Harvard Business School: New Faculty and Electives Introduced for the 2019–2020 Academic Year

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Harvard Business School introduced 12 new faculty and 13 new courses for 2019/2020. There is an interesting array of new course offerings including Deepak Malhotra’s “War & Peace: The Lessons of History for Leadership, Strategy & Humanity” which will examine human history over the last 2,500 years as it relates to war and peace, and how that has informed our approach to leadership, strategy, negotiation, and policy. A final goal of the course is to “make history fun.”

For students hoping to join a digital technology venture after graduation, Jeffrey Rayport and Spencer Rascoff are teaching “Managing Technology Ventures (MTV)” where students will study scaled technology ventures through the lens of a principal investor. Using case studies, the course will examine a number of challenges and opportunities they might encounter as an investor in this type of venture. Tom Eisenmann, on the other hand, will look at “Entrepreneurial Failure” and explore why startups fail and what entrepreneurs can do to either avoid it or fail well.

In the course “Behavioral Economics: The Leader as Decision Architect” (Max Bazerman and Mario Small), students will focus on the leader as “the architect of the decisions of many other people – subordinates, customers, investors, and citizens.”

The experiential learning course “How to Talk Gooder in Business and Life” (Alison Wood Brooks) will focus on pitching, feedback, brainstorming, and strategic decision making, with students participating in immersive exercises and learning tactics to become more effective communicators. And students will learn to be happier leaders in “Leadership and Happiness” (Arthur Brooks and Len Schlesinger).

In a first for HBS, a new course has been created (mostly) by Elective Curriculum students for their peers called “Crafting Your Life.” It aims to help the students discover what matters most to them and prepare them to handle the decisions and tradeoffs they will face in the first 10 years after receiving their MBAs.

A timely and much needed course that directly addresses diversity is “Leading Difference” (Francesco Gino and Frances Frei). In it, students examine the challenges and opportunities of workplace diversity.

Finally, two of the new courses are immersive field courses, one focusing on “Asia; China Belt & Road Initiative” (Meg Rithmire and Willy Shih), and the other on “Cuba; Islands in the Stream — Economy, Trade, and the Role of Business and Global Markets in the Future of Cuba” (Arthur Segel and Charlie Wu). Both courses feature field work in the focus country.

From making history fun to becoming a happy leader who talks gooder, Harvard Business School has an amazing lineup for 2019/2020!

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