The Business Environment in the 21st century
What Role for HBS?
The business leaders surveyed for the colloquium suggested several ways in which business schools generally, and HBS in particular, could play a role. They included
- research and thought leadership on major challenges to capitalism;
- scenario planning to stimulate discussion on possible policies and activities by business groups and leaders;
- helping business leaders organize around the sort of system-level issues discussed at the colloquium and establishing ongoing dialogue among multiple business stakeholders;
- training future business leaders to be successful in environments where their authority is low and conflict is high (unlike in the past, where their authority was high and conflict low).
Comments Joe Bower, “There’s a multitude of business schools that focus on the problems of running modern public corporations. But what business schools increasingly are not doing is addressing the broad questions facing the business community. To the extent that they become involved in working on these issues, business leaders will discover that they are often viewed as lacking legitimacy and authority. They will also learn that these problems are extraordinary in their complexity and interdependency. It’s conceivable that at HBS, maybe in cooperation with the Kennedy School, the Medical School, or the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, that we can begin to understand those problems better and do some things here at Harvard that nobody else can do. We have such resources that we ought to aspire to make a very significant contribution. We’ve had a major impact in the past. We can do it again.”
