Alumni Eager to Help Shape School’s Future
Kelly
Photo by Neal Hamberg
By the time you are reading this, HBS will likely have named Dean Jay Light’s successor. Since Dean Light announced in December his plan to retire, there has been much discussion about the qualities a new Dean should possess and the strategic priorities he or she should lead. The opinions have been as diverse as the School’s more than 70,000 alumni. Yet there has been one clear and consistent area of agreement: Alumni care passionately about the future of HBS, and we welcome the opportunity to support HBS and the new Dean as we usher in the School’s second 100 years.
The alumni community is one among many of the School’s great assets, and we are also an important constituency among many whose interests the new Dean will need to consider when charting a course forward for the School.
To help with that effort, the Alumni Board last year conducted a series of surveys, focus groups, and in-depth interviews with a global cross-section of alumni and identified three primary areas of long-term interests:
Alumni Engagement — How can alumni, in partnership with HBS, maintain and build strong connections with each other, and stay connected to HBS?
Lifelong Learning — How can alumni maintain an educational relationship with HBS over a lifetime?
Professional Development — How can alumni use HBS as an ongoing resource for professional and career development?
Those are the tangible elements that alumni see as important to sustaining a vibrant and valuable alumni community. Then there are the intangibles. Alumni care deeply about the School’s brand and image in the world, which of course are shaped in part by the thousands of alumni who bear the School’s credentials. The value of those credentials is in turn defined by continued excellence on campus: the students, the faculty, the research, and the facilities. Alumni are truly vested in the future of this great institution.
Dean Jay Light has led the School under extremely difficult circumstances over the past five years. Our new Dean will face the equally difficult challenge of leading an institution at once steeped in history and tradition while moving forward in an increasingly complex and global world. There are over 70,000 remarkable alumni ready to support this exciting time in the life of HBS.
— Ann Kelly (MBA ’99) is a partner at Global Philanthropy Group in Seattle, Washington. She can be reached at akelly@mba1999.hbs.edu.
