Photo by Susan Young

Nitin Nohria planned to step down as dean of Harvard Business School on June 30. But in March, as the University shifted to remote learning in the face of the coronavirus pandemic, President Lawrence Bacow asked Nohria to extend his term until December 31 to deal with the unprecedented challenges. Under his ten-and-one-half years of leadership, the School launched FIELD and HBS Online. It created two joint degree programs: an MS/MBA in Engineering in conjunction with the Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and an MS/MBA in Life Sciences & Biotechnology with the Faculty of Arts & Sciences and the Harvard Medical School. It initiated new faculty research initiatives on issues like US Competitiveness and the Future of Work. It marked the 50th year anniversaries of women being admitted to the MBA program and the founding of the African American Student Union. It increased access by expanding fellowships for those with financial need. It opened new international research centers and offices, launched the Harvard-wide i-Lab ecosystem, completed a $1.4 billion capital campaign, and enhanced the campus through several new buildings.

In a conversation with the Bulletin, Nohria reflected on his time leading the School and how students and faculty mobilized to respond to the pandemic.

After all that the world has faced in 2020, it’s easy to forget that you assumed the deanship in the aftermath of an earlier crisis, the Great Recession of 2008. How did that event, coming just as the School celebrated its 100th birthday, affect your aspirations?

The financial crisis was a sober moment for the School. It made us reflect more deeply during our centennial, not only on the areas where we had made progress and could justifiably feel proud, but on the areas where our institution needed to do better. It made us more mindful that society had new expectations of business leaders, and we needed to redouble our focus on developing leaders with both the competence and character to make a difference in the world.

Throughout your tenure, you framed your priorities as the five Is. What are your reflections on your progress on each one? Let’s start with Innovation.

We launched some significant innovations, including the FIELD program and HBS Online. Other lesser-known innovations worth mentioning include SIPs (Short Intensive Programs, offered over a week in January), Bridges (a capstone at the end of the two years), and several entirely new Executive Education courses. In our doctoral programs, we launched PRIMO, a summer program that connects undergraduates with our faculty to learn about management research. We converted our DBA degree to a PhD in Business Administration. We also engaged in the continuous renewal of courses across all our programs, driven by our faculty’s research and the 250 new cases they write each year. The last decade has been an exciting time for curricular innovation at the School.

Intellectual ambition?

We continued to support our faculty to be intellectual entrepreneurs who transform how we think about management problems and improve management practice. We also began to foster collective intellectual ambition—to rally teams of faculty to take on more significant issues facing business and society. This started with the US Competitiveness Project. What we learned allowed us to launch a steady stream of projects, including those focused on creating stability in the financial system, business and the environment, the future of work, advancing gender equity, and driving digital transformation. We also learned to disseminate our research in new ways, including blogs, video cases, podcasts, and large-scale events in Klarman Hall.

Internationalization?

We inherited a powerful international platform from my predecessors that we strengthened by creating new centers in Turkey, Israel, Singapore, and South Africa. These centers have enabled us to deliver a truly global education and enriching field experiences for our students. Our faculty has been able to pursue more international research. The centers have also enhanced our engagement with our global alumni network, one of the School’s distinctive strengths. In the last five years, we’ve also become mindful that we need to understand better parts of the world that feel left behind by globalization. In 2018, I joined a group of faculty members on a trip to rural Mississippi. All of us had been to China, but only 20 percent had ever been to Mississippi. It made us recognize that perhaps we hadn’t thought enough about the American hinterland and similarly neglected regions in many other countries in our push to cover the globe. We have begun to pay more attention to these areas, even as we continue to strengthen our global engagement.

Integration with the rest of Harvard?

