Who should take the course?

This course should be of interest to most, if not all, students. Some of you will find yourselves serving as a CEO or other senior officer working for a board of directors. Others of you will be entrepreneurs needing to build a board for your company as a private entity and later as a public company. Still others of you will be investors or investment professionals needing to assess the governance of the companies you invest in. And of course many of you will serve on one or more boards during your careers, either as an investor, executive, or independent director. The goal of the course is to prepare you to deal with all of these situations, as well as to be an informed shareholder.

What are the course objectives?

The primary purpose of the course is to develop your understanding of corporate governance and the functioning of boards and, importantly, to equip you to work with boards and to serve as a director. In the course, we will examine

• the complex dynamics among boards, executives, and shareholders;
• the changing rights and powers of shareholders;
• the work that boards do and the critical decisions they make;
• the legal, financial, managerial, and behavioral issues that directors must contend with in order to be effective;
• the classic dilemmas that boards confront;
• the costs and rewards of board service and the challenges faced by individual directors.

The course considers these issues in the context mainly of listed companies, though we will also examine the governance of private companies such as private-equity, venture-backed, and family-controlled firms. Roughly two-thirds of the sessions concern companies based in the US; the other third are about companies based in other parts of the world, including Europe, the UK, the Middle East, Asia, South Africa, and Latin America.

Throughout the course, we will explore differing conceptions of “good governance” and what they mean in practical terms for boards, executives and companies. We will consider, for instance, the implications of departures from the long-standing norm of “one-share, one-vote” as seen in IPOs such as, most recently, the Snap, Inc., offering. We will also examine contemporary debates about shareholder activism, board diversity, board leadership, executive compensation, environmental and social factors in governance, hostile takeovers, and the market for corporate control. The course will give students an inside look into the dynamics of the boardroom, a realm that is generally opaque and often misunderstood by outside observes.

What is the course content and structure?

The course has five main modules and a short concluding module. The modules are organized around the following topics: the purpose of governance, including the role of shareholders; building an effective board; the board-CEO relationship; boardroom dilemmas in M&A; the board’s oversight role; and the challenges of succeeding as a director.

The class sessions will involve case discussions, role-playing exercises, and other activities. We expect to have guests in a number of sessions.

What are the course requirements?

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Course Content and Organization

PURPOSE:

Far more value has been created in the last two decades by new companies, like Amazon, Facebook and Alphabet, than by entrenched incumbents, such as P&G or Ford, which struggle to eke out a tiny market share gain. However, many incredibly valuable new ventures, like Tesla and Netflix, are also among the most shorted stocks as investors struggle to see their long term potential. To understand why and how this might occur, the overarching framework applied throughout this course covers “The Complete Strategy Landscape”[1]. This illustrates that companies must not just be concerned with the value captured by the one-time formulation of a beautifully aligned strategy, which was the focus of the RC Strategy course, but by the value potential of their business model, and with its value realization through effective implementation over time.

In this regard, the course is vital to everyone who wants to move beyond classic strategy as “competitive positioning” to understand how to create enormous entrepreneurial value by developing new business models, and to master, as consultants and managers, the actual practice of strategy by continually adapting a firm’s activities to the evolving external opportunity set.

Within this landscape, the Corporate Strategy course addresses three questions. The first, and most fundamental is, “How do companies create shareholder value across multiple markets?” The second, whose identification won Ronald Coase the Nobel Prize in Economics[2] and which, unless we believe that one company will take over the world, is the logical corollary of the first, asks, “What is the limit to the scope of the firm?” The third question addresses the administrative issue of “How can we effectively manage a multi-business corporation?” All companies, whether large diversified multinationals or small entrepreneurial startups wrestle with these issues, and their appropriate resolution has enormous impact on performance.

1) BUSINESS MODELS and THE COMPLETE STRATEGY LANDSCAPE

While introducing the Complete Strategy Landscape framework, which places the RC Strategy course emphasis on strategy as “positioning” in a broader context, the module focuses on understanding how novel business models – the combination of “job to be done”, assets required to deliver that service, and monetization method – create value. We will examine WhatsApp, Walmart in its competition with Amazon, the FBI, Tesla, Komatsu’s introduction of “SmartConstruction” and Netflix, among others to understand how to evaluate the potential in new ways of doing business.

2) RESOURCES and THE CONTINUUM OF CORPORATE STRATEGIES:

Building on the RC module on Corporate Strategy, the course identifies valuable resources (popularly, but incorrectly, termed core competences) that can function as the "Mickey Mouse" that adds value to the corporate portfolio. By studying different strategies at firms like Danaher and Clorox, it introduces a continuum, ranging from conglomerates and private equity firms to tightly related corporate entities and startups, and demonstrates that the same "better off" and "ownership" tests apply to every effective corporate strategy. This logic can be captured in a company's statement of its objective, scope and corporate advantage.

3) BUSINESSES and PORTFOLIO TRANSFORMATION:

Defining the boundaries of the firm - the limit to its scope - is critical to crafting the corporate portfolio. At the extreme this determines which businesses to enter and exit, and the extent of vertical integration and geographic expansion of the firm. More generally this requires developing a portfolio that is robust to changes in the external environment, and has to address the choice between internal development of new businesses and corporate M&A. This module delves into scope choices in a wide variety of settings, from large and global organizations to start-ups.

4) ORGANISATION and THE ROLE OF CORPORATE HEADQUARTERS:

To justify ownership of any business a corporation must have the appropriate structures, systems, and policies to actually realize value. This module examines these design choices, focusing on the role of corporate headquarters in shaping and controlling business unit strategy and performance, building centres of competence, and sharing activities. It covers specific tools used by corporate including delegation of authority, approaches to resource allocation and corporate initiatives. The module concludes with cases on corporate transformation, highlighting the challenge of realigning resources, organizational structure and scope to face a constantly evolving competitive landscape.

The perspective adopted throughout the course is that of the CEO of the corporation and the pragmatic challenges top managers face in managing a multi-business entity. Thus the course should appeal to anyone interested in managing, financing, advising, or investing in a company that operates in multiple, businesses, geographies, or activities.

To adapt to the new class experience, the course will include some pedagogical differences and innovations. First, we intend to have more case protagonists attending class than usual. Those who attended the course in the Spring included Josh Targoff (Third Point), Larry Culp (GE, ex Danaher), Penny Pennington (Edward Jones), Horst Kayser (Siemens), David Roux (Silver Lake), Martin Reeves (BCG), Dunigan O’Keeffe (Bain & Co.), Robert Uhlaner (McKinsey), David Schlendorf (FBI), Dan Simpson (ex Clorox), Kevin Mayer (ex Disney and TikTok), Nils Andersen (Unilever, ex Maersk), Kevin Sharer (ex Amgen) and Irene Rosenfeld (ex Mondelez) [3]. Second, we will include among the regular case classes, current examples of the topic or concept under discussion. Third, there will be video lectures to go with formal notes that function as module summaries you can study on your own time. Finally, as a tradeoff with somewhat fewer class sessions, there will be assignments asking you to apply the course frameworks as help in preparing your final paper.

[1] See D. Collis, “Wither Strategy?” Harvard Business Review forthcoming 2021.

[2] R. Coase “The Nature of the Firm,“ Economica: 1937 for which he received the Nobel Prize in 1991 and which demonstrates why a single firm does not control all economic activity.

[3] Please note that, particularly in these times, invited guests might be unable to attend class.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Educational Objectives

Crafting Your Life: The Tactics and Practices of the First 10 Years Post MBA (LIFE) is an EC course which was created by EC students, for EC students. The course has further been developed in collaboration with HBS alumni, who routinely say that LIFE is the course that they most wish they had available to them when they were at HBS. In our “always-on” culture, in which personal and professional fulfillment grow ever-more elusive, students increasingly want to know how they can approach their busy lives with more intention. This course explores that question, while also building on the conversations sparked by cases in the RC LEAD curriculum, such as those around “Alumni Profiles.”

Fundamentally, LIFE is a tactical course about you. It is about preparing and equipping you to better handle the choices, tradeoffs, and surprises that you will inevitably face in the years after graduating from HBS. Throughout the course, you will define what a life well-lived means to you, and discover and implement tactics and practices to enable you to live consistently with what matters most to you. In addition, you will consider how to adapt along the way when life inevitably does not go according to plan.

The course strives to help you think deeply and intentionally about the following questions very practically and tactically:

1. What does a life well-lived mean to me?

• What are my values? Who am I at my best?
• How has my past shaped me? What assumptions do I have about my life – which do I want to keep and which do I want to revise?
• What does it mean to me to have a satisfying life? What role does joy, meaningfulness, and achievement play? How will I prioritize and cultivate each of these in my post-HBS life?

2. How can I use my agency for what I can control in life to live consistently with what matters most to me?

• How do I approach decisions and tradeoffs across different areas of my life? How do I think about my choice of geography, career, and partner?
• How do I use my time on a daily and weekly basis? How would I ideally use my time and how do I make those changes?
• How do I think about and manage money?
• How do I manage competing demands for my time, energy, and attention across the different aspects of my life?
• How do I create and change habits that enable me to continue making progress towards the life that I want?

3. How do I stay true to myself in the face of all that I cannot predict or control in life?

• How do I take care of myself, and especially take care of my mental health? How do I build my capacity for resilience?
• How do I develop relationships that will sustain me – both at work and in life?
• How do I create structures for navigating life with all of its twists and turns with a life partner?

This course is not about creating a rigid 10-year plan. There is no “right” answer for crafting your life – what works for you might not work for others and what works today might not work tomorrow. You will continue to craft your life as your lived experiences (both those within and outside of your control) shape you over time.

With this in mind, LIFE is not your typical HBS class. When you sign up for LIFE, you are signing up for:

• A Laboratory. We think of life as a laboratory, and crafting your life as an ongoing discovery process of experimenting, learning, and adapting over time. Similarly, this course is not and never will be a finished product. We are constantly innovating on new and different approaches to learning, including exercises, workshops, and technology products. We will continue to innovate and expect you to play an active role in helping to shape LIFE for future generations. By getting comfortable trying new and different ways of learning, you practice a “test and learn” mindset and develop skills that you can apply to your own life laboratory.

• Intergenerational Learning. LIFE is a platform to unlock the full potential of HBS’s tremendously broad and diverse alumni network. This course relies heavily on leveraging HBS alumni to learn from their real-world experiences in the years following their HBS graduation. In addition to alumni case studies and vignettes, you can expect to engage with alumni every week in a variety of different ways, including: LIFE chats or informal conversations, panel discussions, one-on-one interviews, and unique events (e.g., a case discussion using HBS Live Online, an alumni reception).

• A Community. LIFE is a chance to learn about yourself by learning with others. When you join LIFE, you are joining a broader community of students and alumni invested in learning with and supporting one another. As part of the LIFE community, you will join a LIFE team, a LIFE section, a LIFE cohort, LIFERs (HBS alumni who completed the course), and a broader set of alumni who are passionate about sharing their life experiences and perspectives with you.

• A Lifelong Journey. When you graduate from the course, you become a LIFER. As a LIFER, you will have opportunities to continue learning with other LIFERs as you grow over time. In a world that is constantly changing, the LIFER community is a place to which you can turn to reflect on how things are going and to both give and receive support.

Course Structure and Requirements

We have fundamentally re-designed the course structure for this coming fall semester. As a result, this represents another exciting opportunity to experiment and innovate together.

Time

This year, we expect to have two class sections. Each section will be expected to attend two class sessions, both held on Tuesdays. The first session will be 80 minutes and take place during the day (either in the morning or afternoon) with their section. The second session will be 90 minutes and take place in the late afternoon with the full cohort of students (i.e., both sections will come together as one for a single afternoon session).

The 80-minute section class is generally designed to enable deep self-reflection and sharing with a smaller group of students through classroom discussions, small group conversations with your LIFE team, and pair-and-shares with section mates.

The 90-minute cohort class is designed to enable both LIFE sections access to opportunities to engage in intergenerational learning with alumni, and experiential workshops featuring experts or guests.

Outside of Class Commitments

In addition to these regularly scheduled classes, we have two outside-of-class commitments in lieu of two of our regular cohort sessions. You are required to attend these two evening sessions:

• Partner Workshop. On Tuesday, November 9 from 6:00 – 9:00pm, we will hold a three-hour evening Workshop on navigating life with a partner. To better accommodate the schedules of partners, friends, or family members you may choose to invite, this session is in the evening and replaces the 4:30-6 class that afternoon.
• Alumni Reception. On Thursday, November 18 from 5:30 – 8:00pm, we will hold an evening Alumni Reception featuring small group conversations between students and alumni to better accommodate the schedules of alumni participants. This session replaces class on November 23.

Final Paper

You will complete a final paper to integrate all of the different lessons which you will learn through the course of the semester. LIFERs have shared that one of the most valuable aspects of the course is the opportunity to learn from the experiences of their classmates and HBS alumni to gain perspective and to reflect meaningfully about themselves. The paper is an opportunity to synthesize these insights to shape your near-term actions, and to serve as a guide or compass moving forward.

Design Partners

Most importantly, if you sign up for LIFE, you are not just electing to take a course — you are also choosing to pick up the baton from those students who came before you, and to continue the course development process with all the attendant joys of leaving a legacy that will be part of HBS students’ experience for years to come. Note that this also requires the full awareness that LIFE is in the process of being designed. Some things will work well from the beginning, while others will need to be reworked. Your ongoing feedback and help will be part of the experience and part of the learning that you (and we) take away from the course.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Career Focus:

This course is designed for students who plan to create, unlock, or invest in value created through brands in the consumer and retail space. It is appropriate for:

• Marketing professionals charged with creating, nurturing, and managing brand value;
• Entrepreneurs looking to create their own brands in the consumer/retail space;
• Consumer/retail general managers and consultants engaged in stewarding brand strategy; and
• Venture capital or private equity investors seeking to identify brand asset potential and better understand how to value brand equity.

Educational Objectives:

In the consumer/retail space, brands are often companies’ most valuable assets and sources of their sustainable competitive advantage. But, managing brands to achieve their full value potential has never been more difficult. Consumers are increasingly diverse, skeptical of marketing, and empowered by digital technologies that easily connect them to others who share their tastes. They co-create the meaning of the brands that shape their lives and play a participatory role in brand management that can make them allies or adversaries. The contemporary brandscape is crowded with new competitors vying to stake claims to rich, meaning-laden value propositions that reflect and leverage the zeitgeist. Iconic brands are toppled everyday by young upstarts telling new types of stories in authentic ways. Firms are aggressively buying consumers’ brand loyalty at the same time they are firing their customers. Customer relationship management (CRM) investments have failed to deliver on their promise and are often hurting rather than helping the development of strong consumer-brand relationships. Brand managers are losing control as consumers hijack brand meaning and engage in open-source branding. And, the next brand crisis is just around the corner in a 24/7 news cycle driven by social media.

This course takes a contemporary view of branding as a collective and collaborative meaning-making process among firms, consumers, and other cultural producers, and of brands as meaning-based, relational assets that must be carefully designed, curated, and negotiated to unlock their considerable value. As branding becomes more participatory, experiential, and experimental, the role of the brand manager requires cultural and relational prowess. Today’s managers must be able to author resonant stories that spark conversations that capture attention, generate engagement, and provide culturally-relevant meaning to consumers. Learnings will focus on how brands and the stories that define them can be crafted, communicated, and managed in ways that nurture relationships that create value for both consumers and firms.

Course Content and Organization:

The course is organized into six modules:

Module 1: The Value of Brands

• What, exactly, is a brand? What “jobs” do brands do for consumers?
• How do brands create value for consumers and for firms? How can brand be used as a competitive advantage?
• What is competitive brand positioning and how can firms big and small use it to their advantage?
• What is consumer-based brand equity and how is it built and maintained? How may it be measured?
• How can brand managers use consumer research to inform their brand strategy?
• How relevant are brands in today’s marketplace and what are the forces that are making brands more or less relevant to consumers?

Module 2: Brand Storytelling

• How is brand meaning created and who are the multiple authors that narrate it? How can brand managers best manage brand meaning co-creation alongside consumers?
• What makes a good brand story? How can managers use cultural branding techniques to craft culturally resonant brand narratives?
• In today’s competitive marketplace, how can managers best position brands to create maximum value? Which types of value propositions hold the most promise?
• Can brands be repositioned? What opportunities and challenge do managers encounter when trying to change the meaning of a brand?
• How effective is social mission branding? Under which conditions will consumers value a brand with a social mission?
• Should brands be political? Under which conditions does brand activism lead to a stronger and/or a weaker brand?

Module 3: Brand Management

• How should brands be best managed over time for continued growth?
• How flexible are brands and how can this flexibility be leveraged for growth? What are the opportunities and challenges associated with geographic, target market, product line, and brand extensions?
• How can brand portfolio strategy and brand architecture increase the value of a firm’s brands?
• What's the best way for brands to go global? How are global brands best managed?
• Under which conditions should a firm pursue a global branding strategy versus a portfolio of local brands?

