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

INTERNATIONALIZATION

It has been 20 years since we opened the doors to the California Research Center, our first foray outside the HBS campus. Since then, we have opened a total of nine centers and four offices, including, most recently, offices in Singapore, Israel, and Dubai. We recently hired a director who will help us open an office in Africa in 2017.

Cumulatively we now have a remarkable network of locations and staff who, in addition to supporting the research of the faculty, serve a number of other important roles. In effect, these entities are HBS embassies in their regions: hosting information sessions for potential applicants, sourcing global partner companies for the FIELD Global Immersions, enrolling faculty members from local business schools for the Global Colloquium on Participant-Centered Learning, managing corporate relations for Executive Education, hosting faculty immersions and talks, coordinating regional symposia, and more. The directors, often themselves alumni of the School, connect to and engage with the local alumni community.

Where do we go next? Our alumni population today—80,000+ in more than 160 countries— is increasingly international, and while we have an active community of alumni clubs, we know there is far more we can do to connect our graduates to one another and to the School. We would like to use HBX in this effort to collapse time and distance. Building on a start-up studio we opened in New York City this year, we also are exploring whether we might develop a global network of launch-labs or start-up studios that operate alongside our research centers and support the entrepreneurial aspirations so many of our alumni eventually have. The anti-globalization sentiment that is spreading across many nations is one we will need to watch carefully, because in many ways HBS is both inherently and intentionally global. More than one-third of our MBA students and two-thirds of our Executive Education participants come from outside the United States. One-third of Harvard Business Publishing’s revenue is derived from international sales. And FIELD means that all 900 of our MBA students spend time as part of the required curriculum in another country. Forces like global terrorism and viruses like Zika can at times make it seem easier to simply withdraw from our international engagements.

Our mission of educating leaders who make a difference in the world, however, commits us to continued global engagement. This is consistent with our legacy, evident in the students from Japan, Canada, China, and Brazil who joined the earliest MBA classes after the School’s founding in 1908 and as seen in the efforts HBS undertook during the 1950s and 1960s to help found and strengthen business schools in Latin America, Europe, Asia, and beyond. As someone who is at heart optimistic, I believe that the School’s global network of students, faculty, staff, and alumni powerfully demonstrate the ways that business can be a global force for prosperity and peace in communities and countries, and that our core activities of teaching and research are more important to the world today than ever.

INCLUSION

We are deeply committed to the goal of making Harvard Business School a place where everyone can thrive and do their best work. We have made significant progress in the MBA Program, and it is deeply heartening that in the last several years we have closed the gender achievement gap: men and women are now roughly proportionally represented among first and second year honors recipients, as well as among Baker Scholars. Equally important, today there are no differences in satisfaction with the MBA Program among student demographic groups.

However, one of the key findings to come out of our spring outside reviews—something we had known but perhaps failed to fully comprehend—is the extent to which one of our proudest accomplishments has created an unintended consequence. For years, we have invested in need-based financial aid at the School, offering a package of fellowships, loans, summer support, and debt forgiveness that would enable any admitted student, regardless of their financial means, to attend the School and to pursue the career of their choice. Through generous gifts by alumni and friends of HBS and as a result of our own use of unrestricted funds, in FY16 we provided aid to roughly half of all MBA students, with an average annual fellowship of more than $35,000. As one indicator of our success, 71 students in the MBA Class of 2018 are the first in their families to attend college. We should all be proud of this fact.

While our aid covers tuition and living expenses, however, it does not take into account the costs associated with the extracurricular activities that students feel are such an important part of building lifelong relationships with classmates. The MBA leadership team and the Student Association co-presidents for the past two years have made this an area of focus, devising ways to bolster less expensive on-campus activities (including, for example, dinners with faculty and enhancing the residential experience). But this is an area we will continue to examine. If we can get our students to better understand and find creative ways to respond to the economic inequality issues they experience at HBS, undoubtedly we will better prepare them to tackle these pressing issues when they leave the School.

Our commitment to offsetting the costs of the MBA degree and continuing to increase the diversity of our student body is undiminished; indeed, we recently conducted a full review of our financial aid program to look for ways to grow our fellowship program.

Another area of focus includes planning for the 50th anniversary of the founding of the African-American Student Union, which we’ll celebrate and mark in 2018 by engaging our full community of students, alumni, faculty, and staff. We have a group eager to lead this effort and pursuing a combination of research, case development, and on-campus activities.