We have fundamentally changed Harvard Business School’s engagement with the rest of the University. It began with the i-Lab, which helped catalyze the entrepreneurial energy that exists across the entire University. The i-Lab was proof of the power of One Harvard. It breathed life into the vision for an Allston campus, which had been put on hold during the financial crisis. Then the magnificent gift from John Paulson (MBA 1980) allowed the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences’ move to Allston to become a reality. Having a great engineering school as our neighbor in Allston will create extraordinary possibilities. It will be exciting to see what unfolds as our Allston neighborhood becomes a vibrant innovation cluster connected to other local innovation nodes like Kendall Square, the Longwood Medical center, and the Boston waterfront.

Inclusion?

We started out trying to address the stubborn, long-lasting achievement and satisfaction gaps for women in our MBA program. Within three years, we substantially closed that gap, which gave us the self-confidence that we can advance inclusion when we put our minds to it. Yet there’s so much more progress we can and should make. The gains we have made on gender are fragile and must be vigilantly monitored and reinforced.

The 50th anniversary of the African American Student Union made us recognize that we have even more work to do on advancing racial inclusion. This reality was brought home painfully in the racial reckoning sparked by the killing of George Floyd. We formed a Dean’s Anti-Racism Taskforce to examine what we need to do and announced a plan to advance racial equity at the School. We must now implement this plan and show results over time that demonstrate the progress we aspire to achieve.

We have also been steadfastly pursuing greater socio-economic inclusion. We have made considerable strides in increasing need-based financial aid, so that a person's ability to attend HBS does not depend on their financial circumstances.

Beyond ensuring that we increase access to everyone who has the talent to attend the School, we must increasingly also work to ensure that they can thrive while attending the School and, in their careers, thereafter.

Your family was the first in 30 years to live in the Dean’s House. Did living on campus affect the way you led?

My family initially had trepidations about it, but it’s proven to be a great place to raise our family—and so much more. Living in this community allowed us to be closer to its pulse and rhythms. When the taxis pull up with Exec Ed students, we see and hear them. When the campus is undergoing construction, we can feel the piles being driven into the ground and see the structure rise from its foundations. Walking across the campus allows for many chance conversations with people who readily share both what is working well and what’s not. I love Harvard Business School; living on the campus has only deepened my affection for it.

You led the creation of Tata Hall, Chao Hall, and Klarman Hall. In an increasingly online world, why invest so much in the physical campus?

When our campus was built, George F. Baker, our benefactor, said: “This school will not be judged by the magnificence of its buildings, but by the magnificence of the work that goes on inside of them.” That’s a profound piece of wisdom that guides how we think of our campus to this day. A great campus is an inviting campus. For instance, we could ask our Exec Ed students to live in hotels, as other schools do. Instead, we have them come to our campus to live and study together, which leads to close, lifelong friendships they wouldn’t make otherwise. Each of the buildings we’ve opened helps make the School a yet more magnetic place that attracts and connects people. And they help us do magnificent work inside of them. I believe people will seek out physical places like HBS that can create a unique sense of social intimacy even more in an increasingly digital world.

How did you approach the evolving challenges last spring, when the School suddenly shifted to remote learning at mid-semester, and this past summer, when it was clear that fall 2020 would require a hybrid approach?

The first challenge we confronted was to move all our classes online after spring break. It was a marvel to see the School rally to tackle this challenge. Srikant Datar, our new dean, led a working group that mobilized faculty members experienced in teaching online to help those with no experience get ready (thank heavens for the early investments we made in HBX, now HBS Online). Our IT team did wonders to get everyone the technology and connectivity to teach, learn, and work from home. Staff across the School volunteered to train as online facilitators to provide technical support to the faculty. Student leaders showed great ingenuity in reimagining social experiences online, including the annual HBS Show. As a result of these collective efforts, our transition to remote learning and working went smoother than anyone had imagined.

Building on these learnings, we created a system to operate in a hybrid environment over the summer. We wanted students to return to campus and our classrooms to give them as much of the full HBS experience as possible. At the same time, we did everything possible to ensure their safety. By engaging faculty, students, and staff to problem-solve together, we struck this delicate balance and reopened the campus in the fall.