Module 4: Negotiating Consumer-Brand Relationships

• What roles do brands play as relational partners? How do different relational roles contribute to differential costs and benefits to firms?
• How does a consumer-brand relationship form and evolve over time? Why do some relationships decline and dissolve while others intensify and endure?
• What is brand loyalty and how does it manifest itself? How is it best nurtured and negotiated?
• What is customer relationship management (CRM) and how do brands and their consumers enact their relationships? How is artificial intelligence changing these relationships?
• Who is responsible for an unprofitable relationship? Should firms “fire” their customers? Under which conditions?

Module 5: Engaging Influencers and Brand Communities

• Why do consumers join brand communities? What types of value do they provide?
• How can brand communities be crowdsourced to help build brands?
• How are brand communities valuable to and dangerous for brands? How are they best managed?
• What is the role of influencer marketing in building brands? What works and what doesn't? Are paid influencers as valuable as volunteers?
• What happens when consumers hijack brand meaning? How can brand managers work with online and offline influencers and brand communities to create rather than destroy value?
• Under which conditions is brand equity diminished or destroyed? What can managers do to prevent and/or mitigate this? How should managers handle brand crises?

Module 6: Brand Valuation

• How do brands create shareholder value? How can a strong brand increase returns, reduce variability in cash flows, and insulate a company from market downturns? How can brands be used to manage a firm’s risk exposure?
• What are best practices for brand valuation? How does one value a brand asset?
• Why should CEOs, corporate boards, and investors invest in brands? What is the return-on-investment (ROI) of branding?
• Why are so many big brands in trouble in today's marketplace? What can be done to shore them up?

Grading:

Grades will be earned through the following activities:

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Career Focus

This course provides students with skills and knowledge that will prepare them for a variety of careers, ranging from general management to specialized careers in financial consulting, banking, turnaround management, and all types of investing including special situations ("distressed") investing.

Educational Objectives

Corporate restructuring is a common and significant event affecting not only lenders, shareholders, and employees but also the web of relationships between companies and their corporate customers, suppliers, and competitors. Restructuring is the process by which companies renegotiate the financial contracts and commitments they have entered into with their creditors and other stakeholders, usually in response to some financial challenge or crisis. This process of renegotiation and re-contracting - the “re-slicing of the corporate pie” - is the central focus of the course.

An additional objective in dissecting the complex finances and operating challenges that confront companies in financial distress is to deepen student understanding of corporate debt financing, including the rights of secured creditors, subordination agreements, and debt covenants. By understanding how to fix a “sick” capital structure, students will better understand how to optimally finance a business, and more effectively manage financial risk, when times are good.

Lastly, there are important lessons to be learned through studying companies and industries that have struggled. Though understanding a variety of reasons why “things go wrong”, students will be better able to identify the patterns of behavior that often lead to trouble.

Content and Organization

The course is organized around two modules. The first module focuses on the restructuring of debt �" and provides a foundation to understand the fundamentals of corporate restructuring and then applies these tools to explore the many offensive and defensive strategies employed by debtors, creditors, and other constituents. The second module focuses on the restructuring of other sections of the balance sheet such as employees’ claims and equity.

The cases that students study in this course tend to focus on large companies, with complex capital structures, facing extremely challenging business situations (including threats to their survival). Restructurings are often extremely complicated, and involve multiple issues around valuation, bond indentures, subordination agreements, bankruptcy law, employment law, taxes, litigation, regulation, etc. In analyzing the cases in the course, emphasis will be placed on drilling down into the details and "fine print" of these and other issues.

Topics covered in this finance course include Chapter 11 bankruptcy, out-of-court workouts, distressed exchange offers, "Section 363" asset sales, prepackaged bankruptcy, debtor-in-possession (DIP) financing, equity spin-offs, tracking stocks, ESOPs, restructuring of retiree health care/pension plans, and corporate layoff/downsizing programs. While the course focuses on U.S. corporates, it also applies the core principles of U.S. restructuring to corporate restructurings in other countries as well as infrastructure, municipal, and sovereign restructuring.

Although CVCR is primarily a finance course, students will also often have to take an interdisciplinary approach to problem solving, drawing on their training in strategy, accounting, law, and negotiation. The primary pedagogical approach is case discussion. Cases will be supplemented with mini-lectures and outside readings. We will also be joined by a number of visitors who were involved in the cases. One class is a negotiation exercise that simulates a real-world Chapter 11 bankruptcy (overseen by distinguished local bankruptcy attorneys).

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Educational Objectives

This seminar will bring together students in Year 3 of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government / Harvard Business School joint degree program. Meetings will be held on ten Mondays in fall term, from 4:30-7:30 PM

This 3.0-credit course is open only to students in the HBS/HKS Joint Degree Program, and is a required course for all joint degree students in the fall semester of their third year. Its purpose is to integrate on the one hand, the perspectives and analytic tools provided by the HKS core curricula in the MPP or MPA/ID programs, and, on the other, the perspectives and analytic tools provided by the required HBS curriculum in the MBA program.

The course features a series of integrative modules on specific topics. In each of the modules, pairs of faculty members, one from HBS and one from HKS, teach as a team, bringing their distinctive perspectives and analytical approaches to bear on a specific subject area. These subject areas may be defined by: policy realms (for example, finance, tax, health, education, environment, or national defense); methods (for example, decision making under uncertainty, project evaluation, performance measurement, or negotiation); or other topics (for example, international trade, technological innovation, economic development, infrastructure, insurance, management styles and processes, or risk management).

It is intended that students will emerge from this course with an understanding of questions such as: how a regulation is developed and promulgated, and how business can seek to influence the outcome; how legislative battles are fought and how business organizes to shape provisions in legislation; and how business and government can work together to shape an international environment that is conducive to economic growth. The aim of the course is to cultivate in students the capacity to view problems comprehensively from multiple perspectives: how various business interests view an issue, and how government officials in a variety of agencies and institutions view the same problem.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Educational objectives

This course aims to give students a mastery of all aspects of competitive advantage to make them more effective at diagnosing and developing great strategy. The course will examine the role and structure of competitive advantage, how it interacts with and influences competition, the different sources of competitive advantage and their properties, the creation of competitive advantage, and the different drivers that determine whether competitive advantage is sustainable or not. In the process, the course will also pay particular attention to the role of organization and leadership in the creation of competitive advantage and how that affects the general manager's role in formulating and executing strategy.

Course Content

The course will start by exploring the structure of competitive advantage and how the key drivers of advantage combine to determine a company's ability to deliver attractive returns over the long term. We will address questions such as: What levers can a manager use to improve competitive advantage? How do you measure competitive advantage? How do competitive advantage and competition interact? When does being a first mover give you a competitive advantage or disadvantage? Why exactly does it matter to ‘be different’ and what does that imply? How sustainable is competitive advantage that is rooted in economies of scale or in the learning curve? While the focus will be mostly on value creation, we will not overlook the strategic aspects of value capture – esp. pricing and bargaining.

As the course progresses, attention will shift from the structure of advantage to the process of creating and sustaining advantage. Here, we will also consider how effective competitive advantage may depend critically on organization and leadership. We will ask questions such as: When is it advantageous for a company to give up flexibility and commit to a strategy? When and how can a company credibly commit to a competitive position and to a strategy? When should you change your strategy? What limits a manager's degrees of freedom when developing strategy? Should a new leader come up with a new strategy? What is the role of personal convictions versus analysis in developing a strategy? How do all these considerations affect a company's choice of competitive advantage?

Course Format

The class sessions will be (essentially) 2 hours, except for the first and last class, which will be regular length (80 min). The number of sessions will be reduced proportionally to reflect the longer class size.

Grading will be based on class participation and a short project (in small groups) that analyzes the competitive advantage and position of a company of your choice.

Due to important overlap, you should not take both this course and Ben Esty’s (Spring) Strategies for Value Creation (SVC) course.

Career Focus

The frameworks and concepts of the course are valuable for students who expect to be actively involved in developing, advising on, or assessing a company's strategy, and should be of interest to leaders of both established firms and new ventures.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Creating the Modern Financial System offers a vital perspective on finance and the financial system by exploring the historical development of key financial instruments and institutions worldwide. The premise of the course is that students will gain a richer and more intuitive understanding of modern financial markets and organizations by examining where these institutions came from and how they evolved. The course is ideal for students who want to deepen their understanding of real-world finance.

Course Organization and Objectives

The course content covers seminal financial developments in a diverse set of countries - but with a special focus on the United States - from the 18th century to the present. Reaching across the chronological arc of the course are three broad topics: (1) financial markets and instruments, (2) financial intermediaries, and (3) financial behavior. Although nearly every case touches on all three topics, each case also has a primary focus. Whereas some cases highlight the introduction of new financial markets (such as the Dojima futures market in early modern Japan) or the creation of new instruments (such as mortgage-backed securities), others trace the emergence and maturation of critical financial institutions (including banks and insurance companies). Still others focus on the behavior of financial actors and groups, particularly in the context of financial bubbles and crashes. Because the course highlights the origins of financial markets and instruments as well as the fallout from numerous financial crises, government also looms large as an actor in many of the cases.

Throughout the course, the goal is to provide students with the broadest possible grounding in real-world finance by exposing them to some of the greatest (and, at times, most devastating) moments in modern financial history. Although the past is unlikely to repeat itself exactly, business managers who have a strong background in financial history are likely to be better prepared for the full diversity of financial innovations, shocks, and crises that they'll face in the future.

Course Administration

Course grades will be based on class participation (50%) and a final paper (50%). Throughout the semester, Professor Moss will be available to meet with students by appointment. To arrange a meeting, please contact his assistant, Sarah Horn, by email (shorn@hbs.edu) or phone (5-6286). You should also feel free to contact Professor Moss directly, preferably by email (dmoss@hbs.edu).

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Notes:

• This course is a prerequisite for the DSM2 course offered in Q2 and Q4.
  
• DSM1 and DSM2 together replace the 2020-21 Applied Business Analytics EC course.

Career Focus

As Michael Chui, partner of McKinsey Global Institute, once said: “We believe that big data and data analytics are going to be incredibly important…It is becoming a basis of competition in every industry. Companies that learn how to use data effectively are going to be more likely to win in the marketplace and those that don’t are going to fall behind.”

DSM1 is intended for students who want to build an understanding of how data and analytics can help managers make the best decisions. The course is designed for students with little or no background in data analytics, and is suitable for students who plan to work in any industry/sector—from financial services and manufacturing to technology companies—that uses data for decision-making. DSM1 can be taken as a stand-alone course to learn the basic principles of data-driven decision making, or as a building block to more advanced data science courses such as DSM2.

The course will expose students to a range of managerial decisions, from expanding into new customer segments and forecasting future sales, to predicting consumer behavior and evaluating the efficacy of product changes. Students will use the widely-deployed computing software R to conduct analyses and will be guided with “starter code.” Although few HBS MBA students will be actively engaged in coding post-graduation, the course faculty believe that having some exposure to basic, hands-on coding and techniques will allow our students to more effectively manage and interact with data scientists. DSM1 will not delve deeply into technical details, but will require students to engage with some code

Educational Objectives

The educational objectives of DSM1 are to provide students with the necessary foundations to effectively derive and evaluate data-driven insights to inform managerial decisions. Students will learn how to frame and solve business problems while complementing judgment with data-driven insights and gain valuable hands-on experience with R, with the overarching goal of helping students build a robust data analytics mindset. Developing a data analytics mindset requires combining the fundamentals of statistics and computer science with substantive domain knowledge. The course will focus on business applications, including managers’ roles in hypothesis generation and testing, model design, interpretation of results, and the formulation of actionable recommendations.

Content and Organization

The DSM1 course comprises five modules:

Module 1: Exploratory Data Analysis: This module will teach students a variety of approaches (e.g., descriptive statistics, graphs) to explore and gain insights from a data set. Descriptive statistics about key business metrics are aggregations of data that should form the information backbone of every enterprise. For example, sales, revenue, and customer churn are examples of important business metrics.

Module 2: Statistical Inference: Statistical inference, one of the fundamental pillars of data science, is the practice of using a sample to learn something (i.e., draw inferences) about the full population. Using hypothesis tests, we will determine if differences across different groups in the sample (e.g., the two sets of customers in an A/B test) are due to random fluctuations or systematic differences in the underlying populations. We will also use regressions to determine whether relationships seen in the sample hold more generally in the population.

Module 3: Prediction: Prediction is a process that uses historical data to forecast future events. In this module, we will focus on three fundamental prediction methods: regressions, decision trees, and random forests. Mastering these methods will allow students to develop predictions that apply across various business problems and industries.

Module 4: Causal Inference: Causal Inference studies how actions, interventions, or treatments (e.g., launching a new predictive algorithm) affect business metrics (e.g., engagement, click-through rate, or daily units sold). In this module, students will learn about the design of randomized experiments (e.g., A/B tests), the primary method for establishing causal relationships.

Module 5: Data Science Strategy: We will conclude the course with a discussion of how firms can develop their data science capabilities, including how different types of organization and culture might support or hinder a data-driven company.

Course Pedagogy
The classroom sessions will utilize a problem-solving strategy that gives students a clear outline for solving any data science business problem. Emphasis will be put on communication, rigor in analysis, ethical reporting of results and dealing with messy issues such as missing data, nonresponse of participants and study design. Throughout the course, reproducibility of results will be emphasized.

Grading

The course grade will be based on class participation (including posting one lab notebook), a written assignment, and a final exam.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Notes:

• Successful completion of the RC IDS course offered in Spring 2021 or the EC DSM1 course is required to enroll in DSM2.
• DSM1 and DSM2 together replace the 2020-21 Applied Business Analytics EC course.

Career Focus

DSM2 is designed for students who already have some exposure to basic data science. DSM2 allows students to build a deeper understanding of how data and analytics can complement judgment for managerial decision making. The course builds on concepts learned in DSM1 and is specifically suited for students who want to continue their career at companies such as technology companies, where data collection, aggregation, and analysis permeates the entire organization.

In the course, students will learn to “data wrangle” (collect and clean data that suit their purposes) and expand their machine learning repertoire to include gradient boosting, neural networks, unsupervised algorithms and natural language processing. As in DSM1/IDS, students will be guided through data analysis with “starter code.” In addition to the computing software R, students will gain familiarity with SQL to manage relational databases.

Educational Objectives

DSM2 builds on the foundations developed in DSM1 to provide students with an understanding of how to create, design, and manage data science projects from inception through data collections, analysis, and reporting. Students will be introduced to new tools (such as SQL) and new techniques (such as K-Means clustering, natural language processing, and Monte Carlo simulation). The course will also explore essential notions of data privacy, algorithmic fairness, and agile project management to prepare students to manage and lead data science projects at any organization level.

Content and Organization

The DSM2 course comprises four modules:

Module 1: Data Wrangling: Students will learn SQL (Structured Query Language), commonly used to store, manipulate and retrieve data from a relational data base.

Module 2: Inference: This module’s topics include probability distributions, Monte Carlo simulation, Clustering, K-Means, and variable transformations and interaction terms in linear and logistic regression.

Module 3: Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence: This module will examine several concepts key to machine learning: e.g.,

autocorrelation, time series, Lasso and Ridge regressions, confusion and payoff matrices, ROC curves, neural networks, gradient boosting and algorithmic bias, as well as NLP (Natural Language Processing), including sentiment analysis, naïve Bayes classification, and LDA (Latent Dirichlet allocation)

Module 4: Data Science Strategy & Agile Development: This module will focus on essential strategy questions around data privacy, algorithmic fairness, and agile product development.

The course consists of two types of class sessions: Laboratory sessions in which students practice analyzing assigned problems and class sessions with case discussions. Teaching fellows will be available at each lab session to answer questions and provide both technical and conceptual support. Teaching fellows will also hold office hours and review sessions outside of class.

Course Pedagogy
The classroom sessions will utilize a problem-solving strategy that gives students a clear outline for solving any data science business problem. Emphasis will be put on communication, rigor in analysis, ethical reporting of results and dealing with messy issues such as missing data, nonresponse of participants and study design. Throughout the course, reproducibility of results will be emphasized.

Grading
The course grade will be based on class participation (including posting one lab notebook), a written assignment, and a final team project.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Career Focus

This course provides students with the skills and knowledge essential for a career in managing, developing, or investing in real estate. Real estate is a multidisciplinary industry that requires strong analytical rigor as wells as broad strategic thinking.

Educational Objectives

Students will learn about the interplay of capital structures, building characteristics, stakeholders, and legal parameters. The class goals are to illustrate the process of sourcing, underwriting, and ultimately acquiring real estate investments.

Content and Organization

The course is organized into three modules.

Deal Making Fundamentals – The first module focuses the mechanics of real estate deal making and provides a foundation to understand the fundamentals of deal structuring, property types, negotiation and sourcing techniques.

