Transcript


Well, that's a question very near and dear to my heart, because I kind of came to the conclusion back then, when we were just getting the MOC thing going, that I had to find a new leverage model.

What's the traditional way in which we get leverage around here? Well, probably the most traditional way is we have, you know, 85 amazing young people in the classroom. And by spending, you know, thirty sessions with them, we inform those people, and they go out and be leaders. You know, that's kind of the most traditional leverage model that HBS was really built on.

And then we, fortunately, added the second leverage model, which most academic institutions have, which is people write stuff. Writing was not really part of the tradition of the Harvard Business School, as you know. There were very few articles written, and books. That was more the exception, it was more teaching by the case method. But over the years, I think we developed the capacity, and people here write, and in my own case, the articles and the books have been a great leverage device.

But ultimately, in the competitiveness area, I became convinced that unlike in strategy—where there was a large, existing infrastructure of business schools and strategy courses, where if I wrote something really good, they might use it—in the competitiveness field, there were no courses. And I had found myself running around the world trying to help countries, and come up with ways of thinking about what they need to do. And I kept feeling that I was bumping up against a constraint. There just weren't enough people around in the country to actually make sure that this stuff happened. And the big problem with competitiveness is, you know, it's nobody's primary agenda. And it's awfully easy for one government to toss out everything the previous government has done.

So you really need a cadre of people sort of embedded in the society that kind of think, at some level, in similar ways. So all of a sudden it dawned on me that whatever 85 students that I taught here, I wanted to pick them as well as I could so they individually have high-leverage potential. So that's why we have 49 nationalities, and that's why we really look for young people that are committed to do this stuff.

But then I had to figure out a way to multiply that, and that's where MOC came up. And the idea there was that if we could take the same experience that we're creating here for HBS students, and Kennedy School students, and we can make it possible for faculty in other universities to actually create this experience as well for their students, we could just exponentially increase the number of people we could touch, and reach, and the number of countries we could touch and reach.

The affiliate concept was sort of an experiment, you know—we didn't quite know what would happen. But, you know, fortunately, it's going very well. I think we're getting close to 90, and we're getting better at managing them. And this year, coming to Harvard will be one of the faculty members of one of those affiliates who's probably one of the more successful ones in Colombia. He's going to be with me for a year. So finally now we have somebody who can kind of help us really build out that whole idea.

But in any event, I think the school's case method approach, and its deep commitment to practice, and all that is great, but if we're ultimately going to have impact, I think we have to help our colleagues in other schools to actually learn how to do this successfully. And I think our traditional model of just selling cases, and teaching those, works better in the business school context, but when you're starting to get into these other fields that don't have anywhere near this tradition, then I think we have to find ways of helping those faculty succeed. And if we can get the faculty turned on to the cases, and the reality, and the problem, and the richness, then what happens is what you would expect: Some of them get really turned on. And so I think we're up to about a dozen or so institutes now. And these schools have all of a sudden become major players in their discussion in their country about this topic. And you know, that's the dream scenario.