Since then, we have used the metaphor of a dimmer switch as our guide—allowing for more on-campus activities, including hybrid classes, when the virus is under control (as we saw from August to October) and moving some activities online when the virus becomes more widespread (as happened in early November). We also transitioned many of our Executive Education programs into a virtual delivery model leveraging the Live Studio technology pioneered by HBX. The operating flexibility we have built should serve us well through the rest of this pandemic and even into the future.

Do you expect the remote learning the School did in 2020 to affect the faculty’s long-term thinking about the need for face-to-face classes versus online experiences?

Our response to the pandemic has revealed an interesting duality. On the one hand, we have discovered that online learning can be far more effective than we might have initially imagined. At the same time, our experience has reinforced how much our faculty, students, and staff still yearn for the spontaneity and energy of in-person interactions. In the future, we believe the demand for our intimate, in-person educational experience will remain strong. Simultaneously, we will be able to enhance and extend our educational offerings through our growing online capabilities.

How do you assess the School’s relationship with its alumni?

I remember an alum coming back for his 75th reunion. He was nearly 100 years old and had just two living classmates. Yet it meant so much to him to return to our campus as he had never missed a reunion. He epitomizes the extraordinary commitment of our alumni. By raising $1.4 billion during our capital campaign, our alumni showed how devoted they are to the School and its mission. Our alumni are looking for a lifelong relationship with the School. We have started to engage them in many more ways and hope, in the future, to meet alumni at any point in their life when we can deliver an educational experience they find valuable. No school is better positioned than we are to create a set of offerings that serve alumni throughout the arc of their careers and lives.

Do you worry that the traditional, two-year, full-time MBA is losing relevance?

Punctuated equilibrium is a concept in evolutionary biology. It suggests that evolution occurs through long periods of incremental change, punctuated by occasional periods of extraordinary transformation. It’s a useful way to look at the field of MBA education. The dominant model, created by schools like ours in the early 20th century, was the two-year, full-time MBA degree, and with minor variations, it was almost ubiquitous until around 2000. Since then, we’ve been in a punctuated period of rapid experimentation and change. We see many one-year, online, and executive programs challenging the two-year model. That’s because the real opportunity costs of going to school for two years are increasing. Yet, the demand for business education as a whole is expanding because people now have more ways to access it. Does this pose a serious threat to two-year programs? I don’t think so because many more people than we can admit still want the full two-year MBA experience at a high-quality program like ours. At the same time, we need to prepare for a world where people will consume business education in many different ways.

Why do you frequently talk and write about the problem of the public’s falling trust in business?

I’ve always believed the business enterprise is one of society’s great inventions. It’s one of the most powerful mechanisms by which we can increase prosperity. Businesses enable economic self-reliance, which is essential to human dignity. At its core, business is a powerful source for good. But like any powerful instrument, it can also do harm—by polluting the environment or exacerbating inequality, for example. Keeping business on a path where it’s seen as a force for good is deeply important. When society loses trust in business, everyone is worse off. We need to educate leaders who will regain and rebuild society’s trust in business.

Fifty years from now, how do you hope future deans look back on your tenure?

Darwin famously said that it is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive but those who can best manage change. I hope people who look back on my tenure will see it as a time when the School became more comfortable and capable of experimenting at scale and increased its adaptive capacity. That would make me very happy, because who knows what the future will bring.

On January 1, you begin a one-year sabbatical. What are your plans after that?

Before I became dean, I thought the single best job in the world was to be a professor at Harvard Business School, so I can readily imagine returning to that role. On the other hand, moments when you can take a completely fresh look at what the future might hold come rarely in life. So I want to use my sabbatical to fully explore what would give me the greatest fulfillment and joy in the future. One thing is for sure: Whatever I do next, I will always be a loyal and devoted member of the Harvard Business School community.

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