Stakeholder Motivations – Students will learn to understand the various stakeholders’ economic incentives, legal constraints, moral and ethical motivations and fundamental human behavior. Negotiation games and role play will be an important part of this section.

Success and Failure The last module will reflect an investment committee style organization highlighting key decision-making characteristics that may lead to success or failure.

Pedagogical Mix

Real estate lends itself to case method teaching as virtually every subject requires quantitative and qualitative analysis, judgment calls, quick thinking and development of practical action plans. "Cold calling" and active participation are frequent and important components of class. We expect that students will be prepared as most classes will have the case protagonists or other industry leaders present.

Most homework assignments are required to be completed in groups. Additionally, polls will be used frequently and are considered an important aspect of class participation. The course will have a final group project.

This advanced negotiation course examines complex corporate deals. Many of the class sessions will be structured around actual corporate deals, selected for the complex issues of law and business that they raise. Students will research and analyze these transactions in order to present their most important aspects and lessons to the class.

Topics developed throughout the course include: how negotiators create and claim value through the setup, design, and tactical implementation of agreements; complexities that can arise through agency, asymmetric information, moral hazard, and adverse selection; structural, psychological, and interpersonal barriers that can hinder agreement; and the particular challenges inherent in the roles of advisors as negotiators. The course will also explore the differences between deal-making and dispute resolution; single-issue and multiple-issue negotiations; and between two parties and multiple parties.

The class will be comprised of approximately an equal number of students from HBS and HLS.

Evaluation will be on the basis of class participation and a final paper or project.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Educational Objectives

The course is designed to help students in two ways: by presenting tools and processes for dealing with uncertainty, but more importantly for developing intuition about how to deal with risky situations both in business and everyday life.

Content and Organization

Many of the decisions we face are made complicated by having uncertain consequences: how should I set my inventory when I don’t know what demand will be, should I refinance my mortgage when rates might go lower, how big a bet shall I make in a new business, and so on. Evidently a proper examination of these problems requires thinking through the possible outcomes of any decision, an understanding of how likely the various possible outcomes are, and a system for weighing the pros and cons of the alternatives. The course will provide tools for handling all three of these aspects. The reality is that formal analyses are usually carried out when you are preparing a recommendation for someone else. This course will teach you how to do that, but even more importantly, it will teach you how to think about risky situations so that it becomes part of your instinctive approach to problems.

The first half of the course is about techniques for appraising specific problems. It consists of a somewhat traditional approach to the subject of decision analysis. We begin with estimating probabilities through subjective belief (personal experience and judgement), using experts, and using data. We will cover regression analysis, updating beliefs based on evidence, evaluating hypotheses, and the use of scenarios. We will cover the evaluation of alternatives using decision trees, simulation and preference analysis.

The second half of the course is about using systematic strategies to reduce risk. We will practice estimating exposure (e.g. how much will you lose/gain if interest rates go up), learn hedging techniques to reduce exposure (for example by insurance or using the futures market), the merits of diversification and the use of options. The final few classes applies the techniques we have covered to the analysis of personal risks. We will consider both rational and psychological aspects of risk taking.

The course is about techniques and approaches. You don’t have to be a quant jock to learn a lot from the course, but you shouldn’t take the course if you don’t enjoy using spreadsheets. Some students will have seen decision trees and forecasting before. For these students there will be some duplication but I believe the course has much more to offer. Most of the sessions will be based on exercises or short cases in order that we focus on the underlying ideas, but the situations we discuss will be based on real problems that did happen to businesses or individuals.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Career Focus

This course is primarily designed for students who are pursuing a career in businesses that are family owned - i.e. the majority shareholders are family, investment roles in family offices, or students that might invest in or wholly purchase a family owned business through a private equity firm, search fund model or a public company that through dual class stock is still family controlled.

90% of the GDP in the world is created through family owned businesses. Family businesses are frequently thought to be exclusively mom-and-pop, small businesses. Most fail to realize that Walmart, Fidelity, Cargill, Koch Industries, and Ford, to name a few, are all family-owned or controlled businesses. Family businesses can be private or public, sometimes with a dual-class stock structure. They can also be 100 percent family-owned or have outside investors; value is certainly affected not only by management quality, but also by the level of Family control and ownership. Family businesses come in all shapes and sizes, and they are here to stay globally, gaining power and influence by the day.

The course is also useful for students who are planning to work in companies that advise or support family owned businesses. It may further be interesting for students seeking to advance their knowledge of general management, strategy, succession and governance issues in the context of a challenging and sometimes emotionally driven work environment.

Educational Objectives

Learning how to work in or run a family business, create and run a family office, invest in a family business and work within any of these structures. Course focuses on interpersonal dynamics of employees - both family and non-family professionals.

All three Family organizations, the Family, the Operating Company, and the Family Office should have (1) their own set of goals, (2) their own governance structures, and (3) their own contribution to supporting a Family’s legacy. There is great value that can be created through Family businesses. In fact, wealth creation in Families is becoming a powerful disruptor in all of the global markets as Families professionalize and deploy capital across a variety of industries and sectors.

Modules explore:

1. Module one focuses on the Family, the bedrock of the organizations that comprise the collective Family organization, specifically, the virtues that define the Family members’ rules of engagement and the Family governance structure necessary to support it.
2. Module two deep dives into the Operating Company and the Corporate governance structure necessary to support the Family Organization. In Module two, we also study non-Family minority partners of Operating Companies and non-Family acquisitions of Operating Companies.
3. Module three examines the Family Office and its role in managing not only the Family’s assets but also the wealth governance that accompanies it. In Module three, we examine different best practices of (a) when and how to set up a Family Office, (b) how to bring in professional management and (c) how to compensate these professionals.
4. Module four brings it all together by exploring what it takes to build an enduring Family legacy by creating excellent stewards of Family wealth and its impact on Society. The stewards struggle through both external and internal factors to achieve Family unity through (1) the Three Virtues and Family governance, (2) control through corporate governance, and (3) competence through wealth governance, to propel a Forever Legacy.

Cases focus on established and emerging companies, products, and personalities in family businesses and family offices both domestically and internationally. We will have a large number of case protagonists and other guests that have been successful and failed.

Family Businesses are not only meaningful but can also be emotional-exciting and scary at the same time. This course will journey through many successes and failures within this space and examine best practices to help mitigate common pitfalls.

Families vary significantly in how they structure themselves, but the common link among Families that succeed in building multiple generations of wealth creation is that they all have policies and procedures that serve as a roadmap. Taking the time to create these documents-mission statements, shareholder agreements, succession plans, inheritance policies, distribution rules, outlaw / in-law procedures, hopefully lead to a more educated and cohesive group of Family members.

Course Content and Organization

The course consists of 28 sessions and includes a final project. Grading is based on class participation (50%) and the final project (50%).

Office Hours: The instructor welcomes the opportunity to meet with students outside of class. Please contact her assistant, Dylan Turner (dturner@hbs.edu) to arrange a meeting.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Career Focus

Digital Innovation and Transformation is designed to equip students to confidently help conceive, lead and execute digital innovation initiatives and develop new business models for existing and insurgent organizations. The basic premise of the course is that the digital revolution is rapidly transforming the fundamental nature of many companies in a wide range of industries and executives, entrepreneurs and general managers need to understand the economics, technology paradigms and management practices of innovating in digital-centric businesses to ensure corporate and personal success. The course is intended for students pursuing business careers in which digital technologies will be critical to the development of new products and services, e.g., entrepreneurial start-ups, consulting and venture capital, and senior positions in marketing, R&D, and strategy. Visits by case protagonists and industry experts will enable students to understand the career options in this rapidly evolving space.

Educational Objectives

Today firms are now establishing market leadership by mastering digital innovation. For example the traditional "Mad Men" advertising agencies now have to be able to blend digital products and services with creative strategy. Amazon is as much a retailer and supply chain powerhouse as it is a digital innovator. Similarly the Netflix business model is heavily reliant on continuously building and enhancing digital products and services to compete against incumbents in the entertainment industry. Ford is realizing that its future competitors are likely to be Facebook and Google and not BMW and Toyota. Meanwhile, Local Motors, an HBS-alum led startup, is using crowdsourcing, digital fabrication and 3D printing to disrupt the automotive industry.

The course introduces you to the critical elements of designing and developing digital products and services, how these can be configured and lead, and how the results are managed. These elements include economic and technological principles underlying digital transformation, identifying and integrating diverse user needs, organizing and leading product and service innovation initiatives, harnessing crowdsourcing and distributed innovation networks.

Course Content

The course materials intentionally cuts across functional boundaries, for the focus is squarely on the managerial skills and capabilities needed for effective practice. So while many situations you encounter emphasize the role of (new) technology, you will approach these as a manager, not as a technologist. If you happen to be a technologist, however, the managerial perspective will be enriching! But it's important to note that this managerial perspective is not undifferentiated. Depending on the situation, you will be assuming the role of team manager, project manager, functional manager, general manager, or CEO. This array of roles suggests how fundamental digital innovation is to firms at every level, and how excellence in its management is critical to competitiveness.

Specifically the course will help you learn:

• The economic and technological factors that are at the heart of the digital revolution taking place in the economy;
• The clash between existing business models and new digitally enhanced and led business models emphasizing platforms and ecosystems;
• The competitive interactions among firms with different digital business models;
• How to best organize and lead product and service innovation initiatives in the digital space;
• The principles and practices of leveraging crowds for innovation and how various crowdsourcing business models are executed.

An important component of the course is the HBS Digital Initiative Summit, which will bring together leading practitioners at the cutting edge of digital technologies to discuss emerging issues.

Grading

Grading will be based on class participation and blog posts.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Note: EC MBA students who are interested in earning an additional 1.5 credits through a related Independent Project are encouraged to reach out to Prof. Kirby at term start.

By 2035 China will be the largest economy in the world and an innovation superpower. Engagement with China—as entrepreneurs, investors, or partners—is part of our collective future.

But in 2022, Chinese firms—and foreign firms in China—face new challenges and opportunities under President Xi Jinping. The Chinese Community Party's increased role poses significant headwinds to firms doing business in China. As relations between the world's two largest economies, the U.S. and China, continue to deteriorate, companies must find creative solutions to counter ongoing global trade and technology wars while still responding to ever-changing policy directions in Beijing, Washington, and Europe.

How can you succeed in doing business in and with China in the coming decade and beyond?

In our course, we consider these questions:

• What are the openings for entrepreneurs in new markets as China pursues “common prosperity” for its people?
• How do foreign businesses succeed and fail in Chinese markets?
• How can Chinese firms, such as Huawei and ByteDance, navigate investment restrictions that threaten to "decouple" the U.S. economy from China's?
• Will China's ambitions to become a "self-sufficient" superpower succeed or flounder?
• As Chinese firms go global along the "Belt and Road," what are the opportunities for international partners?
• How do the Communist Party and Chinese governments—local, provincial, and national—shape market opportunities?
• How do family businesses survive and thrive in an economy where the state still plays such a large role?
• What are the opportunities and risks for businesses in Taiwan, as "greater China" becomes integrated economically but with greater tension politically?
• What is the impact on business amidst Hong Kong's political turmoil? Can it recover?
• What are the political rewards and risks, in the era of Xi Jinping and Joe Biden, of doing business with China?
• In short, where is China going—economically and politically—and how can you take part in its continuing rise?

We will be joined in this course by CEOs of many of the enterprises we study, in industries such as finance, healthcare, consumer products, agribusiness, semiconductors, education, and automobiles.

Course Overview

This year, this course is taught in seminar format to explore central themes in greater depth.

Through cases, notes, discussion, and research, students explore the opportunities and risks of international and Chinese business in China and the outward expansion of Chinese firms. Key issues include:

• The nature of China's political system
• Revolutions in technology at home at abroad
• The changing role of politics in business: How well do you know your Party Secretary?
• The evolution of Chinese SOEs into modern, global corporations
• The diverse political risks Chinese firms encounter in foreign markets
• The challenges of developing public affairs strategies outside China
• Challenges and opportunities facing start-ups
• Strategies for protecting and developing intellectual property
• Reaching new consumer audiences

Audience

This course is suitable for any student interested in understanding emerging markets, government-business relations, and the impact of China's continued economic and political transformation on international business. No prior knowledge or experience with China's business environment is required. Cross-registrants are welcome.

Course Requirements and Grading

• Class participation based on assigned reading material: 50%
• Written Assignment- an essay on a topic of choice or an outline of a prospective HBS case: 40%
• U.S.-China policy memos short writing assignment: 5%
• Know your geography map quiz: 5%

Questions to help guide the reading of assigned materials will be released in advance of class on Canvas (no written response needed)

Q4 Optional Independent Project

This project, open to students who have completed Q3, may take the form of a business plan for an enterprise in China, Hong Kong, or Taiwan; research on a company or sector written in the form of an HBS case; or a related research project. Students will work closely with Professor Kirby to identify a topic and relevant source materials.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Course Overview

Virtually every organization considers growth a critical objective. But while almost universally desired, and much talked about, enterprise growth is quite poorly understood. Careful empirical studies show that very few enterprises grow profitably over sustained periods of time. Indeed, many organizations’ pursuit of growth is the very cause of their demise. How can companies grow profitably? In examine this question, the course focuses on three components of an organization’s growth strategy: the rate of growth, the direction of growth (e.g. penetrate existing markets vs. diversification), and the method of growth (e.g. organic vs. acquisition).

The conceptual framework of the course is built around the idea that growth is a dynamic process of balancing the pursuit of market opportunities with the capacity and capability to serve those opportunities. Following this framing, the course is divided into three modules. In the first module, we explore the underlying dynamics of organizational growth processes. Our focus here is on understanding the optimal rate of growth. In the second module, we examine the problem of expanding and scaling the organization to meet demand. Typically, organizations portrayed in this part of the course are smaller or younger. They have ample market opportunities, but need to figure out how to expand their organizational capacity effectively. Here we examine how growth might stress an organization’s operating process, systems, business model, and culture, and how you might circumvent these challenges. In the third part of the course, we examine the “demand side” of the growth problem. Here we see larger organizations with ample resources but who are struggling to generate new demand. We look at strategic choices involving the direction of growth (e.g. diversification) and the method of growth (organic, acquisition, etc.). Regardless of the specific challenge (supply side or demand side), however, we will learn that growth inevitably evolves significant and often difficult organizational changes.

The course will use a mixture of case studies drawn from a variety of contexts, including fast food, airlines, social enterprises, luxury goods and services, rescue operations, technology, life science, manufacturing, and private aviation. We will also use readings to introduce the theoretical and conceptual foundations of the course.

Course Requirements

Instead of a final exam or final project, the course will require students to write-up brief analyses (1 page) and reflections on a bi-weekly basis. For some of these assignments, I will provide a new case for you to examine and discuss how the lesson discussed in the course apply to that case. In other assignments, you will have more open-ended questions to explore.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Career Focus

This course is designed to address the challenges of (i) creating, (ii) growing, and (iii) optimizing an e-commerce business for profitability. It is appropriate for:

• Managers in companies with an e-commerce presence;
• Entrepreneurs building online startups;
• Consultants engaged with e-commerce businesses; and
• Investors seeking to evaluate the potential of new business models.

Educational Objectives

The percentage of products that consumers and businesses are buying online rather than offline is growing in virtually all categories. The two main reasons that cut across all categories have to do with convenience and better prices. The challenges for e-commerce players have been how to scale up and be profitable. Many new business models that did not exist as recently as ten years ago have emerged to profitably sell online. This course is intended to (a) help students conceptualize the various different e-commerce business models that exist, as well as build novel models. In addition, students will (b) learn how to grow an e-commerce enterprise quickly and profitably. Finally, students will (c) practice data analyses and data-driven decision making in e-commerce settings.

Cases in many industries will be discussed (e.g., mass merchandising, apparel, beauty, furniture, food, consumer services, media, etc.) and in various life stages of the firm (e.g., startup, early traction, fast growth, maturity).

Course Content and Objectives

The topics relate to the three major classes of e-commerce businesses: e-tailers, i.e., online retailers of goods and services not made by the firm (such as Amazon), direct-to-consumer companies, i.e., online sellers of goods and services made by the firm (or bought from manufacturers) (such as Harrys.com), and two-sided marketplaces, i.e., online matchmakers between supply and demand for goods and services (such as Etsy).

Questions that will be addressed:

• How to acquire customers cheaply and practice growth hacking?
• How to craft a path to profitability?
• How to deliver value to consumers (via assortment, convenience, services, price)?
• How to extract value from consumers?
• How to create and extract value for manufacturers?
• How to compete (or coexist) with Amazon and other E-Commerce Giants?
• How can incumbent firms compete with new business models?
• How to utilize the rich data available in an e-commerce setting for decision making?
• How to choose an e-commerce strategy?

Questions that will not be addressed:

• How to manufacture products to sell online?
• How to build and organize warehouses?
• How to contract with shipping, payment and related firms?
• How to build a website?

