Transcript

When we look at "community," we are looking at something that's at the heart of the Harvard Business School. It's been true for a long, long time. And I think it's important to understand that in the mid-nineties, as we got involved in this stuff, and as we went through that ten year period, there was some clarity that developed around the importance of community. Because the School needed to change, and it needed to change in some pretty fundamental ways. And yet we had to be clear in our minds about those things that should not change.

So we were really careful about making sure we didn't change the core, but there were other things. So we had to really be careful about: what was the community? What held it together? What was the nature of it?

And I think a couple things became very clear to me as I got into this. One was that we needed a lot more engagement of the faculty in the real hard, substantive work of changing and developing the institution. That it could not just be the faculty goes about their daily activity, you know, does their research, teaches their classes, and some other group of people figures out where the institution's going. That could not be the pattern. It had to be that we had to get a lot more people involved. And so we went to work to create processes to get a lot more of that taking place.

And I think that had an important influence on the way the community felt, and the way it developed—that there was, among the senior staff and the faculty, a lot of engagement on a broad range of issues. And so we had the Operating Group. We got the unit heads involved, because we had a planning process that was new. And then we created a lot of task forces, and other initiatives. Got lots of faculty involved. And really created voice in the faculty. And it was clear that the important work needed to go to the faculty and involve the faculty in the process. And so we tried to do that.

A second thing was this process of creating values in the community—really engaging people on what that meant, and how it ought to play in our work together, and what it was about.

And I think the third thing—very closely related—was the emphasis on leadership. That the institution had always been about general management, but we needed to clarify, and really make it clear that that meant that we were educating people who were going to take on responsibilities of leadership.

And I think those things, both intellectually, and personally, and socially helped to knit together the community. And then we did a lot of "atmospheric" kinds of things. We created this, you know, this thing we did in September, the beginning of the year, where we opened up the whole campus, invited everybody, family and friends, and everybody to come and have an afternoon together. We looked for opportunities to highlight the fact that we are connected together.