Teaching Leadership
It’s a muddle out there, but HBS charts a bold path
Scan the mission statements of leading US business schools, and you’ll find a remarkable consistency in their dedication to educating leaders. Do an Amazon search for books about leadership, and you’ll turn up 33,353 paperbacks.
Clearly, there’s no shortage of interest in leadership on business school campuses or in society at large. If anything, the need to educate leaders to address all manner of business and social issues has never been greater.
Yet, all this attention to the topic begs important questions: Can leadership be taught? If so, how?
A new book edited by three HBS faculty members answers in the affirmative and lays out a framework for leadership education built around three types of experiences: knowing, doing, and being. Not surprisingly, that’s the approach HBS has taken as described in our feature on MBA curriculum innovation.
The book, The Handbook for Teaching Leadership: Knowing, Doing, Being (Sage), is a reference that consolidates current knowledge and encourages further research and academic rigor. In their introduction, Scott Snook, Dean Nitin Nohria, and Rakesh Khurana deliver an unvarnished assessment of the muddled state of leadership education:
“From college classrooms to corporate universities to snake doctors, the field is littered with unsubstantiated yet flourishing responses to the seemingly endless demand to grow better leaders. Despite leadership being so central to the core mission of many schools, there is surprisingly little serious scholarship on how to teach it in any of these institutions.”
HBS stands apart. A decade ago, the School established the Leadership Initiative to foster groundbreaking research and course development projects on leadership and leadership development. Informed by this ongoing work, the curriculum innovations under way this year aim to keep HBS on the forefront of leadership education by presenting students with more opportunities to develop hands-on skills and self-awareness.
Over the years, HBS faculty members have written numerous case studies about alumni facing leadership challenges. For this issue, we picked five such cases, spoke with the alumni involved, and wrote follow-up profiles about their personal journeys and thoughts about leadership.
Leadership of a global enterprise is the subject of our Q&A with William Fung (MBA ’72). Fung and his brother, Victor (PhD ’71), transformed a faltering Hong Kong–based, family-owned trading company into a global powerhouse that stocks the shelves of most major retailers.
From the faculty’s commitment to research and teaching, to alumni examples of leadership in action, HBS demonstrates and lives up to its mission to educate leaders who truly make a difference.
As this issue went to press, we learned of the death of Professor Paul Lawrence, a member of the HBS faculty for more than four decades. To read more about Lawrence’s life and his key role in the creation and development of the field of organizational behavior, view the obituary.
— Roger Thompson