Grading:

Grading in the course will be based on class participation (40%), brief group final paper (40%), and individual pre-class answer submission to short cases that include data analysis (20%). These include simple applied data analyses and are designed for both novices and students with data analytics experience. No prior data analytics experience or programing skills are required, they can be successfully completed using Excel.

Final Paper:

Students work in small groups to write a memo that takes one of the following approaches or addresses a topic approved by the instructor:

• Using course frameworks, develop a new e-commerce business model in any industry of choice and in any portion of the customer value chain.
• Using course frameworks, analyze an existing e-commerce firm and identify main challenges and potential solutions.
• Propose a new e-commerce case: identify a specific company and main challenges.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Most startups fail. Entrepreneurial Failure (EF) explores why startups fail and what entrepreneurs can do to anticipate and avoid failure.

The course may be of interest to students who plan to found or join a startup, as well as those who’ll invest in new ventures. Course content will overlap to some extent with topics covered in Founders’ Journey, Launching Technology Ventures, and Scaling Technology Ventures.

Entrepreneurial Failure is a case-based course with two modules that examine early-stage and late-stage startup failure patterns.

1. Early-Stage Failure. Early-stage startup failure patterns include:

• Good Idea, Bad Bedfellows: Founders identify a promising opportunity but fail to assemble the right resources to capitalize upon it.
• False Starts: Founders attract a solid complement of resources, but because they don’t do enough upfront customer research, they fail to identify a good opportunity before they burn through their capital.
• False Positives. Success with early adopters can be misleading and give founders unwarranted confidence to expand—or send them in the wrong direction.

1. Late-Stage Failure. Surprisingly, about one-third of late-stage ventures fail to earn a positive return for investors. Late-stage failure patterns include:

• Speed Trap: Growing too fast can lead to a scaling startup’s demise if the company must spend more to acquire new customers than they are worth.
• Cascading Miracles: Some founders devise bold, ambitious innovation plans that require radical changes in customer behavior; strategic partnerships with powerful corporations; technological breakthroughs; relaxation of regulations; and/or vast amounts of capital. Each requirement is “do or die,” so founders hope in vain for a series of miracles.

Most class sessions will focus on venture capital-backed tech startups, but the course will also examine entrepreneurial failure in other contexts, for example: science-based “tough tech” ventures; startups that aim for social impact; new ventures launched by established corporations; and bootstrapped, “low tech” businesses.

Students can choose to take a final exam or—alone or in pairs—complete a final paper that takes one of the following approaches or addresses a topic approved by the instructor:

• Using course frameworks, analyze factors that contributed to the failure of a startup of their choosing.
• Write a “pre-mortem” for a going concern—or a startup that students might plan to launch—analyzing the factors behind that startup’s imagined future failure.
• Analyze distinctive factors behind startups in a specific context or industry sector, for example, biotech, social enterprise, or emerging markets.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Entrepreneurial Finance (EF) is designed for students who plan to be involved with a startup venture at some point in their career as a Founder, Joiner, Leader, Investor, Board Member, or Advisor. However, the course is also very applicable for students interested in gaining a broader view of the financing landscape and deal structures for startup companies, going far beyond the basics of entrepreneurial strategies and venture capital and angel financing approaches introduced in TEM.

The EF course covers the entire lifecycle of a startup company from launch to IPO / M&A and delves into a wide variety of financing alternatives from equity to debt, bootstrap to buyout, including many successes and some challenges. At every step along the way, we’ll connect the financing options (and costs) with the company’s ambitions and strategy. I love teaching this course as it allows me to translate over two decades of experience as a VC, founder, CEO and Board member for dozens of different startup companies.

After an adventuresome virtual course in 2020, I am excited about the prospect of being together again in the classroom in Fall 2021 and will be bringing some of the best parts of on-line functionality into the in-person class discussions which will be combination of traditional and live cases. We will have guests & protagonists involved in nearly every class this semester.

I make significant time available for 1:1 meetings about the class, career planning, startup advice and for small group gatherings with other EF classmates as well as opportunities to engage with our class guests and other special folks.

Class grading will be based 50% on participation, 20% on select and specifically assigned pre-class assignments, and 30% on a case based Final Exam.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

The “Entrepreneurial Finance:Q2 Edition” class will be taught during the Q2 of the Fall. This is a shortened version of the Entrepreneurial Finance class that will be will be taught during the Fall by Professor Jim Matheson. This Q2 Edition will be of particular interest to students who are considering other short courses in Q1 and Q2 of the Fall semester and may therefore not have the flexibility to take the full Entrepreneurial Finance course.

Career Focus

Entrepreneurial Finance: Q2 Edition is designed for students who plan to be involved with a startup venture at some point in their career as a Founder, Joiner, Investor, Board Member, or Advisor. The course is also very applicable for students interested in gaining a broader view of the financing landscape for startup companies, going beyond the basics of entrepreneurial strategies and venture capital approaches introduced in TEM.

Course Content and Educational Objectives

The goal of Entrepreneurial Finance is to help managers make better investment and financing decisions in entrepreneurial settings. The course will focus first on understanding the intimate link between financing strategy and product market strategy through the considerations of how much money should a firm raise, when, and at what value. During the course we will discuss various forms of capital available for entrepreneurial firms throughout their life cycle, from angel investments, venture debt, and venture capital and all the way to IPOs and SPACs. We will explore how different financing arrangements and deal structures can align incentives and position firms for success.

Logistics

During the course, guests and protagonists will join most classes. The course will incorporate a significant use of asynchronous content to ensure that students fill comfortable with the more technical aspects of term sheets, cap tables, and firm valuation.

Beyond office hours, the course will be accompanied with small group gatherings with the goal to allow discussions of relevant topics that are of particular interest to smaller groups of students.

Class grading will be based 50% on participation, and 50% on a case based Final Exam.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Career Focus

This course is intended for students pursuing a range of career options as business operators, investors, and/or consultants. First, it would be of interest to those who at some point in their career see themselves as a CEO or senior manager potentially leading a troubled enterprise (small, medium, or large) through a crisis or through significant performance transformation. Secondly, it would be important for investors who may be in distressed, special situations, or restructuring-oriented investing or would be investing in assets needing significant performance improvement. Finally, it will be of value to those who expect to support or interface with troubled enterprises as management consultants or as a restructuring advisors.

Educational Objectives

The focus of this course is the leader as a strategist, architect, decision maker, and change agent in a turnaround or transformation environment. This course will present situations where you can analyze potential opportunity in turnaround situations and decide if there is a reasonable chance for the managers in the case to create value. It will also present many situations where you will be challenged to develop a plan of action for the managers that will lead to the creation and realization of value. Importantly, our newly expanded curriculum will include a number of practical ‘how to’ sessions covering topics such as designing turnaround programs, successfully driving necessary cultural change, transformation performance management techniques and systems, and common commercial and operating transformation improvement levers. Some of these sessions will include and be co-taught with practicing executives and advisors. In others, we will invite case protagonists and guest speakers who have decades of hands-on experience to share with the class. In short, this course is about architecting and successfully driving large-scale transformation. We will examine a broad array of factors involved in a turnaround, including financial, strategic, organizational, and cultural factors.

Course Content and Organization

The course will include some brand-new cases (e.g., Netflix, Etsy, Panera, Blackberry, and the Seattle Seahawks), with the CEO protagonists present in class, in order to give students first-hand exposure to turnaround challenges. We will look at a range of organizations, including small and large companies, family-owned ventures, private and public firms, and US and international companies.

The course will be organized around five key dimensions of turnarounds: financial, strategic, organizational, cultural, and leadership. The course opens and closes with critical lessons and devotes an equal number of cases to each of the dimensions.

Leadership: The opening and closing of the course will be devoted to analyzing leadership skills fundamental to planning and executing successful turnarounds. We will examine, among others, the importance of personal and organizational resilience, the management of critical thinking (logos), emotions (pathos), and relationships (ethos), and the challenges involved in professionalizing a leadership team in a crisis.

Strategy: The strategic dimension of a turnaround involves defining a new direction for the organization. The course will feature strategic challenges turnaround leaders often face, such as managing complexity and strategic dualities, addressing marketing myopia, examining core capabilities that have morphed into rigidities, and reining in disorganized innovation efforts.

Finance: The financial dimension is central to most turnarounds. The course will present situations where leaders must make critical decisions regarding the management of cash flow, the convenience of keeping or divesting assets, and the possibility of restructuring debt, among others.

Organization: The organizational dimension of a turnaround encompasses three mutually-reinforcing elements: structure, processes, and people. The course will focus on fundamental organizational challenges such as streamlining the organization, simplifying structure, and redesigning core processes while sustaining morale, retaining key talent, and energizing people.

Culture: Culture is often overlooked as a factor that leads to crisis in organizations. However, given the “sticky” nature of culture (it persists over time more than any other component of the organization), it is often neglected. The course will feature situations where leaders must reassess organizational culture, values, and purpose.

While these dimensions are analytically distinct, they interact with and shape each other. We will reinforce a holistic view of turnarounds that simultaneously encompasses all these dimensions by looking at their impact across the four key stages in the life-cycle of a turnaround: (1) triage (assessing whether the company is indeed worth saving), (2) crisis management (stopping the negative cash flow and erosion of morale and talent), (3) stabilizing the situation (building a stable management team that can lead to growth and future profitability), and (4) planning the future (developing a strategy and a structure suited to ensuring the company’s long-term viability).

Interwoven throughout the course will be practical ‘how-to’ sessions that will marry the strategic thinking of five dimensions and the four stages with the actual practical tools and approaches that ensure execution success. These toolkits will include topics such such quantitative improvement opportunity scans, turnaround program construction methods, leadership assessment and upgrade techniques, turnaround performance management system design, resetting mission / vision / values and incentives, communications in turnarounds, the basics of re-orgs and re-processing, common commercial improvement levers (e.g., e-commerce / digital transformation, sales force effectiveness programs), and common operational improvement levers (e.g., SG&A reduction programs, supply chain restructuring programs). These sessions will be led by practicing executives and advisors.

This course will be 14 class sessions (in Q3) that will be primarily case-oriented with some additional readings and high-profile in-class speakers.

This course pairs well with Q3 Entrepreneurial Failure and complements Creating Value Through Corporate Restructuring and Financial Management of Smaller Firms.

Final Short Paper for Q3 only (course 1635) students:

Your final project deliverable for those only taking the Q3 class is an essay in the form of a Google Doc due at the end of the exam period at 5 pm on Wednesday, March 16. If you are working with others please submit one essay per team, not one per student. Please set the Sharing Settings of your document as “Anyone who has the link can edit” and email Ranjay and my FSS Evan Terwilliger the link to your final document.

In your email with the link to the essay, please specify whether or not you give us permission to publish it on our course blog (a public folder in Dropbox). If you are okay with publishing, please specify if you’d allow your name to be attached or if you’d want to be anonymous. We understand that there may be good reasons why you would wish to keep your essay private, and this poses no problems whatsoever.

The essay requires you to choose any turnaround and examine it. The essay should be about 2,000 words in length if in a pair, or 1,500 words if solo, excluding any charts/graphics you choose to include. This should include the following topics, with about 1-2 paragraphs devoted to each topic. You should get approval from Ranjay on your topic by the end of week 4 (Friday, Feb. 18).

• A brief description of the turnaround;
• What tools you applied from the course or outside of the course;
• What general principles about turnarounds you learned from the exercise.

We encourage you to embed screen shots and/or links to web pages, videos, wireframes, Google docs, etc. in your essay. If you want to link to a file in your blog post but you don’t want to permanently devote storage space in your personal Dropbox or Google Drive account, send it to Evan, and we’ll put in a public folder that we’ve created for the course blog.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Career Focus

You should take this course if you expect to found or join a startup, especially in a marketing, sales operations, or business development role; or if you expect to join a VC, PE or other entity (e.g., search fund) that evaluates the go-to-market activities of ventures. The course examines firms in various settings (high-tech, low-tech, professional services, retail-based, others). It builds on concepts introduced in RC Marketing and TEM, and is a complement to EC courses on sales, ecommerce, product management, and launching technology ventures.

Educational Objectives

Startups face challenges with customer acquisition at stages from customer discovery to scaling. This course examines some (not all) representative issues and tools for that context.

At the outset, startups often have few or no systems to manage customer acquisition, including for basic issues such as identifying and prioritizing customer segments, establishing the marketing budget, choosing marketing options ranging from SEM or inbound methods or paid advertising, and so on. In addition, marketing and selling in startups are intimately linked with evolving business-model decisions, not just “handled” by separate marketing or sales functions. At the same time, startups must understand and navigate the relevant buyer journey(s) while conserving scarce capital. Then, moving from early adopters to more mainstream customer groups is often a scaling requirement. This introduces issues involved in adapting marketing processes put in place at earlier stages.

Course Content and Organization

The course begins with (and throughout has a heavy emphasis on) tactical issues in understanding buying behavior and the implications for marketing and business development, and then moves to wider topics in growing a customer base. The core modules are:

1. Identifying and Understanding Buyers: Customer Discovery, Buyer Personas, and Buyer Journeys
2. The Marketer’s Toolkit: Brand, Storytelling, Data Analytics, Community
3. Marketing Analytics: Digital Marketing, Pricing, and Channel Management
4. The Go-To-Market Team: What Roles, When to Hire, How to Pay
5. Scaling the Venture: New Offerings, New Geographies, Growing the Team (Sales, BD, and Marketing)

There is no final exam. Instead, students form teams and focus on a field-based final paper. The case studies and guest lectures provide tools, frameworks, and learnings about customer acquisition topics in startups: what to do and why. In the projects, students focus on an issue required to help build a specific venture’s customer base: how to do it and application of analytics. Each team of 2-4 students must map the relevant buying journey for that venture, interview customers and/or business development people, apply their learnings to a specific marketing or sales topic, and present their analyses and recommendations in a final paper.

Projects can be sourced by the students (e.g., your venture, or a venture you know or want to know) and the professor will also post projects sponsored by alumni and others. Projects should involve designing and testing specific marketing methods for customer-acquisition and retention (e.g., refining a paid advertising campaign, crafting content marketing, running pricing A/B tests) rather than focusing solely on market or industry analyses or strategy formulation. Examples of project topics that students might pursue include:

• Conduct customer interviews to learn about prospects’ buying criteria and decision-making process.
• Develop criteria for screening beta customers for a startup’s first product; then identify and recruit pilot participants based on these criteria.
• Create personas and then use them to choose marketing media and craft messages.
• Develop or change a startup’s pricing strategy, understanding the links between pricing, value proposition, and the recommended sales approach.
• Develop criteria for qualifying and prioritizing leads generated through different marketing methods.
• Develop an account prioritization scheme.
• Run a Kickstarter campaign.
• Plan and execute an inbound marketing program: use blog posts or social media to generate leads.
• Craft a plan for choosing or managing channel partners, including approaches for recruitment, training, monitoring; develop fee structures and marketing materials for partners.
• Develop and a process for conducting relevant and falsifiable go-to-market experiments.
• Create dashboards that automate cohort analyses and assess ROI for different marketing programs.

Deliverables will include an early work plan and a final team paper (can be a PowerPoint presentation or a written document). Along with the team’s final paper, each team member will also submit a brief essay (1-2 pages) about what s/he learned (professionally and/or personally), and the context(s) in which those lessons do and do not apply.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

‘Nothing happens until a sale is made’

Nothing happens until a sale is made. That simple point underlines the critical importance of sales. Every operating model and business plan ‘assumes’ a certain amount of sales, but that assumption is the tipping point. Without sales, the entire model is an exercise in frustration and futility.

The purpose of this course is to demystify sales and help you understand how to sell and manage go-to-market functions within entrepreneurial settings. The course material is applicable whether you become an entrepreneur, venture capitalist, management consultant, general manager, product manager, salesperson, or sales manager. The course is geared toward entrepreneurial settings, specifically execution required by the founder. However, the best practices are applicable to larger company requirements as well.

“The #1 skill HBS alums wish they had spent more time understanding at school was how to sell.”
-Dean Nohria

Entrepreneurs and general managers must not only understand the sales process but also embrace that the ability to sell is the single most critical success factor of any new enterprise. This course does not approach sales from the vaunted perspective of ‘strategy’. It gets right into the very practical and tactical ins and outs of how to sell as a founder. Then it moves into the more complex subject of how to build, manage, and scale the first sales force. The course covers subjects such as building compensation systems, setting up the first revenue plan, designing the first sales team, managing channel conflicts, opening sales offices and other complex sales and sales management situations. In the final module of the course, we will apply these sales skills to seemingly non-sales roles, such as venture capitalist, management consultant, CEO of a public company, executive director of a non-profit, and raising capital as a founder. Not only do these professionals need to understand how to setup sales in the organizations they build, run, advise, and invest in, but they also need to apply the raw skill of selling to succeed in their own roles.

