellectual energies on some of the most important problems facing business and society.

We continue to invest, as well, in longer-term initiatives in areas ranging from social enterprise (soon to be celebrating its 25th anniversary) to gender (launched formally just last year). In addition to supporting faculty research and course development, these initiatives connect students with independent studies and summer and post-graduation jobs, and they engage alumni through symposia, mentoring and advising, and project work. And with construction underway on Klarman Hall, a wonderful convening facility slated to open in 2018, we are excited to explore new and distinctive ways we can bring together people and ideas.

To strengthen the core of our research, we are looking to ensure that succeeding generations of faculty master the art of case writing. Beyond their importance in our own curricula and as a means of engaging with practice, HBS cases make up a significant portion of the curricula at business schools worldwide. And the ability to develop a really great case— one that endures the test of time and can be taught across faculty members and courses— is a learned and refined skill. With very few new faculty members coming to HBS with an MBA, it’s rare for them to have even encountered a case, much less taught or written one. Happily, they remain eager to begin developing cases; we must help them where they need it by partnering them with more seasoned senior colleagues who can open doors at case sites, help them think through teaching plans, and offer feedback on early drafts. The case method is foundational to the School, and case writing is a craft we want to see continue to thrive at HBS.

We also are taking a comprehensive look at faculty development, from the information we provide when recruiting new faculty members so they have clear expectations and excitement about joining the School, to how we socialize junior faculty members in their first few years to embrace our distinctive teaching and research approach, to how we support them during their pivotal associate professor years, to helping them become full partners and leaders of the School upon gaining tenure, to ensuring they continue to grow and stay intellectually vibrant throughout their careers.