Leadership
Leadership
As our world grows increasingly global, intricate, and ever-changing, the role of leaders is becoming more and more complex and critical to business success. In the 1950s and 1960s, Fritz Roethlisberger and Elton Mayo's contributions to the "Hawthorne effect," and work by Paul Lawrence and Jay Lorsch on organizational integration, sparked the field of Organizational Behavior. Early work by Michael Beer on leading organizational change, Rosabeth Kanter on innovation for productivity, John Kotter on power and influence, and Michael Tushman on innovation management helped shape today's understanding of organizational transformation. With an interest in Leadership that spans our academic units, our approach to research is collaborative and multi-disciplinary. We leverage a wide range of research methodologies – from onsite field research to surveys, experiments, and extensive longitudinal studies.
Leadership Initiative
The Leadership Initiative undertakes cutting-edge research and course development projects about leadership and leadership development, both within HBS and through collaborations with other organizations.
LeadershipRecent Publications
Funderbeam: Teaming Up or Going Alone?
- March 2024 |
- Case |
- Faculty Research
Continuity & Change at Boston Consulting Group
- February 2024 |
- Case |
- Faculty Research
Archetypes of Product Launch by Insiders, Outsiders, and Visionaries
- February 2024 |
- Article |
- Industrial and Corporate Change
Leaders Must React: A Framework for Responding to Unforeseen Events
- January–February 2024 |
- Article |
- Harvard Business Review
On average, addressing unexpected issues—which range from fluctuations in stock price, to just-discovered product flaws, to major accidents and crises—consumes 36% of a CEO’s time. That’s a big proportion, and not all those problems merit a leader’s attention. To help CEOs understand which ones they truly need to focus on, Nohria, the former dean of Harvard Business School, has created a framework that sorts events into four categories—normal noise, clarion calls, whisper warnings, and siren songs—and offers guidance on how leaders should handle each type.
Runa
- January 2024 |
- Case |
- Faculty Research
Vibrant Health
- January 2024 |
- Case |
- Faculty Research
Uncle Nearest: Creating a Legacy
- January 2024 (Revised January 2024) |
- Case |
- Faculty Research
Deion Sanders: The Prime Effect
- January 2024 |
- Case |
- Faculty Research
Christiana Figueres and the Paris Climate Negotiations (A)
- 2024 |
- Case |
- Faculty Research
As UNFCCC Executive Secretary, Christiana Figueres was tasked with a seemingly insurmountable challenge of putting together an impactful, global climate agreement. Coming out of the dramatic failure of the Copenhagen summit five years before, many believed that such an agreement was not possible. However, with persistent optimism and careful, targeted interventions, in 2015 the Paris Agreement was adopted by the 196 participating nations and set forth a new global consensus framework for international climate action that was anything but a “least common denominator” agreement.
Figueres had to personally undergo a transformation to let go of her identity as a Costa Rican diplomat so she could approach the negotiations from a global perspective and meet each participating nation from their perspective. The negotiation process itself was not just the two-week conference in Paris but instead was a years-long series of actions “away from the table" taken by Figueres and others years before the Paris talks to enhance the probability of a successful outcome at the negotiating table. By bringing different coalitions of countries and non-state actors together to lead the way, a more expansive agreement became possible. Here are the stop-action “negotiation challenges" for classroom discussion:
Negotiation Challenge #1: Given the controversy surrounding the “consensus” decision-making process in Cancun and prior Conferences of the Parties (“COPS”), how should Figueres handle this issue in Paris?
Negotiation Challenge #2: How could Figueres create a “fourth concentric circle of mobilization” that would involve stakeholders who were historically considered outsiders into the process, including non-state actors, so that they could influence the trajectory of the negotiations?
Negotiation Challenge #3: How could Christiana Figueres get the Saudis, who had been staunch opponents of a climate deal, to change their minds and support a meaningful agreement in Paris?
Negotiation Challenge #4: How should Figueres handle the traditional timing of the visits of heads of state to the Paris COP?
Christiana Figueres and the Paris Climate Negotiations (B)
- 2024 |
- Case |
- Faculty Research
As UNFCCC Executive Secretary, Christiana Figueres was tasked with a seemingly insurmountable challenge of putting together an impactful, global climate agreement. Coming out of the dramatic failure of the Copenhagen summit five years before, many believed that such an agreement was not possible. However, with persistent optimism and careful, targeted interventions, in 2015 the Paris Agreement was adopted by the 196 participating nations and set forth a new global consensus framework for international climate action that was anything but a “least common denominator” agreement.
Figueres had to personally undergo a transformation to let go of her identity as a Costa Rican diplomat so she could approach the negotiations from a global perspective and meet each participating nation from their perspective. The negotiation process itself was not just the two-week conference in Paris but instead was a years-long series of actions “away from the table" taken by Figueres and others years before the Paris talks to enhance the probability of a successful outcome at the negotiating table. By bringing different coalitions of countries and non-state actors together to lead the way, a more expansive agreement became possible. Here are the stop-action “negotiation challenges" for classroom discussion:
Negotiation Challenge #1: Given the controversy surrounding the “consensus” decision-making process in Cancun and prior Conferences of the Parties (“COPS”), how should Figueres handle this issue in Paris?
Negotiation Challenge #2: How could Figueres create a “fourth concentric circle of mobilization” that would involve stakeholders who were historically considered outsiders into the process, including non-state actors, so that they could influence the trajectory of the negotiations?
Negotiation Challenge #3: How could Christiana Figueres get the Saudis, who had been staunch opponents of a climate deal, to change their minds and support a meaningful agreement in Paris?
Negotiation Challenge #4: How should Figueres handle the traditional timing of the visits of heads of state to the Paris COP?