In a larger sense, the entrepreneur and general manager must “sell” his or her vision to prospective employees, to angel and venture investors, and to strategic partners. While all true and all necessary, this course focuses mainly on selling to customers, whether that is through a direct sales force, a channel sales force, or building an OEM relationship. A few cases focus on selling to investors and strategic partners. Sales is the one function that cannot hide behind the veil of corporate doubletalk; sales goals are either made or not made. Every organizational activity leverages off that single fact. Markets are not totally rational organizations and the firms with the best sales teams will usually win.

“Superior sales and distribution by itself can create a monopoly, even with no product differentiation. The converse is not true. No matter how strong your product, even if it easily fits into already established habits and anybody who tries it likes it immediately, you must still support it with a strong distribution plan.”
-From “Zero to One” by Peter Thiel

One common misconception is that product innovation alone is a winning tactic. It is not. Often the critical success factor is exactly how a firm goes to market – with its sales force. But the rules have changed – innovations like ‘freemium’ models and social networking are changing the status quo and forcing managers to consider new way to structure and incent sales teams.

CLASS REQUIREMENTS

Preparation and class participation are a requirement. We will cold call students to open each class. Every class is associated with a short assignment, and all students are required to be ready to discuss the assigned material.

Sales and sales management is a highly experiential, hands on skill that requires role playing and iterative practice to master. As such, Entrepreneurial Sales uses a more experiential pedagogy during the semester. Unlike most courses at HBS, there is no final exam or final project. Instead, we will run seven experiential assignments, largely executed outside of the classroom, in parallel with the 28 in classroom sessions. In addition to the course faculty, students will be assigned to a sales coach who will review assignment submissions with the course faculty and be available for one-on-one coaching after each assignment.

Class sessions will be 80 minutes long and will be largely be executed in three parts: a cold call opening in which a student presents his/her course of action as outlined in the case, class discussion of the case, and a presentation by the professor to emphasize the key leanings from the case. More than one unexcused absence will affect your final grade.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Course Overview

The world has a seemingly infinite supply of problems, from climate change to pandemics. The basic premise of this course is that entrepreneurs view problems as opportunities. If healthcare is expensive and ineffective, entrepreneurial teams create ventures (for-profit or not-for-profit) to deliver better health outcomes at lower cost. If burning fossil fuels creates damaging greenhouse gases, then there are opportunities to find new, cleaner ways to produce energy or mitigate its negative impact. If education at all levels costs too much, takes too long, and is mediocre, entrepreneurial teams explore ways to deliver better learning outcomes faster and less expensively. The course will focus on entrepreneurial efforts in healthcare, education, and the environment. Most of the cases are US-centric, though the challenges are global.

This course was first introduced in the fall of 2020. The course will feature background readings, cases, guests - protagonists and subject experts, and raw data.

The course includes newly written and updated cases on companies like Iora Health (primary care for Medicare patients), Guild Education (education as an employment benefit), and Carmichael Roberts (venture investments in cleantech).

Grading will be based on class participation and a case/paper based on an entrepreneurial response to a pressing global challenge.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Career Focus

EGC discusses the history of the modern world through the entrepreneurs who shaped it. It emphasizes the challenging contexts these entrepreneurs faced in their times, the difficult decisions they made, and the legacies they left behind. The course is relevant to all future leaders operating in today’s global context, as it considers the roles of entrepreneurs, CEOs, investors, inventors, philanthropists, and politicians.

Cases follow the lives of some of the most successful entrepreneurs and leaders in history throughout different eras of globalization and deglobalization, across a broad range of contexts and industries from the opium wars to the luxury fashion industry. In addition to character lessons from these entrepreneurs, students will learn to understand how the modern business environment came about, and to think strategically about how value can be derived in volatile circumstances with unpredictable political contexts as well as micro and macro-economic shifts.

Course Content and Organization

EGC is best seen as a journey, which grows in complexity and depth as students debate contested and sensitive topics. The course challenges students to think of business not in a vacuum, but in a rich context considering competitive landscapes, information asymmetries, conflicting interests, institutional and legal gaps, geopolitics, and cultural differences across countries. The five modules of the course provide a dynamic framework for exploring the challenging decisions entrepreneurs have faced in the different eras of globalization. The roles of business leaders in inflection points, including Nazi Germany, the struggle for Indian independence, apartheid-era South Africa, and conflicts in the Middle East, are examined. The cases, set across centuries, continents and industries, explore how different contexts and regulations have provided incentives for entrepreneurs to develop businesses in either productive or unproductive ways. Cases of stellar business success are accompanied by cases on morally-challenged figures, and conflicting views on the responsibilities of business are debated in widely differing settings. A highly diverse set of business leaders emerge as important actors shaping how local economies and the global economy have evolved. A typical class will try to get into the minds of the protagonists, establish the context in which they took decisions, debate the legacy of those decisions, and discuss how the class would have acted in those circumstances.

The five modules of the course are: First Global Economy; Globalization Reversed; Origins of Second Global Economy; Second Global Economy; New Deglobalization.

Course Administration

Course grades will be based on class participation (50%) and a final self-scheduled exam (50%). A paper can be substituted for the final exam. Throughout the semester, Professor Jones will be available to meet with students. To arrange a meeting, please contact Professor Jones directly, preferably by email (gjones@hbs.edu). You can also contact his assistant, Conor Riley (criley@hbs.edu).

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Career Focus

This course will provide tools and frameworks to students who aspire to lead businesses in highly competitive markets. The course will also be valuable to those who manage private equity firms and to consultants who advise business leaders on strategy execution.

Educational Objectives

The focus of this course is strategy execution (not strategy formulation). That is, we take business strategy as our starting point and teach students how to design and implement systems and structures to execute that strategy.

Course Content

The course is divided into seven modules:

1. Allocating resources to customers: How to choose a primary customer and allocate resources to market-facing and operating core units to deliver maximum customer value.

2. Prioritizing core values: How to identify and communicate core values that guide employees to make the right choices when faced with competing interests.

3. Tracking performance goals: How to identify critical performance variables for strategy execution and design management control systems to motivate and track progress in achieving key goals.

4. Controlling strategic risk: How to identify business and strategic risks and implement internal controls and boundary systems to protect the business.

5. Spurring innovation: How to design systems and structures to foster creative tension, innovation, and entrepreneurial behavior.

6. Building commitment: How to build an organization culture that motivates people to help others succeed and achieve shared goals.

7. Adapting to change: How to identify strategic uncertainties and design systems that can provide early warning and adapt current strategies to respond to changing competitive conditions.

Concepts will be illustrated using case studies in both early-stage and mature firms in a variety of industries including consulting, consumer products, education, financial services, healthcare, hospitality, military, publishing, retail, robotics, software development, and space exploration.

By the end of the course, students will have gained the practical knowledge and confidence to execute strategy, measure performance, deliver results, and win in any competitive market.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Q4 entails a mix of live classes once per week (dates below) and project work classes

Q3Q4 students begin working on their final projects during Q3

A 1.5-credit version of this course is offered as Entrepreneurial Management in a Turnaround Environment Q3 (course 1635)

Students in Field Course: Entrepreneurial Management in a Turnaround Environment will participate in the same 14 case method classroom sessions as students enrolled in the Q3 1.5-credit course Entrepreneurial Management in a Turnaround Environment (course 1635). For information on the content of those sessions, see the course catalog description of Entrepreneurial Management in a Turnaround Environment (course 1635). Students in the field course will not complete the final exam/final paper assigned in course 1635. Instead, they will work on the team project described below.

This field course will focus on how turnarounds are done. Class sessions will include a mix of case discussions, guest speakers, and student team presentations of project work. The full section will not meet for some sessions; these will be devoted to team work on projects.

In project teams of 3-4, students will conduct interviews with leaders and investors who have first-hand experience with a specific turnaround. This, combined with other analyses, will be used to develop a deeper perspective on one aspect of turnarounds.

Career Focus

This course is intended for students pursuing a range of career options as business operators, investors, and/or consultants. First, it would be of interest to those who at some point in their career see themselves as a CEO or senior manager potentially leading a troubled enterprise (small, medium, or large) through a crisis or through significant performance transformation. Secondly, it would be important for investors who may be in distressed, special situations, or restructuring-oriented investing or would be investing in assets needing significant performance improvement. Finally, it will be of value to those who expect to support or interface with troubled enterprises as management consultants or as a restructuring advisors.

Educational Objectives

The focus of this course is the leader as a strategiest, architect, decision maker, and change agent in a turnaround or transformation environment. This course will present situations where you can analyze potential opportunity in turnaround situations and decide if there is a reasonable chance for the managers in the case to create value. It will also present many situations where you will be challenged to develop a plan of action for the managers that will lead to the creation and realization of value. Importantly, our newly expanded curriculum will include a number of practical ‘how to’ sessions covering topics such as designing turnaround programs, successfully driving necessary cultural change, transformation performance management techniques and systems, and common commercial and operating transformation improvement levers. Some of these sessions will include and be co-taught with practicing executives and advisors. In others, we will invite case protagonists and guest speakers who have decades of hands-on experience to share with the class. In short, this course is about archtitecting and successfully driving large-scale transformation. We will examine a broad array of factors involved in a turnaround, including financial, strategic, organizational, and cultural factors.

Course Content and Organization

The course will include some brand-new cases (e.g., Netflix, Etsy, Panera, Blackberry, and the Seattle Seahawks), with the CEO protagonists present in class, in order to give students first-hand exposure to turnaround challenges. We will look at a range organizations, including small and large companies, family-owned ventures, private and public firms, and US and international companies.

The course will be organized around five key dimensions of turnarounds: financial, strategic, organizational, cultural, and leadership. The course opens and closes with critical lessons and devotes an equal number of cases to each of the dimensions.

Leadership: The opening and closing of the course will be devoted to analyzing leadership skills fundamental to planning and executing successful turnarounds. We will examine, among others, the importance of personal and organizational resilience, the management of critical thinking (logos), emotions (pathos), and relationships (ethos), and the challenges involved in professionalizing a leadership team in a crisis.

Strategy: The strategic dimension of a turnaround involves defining a new direction for the organization. The course will feature strategic challenges turnaround leaders often face, such as managing complexity and strategic dualities, addressing marketing myopia, examining core capabilities that have morphed into rigidities, and reining in disorganized innovation efforts.

Finance: The financial dimension is central to most turnarounds. The course will present situations where leaders must make critical decisions regarding the management of cash flow, the convenience of keeping or divesting assets, and the possibility of restructuring debt, among others.

Organization: The organizational dimension of a turnaround encompasses three mutually-reinforcing elements: structure, processes, and people. The course will focus on fundamental organizational challenges such as streamlining the organization, simplifying structure, and redesigning core processes while sustaining morale, retaining key talent, and energizing people.

Culture: Culture is often overlooked as a factor that leads to crisis in organizations. However, given the “sticky” nature of culture (it persists over time more than any other component of the organization), it is often neglected. The course will feature situations where leaders must reassess organizational culture, values, and purpose.

While these dimensions are analytically distinct, they interact with and shape each other. We will reinforce a holistic view of turnarounds that simultaneously encompasses all these dimensions by looking at their impact across the four key stages in the life-cycle of a turnaround: (1) triage (assessing whether the company is indeed worth saving), (2) crisis management (stopping the negative cash flow and erosion of morale and talent), (3) stabilizing the situation (building a stable management team that can lead to growth and future profitability), and (4) planning the future (developing a strategy and a structure suited to ensuring the company’s long-term viability).

Interwoven throughout the course will be practical ‘how-to’ sessions that will marry the strategic thinking of five dimensions and the four stages with the actual practical tools and approaches that ensure execution success. These toolkits will include topics such such quantitative improvement opportunity scans, turnaround program construction methods, leadership assessment and upgrade techniques, turnaround performance management system design, resetting mission / vision / values and incentives, communications in turnarounds, the basics of re-orgs and re-processing, common commercial improvement levers (e.g., e-commerce / digital transformation, sales force effectiveness programs), and common operational improvement levers (e.g., SG&A reduction programs, supply chain restructuring programs). These sessions will be led by practicing executives and advisors.

The first part of this course will be 14 class sessions (in Q3) that will be primarily case-oriented with some additional readings and high-profile in-class speakers.

This course pairs well with Q3 Entrepreneurial Failure and complements Creating Value Through Corporate Restructuring and Financial Management of Smaller Firms.

Final Project for Q3Q4 Full-Course Students

Full-course students taking both the Q3 and Q4 courses don’t do a short paper. Full-course students will complete a group project. You should start working on your project during Q3 in groups of 3. We’ll require that your projects are fully scoped/staffed before we commence Q4 (Thursday, March 10) and each team will have milestones to complete during Q3 that will be outlined in the beginning of the course.

During Q4, each group will have an opportunity to do a presentation during class on campus. Each group will have 5-8 minutes to present a few PPT slides to the entire class. In return, you will receive quick input from me and your fellow classmates. More details will be provided at the start of the semester.

The final deliverable will be a project write-up that will be no more than 3,000 words and submitted by 5pm on Wednesday, May 4.

In the write-up, I will expect that you will explain what you did (brief description of turnaround, why you chose it, which tools from the course were used, etc.) and what you learned (general principles around turnarounds, applying the tools, etc.). A detailed summary of the outline for this report will be provided at the start of the term.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Educational Objectives

The nonprofit arts and culture industry generates more than $166.billions of economic activity in the US—approximately $64 billion in spending by arts and cultural organizations and an additional $103 billion in event-related expenditures by their audiences. This activity supports 4.6 million jobs. A recent report by the Conference Board noted that in addition to the enormous financial impact of the sector, “companies consider the arts to be important in building quality of life, stimulating creative thinking and problem solving, and offering networking opportunities and the potential to develop new business and build market share.”

All arts leaders are entrepreneurs who are tasked, by Howard Stevenson’s definition, with “the pursuit of opportunity beyond resources.” Arts and Cultural Entrepreneurship (ACE) is designed to introduce students to the key issues faced by managers in this important economic sector. This year the course will place a special focus on the challenges the industry’s leaders face in guiding the response of their organizations to the Covid-19 pandemic. Canceled performance seasons and closed museums and libraries have had a devastating impact on the sector and a recent survey found that more than one-in-ten arts leaders were not confident that their organization would survive the pandemic.

Course Content and Organization

The course will utilize three approaches to learning—traditional case-based classes, talks by key arts leaders, and consulting assignments with Boston-area arts institution focused on helping the organizations devise and implement strategies to survive and thrive during the pandemic and afterwards.

Cases: Cases and required background reading will cover entrepreneurial issues encountered by an extensive range of arts and cultural institutions both in the United States and abroad.

Guest Talks: Students will hear firsthand from a number of arts and cultural leaders who will discuss the entrepreneurial challenges and opportunities they face.

Projects: Students will assemble into five-person teams to work on projects throughout the course. Project partners will include a wide variety of Boston-area arts and cultural institutions with different missions and a range of resources. Each project will focus on solving a specific and well-defined entrepreneurial challenge related to dealing with the consequences of the pandemic. The projects will require extensive data collection and analysis.

Non-Disclosure Agreements: Partner organizations will provide student teams with confidential information. Students will be required to sign a confidentiality and intellectual property assignment agreement.

Course Requirements and Grading

Deliverables: The course will have five deliverables: (1) Team Launch Document (2) Situation Analysis, (3) Preliminary Draft of Partner Presentation, (4) Final Partner Presentation, and (5) Individual Learning Reflection.

Grading: Each student’s grade will be based on (1) Class Participation, (2) Quality of Team Deliverables, (3) Partner Input, (4) Team Member Peer Evaluation, and (5) Quality of Individual Learning Reflection.

Pre-Requisites

None

Cross-Registration

A limited number of places will be held for students from the Kennedy School of Government and the Graduate School of Design. The mix of students from diverse disciplines will contribute to both student learning and the range of solutions proposed for the entrepreneurial challenges faced by the course partners.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Students in Field Course: Entrepreneurial Failure will participate in the same 14 case method classroom sessions as students enrolled in the Q3 1.5-credit course Entrepreneurial Failure (course 1745). For information on the content of those sessions, see the course catalog description of Entrepreneurial Failure (course 1745). Students in the field course will not complete the final exam/final paper assigned in course 1745; instead, they will work on the team project described below.

This field course will focus on how entrepreneurs can fail well — preserving their relationships, reputations, and integrity; learning from the experience; and positioning themselves for their next career move. Class sessions will include a mix of case discussions, guest speakers, and student team presentations of project work. The full section will not meet for some sessions; these will be devoted to team work on projects.

