This past fall, 49 employees of the US Department of State logged in to a virtual HBS classroom from all over the world—Honduras, China, Namibia, and Kazakhstan, to name a few—to kick off a first-of-its-kind partnership between the School and the US Department of State. These students represented the first cohort of the Secretary’s Leadership Seminar, a six-month, custom Executive Education offering for mid-career foreign and civil service employees.

The idea for the program—and the funding that made it possible—came from Howard Cox (MBA 1969). Cox, now a special limited partner at Greylock, began his career working in the Office of the Secretary of Defense under Robert McNamara (MBA 1939) in the 1960s. That experience left him with a deep appreciation for those in public service and for the value of business leadership training to those government officials. “My observation was that senior military people have, in the course of their careers, received significant additional training in management and leadership,” Cox says. But the State Department, he noted, had few equivalent opportunities.

In 2019, Cox approached the School and the State Department about providing further development to foreign and civil service employees. He found support from Brian Bulatao (MBA 1995), who was at the time serving as under secretary of state for management. Bulatao tapped career diplomats Carol Perez and Daniel B. Smith to help create the Secretary's Leadership Seminar.

“The State Department has operations in virtually every country in the world, and we have to manage very large enterprises that are subject to the same sort of constraints and rules that any large organization is,” explains Smith, who until recently oversaw the department’s Foreign Service Institute and is now the US chargé d’affaires to India. “A lot of what Harvard Business School has to offer is fundamental leadership training, change management, organizational management, and other things that are very germane to what our officers and staff need.”

David Ager, a senior lecturer in Executive Education who also has a background in the civil service in his native Canada, worked with the State Department to design the custom program. Career employees in government agencies face unique challenges, Ager says. The agencies have frequent transitions of top leadership and a siloed department structure, and they serve multiple constituencies, including Congress and the president. “These dynamics have implications for how you make decisions and how you think about leading through change,” Ager observes. Those ideas became central to the curriculum, which includes such cases as “The 2010 Chilean Mining Rescue” and “SOFWERX: Innovation at US Special Operations Command,” as well as Karim Lakhani’s work on data analytics and AI.

For Carol Perez, now acting under secretary of state for management, a key component of the program is the “business impact project,” in which the students address actual leadership challenges identified by the State Department, such as strengthening diversity and inclusion efforts in recruitment, retention, and leadership development. “These are all tangible projects, and I believe the results will be something that could actually be implemented,” she says.

The results of the business impact projects will be just the first benefit of this investment in State Department employees, Perez says. “We’re trying to create a cohort of people who will continue to work across barriers. They are going to have a network that is going to allow for this culture shift. And that’s really critical to making sure this organization remains the premier foreign-affairs agency in the world.”

Plans are currently underway to welcome a second cohort of State Department employees to the Secretary’s Leadership Seminar, and the School also is engaged in discussions about expanding this type of leadership training to other government agencies. “In the Cold War, when we were competing with the Soviet Union, we were competing with guns and missiles. In today’s world, we are competing financially,” says Cox of the importance of the business acumen in government.

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