Leadership

Registration

Aldrich Hall

Transportation to HBS for participants staying at The Inn at Harvard
Continental breakfast available at HBS

The State of Leadership

Aldrich 111

Discussion Leaders: Joel M. Podolny, Dean, Yale School of Management & David Gergen, Director, Center for Public Leadership, Kennedy School of Government

Moderator: Rakesh Khurana, HBS

Colloquium co-chairs Nitin Nohria and Rakesh Khurana will deliver welcoming remarks and briefly set the stage for discussions to follow. Joel Podolny and David Gergen will then address the purpose of our conference: taking stock of the current state of leadership in theory and practice.
No advance reading is required for this session.

What We Know About Leadership: Perspectives from the Disciplines

Williams Room - Spangler Hall & Aldrich 111

In this three-part session we will discuss what various academic disciplines contribute to our understanding of leadership and whether the sum of those perspectives is complementary and additive or conflicting and confusing. Each participant is expected to read in advance the paper on his/her assigned topic and summaries of the other Perspective papers.

Perspective Papers:

Psychology
Jennifer Chatman, UC-Berkeley
Organizational Behavior
Mary Ann Glynn & Rich DeJordy, Boston College Carroll School of Management
Political Science
Joseph Nye, Kennedy School of Government
Clinical
Manfred Kets de Vries & Elisabet Angellau, INSEAD
Economics
Laura Veldkamp, NYU, Patrick Bolton, Columbia & Markus Brunnermeier, Princeton
Sociology
Mauro Guillen, Wharton School - University of Pennsylvania
History
Walter Friedman, HBS

Part I:
11:40am - 12:40
Small Group Discussion

In small groups, participants will discuss their assigned Perspective topic. Commentator/facilitators will guide each group's discussion culminating in the identification of key insights to be shared in the later plenary discussion.

Part II:
12:40 - 1:20 pm
Lunch Discussion

Over lunch, groups will incorporate their Part I discussions with key themes gleaned from the summaries of the other Perspectives to consider commonalities and differences across the perspectives, leading in to the subsequent plenary discussion

Part III:
1:40 - 3:00 pm
Plenary Discussion

Commentator: Rod Kramer, Stanford GSB; Moderator: Nitin Nohria, HBS We will reconvene in the classroom to take a collective look across the disciplinary perspectives, incorporating the key insights generated from the small group and lunch discussions.

Leadership in the 21^st Century: What Lies Ahead

Workshop includes dinner
Williams Room - Spangler

Workshop Designers and Facilitators: Linda Hill, HBS & Maurizio Travaglini, Architects of Group Genius

How will leadership evolve as we move through the 21st Century and what are the forces that will shape it? What sort of leadership processes will unfold in contexts extremely different from those of the past-and of today? What sort of leaders will we need? What new problems will they be asked to solve? What role will academics, educators, researchers, and practitioners play in defining new concepts of leadership and developing new leaders? Will business schools as institutions continue to be relevant? What will we all need to learn?

For this workshop we will create a stimulating environment to enrich discussion of these difficult and intriguing questions. We will observe "weak-signals", consider social trends, and take into consideration some "disruptive scenarios" to spark our imagination and gain some insight into possibilities, including the potential for morphing (y)our own role in developing leadership.

No advance preparation is required for this session.
Transportation to The Inn at Harvard will be provided at the conclusion of the day.

Leadership: What's Core and What's Contingent

Aldrich 111

Implicit in most competency models that companies use to select, develop, and promote leaders is a unitary view of leadership: There is one best way to lead. Yet, most companies also feel the need to increase the diversity of leadership in their organizations, which they assume will lead to superior performance. This session will explore what's core and what's contingent about leadership: what's similar and what's different in leadership across the globe, across gender, and across different tasks.

We will explore these themes through a case discussion about a company wrestling with how to increase diversity in its senior leadership ranks. The discussion will incorporate perspectives from three related papers.

Case: Nitin Nohria, HBS
Papers: Global/Cultural - Mansour Javidan et al, Thunderbird Business School; Gender - Robin Ely, HBS, & Deborah Rhode, Stanford Law School; Task Contingencies - Jay Lorsch, HBS
Moderator: David Thomas, HBS

All participants will be asked to read the case study in advance as well as short summaries of the three papers.

The Practice of Leadership

Williams Room - Spangler

Papers: Teams - Ruth Wageman amp; Richard Hackman, Harvard; The CEO's Job - Michael Porter & Nitin Nohria, HBS; Integrity - Michael Jensen, HBS; Defining Decisions - Michael Useem, Wharton; Global Leadership - Rosabeth Moss Kanter, HBS; Social Movements - Marshall Ganz, Kennedy School of Gov't.

Part I
10:20am - 11:20am
Small Group Discussions

Members of pre-assigned breakout groups will focus on a particular facet of leadership in practice. Discussion in each group will be preceded by a short talk by the author on that topic and facilitated by commentators.
Participants are encouraged to read in advance the paper on the topic to which they are assigned.

Part II
11:40am - 12:40 pm
Moderated plenary discussion with Bill George, HBS

Bill will solicit the views of practitioners attending the colloquium on the leadership challenges they wrestle with, and the full group will be asked to discuss the key issues involved.

Part III
12:40-1:40
Lunch discussion

Informal conversation on the takeaways from the morning sessions will continue over lunch.

Developing Leaders

Aldrich 111

In addition to exploring the practice of leadership, many academics and most practitioners are ultimately interested in how to lead more effectively, how to increase the leadership capacity within organizations-in essence, how to develop leaders. This raises many fundamental questions: What are our basic assumptions about leadership development? Are leaders born or made? When we talk about leadership development, what is it exactly that's changing? Is developing leaders more about honing their strengths or reducing their weaknesses? What are the most effective methods of leadership development? What can we learn from the wide range of approaches currently available on the market? How should we think about assessing the impact and value of leader development interventions?

A moderated panel discussion will open this plenary session in which a range of intellectual and practical perspectives on developing leaders will be debated.

Panelists: Bruce Avolio, Global Leadership Institute; Robert Kegan, Harvard GSE; Morgan McCall, USC; Lily Kelly-Radford, Center for Creative Leadership; Judith Rosenblum, Duke
Session Chairs: Scott Snook, HBS; Herminia Ibarra, INSEAD
Moderator: Jay Conger, Claremont McKenna College

Papers related to this session will be posted, however no advance reading is required

Leadership: Advancing a Discipline

Aldrich 111

Moderator: Richard Hackman, Harvard

What are our conclusions after two-days of intense discussion? How can we best advance this discipline? Where should we build on the past, and where do we need to have the courage to depart significantly? What are the implications for future research? What is our commitment for future action and collective next steps?