In project teams of 3-4, students will conduct interviews with entrepreneurs and investors and other analyses to develop a deeper perspective on one aspect of failing well as an entrepreneur. Possible project topics will include:

• Why is it so difficult for entrepreneurs to decide whether and when to pull the plug on their struggling startup? How should they approach this decision? Where can they get the best advice?
• How can entrepreneurs who lead a struggling startup manage the intense psychological pressure they inevitably encounter—in particular, the risk to their personal relationships and their mental health?
• When they do decide to shut down, what should founders do to fail responsibly, leaving their personal and professional relationships and their integrity intact? What are the attributes of a “graceful” shutdown?
• Before and during a shutdown, how should entrepreneurs communicate with various stakeholders, including employees, investors, and customers? How should they balance a moral obligation to be transparent—and the need for advice that depends on transparency—with the risk that candor might accelerate their venture’s demise, causing valued employees to exit and investors to pass?
• Is there a “best practices” playbook for healing after failure?
• What should founders do to maximize personal learning from their startup’s failure?
• How does the nature/magnitude of an entrepreneur’s past prior experiences with personal or business influence the way they manage, learn from, and bounce back from their startup’s failure?
• How do entrepreneurs describe their experience with failure, for example, on LinkedIn? Do they attempt to camouflage the outcome to avoid stigmatization? Does this vary by gender? By country?
• How does the stigma associated with failure differ by country and culture? Are differences associated with rules regarding personal liability for losses in bankruptcy?
• What is the personal financial impact of entrepreneurial failure?
• What do entrepreneurs do next, after their startups fail? How do they think about the pros and cons of founding again? Do they frequently switch industries, and how does doing so impact future success odds? Are there gender patterns to these decisions?
• How can entrepreneurs maintain the relentless drive needed to succeed, but avoid having their entire identity and happiness tied to their venture’s success?

In addition to the final project, students will be assigned a few short essays, for example, a reflection on a past personal experience with failure and how/what they learned from it.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Course Details

The EF Startup Lab will be offered during Fall Q2. The co-requisite for the class is taking one of the two Entrepreneurial Finance classes in the Fall (either Q1/Q2 taught by Professor Matheson, or the EF Half Course taught in Q2 by Professor Bernstein).

This course is designed for students who plan to be intimately involved with a startup venture at some point in their career as a Founder, Joiner, Leader, Investor, Board Member, or Advisor.

The EF Startup Lab is an immersive project-based course in which small Teams of ~3 students work directly with real startups to analyze their financial strategy and statements and financing contracts by applying the key concepts and frameworks discussed in the Entrepreneurial Finance course. The Startup Lab was included as part of the Fall 2020 EF (which was taught virtually), and based on positive feedback, is now being “spun-out” and offered as a stand alone course.

The EF Startup Lab will allow students to get deep and longitudinal exposure to a single company’s context, strategy, business model, and financing strategy. This immersive exposure includes the intricacies of the firm’s financial and fundraising strategy, including a complete understanding of the investors’ agreements, term sheets, and other important contracts that affect firms’ operations. This approach allows students to experience first hand the complexities associated with the financial and financing challenges and decisions companies at these early stages face while attempting to scale and grow.

The Teams will be expected to generate three deliverables thorugh the course based on the three phases described below. The first two deliverables will be in written form and forensically describe the startup and its financial history. The final deliverable will be based on the third phase objective and include a pro foma recommendation for the company and be delivered as a final presentation to the company, and class.

The Team project will be comprised of these three main phases:

1. Evaluate the startup’s business model, financing needs, cash flow characteristics and potential enterprise value;
2. Evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the historical financing term sheets and other
3. contractual arrangements between the company and its investors and key partners;
4. Evaluate the company’s going forward growth strategy, financing needs and potential, and recommend appropriate sources of capital, financing structures and exit options.

The class size will be limited to 30 students to keep the discussions intimate and maximize cross-Team learning and collaboration. The course grade will be based 1/3 on class participation and 2/3 on Team project with all Team members receiving the same grade for their respective project.

The class will meet once per week during the Wednesday early evening sessions (10/27, 11/10, 11/17, and 12/1) to cover some specific EF frameworks, and to enable cross-Team sharing and project updates. We will also have two additional 1-hour meetings directly with the assigned company at the beginning and end of the course for the Teams to collect information and ask specific questions. The remainder of the allocated course time will be dedicated to the structured Team project work.

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This course teaches specific practical skills that are required to become an effective entrepreneur through acquisition. The course is not a case-based course. It will meet weekly and students will be required to complete assignments on topics relevant to buying a small company such as how to screen potential acquisition targets, the likely types, terms and amounts of debt financing, the typical deal terms and the items open to negotiations, the sources of equity investments, including search funds, private equity partnerships and individual investors. We will also learn about the due diligence process and legal concerns when buying a smaller company. We will have guests in most classes who have practical, hands-on experience.

The course will have practical exercises designed to help entrepreneurs complete their acquisitions. These include pitching to potential equity investors, prospecting for potential targets, seller cold calls and negotiating bank loans.

The seminar is designed for students with a serious interest in buying a small company early in their careers.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Educational Objectives

The course is designed to enable students to develop and grow their businesses. Doing so while on campus has several advantages, including access to resources (faculty time and attention, library and computer access); advice from your peers in a structured environment; and devoted blocks of time during your EC year to move your business forward while your team is all in one location. The course employs a combination of field methods, classroom exercises, cross-team interactions, and access to faculty, guest experts, and other advisors. The largest single allocation of time is for working with your team to make meaningful progress on your own business.

"Joiner" students who are interested in taking the class by joining a business with one or more existing members are strongly encouraged to do so. We will create opportunities for businesses with one or more members to meet and combine with joiners.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Students can expect to:

1. Summarize and critique their existing business, its strengths and weaknesses, and set priorities for moving the business forward, including the most pressing priorities to be addressed during the course itself.
2. Develop a strategy for taking the business to the next level, including a plan for funding, and a plan and timeline for reaching scale.
3. Give and receive feedback from other highly motivated student teams.
4. Meet frequently as a team with the faculty advisor.
5. Receive feedback and counsel from outside business advisors.
6. Have opportunities to pitch your work to angel, seed, and venture capital investors.

This course can be thought of as occupying a space between an IP and a traditional course, giving you an opportunity to work on something of great interest to you, while preserving many of the benefits of a larger course, including opportunities for guest speakers, feedback from your peers, and clearly delineated deliverables and milestones that act as commitment devices to push the business forward.

In the past the School has provided each Field X team with a modest grant of around $2,000 to help launch their business. While we cannot guarantee the grant program will continue this year, we hope and expect that it will.

A substantial number of Field X businesses have been funded by mentors and investors they met through the course. Several dozen teams from last year are running their businesses full-time now, most of whom have received funding of $500,000 or more; in some cases far more.

In terms of requirements, "in between an IP and a course" means that there will be almost-weekly class meetings, but there will not, in general, be substantial weekly homework or required preparation for class, other than that you work to push your business forward.

Who Should Enroll?

Students who are sufficiently excited about a business they are running, or a business they want to start immediately, that they want to focus on it in a serious way. Some, because they treasure the lessons they are learning from building a business. Some, because they think their business has a legitimate opportunity to grow rapidly and create a successful career path for them. And some because they believe their business can do a substantial amount of good for the world and so they want to continue working on it during their EC year and perhaps after graduation.

Course Deliverables

The main deliverable will be the team’s final presentation and the supporting slide deck and report. There will also be intermediate deliverables building up to that point. In short, expect to produce a Word document and a Powerpoint deck with descriptions of your business at the beginning of the course and a (perhaps similar, perhaps very different) version at the end of the course.

On the final day of class, students who wish to will have the opportunity to present their businesses to an audience of angel, seed and venture investors at our Pitch Day event. At our most recent Pitch Day, the first run over Zoom, around 350 investors attended.

Short FAQ:

Q: Can I take Field X if I am the only person involved in my business?

A: Yes, Field X welcomes teams of all sizes; including solo founders, multiple team members in the class, and teams with multiple members, only one of whom attends HBS and takes the course.

Q: What are classes like?

A: Most weeks the class consists of an hour-long interactive talk/discussion with a luminary, followed by an hour of "mini office hours" in which student teams pair up with mentors who can help their business. Past speakers have included venture capitalist Tim Draper, Shark Tank's Kevin O'Leary, stellar entrepreneurs like Yvonne Hao of PillPack and Charles Curran of Armored Things, and many others with wisdom to share.

Q: How will the course be different due to Covid-19?

A: We will do the classes and "mini office hours" with mentors via Zoom. The bad news is, in person would be better all else equal! The good news is, we expect far more mentors to join us for the class given the convenience of Zoom, leading to more great advice and more relationships built.

Meetings with the Professor and TA can still be in person if students wish, or they can be by Zoom for students who prefer that.

Q: Can I take the class if I just have an idea but I haven't started yet?

A: Yes, this is typically the situation of between a quarter and a half of the teams in the course.

Q: What if I don't even have an idea yet?

A: If you want to start a business but don't have an idea, we'd welcome you as a "joiner" in Field X -- we will match you up with a team that is doing something you find exciting and that is looking to add talent. If you want to start your own business and have a nascent idea, we can work with you to build it into something real.

Q: How about the other side of the coin, what if it's an old family business I'll be taking over, something like that?

A: Yes, that's also fine.

Q: Is Field X aimed at any particular sector, like tech?

A: No, Field X teams run the gamut, every year we have consumer, healthcare, finance, real estate, tech, arts and entertainment, social enterprise, you name it.

Q: What if my business has modest goals?

A: That's fine, in Field X we're happy to work with teams that want to serve a small need as well as teams with enormous ambition.

Q: If I take Field X, can I take Field Y? Do I have to take Field Y too?

A: You can take just X, just Y, or X and Y.

Cross Registration

Cross-registrants are welcome to take the course.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Educational Objectives

The course is designed to enable students to develop and grow their businesses. Doing so while on campus has several advantages, including access to resources (faculty time and attention, library and computer access); advice from your peers in a structured environment; and devoted blocks of time during your EC year to move your business forward while your team is all in one location. The course employs a combination of field methods, classroom exercises, cross-team interactions, and access to faculty, guest experts, and other advisors. The largest single allocation of time is for working with your team to make meaningful progress on your own business.

Several dozen teams from last year are running their businesses full-time now, most of whom have received funding of $500,000 or more; in some cases far more.

NOTE ALSO: BECAUSE THIS COURSE HAS MANY CHARACTERISTICS OF AN INDEPENDENT STUDY, THIS CLASS, UNLIKE FIELD X, COUNTS TOWARD THE MAXIMUM NUMBER OF IP CREDITS A STUDENT CAN RECEIVE. Thus if the rule is that you can do three IPs in your EC year, if you take Field Y you can only do a maximum of two other IPs (6 credits total).

Students can expect to:

1. Summarize and critique their existing business, its strengths and weaknesses, and set priorities for moving the business forward, including the most pressing priorities to be addressed during the course itself.
2. Develop a strategy for taking the business to the next level, including a plan for funding, and a plan and timeline for reaching scale.
3. Give and receive feedback from other highly motivated student teams.
4. Meet frequently as a team with the faculty advisor.
5. Receive feedback and counsel from outside business advisors.
6. Have opportunities to pitch your work to angel, seed, and venture capital investors.

This course can be thought of as occupying a space between an IP and a traditional course, giving you an opportunity to work on something of great interest to you, while preserving many of the benefits of a larger course, including opportunities for guest speakers, feedback from your peers, and clearly delineated deliverables and milestones that act as commitment devices to push the business forward. In terms of requirements, "in between an IP and a course" means that there will be some class meetings, but not every week. Coursework will be focused on improving and growing your business.

Who Should Enroll?

• Students who took Field X and who are still running and growing their businesses

• Students who are starting and/or running businesses in Spring of their EC year and who did not take Field X.

Course Deliverables

The main deliverable will be the team’s final presentation and the supporting slide deck and report. There will also be intermediate deliverables building up to that point. In short, expect to produce a Word document and a Powerpoint deck with descriptions of your business at the beginning of the course and a (perhaps similar, perhaps very different) version at the end of the course.

We will work hard in the course to connect students with sources of funding, including angel, seed, and venture investors. At the end of the semester there will be an opportunity for each team to present their business to a room full of such investors; in the past many fruitful relationships have been initiated through these presentations.

Short FAQ:

Q: Can I take Field Y if I didn't take Field X? If I did?!

A: Yes to both. Field Y is open to both students who took Field X and those who didn't. If we are above capacity we will give priority to students who took Field X.

Q: Can I take Field Y if I am the only person involved in my business?

A: Yes, Field Y welcomes teams of all sizes; including solo founders, multiple team members in the class, and teams with multiple members, only one of whom attends HBS and takes the course.

Q: What are classes like?

A: Most weeks the class consists of an hour-long interactive talk/discussion with a luminary, followed by an hour of "mini office hours" in which student teams pair up with mentors who can help their business. Past speakers have included venture capitalist Tim Draper, Shark Tank's Kevin O'Leary, stellar entrepreneurs like Yvonne Hao of PillPack and Charles Curran of Armored Things, and many others with wisdom to share.

Q: How will the course be different due to Covid-19?

A: We will do the classes and "mini office hours" with mentors via Zoom. The bad news is, in person would be better all else equal! The good news is, we expect far more mentors to join us for the class given the convenience of Zoom, leading to more great advice and more relationships built.

Meetings with the Professor and TA can still be in person if students wish, or they can be by Zoom for students who prefer that.

Q: Can I take the class if I just have an idea but I haven't started yet?

A: Yes, this is typically the situation of between a quarter and a third of the teams in the course.

Q: What if I don't even have an idea yet?

A: If you want to start a business but don't have an idea, we'd welcome you as a "joiner" in Field Y -- we will match you up with a team that is doing something you find exciting and that is looking to add talent. If you want to start your own business and have a nascent idea, we can work with you to build it into something real.

Q: How about the other side of the coin, what if it's an old family business I'll be taking over, something like that?

A: Yes, that's also fine.

Q: Is Field Y aimed at any particular sector, like tech?

A: No, Field Y teams run the gamut, every year we have consumer, healthcare, finance, real estate, tech, arts and entertainment, social enterprise, you name it.

Q: What if my business has modest goals?

A: That's fine, in Field Y we're happy to work with teams that want to serve a small need as well as teams with enormous ambition.

Cross Registration

Cross-registrants are welcome to take the course.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Whether you are a founder, CEO, general manager, private equity or Venture investor, you will all

experience the same problem: how do you increase sales in your company?

This field course will enable you to work with a company to help develop their sales and go to market strategy. You can work with an existing company or your own startup. Your objective will be to experiment with different alternatives and grow revenue. You could learn various go to market sales tactics , when they should be used and the pros and cons of each. You could define a new route to market, build a modern sales playbook, or pursue some other strategy. This field course will be designed to put into practice the tactics and strategies covered in Entrepreneurial Sales (ES), although taking ES is not a requirement for the field course.

Groups of three or four will work closely with a selected company, or on your own venture. Course will have five in-person classes where experts in specific go to market functions will speak to the field course group. Grades are based on the final project deliverable and class participation.

Course objectives include:

1. What is the best go to market model for the sponsoring company? Direct sales, indirect channel sales or another model. Why?

2. What go to market/sales playbooks are used by similar companies? How are they similar or

different? What drives these differences

3. How should you implement your recommendations?

Companies that are participating in the field study:

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Educational Objectives

As impact investing has emerged as a new, fast-growing category of private investing, so too has the awareness of the stark disparity between access to capital among Black, Latinx and immigrant small business owners who are poorly served by the small business finance sector. The educational objective of the field course is to understand why certain business founders lack access to capital and work to understand whether and how small investments from an HBS Impact Investment Fund of $25,000 to $50,000 might help these businesses grow.

Specifically, the field course will seek to focus on three things:

• To provide hands-on experiential learning in thinking about the financial, commercial and operational diligence of small businesses, as well as to provide hands-on experience with the investment process, from sourcing opportunities, working with founders, negotiating with co-investors, engaging advisors to presenting to an investment committee and moving into the mechanics closing an investment.
• To understand the barriers in access to capital (financial, social and human) that have historically hindered growth in Black, Latinx and immigrant small businesses in the Boston region, and nationally
• To increase familiarity and collaboration between HBS students and businesses (including their customers and employees) in communities in and around Boston that they might not otherwise be familiar with.

Course Content and Organization

The course primarily involves small teams of students (3-5 per team) conducting investment due diligence on local Black, Latinx and immigrant small business owners who are looking for investment to scale their businesses. In partnership with a number of Boston-area networks (e.g. Boston Impact Initiative, Foundation for Business Equity, New Profit, Visible Hands) that are seeking to promote the growth of small businesses, teams of students will be conducting financial, commercial and operational diligence on prospective investments from the HBS Impact Investments Fund. Students will also be providing business advisory support for companies that have already been supported with investment in prior years.

Course Requirements and Grading

The final deliverables will be a due diligence plan to assess the business from a commercial, operational and impact perspective; a final investment memo that summarizes the diligence and recommends an investment (or not); a financial model that is the basis for informing the investment decision; and an impact plan that outlines how the business will deliver impact. The course grade will have the following components:

• Due Diligence Plan: 20%
• Investment Memo (with financial model and impact plan): 40%
• Investment Committee Presentation: 10%
• Class Participation: 30%

Pre-Requisites

None

Cross-Registrants/Auditors

The course is open Kennedy School of Government students enrolled in a joint MBA program.