We continue to probe the findings of the 2015 American Association of Universities survey on sexual conduct and to seek ways both to prevent gender-based and sexual harassment (including assault) and to support members of our community when they do experience it. We have adopted new orientation materials, and we are pleased that MBA students have taken the lead in exploring, for example, effective “upstander” training.

Finally, we continue to discuss and debate the tensions between inclusion and free speech. The educational experience at HBS, at its very core, requires diversity. The case method and our participant-centered learning model would collapse without diversity of thought, experiences, and backgrounds in our classes. Each voice is important, and therefore it is incumbent upon us to make sure everyone feels fully welcome, genuinely respected, and heard. Yet, inclusion fails if people feel that they can no longer disagree with each other freely and vigorously, or if people censor their thoughts for fear they are different or not widely shared. Harvard Business School has long sought to embrace this dichotomy, knowing that true learning takes place when opinions are tested, and this is the balance we must continue to strive to attain.

INTEGRATION

Earlier this fall we celebrated the opening of the Pagliuca Harvard Life Lab, an exciting and important addition to what we are calling the i-lab ecosystem: the original i-lab, the alumni Launch Lab, and now the life sciences Life Lab, three adjacent facilities straddling Western Avenue that support the entrepreneurial aspirations and ventures of the full Harvard community of students, alumni, faculty, and staff.

The reach and impact of this i-lab ecosystem continue to grow. In the years since its founding, for example, the i-lab has hosted more than 175,000 student “visits,” spread almost evenly across HBS, Harvard College, and other schools. It has helped support the launch of more than 75 companies that have raised more than $250 million in venture funding. The Launch Lab has served as home to nearly three dozen companies, half with women founders. And more than 33 life science teams applied for bench space at the Life Lab. The flexibility of the i-lab ecosystem makes it well prepared to adapt to new areas of opportunity like artificial intelligence, machine learning, and augmented and virtual reality, for which we have just created a small lab outfitted with equipment and tools students can use to pursue ideas that leverage these technologies.

As an on-campus resident myself, I can attest to the other sights and sounds of life along Western Avenue: the opening of the residential apartment building at Barry’s Corner, for example, and the ground breaking and construction on the new John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS) facility. These are deeply exciting developments for Harvard Business School. An Allston enterprise zone that realizes the potential of the interrelationships between HBS, SEAS, a University-wide Data Science Initiative, and the i-lab ecosystem will be transformative not just for us and Harvard, but for all of Boston and Cambridge.

Anticipating that future, we made good strides this year in building bridges to our colleagues in SEAS. We jointly hosted, for example, our annual faculty research symposium, developing cases on both schools to help us better understand the unique structures and activities of each; more than 100 participants gathered for a day in May for discussions, presentations, and small-group meetings. We met again jointly in the fall to learn about new streams of faculty research at both schools. This is but one step toward finding areas of mutual benefit—ultimately, perhaps, culminating in a new degree proposal, but leveraging ways to get to know and learn about one another in the interim.

Finally, we are seeing the boundaries across schools become ever more porous. It used to be that the idea of an HBS faculty member teaching undergraduates was inconceivable; today, we have a number of them teaching courses exclusively to students at Harvard College, or open to students from throughout the University, enriching the learning experience for all. More faculty are finding benefits in joint appointments, strengthening the flow of cross-disciplinary ideas. And our joint programs with the Medical, Kennedy, and Law Schools continue to attract outstanding applicants and graduate outstanding students.

We will continue to look for mutually beneficial ways to realize the potential of President Faust’s vision for One Harvard.

None of this would be possible without the support of alumni and other friends of the school. The Harvard Business School Campaign, launched in 2014, reached its initial goal of $1 billion during 2016. That we reached this milestone reflects the dedication and commitment so many feel to the School and our mission. As we look to the next two years, we have identified an additional goal of $300 million we seek to raise, reflecting the importance of sustaining the initiatives we have launched, providing future flexibility, and strengthening the core.

Toward that end, we are focusing on four key areas: growing the HBS Fund for Leadership and Innovation to support current and emerging priorities and sustain the Fund as the annual engine of philanthropy at HBS post-Campaign; endowing associate professors and enabling the hiring of practitioners so that we can develop and support a distinctive faculty; providing fellowships that expand our ability to support students who study at HBS and who pursue their passions after graduation; and realizing the vision of One Harvard by supporting work across the University and advancing Harvard’s (and our own) aspirations in Allston.

On behalf of the entire Harvard Business School community, thank you. It is an exciting time to be on campus, and I remain awed by the sincere aspiration students, faculty, staff, and alumni share of making a difference in the world.