Professor Robert Huckman kicks off the daylong Viewpoints program for first-year MBA students.

Professor Robert Huckman kicks off the daylong Viewpoints program for first-year MBA students.

In their first year at HBS, MBA students take a dozen required courses vital to developing their knowledge and mastery of business. “However, they often don’t get to tackle some of the big issues that intersect business and society and that don’t fit neatly into a single course,” says Robert Huckman the Albert J. Weatherhead III Professor of Business Administration and faculty chair of the MBA Required Curriculum. To address this need, the School piloted a new daylong program, Viewpoints, this past spring.

“Our goal was to help students understand how they need to think about the broader social context in which firms operate and how the tools they’ve been building during their first year can be applied to a wide range of issues,” explains Huckman, who co-chaired Viewpoints.

The day opened with a keynote on “The Fragile State of the World,” by Rawi Abdelal, the Herbert F. Johnson Professor of International Management, which explored the threats facing globalization and the rise of populism on both sides of the political spectrum worldwide. “Pragmatic policy making has become regarded as status quo,” Abdelal said. He urged students to help save globalization from itself.

Students then chose from 16 concurrent sessions designed to broaden their knowledge and understanding of timely topics. For example, in “Reimagining Capitalism,” Rebecca Henderson, the John and Natty McArthur University Professor, examined how the private sector might play a major role in driving the systemic change needed to address big problems like climate change and inequality. And in “The Future of Work,” Professor Joseph Fuller looked beyond dystopian forecasts to explore how ever-evolving technology has the potential to improve the quality of work lives, the earnings of most workers, and company productivity.

Viewpoints exposed students to the latest faculty research and to professors they might not otherwise meet. The day concluded with a panel discussion on how to build and maintain society’s trust in business. Panelists included Bethany McLean and John Carreyrou—renowned journalists who have covered this century’s biggest corporate scandals, including Enron and Theranos—and Joseph Badaracco, the John Shad Professor of Business Ethics.

Student feedback on Viewpoints was very positive. “It shed light on a lot of wider political-economic issues . . . [and] encouraged us to think about what we, as HBS students and future leaders, should do about them,” commented one student.

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