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The greater Boston area is home to some of the world’s finest research laboratories and hospitals, and together secure billions of dollars in federal, state, non-profit, and private funding to advance the frontiers of knowledge. To bring these technologies to market, there is an ever-growing need for entrepreneurs who can work in technical multidisciplinary teams, secure funding, and pursue commercial opportunities.

The Lab to Market field course is designed to outline the path from the very early discoveries made in R&D labs to their development for commercial use. The course is designed for students who want to pursue entrepreneurship in science and technology, anticipate leading market launch teams in incumbent organizations, or are interested in becoming investors.

The course covers such issues as creating value from science and technology innovations, business model design, value creation and capture strategies, financing, intellectual property, and organizational models of science and technology-based ventures.

By design, approximately 50% of the students in the class will be cross-registrants from Harvard Medical School, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard Law School, and the MIT Sloan Fellows Program. This highly diverse student body provides a unique opportunity for cross-disciplinary learning.

Students will work in multidisciplinary teams to develop business plans around real intellectual property emerging from world-class laboratories at Harvard, MIT, various teaching hospitals, and other local scientific research institutions. Course faculty will provide mentoring and advice for project teams, and students will work directly with principal investigators from these research labs. Many past projects have entered and performed well in business plan competitions, with several alumni entering the science-based startup sphere as co-founders or executives afterward.

HBS Lab to Market is open to cross-registrants. Interested cross-registrants should submit a resume here. The faculty will review all cross-registration candidates and select a subset that will reflect a balanced diversity of relevant fields of study to create interdisciplinary student teams.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Overview and Career Focus

Product Management 101 (PM 101) is designed for students who are seeking Product Management careers in startups or larger technology firms. This course would also be relevant for anyone looking to understand the science behind Product Management in a leadership role. This course is appropriate for students with no product management experience to entry level product management experience. The focus is on B2B or B2C digital products, however many of the concepts covered can be applied to non-digital product roles.

Educational Objectives

This course will take the perspective of a product manager or product executive inside an organization leading the vision and development of a software product. We’ll cover software product lifecycles, including starting new products and expanding existing products. The skills learned in this course will be applicable to a wide array of product management scenarios, agnostic of industry. Some of the topics we’ll cover include setting product strategies and visions, understanding your customer needs, experimenting to validate ideas, working with developers and designers, and developing Minimum Viable Products.

Course Organization

*Please note, this course has changed from a previous version.*

This course is organized into weekly themes building upon the foundations of great Product Management and Product Leadership. We will utilize three approaches to learning—traditional case-based classes, talks by product leaders, and hands-on projects.

The first class of the week will consist of cases. The required readings will examine the success and failure stories of existing products and product companies. Many class sessions will use the “live case” format in which students will actively engage with the case protagonist in the analysis and proposed solution to the issues presented in the case.

The second class of the week will focus on application of the principles learned that week. This will be a mix of lecture and practice, with students working on a well defined product challenge.

In previous years, students would work on their own startups, with founder and joiner groups. This year, we will be focusing on individual work and class projects that relate to existing products in the market. There will be an opportunity for students who successfully complete PM101 to gain hands-on experience building products in PM102.

Course Requirements and Grading

There are no pre-reqs for this course.

Grading: Each student’s grade will be based on (1) quality of course deliverables, (2) class participation, (3) personal reflection and (4) final project.

Deliverables: The course will have four deliverables:

(1) creation of wireframes for a product - students will choose from a few problems to conceptualize and wireframe a solution that will satisfy the needs of the target customer

(2) evaluation of a product requirements document - students will be given a product requirements document to evaluate and critique

(3) personal reflection - a small essay on what you learned during class

(4) and the final project, a product feature pitch - this is a common interview question for Product Managers applying for jobs, and here you get to practice it and learn how to nail the answer. Students will choose a product they would like to improve, and create a presentation on how they would do that as if working as a product manager in that company. Students will need to present that pitch in a short video.

Spring Term Options

Students who wish to practice their Product Management skills on real life projects can enroll in the Spring Term field course, Product Management 102 (HBS course 6702).

Students will be matched with a real life project in a company where they will act as a product manager on a well defined challenge. This will provide students with a chance to work with stakeholders, developers, and designers just as they would in a full time product management role.

PM102 is application only, and project based. PM101 is a prerequisite for students enrolling in PM102. Students will be able to bring their own projects from outside companies, or will be matched with course selected projects from the Harvard community or Boston technology community. All outside projects must be approved by the instructor.

Pre-Requisites

None

Cross-Registrants/Auditors

The course is open to cross-registrants by petition only.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Course Overview

Private Equity Projects is a hybrid field and lecture series which provides the opportunity to work hands-on with leading private equity firms on projects of “mutual value” and to learn about the so many things critical to success in PE beyond the transaction itself. Over thirty firms have participated with an over 90% requested renewal rate.

Through project work, students will get the opportunity to "practice private equity" in a setting as close to authentic as possible. Projects will entail many different aspects of private equity, and students will work directly with private equity firms and/or portfolio companies. A final presentation is made to a component of the private equity firm investment committee. Project work is designed to be of mutual value to students and the PE partner. Students are permitted, upon firm review, to list the projects and the firm on their resumes.

The course is structured so that students can be exposed to the inner workings of up to ten PE firms at once. Private equity firms hosting student projects for the 2022 year could include Abry Partners, Advent, Apollo, Bain Capital, CD&R, Great Hill, KKR, L Catterton, New Mountain, Odyssey, Warburg, Summit Partners, and TH Lee. The course has enjoyed very high ratings from both the PE firms and students for several years and is an excellent relationship-building opportunity.

Projects range from sector vertical analysis, re-underwriting failed deals, deal sourcing, platform deal add-on strategies, and much more. The workload is carefully managed.

In addition to the projects, a very popular slate of PE professionals provides full-class lectures on a variety of PE topics, including Deal Sourcing, Portfolio Operations, Capital Formation, PE CEO's, First Time Funds, Career Management, Recent Alumni Retrospectives, "Getting Paid" and Product Line Extensions. The professor pushes guests hard to maximize learning for the students.

Professor Dionne also provides a popular Random Musings report stemming from his role as Blackstone Senior Advisor, his PE fund formation business, and director of many companies.

There is virtually no overlap with Starting Your Private Investment Firm, which Professor Dionne co-founded as a SIP, or PE Finance. Professor Dionne will make inquiries of professors of each course and modify content as needed.

Who Teaches This Course?

The course will be taught by John Dionne, a Blackstone Senior Advisor and Senior Managing Director of seventeen years. Mr. Dionne was a Member of the Private Equity and GSO investment committees and has led investments totaling $4 billion of equity over his career in Distressed and PE investing. He co-founded five multi-billion investment vehicles, including Blackstone's Tactical Opportunities Fund, its Energy fund, and its Distressed Securities Fund. He has served on fourteen boards and raised more than $30 billion in equity capital.

Professor Dionne ensures he is accessible to the various needs of his students.

Enrollment

The course could be open for limited cross-registration, and enrollment will be limited to 50 students.

Enrollment is by application only. To apply, please submit your CV and a brief one-page summary explaining your interest in the course to this link by January 7th, 2022. Early applicants are encouraged.

Due to the nature of some EC Field Courses, students may be required to sign a legal agreement requested by project/business partner organizations. Additional requirements and documentation may also be asked of students by organizations. While students are typically not charged a course fee for taking an EC field course, students may be responsible for minimal out-of-pocket costs (varies per course); however, funding is provided for local travel to partner locations.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Applications, to be reviewed by Prof. Fleiss, must be submitted by January 10th, through this form. which provides more details on specific projects. Applicants will be informed of enrollment decisions on or before January 14. Successful applicants who choose to enroll will use the Add/Drop process as needed to adjust other credits for the term.

Course Overview Video

Course Overview

This field-based course represents a unique opportunity for students to apply the skills learned in the classroom to a real-world public-market investment setting. Students will partner with an investment firm to work directly and deeply on an investment theme or question. In conjunction with their sponsor, students will develop a process and plan and execute it during the 14-week semester.

Students will learn first-hand the challenges and issues surrounding the diligence of an investment idea, the sourcing of opportunities, implementation, and portfolio and risk management. Students will develop and refine their investment process organization, creating a framework for investing. This should allow them to better utilize and develop pattern recognition and allow them to ponder:

What is this firm's edge? How do they add alpha? How is the investment industry changing?

Is the industry in a crisis?

This experience will not only help students shape their skills as investors-- modeling, pitching, participating on an investment committee--but also continue to build perspective on the eco-system of investment management.

Learning Objectives

• Pattern recognition: Refine and develop a framework for investing
• Investment process organization: expose students to the investment process beyond research, from sourcing to implementation
• Develop more robust modeling and pitching skills
• Participate in an investment committee setting
• Work and develop relationships with incredible investors

Course Content

Field-Based Work: Teams of three will work with an investment firm on a specific investment theme or question; students will be allowed to rank top choices from a curated list of projects. Students will meet with their sponsor at least three times during the semester-- an introductory meeting, an in-person, and a final presentation. Students are expected to check in weekly with their sponsor. A final presentation will be given to their sponsors-- presented in front of the investment committee and senior management team. Students are expected to use their time with sponsors to think through and develop a research process, to plan out time management, to better understand other issues surrounding an investment such as legal, trading and risk management. Students should spend time shadowing other functions within the firm to better grasp the investment process.

The majority of the work will be done independently by the students using the resources at HBS and from the sponsoring firms. Students must be proactive and motivated; sponsors are giving their time for these projects and students must respect this commitment and deliver a strong product.

Classroom Setting: In addition to the project work, we will meet together for 8-10 sessions over the course of the semester. Classroom time will be used for a mix of skill building, guests and time to come together to share challenges, learn from each other and seek feedback across teams. Interactive guest lectures will provide focus on building skills in the investment process from data sourcing and research to risk management and operations to asset allocation. The content of these sessions will help support the work students are doing in the field; there may also be time outside of the classroom to engage these guests for feedback on the projects. Students will be expected to present twice during the semester. There will be a brief presentation mid-way through the semester to update the class on the project and their firm. Final presentations will simulate an investment committee, allowing peers to actively participate in an investment committee-like setting. Teams will be expected to have regular meetings with faculty.

Course Requirements and Grading

In addition to attending all the classroom discussions, students are expected to spend 3-5 hours a week working on their projects. Students will present twice over the semester to their peers and also give one final presentation to the investment committee of their sponsoring firm.

Students will be asked to submit their final presentation along with a short self-reflection at the end of the semester. These

materials in combination with peer and company feedback and classroom participation will determine a student's grade.

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Educational Objectives

Black-owned businesses are important components of the US economy and in 2016 employed over a million people and generated more than $104 billion in sales. They are essential contributors to the economic vitality of the Black community and their need for help during this turbulent time is both acute and urgent. Ensuring that these businesses survive in the current circumstances will require fundamental shifts in how private-, public-, and social sector organizations come together to support them.

‘Scaling Minority Businesses” is designed to meet that challenge and leverage the intellectual power and community of Harvard Business School to address the vital needs of Black-owned enterprises as they face the twin tasks of surviving and growing. It will provide students with the opportunity to draw upon and strengthen their learnings from a range of RC courses including, but not limited to, TEM, Marketing, Strategy, and TOM. Students will receive hands-on experience wrestling with key issues in scaling a small business and will gain an understanding of the historic and systemic barriers to growth faced by Black businesses.

Course Content and Organization

The course is a mix of traditional case-based classes and hands-on consulting assignments with Black-owned businesses in the greater Boston-area. There are three course modules:

• Challenges of systemic racism and inequities in business and society
• Challenges of access to capital
• Challenges of access to customers

The cases and background readings will examine the range of issues faced by Black businesses including racial discrimination, limited access to capital, and difficulties in establishing government and corporate supplier relationships. Students will also hear from a range of speakers, including policy experts and prominent businesspeople, who will discuss the challenges and opportunities faced by Black-owned businesses.

The hands on projects will entail students working in small teams directly with a scaling Black-owned business (typically > $1m in revenue) to tackle a well-defined challenge or growth opportunity. To facilitate collaboration, students will be required to sign a non-disclosure agreement covering their work in the course.

Course Requirements and Grading

Deliverables: The course will have six deliverables: (1) team launch document, (2) situation analysis, (3) draft presentation, (4) final presentation, (5) peer evaluation, and (6) individual reflection.

Grading: Each student’s grade will be based on (1) quality of team’s final presentation and viability of recommendations, (2) class participation, (3) peer evaluation, (4) situation analysis, (5) draft presentation, and (6) personal reflection.

Pre-Requisites

None

Cross-Registrants/Auditors

The course is open to cross-registrant students.

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Application can be found here. Accepted students will be notified by Dec 23, 2021

Accepted students will automatically be enrolled in the Rock Accelerator program.

Career Focus

Startup Operations is designed for three types of students:

1. Those who have already launched or are about to launch a startup. See the course application for more details about company stage expectations.
2. Those who are curious about working for early stage startups or know they want to found a venture but don't have an idea yet.
3. Those who are interested in investing in startups.

There is no specific industry focus for this course - all sectors and business models apply - including social enterprise, nonprofits and bootstrapped businesses.

This skills-building, field course complements concepts covered in Product Management 101/102, Launching Tech Ventures, Entrepreneurial Sales and Marketing, Founders Journey and Field X.

Educational Objectives

This course is designed to provide hands-on guidance through the early stages of building your business. Students will test assumptions and hypotheses to evolve their product, build their strategic and operating roadmaps, create organizational plans and develop skills necessary to manage the many complexities of operating a startup. Sessions will feature skill-building exercises led by the instructor and outside experts as well as weekly peer-to-peer critiques on work-in-progress. All registered students are encouraged to work as a cohort to support each other through their networks and to offer insights based on their own experiences.

Course Content

Through a series of class exercises and intimate conversations with startup founders and experienced startup leaders, students examine operational challenges in early stage startups. Taking the perspective that there is more to just “build it and they will come”, the course will explore four modules:

1. Getting To Product Market Fit: Exploring best practices for customer feedback, solution iteration, metrics that matter and developing a product and operations roadmap.
2. Establishing The Startup Organization: Structuring early teams and the processes by which to operate your business. Topics will include: Who to hire and when - from technical hires and managing freelancers/first hires to product managers, operations, support and other key team members. Cross-functional communication from across and between the organization to external communication with customers, partners and investors - and role shifting as the organization scales.
3. Startup Business Operations We will explore legal matters, budgets, contracts and early go-to-market strategies such as pricing and product marketing.
4. Startup Evolution As companies grow and scale, operations and products will evolve. We will explore when and how to pivot, shift and adapt to these changes as your companies evolve.

The course is highly focused on ensuring each team’s business evolves towards a success metric unique to their product and organization. Therefore, each team will build a Goals & Milestones plan as their first deliverable. Meeting these milestones will be a large percentage of the course grade. Session participation, including weekly peer-to-peer critiques, routine session deliverables, and a final reflection will make up the remaining elements of the individual grade. Light weekly readings, podcasts and films will be required in prep for each session. All readings and deliverables are designed to move student companies forward.

In addition to course content and materials, all students enrolled in the course will receive:

• access to a curated list of relevant industry and functional expert mentors; and
• automatic enrollment in the Rock Accelerator program which includes funding, deep-dive coaching sessions with Executives in Residence or Fellows, routine mentor check-ins, pitch feedback and opportunities to pitch for additional seed funding.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

This field course teaches specific practical skills that are required to become an effective manager, CEO, or operator of a small or medium enterprise. The course is not a case-based course. It will meet weekly and students will be required to complete assignments on topics relevant to creating enterprise value in a company such as: how to communicate with employees of a newly acquired firm, improving the financial reporting and metrics capabilities, selling your service/product, having difficult conversations with employees, recruiting and building an “A” team, managing ongoing capital structure, and allocating capital over time. Creating value through follow-on acquisition, building sales teams, and building a repeatable product/service offering will be explored. Guests who have practical, hands-on experience will be a part of each class. The course will feature practical exercises designed to help entrepreneurs create value in small and medium enterprises. Class sessions will include robust student discussion and debate, presentations, role playing, and guest immersion. The course is designed for students with a serious interest in buying or operating a small or medium enterprise early in their careers. Grading will be based on 50% class participation and in-class exercises, 25% on pre-class assignments, and 25% final paper/project.

Course Overview

The course will enable students to analyze and understand how financial business decisions affect the overall welfare of society. The course will emphasize situations in which the pursuit of business profits both positively and negatively affect their communities, including their employees, local physical and social environments, educational and cultural opportunities and the like. It will also explore the larger impact of capitalism on economic growth and living standards, along with the role that capitalism can play and has played in exacerbating and/or ameliorating broader societal challenges, including climate change, environmental degradation, inequality, and social immobility. The course will delve into current topics and concerns with the goal of providing a less political and more analytical framework for students to form their own views about these important societal issues.

