The Harvard Business School Women’s Association (HBSWA) will host a Virtual Launch Celebration on Wednesday, June 12, to mark its official expansion as a nationwide HBS alumnae Shared Interest Group (SIG).

The online event will feature a panel of speakers—Angela Crispi (MBA 1990), Executive Dean for Administration at HBS; Jana Pompadur Kierstead, Executive Director for MBA and Doctoral Programs and External Relations at HBS; and Heather Myers (MBA 1992), President of the HBSWA—who will talk about what it means to be an alumna of HBS and the many benefits of staying connected with each other and with the school throughout their professional and personal lives.

The virtual event will be followed by several in-person HBSWA meetups in a dozen cities over several weeks.

The launch marks the culmination of a two-year organizing effort by a core team of alumnae, working closely with HBS, to expand the former HBS Women’s Association of New York (HBSWANY) from a local alumni club to an association serving HBS women across the globe. The idea to expand emerged from the fact that many HBS alumnae from other cities would travel specifically to New York to attend the club’s programs. When the pandemic hit, the shift to virtual programming attracted even more HBS women from around the world.

“That’s when we started to wonder if there was a role for a national or even a global organization for women,” says Myers. “After the pandemic, we talked to HBS women across the country to learn how they interacted with HBS and other alums. We found that alumnae are looking for interaction that isn’t just surface-level networking. The vision is to really unlock the power and impact of the HBS alumnae community and create a global network that advances our professional and personal goals.”

Several hundred HBS alumnae participated in 30-minute virtual listening sessions hosted by the HBSWA team in order to discover how the expanded association can best serve them.

The overwhelming majority expressed a desire to connect with other women who shared similar journeys and experiences, both in their business lives and in their personal lives. In response, the club has expanded its programming by organizing local gatherings and adding more virtual roundtables, which are monthly group discussions dedicated to a specific industry or life stage. In addition to its longstanding roundtable for independent consultants, the club now hosts roundtables on the future of food, working mothers, women in health care, and women in career transition, with many more to come. Women can also connect via a series of WhatsApp groups and through LinkedIn.

“Because women have many different roles in society, being able to connect and collaborate with and learn from each other throughout all stages of life is hugely impactful,” says Sherri Sklar (MBA 1989), HBSWA board member and vice president of programming.

“The HBS alumnae journey is very special,” says Sklar. “We share similar business and leadership aspirations at HBS, and along the way we are women dealing with different life circumstances: single, married, kids, no kids, aging parents. Women want to get on boards. Women want to advance their careers. They want to discuss their leadership experiences. How can we help them? Women want a safe place to talk about these issues, share with each other and ultimately to be the best they can be.”

Since announcing the launch of the new HBSWA, membership has nearly tripled.

“The enthusiasm for our programming is off the charts,” says board member Elizabeth Crabill (MBA 1999). “We had 130 registrations for the virtual launch celebration alone on the day we announced it.”

The Virtual Launch Celebration will take place at 5 p.m. EST/ 2 p.m. PST on June 12. There’s still time to register; interested alumnae can find details at the HBS Women’s Association website.

The HBS Club of Connecticut hosted HBS Professor John Beshears in a virtual fireside chat on April 17 that explored the science of behavioral economics as it is applied to health care.

Behavioral economics, which combines psychology and economics to understand individual decision-making and market outcomes, is the primary focus of Beshears’ research, and he collaborates with organizations to study how managers can change the design of decision-making environments to influence the decisions of customers and employees. In recent work, he has examined participation in retirement savings plans, household investment decisions, and health care choices.

Fifty people attended the chat, which was organized by club president Roger Cole (MBA 1985) and moderated by club member Karen Horgan (MBA 1999), whose company also focuses on behavioral economics in health care.

“We worked with him to create a talk that included a real case that he teaches, and some ways that people can use behavioral science concepts to improve their day-to-day lives,” says Horgan, the cofounder and CEO of VAL Health, a consulting firm that deploys behavioral economics to create “nudges” in health care to improve health outcomes. “So it was both intellectually interesting and practical.”

Horgan explains that behavioral science “says humans are irrational and we need to harness that irrationality rather than change it. That’s how you can improve your impact professionally and personally. It’s pretty fun.”

Beshears started the talk with about 10 minutes of a case, without discussion, based on his published research around increasing the rate of mail-order prescriptions, which has been proven to increase medication adherence.

“We focused on health care, where a 40 or 50 percent medication adherence is considered really effective,” says Horgan. “But some people working in other industries asked how we can call that success if it’s not 80 or 90 percent. If you’re in, say, the consumer packaged goods industry, you want to get to 80 percent, but in health care, getting to 40 percent is an extremely high impact. I think people were interested in how much health care metrics vary from other consumer-oriented industries.”

Horgan shared an example of how her company uses behavioral economics to “nudge” people toward specific decisions.

“After calorie labelling was introduced in New York City, people still purchased the same number of calories as before. Working with a sandwich shop, our team changed the order in which items were listed. When they listed lower-calorie items first, people purchased 25% fewer calories. That’s the concept of choice architecture, in that we are lazy as humans and we are influenced by the order in which items are presented. So nudges come to life in the presentation of defaults and the order in which items are listed.”

Beshears talked about applying those same concepts in business settings to get specific outcomes.

“It was a very interactive conversation. There were a lot of ‘aha’ moments and intellectual curiosity because behavioral economics is a relatively new science,” she says. “When I was at HBS, it did not exist.”

Professor Beshears is the Albert J. Weatherhead Jr. Professor of Business Administration at HBS, and teaches the second-year MBA course, Negotiation. He is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

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