An American In (HEC) Paris: P&Q’s Exclusive Interview With Brad Harris, Dean Of MBA Programs

POETS&QUANTS’ INTERVIEW WITH HEC PARIS ASSOCIATE DEAN OF MBA PROGRAMS BRAD HARRIS

Poets&Quants: If I’m a prospective student and I’m thinking of applying to the school in the next application cycle or the one after that, what can I expect to see in the curriculum or the programs that are under your control?

Brad Harris: A lot of learning, a lot of growth in the MBA program happens outside of the classroom. And for us, like a lot of places, we do have some coordinated activities that hopefully align with what we’re teaching in the classroom. But also there’s this organic part of just getting to talk to someone that grew up in a different place than you or had a different background than you.

I want us to get really, really intentional about, maybe not formal programming, but making sure we’re using those moments in a way that we’re reinforcing people. I say… And I’m borrowing from a friend that’s in the States named Chris Shook, he’s a dean of the Collat School of Business at the University of Alabama-Birmingham: “We’re in the business of changing lives, and we have a lot of different levers for how that happens, and it might happen whether we’re doing anything or not.” I want us to be building leaders with the character, the competence, and the courage to change the world. That last part’s important to me. I really want to push our students to think about the problems that need to be solved today. And man, there are so many of them.

But I don’t want us to be an MBA program where you take an entrepreneurship class and you learn how to put together a pitch deck and you propose some product that no one really needed. I want us to be thinking about the problems that need to be solved. So there’s that ambition.

I think also very much aligned with that, and I’m not the only dean thinking about this: How do we truly have an integrative curriculum, one where these classes make sense together and we see themes throughout them? And so I know sustainability, ESG, all these topics are very, very important today. I think maybe there’s room for standalone classes where we’re just introducing the topic, we’re giving some depth to it, but these need to be transversal. And it is not just sustainability or something like this, it’s a mix of things. Leadership, that’s my core. Leadership, I mean, maybe one or two standalone courses, but how many times do we have the right answer or the product that can really do something or the technology that can improve the world, and we don’t adopt it due to politics or resistance to change? All these things have to work together, and we need to give our students some tools — some confidence, too — to get this done.

HEC Paris is in many ways, and long has been, the leader in accomplishing these things — in producing quality leaders.

Yeah. I think we’ve got a real opportunity to do that. And I think a personal thing that I’ve seen in the past year, and I’ve watched myself struggle with this, is our student body or even our faculty, we come from such different backgrounds that often there’s this struggle to get on the same page. Everybody’s friendly and cordial and things like this. I don’t want to paint it differently, but just little nuances. My Texas phrases don’t work anymore here. We’re not starting from the same place. All of these things. And so you really have to get clear and simple in your message.

And we see this with diverse teams, too. This is something I wrote a book about with Brad Kirkman: There’s a real challenge there, and it can be frustrating. And it’s not just like if you have diversity, you’re going to get all these innovative outcomes. No, there’s a hell of a lot of work that goes in to making it work. And I think the older I get and the more opportunities like this one I get, the more I see the real work of leaders is that simplification, that clarification part of the exercise. And I think our students are getting that sometimes without even really realizing what they’ve got.

They’re so focused on the adding the technical depth — which is important, too, especially early in your career. I hope they realize eventually they’ve been equipped to do some pretty special things here.

You study leadership. So what kind of leader is Brad Harris?

He is an evolving one.

Well, all of us are evolving, right?

Yeah. I mean, it is one thing to lead a class. The classroom is interesting and there’s variance in where you’re at, what institution, what country, EMBA, MBA, undergrad, that sort of thing. But in the classroom, if we’re calling this a leadership role, there’s clear norms. I’m the professor, and we might have discussion-based things and people have different expectations, but you’re clearly the person in charge. And then you realize as you get in these other roles, you might have the title but there’s a lot of pushback, a lot of politics, and you really have to work.

A lot of collaboration, too.

A lot of collaboration. So let me think about this for a second. I always start with, if we’re going to talk about leadership, we should define it. And I don’t really have a sexy definition, but I think I’ve got a very useful one that I’m stealing from the literature.

Leadership is a social process of influence. So how do we get people to do something they might not have done otherwise? I think the kind of leader I am is a coach. I really like asking questions. I like helping people figure out how they’re going to solve problems with me — so back to your collaboration thing. I’ve written a lot about teams, too. I love the stuff. I love the idea of empowerment.

And listen, I have to rely on that here. We have a team of 60 that are helping me. I don’t know how to do all the marketing, recruitment. I don’t know all the ins and outs of program delivery. So I am at the mercy, I’m totally dependent on some of these people that are working for me — and they’re great people — to get it done. So I’m in the role of coach here.

I was going back over our story about you from 2019, when you were a 40-under-40 honoree, and you filled out a questionnaire for us. And in it you said something that ties in with the personal touch thing. Let me just read it to you: “We all have unique backgrounds and stories, so shame on me if I don’t facilitate opportunities for us to learn from one another.” How can you do that in your new role — facilitate opportunities to learn from one another?

That’s a good question. And so the reason I got into this field — and I didn’t go there directly, I wanted to be a teacher and then a youth minister and then a basketball coach, and nothing really fit perfectly. And then I was like, “I’m going to try, I don’t know if I can do this, but I’m going to try to be a university professor.” And so I’ve always had this desire to help people and I don’t know where that comes from. I don’t want to make it more than it is. But for some reason, when I saw someone that needed help, I just felt like I needed to do something. And so the teaching part of it, building relationships with students, talking to them, getting out of the content and really trying to push them forward, that’s what motivates me.

The story of how I’m going to do it as a dean is an interesting one, but it’s more than that. If you’ll give me a second, I’ll try to explain it.

In 2017, 2018, I got connected with a guy that’s out in your neck of the woods named Andrew Bartlow. And we wrote a book called Scaling for Success, and it was about HR policies at companies that are going through rapid headcount growth. And then we started a follow-on program. The book was published in 2021, and a lot happened in the world between 2017 and 2021. But we started a group called People Leader Accelerator, and we brought in top-of-function HR leaders at high-growth companies. And we used the book as a backbone, but we got to know these people. They’re super sharp, they worked really hard, mostly women. A common theme is impostor syndrome. And so this was an opportunity to also double down, like, “How do I convince this person that you are worth it, you belong here?”

And a funny thing happens when you talk about things like authenticity, scaling up your own impact: Eventually you feel like you might want to do some of it yourself. And so a big thing for me is, we’ll stop and talk about how we scale headcount or scale a company, but I begin to ask, “Can Brad Harris keep his values and try to scale up his impact in different ways?” And it’s going to be more than just the classroom. For me, it’s going to be, “How do I connect with my team? How do I find these moments that are a little more curated than I’m used to, like speaking to a group of 300 or doing an interview with Poets&Quants, in a way that helps people move forward in their lives?”

DON’T MISS POETS&QUANTS’ DEAN OF THE YEAR: ANN HARRISON OF UC-BERKELEY’S HAAS SCHOOL OF BUSINESS and MBAs DOING GREAT THINGS: MEET THE STANFORD GRAD WHO FOUNDED A GLOBAL TALENT FIRM