Executive Education Program Connects Business Leadership to Corporate Citizenship

In May, members of the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce (GBCC) gathered on campus for a first-ever custom executive education program called Business Leaders as Social Value Creators. Enriching high-potential young professionals and engaging them in the business and civic life of Greater Boston is a GBCC strategic priority. The program emerged from discussions between GBCC president and CEO Paul Guzzi and HBS Dean Kim B. Clark, who share an interest in developing the city's future business leaders.

The program encompassed topics such as managing organizational change, acting ethically, serving as nonprofit board trustees, and creating strategic alliances between corporations and nonprofits.

Enter James E. Austin, the Eliot I. Snider and Family Professor of Business Administration at HBS, who developed a model for the program with a social enterprise focus, ideal for GBCC's goal of connecting business leadership to corporate citizenship. "To pursue this opportunity with the GBCC, we integrated for the first time different subcomponents of our teaching and research," said Austin. "The aim was to address different ways leaders act in a socially responsible way and contribute to their communities." The program encompassed topics such as managing organizational change, acting ethically, serving as nonprofit board trustees, and creating strategic alliances between corporations and nonprofits. "This combination proved quite effective in enabling the participants to explore the challenges and opportunities they will face as creators of social value," Austin noted. "In turn, the Social Enterprise faculty learned how to combine our collective knowledge and teaching materials in a novel way." The agenda included case discussions and presentations led by HBS professors F. Warren McFarlan, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, and Austin, as well as then-HBS senior lecturer Diana Barrett.

Guzzi felt the program succeeded on many levels. "It offered the group a unique opportunity to learn relevant skills from some of the world's most prominent professors, discuss socially conscious initiatives that are critical to leadership success in a global economy, and interact closely with peers who are on similar career tracks," Guzzi said. "They left with new knowledge, introspection into their own decision-making processes, and a new perspective on the combination of business excellence and social responsibility."

Participants agreed that the program was challenging and engaging. "I was able to interact with other members and learn from the experiences of the group as well as the HBS faculty," said Kate Wilson, director of corporate relations at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts. "I found the program to be closely tied to my professional work as well as to my personal endeavors within the community."