Course Structure

1) Course overview and empirical evidence / discussion on the role of capitalism and capital markets in economic development

2) A series of “micro” cases. Representative themes: entrepreneurship and local development, shareholder vs. stakeholder conflict

3) A series of more macro/system-oriented cases on businesses operating in different economics regimes. Representative themes: financial market development, trade protectionism, corporate governance

4) Concluding discussion of broader themes

One exciting aspect about the course is that we anticipate other (mostly senior) HBS faculty will teach and share their expertise as relevant.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Career Focus

This course is suitable for anyone who is interested in owning, managing or investing in smaller businesses.

Educational Objectives

The course focuses on how to manage smaller businesses with an emphasis on the financial aspects of buying and growing these businesses. The cases are designed to give students practical knowledge that will be immediately helpful if they plan to own or manage a small business, provide consulting or financial services to these businesses, or invest in smaller businesses. These smaller businesses are privately owned, are typically led by a CEO/entrepreneur supported by a very small management team, produce a service or product for which a current profitable business model exists (as distinct from many VC-backed developmental businesses), and frequently the businesses are of a scale that they can be acquired and owned by individuals instead of institutions or families. The managerial and financial challenges for these firms are different from those of larger, public firms and often require a different approach because of their small scale, lack of liquidity and the difficulty of attracting and deploying capital. The careers of small business entrepreneurs are also very different from the employees of larger firms, and we explore those differences through numerous guests and a few cases that focus on the advantages and disadvantages of the career choice.

Click on this link to see comments of former HBS students who discuss why they chose a career in entrepreneurship through acquisition: https://courseware.hbs.edu/video/?v=0_cteitfd6

Course Content and Organization

The course first focuses on how to buy a small business. We begin with a case of two HBS MBAs who chose to purchase a small business using a search fund instead of pursuing a more traditional career path. The case tracks their search process and highlights the challenges encountered when acquiring a small business. We then learn about different ways to fund a search through five other acquisitions by HBS graduates. We then focus on the market for smaller firms including cases about a private equity firm that operates in the small business market and a case about a merchant bank that combines consulting with financial services for smaller firms.

We then focus on how to successfully manage the financial aspects of smaller firms. We explore the difficulty of growing these firms and explore which business models are more likely to succeed. And, of course, we explore how these businesses finance themselves as they grow. These smaller firms, unlike bigger firms, often face tradeoffs between liquidity and profitability, and a common feature of successful firms seems to be a willingness to sacrifice profitability for liquidity. These tradeoffs are particularly relevant to acquisitions made by recent MBA graduates as they navigated through the Great Recession and we discuss three recent acquisitions that faced significant financial hurdles.

We study capital investment decisions made by smaller businesses, decisions that emphasize financial capacity and lifestyle choices instead of maximizing market value. We study alternative growth strategies including approaches to sales force management in the context of a smaller firm. We also learn about the special problems that confront smaller business like customer concentration and different objectives between outside investors and managers.

We conclude the course with integrative cases that follow the experience of two recent MBA graduates as they search for a smaller company, acquire it and grow it successfully. They confront the decision of when to sell the business so that they can realize the benefits of their entrepreneurial venture.

The course is a prerequisite for the EC field course, Entrepreneurship through Acquisition, which is offered in the spring term.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Course Overview

The course will provide a survey of the global food and agribusiness system. While studying the management problems of farmers, processors, branded consumer goods manufacturers and food retailers, we will consider consumer trends, technological advances, public policy issues, food safety, and risk management. The pervasiveness of food and agribusiness makes the course suitable for future consultants and investment bankers in addition to those who have a direct interest in the industry; it may also be of interest as a general management course due to its integrative, cross-functional approach and emphasis on strategy. The course may also appeal to students with interests in political economy and business-government relations, since the firm's ability to capture value is affected by regulatory institutions at the national and global levels.

Content

The structure of the course may evolve before the spring semester, but a likely outline is as follows:

The Agribusiness Value Chain
The module provides insight into the typical challenges faced by players in the value chain from input suppliers (seeds and "traits", machinery) to food manufacturers (how to adapt to powerful retailers and increased scrutiny of nutritional attributes) to retailers and consumers (from apparently short-term fads such as 'low carb' diets to long-term changes in demographics and eating habits).

The Global Food Industry
What was once the most local of industries is becoming global. We study the forces causing the industry to evolve and the responses of firms (vertical integration, acquisitions, alliances and partnering) and countries (subsidies, tariffs, self-sufficiency) to these changes.

Food Safety and Environmental Sustainability
Food recalls get a lot of visibility but, at least in developed countries, food is plentiful and remarkably safe to eat despite the distances much of it travels. However, outbreaks of "Mad Cow" disease and other food safety scares have heightened consumer sensitivity. Traceability has become an increasingly important factor in food production. In addition, more and more consumers are asking where and how their food is produced, and companies are being judged according to their environmental impact. In addition, growers confront problems of land scarcity and water shortage, and the challenge of feeding nine billion increasingly prosperous mid-century people may be significant.

Risk Management
The global food system is prone to shocks from weather and fluctuating demand. We will study how firms seek to control risk through the use of the futures market, diversification, and integration.

Current Issues
Every January, nearly 200 executives come to the HBS campus to discuss newly written cases on current topics (e.g., nutrition, obesity, the political economy of agriculture and trade, labor issues, food safety, organic and natural foods). The MBA course will include some of these fresh cases. It is expected (but not guaranteed) that many of these cases will feature, as a guest, a senior executive from these companies.

Course Requirements

The course is offered on a 28 session plus exam basis. There may also be a modest, but graded, group project for which time will be allocated during the course.

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Educational Objectives

Founders Journey focuses on the human side of building an entrepreneurial venture. How do you assemble, motivate and lead a team when you have big ambitions, limited resources and a compass instead of a map? The course examines the choices founders face while assembling and structuring an entrepreneurial team. These decisions are often made without careful consideration of the range of options available and tradeoffs between them. Several studies have shown that these choices are a primary driver of the ultimate success or failure of the venture. The course starts with an examination of the choices a founder makes in selecting a founding team, choosing a business model and raising capital from angels or institutional investors. Subsequent modules explore the decisions entrepreneurs make in adding structure and formal processes as the organization goes through multiple phases of growth. The final module addresses the question of when and how the founder should exit the business. All three modules address the personal, organizational and business model challenges of dealing with the entrepreneurial roller coaster. This course is for students who are interested in founding their own high growth ventures, joining an entrepreneurial firm or working with entrepreneurs as investors or advisors. It provides students with tools, practices and frameworks for succeeding in the face of uncertainty and for increasing their resilience while pursuing difficult challenges.

Course Content and Organization

The course is divided into three modules that cover key milestones in a Founders' Journey.

Start: The first module covers the most important choices in structuring the founding team. Who do you include in the founding team? How do you structure roles and relationships within the team? How do you divide equity? It examines different types of founding teams – solo founders, founding with friends, founding with family members or close friends. What are the benefits and costs of each structure? It also examines the fit between the founding team and the business model and the stresses caused by the constant need to adapt. What happens when you need to pivot? What are the roles and rights of early investors and Board members? What happens when the venture outgrows your ability to lead it?

Build: The second module covers team choices after the venture has achieved Product Market Fit. The founder has to operationalize the business and establish processes to deliver on the promise. Strengths in the first phase of the venture become weaknesses. Generalists get replaced by functional specialists. Individual initiative gets augmented by bounded processes. How can you set up the structure, process, culture, and resources to deal with growth? What skills do you need to lead the organization through changes and growth (hiring, leading, firing)? How should you manage key external relationships with customers, suppliers, partners, board members, and investors?

Exit: The final module covers the returns from entrepreneurship. It addresses the most difficult and consequential choices entrepreneurs face. What does success and failure mean in the context of entrepreneurship? How do you decide when to quit and when to double down? How do you balance the needs of the company with your own personal goals and skills? How can you sustain your physical and mental well-being in an often turbulent and emotionally taxing environment? We examine choices made by entrepreneurs who have succeeded beyond their expectations and some where they succeeded despite having to close their ventures.

Most classes are structured around a mix of cases and experiential learning. Approximately 30% of the classes will be simulation-style exercises or workshops. For example, students structure agreements with co-founders or investors; source, select and make offers to potential partners and employees; provide difficult feedback or fire employees; and negotiate terms for selling or closing their companies. Approximately 50 percent of classes have the case protagonists as guests.

Students write reflections at the end of each module, and submit regular interactive assignments in lieu of a final exam.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Course Overview

Data and experiments are increasingly used to guide managerial decision-making. Large tech companies run thousands of experiments per year to test everything from product design to pricing to which markets to enter and how. Human resource and people analytics departments use experiments to understand which incentive systems are most effective. Marketers run experiments to understand which advertisements increase sales. Governments run experiments to evaluate policies in areas ranging from education to encouraging entrepreneurship. More broadly, industries ranging from consulting to tech depend on systematic data analysis to complement managerial judgment.

Effective strategy and managerial judgment in today’s world requires a foundational understanding of data and experiments, which is a core component of the modern analytics toolkit. The overarching goal of the course is to help students gain effective tools and leverage data and experimental insights to inform managerial and strategic decisions in an increasingly complex and data-driven world.

Course Structure

The course has three modules:

Module 1: Finding signal in the noise

The world is increasingly filled with data, and we are regularly bombarded with facts and figures. Being a good consumer of data analytics starts with gaining a basic understanding of data. Drawing on research from behavioral economics and applied econometrics, this module will introduce MBA students to a set of common mistakes people make when interpreting data, and how to avoid these mistakes. It will help them be good consumers of data, and to diagnose whether or not a fact is compelling. Students will learn to recognize common challenges of observational data. The module will also introduce students to being producers of basic visualizations and summaries of data, allowing them to transparently communicate using data. The goal is to help students become more fluent in thinking about data.

Module 2: Leveraging experiments

Armed with a basic fluency in data, module 2 will help students to develop a toolkit around a powerful approach to identifying causal relationships – experiments. This module will help students gain an appreciation of the value of experimentation. It will provide a foundational understanding of how to interpret and design experiments in an organization. And, it will more broadly help them to approach questions with a causal lens.

This module focuses on three broad questions:

• When should organizations run experiments? Through case studies, the course will help students to approach managerial problems with an experimental mindset, and shed light on the types of insight that can be gained from experiments, as well as the disasters that can be avoided through careful experimental analysis.
• What are the core concepts involved in designing and interpreting an experiment? The course will develop frameworks for interpreting, designing, and analyzing experiments, provide a solid understanding of experimental methods, and offer insights on how to identify the mistakes even smart leaders and managers make when they try to gather and interpret data that will guide their strategic decisions.
• How should managers incorporate experimental evidence into managerial decisions? This course will develop frameworks for students to better understand and address the challenges that arise in using experiments to inform managerial judgment. Examining real-world experiments that organizations have run, students will gain an understanding of how experimental evidence fits into the broader picture and how managers can move from experimental evidence to decisions.

Module 3: Creating a culture of data driven decision making

This module will look at the broader role of data and experiments within organizations. It will go through cases of organizations - ranging from Airbnb and StubHub to the UK tax department to the National Basketball Association - that made the transition to taking a more data driven approach. This module will explore lessons that these and organizations learned along the way, and develop a toolkit for creating a culture of data-driven decisions.

Course format and focus

The focus will draw heavily on the tech sector (which has been an early adopter of data analytics). However, the lessons will apply more broadly, and the course will explore a variety of contexts, such as platform design, strategy, operations, human resources, and marketing. The course will consist of a combination of case studies, book chapters and articles, as well as guest discussions and panels. The course will involve a final project. No technical background is required.

For more discussion of the content of the types of topics covered in the course, please see this article: https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/steer-clear-of-the-blind-spots-that-derail-experiments

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Course Overview

The course will assess the origins, context and implications of climate change for business and society. It will explore how and why we have created climate change; how it will change the world we live in; and how we can and will respond to it. The course will consider the scientific, economic, social, political, and ethical context of that response. It will also be explicitly an exploratory course, with the goal of developing/refining an approach for teaching climate change at HBS.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Course Overview and Objectives

Global Energy in Transition will explore how several fundamental drivers (such as the awareness of the risks of climate change and related major technological shifts) will affect the role of incumbents and new participants in the energy system over the coming decades. The course will provide a relatively high-level overview of the role energy plays in today’s world and then explore the complex challenges general managers of incumbent companies such as the large integrated oil and gas companies, conventional automobile manufacturers or equipment suppliers will have to address in an uncertain yet rapidly changing world. It will also explore the opportunities created by the same disruptive forces for new entrants.

Some of the core questions explored in the course include: How do these potentially disruptive forces impact key decisions made by both incumbents and new businesses in the energy sector? What opportunities do they create? How do decisions often involving large amounts of long-lived capital properly consider significant “unknown unknowns”? How much risk is related to government policy or regulation?

The goal of this course is to deepen your insight into navigating a company’s decision making in an almost certainly changing energy landscape, but where both the pace and the depth of change create significant risks and uncertainties, but where the decisions made over the coming decades have dramatic consequences for the future of the planet.

Career Focus

The course is designed for students who aim to lead private or public sector institutions navigating the fundamental transition of the global energy system already underway and likely to accelerate in the coming decades. The skills and knowledge developed in the course are also relevant for students interested in shaping this transformation as consultants, financiers, policy makers or leaders in civil society institutions. No prior experience in the energy industry is needed. However, the introductory portion of the course will be dense, supplemented by a pre-course reading package.

Course Structure

The first two modules involve a brief introduction to the global energy system today and immediately highlight the complexities and uncertainties of projecting the future of both demand and supply for the world’s main energy sources. After an initial setting the stage, module two will introduce and evaluate the main “disruptive” forces – technological change and climate change and related externalities. We will explore the potential impacts of both on global energy systems, but again focus on key uncertainties and the implications of those uncertainties.

The third and central module of the course uses mostly case studies, complemented by a mix of simulations and other non-case material, to understand how general managers in both incumbent and new energy companies make important decisions under the fundamental uncertainties identified.

The first case in the third module will ask whether or not the leadership of a leading global automobile manufacturer should accelerate its plans to transition away from selling internal combustion engine cars in light of rapidly changing regulatory and competitive environments and consumer preferences. The case will help students understand the complexity of decision making for a successful incumbent, but will also help understand how (rapidly) global demand for oil might shift, which sets the stage for discussing the strategies for oil companies. In this way the module will cover a number of companies across multiple dimensions, including both the demand and the supply side of oil, gas and electricity markets operating globally or locally in multiple geographies and a variety of protagonists.

The final module provides an opportunity to bring all the pieces together and explore some additional topics of global relevance – such as energy security and the future of utilities – and end with student project presentations.

In summary, the course will offer a comprehensive overview of key elements of the global energy system via a mix of cases, supplementary readings, exercises and projects.

Course Administration

Course grades will be based on class participation (50%) and a small group project (50%). For the project, students will apply the tools and ideas from the course to prepare, with one or two partners, a projected 2050 energy mix for a country or region of their choice, complete with a solid rationale for the projection, as a basis for a hypothetical large-scale investment decision. The final project scope is designed so that the time required to prepare the energy mix projection is comparable to the time a student would devote to a final exam. Throughout the term, Professor Weiss will be available to meet with students by appointment. To arrange a meeting, please contact his assistant, Jefferson Zhu, at jzhu@hbs.edu.

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Career Focus

Globalization and Emerging Markets is designed for students who will be investing, managing a business or nonprofit, or working for a government in an emerging or frontier market, as well as for those who wish to acquire a richer conceptual understanding of the nature of capitalism, globalization, and economic development worldwide. The unit of analysis of the course ranges from the international system as a whole through individual countries, alone and in comparative perspective, to multinational and domestic companies operating in emerging markets. Students are asked to adopt the perspective of different decision-makers, such as politicians, technocrats, investors, and managers. For instance, students may have to take the perspective of a large-cap mining firm in Mongolia, a muckraking foreign-run hedge fund in Russia, local and central authorities confronting a pandemic in China, or the Prime Minister of Bhutan considering the development of a new hydropower project. Many of the cases are set beyond the so-called BRICs of Brazil, Russia, India, and China, in today’s “frontier” markets that are only beginning to attract the attention of mainstream investors, and some are purposefully historical in order to give insight into the evolution of the world economy and the strategies once pursued by states and companies in currently developed countries when they first emerged. The course should, in short, appeal to anyone considering spending part of their career working, investing, or thinking outside of the major developed markets.

Educational Objectives

The majority of economic growth is now occurring in countries that are not historically wealthy high-income democracies, and where many of the textbook assumptions regarding how markets function—such universally low or absent tariffs, governments acting as referees rather than players, anti-trust laws, and the enforcement of contracts—often do not hold. These trends and characteristics provide a unique set of opportunities for entrepreneurs and investors in the developed world and within emerging markets themselves, as well as for politicians and stakeholders searching for paths to development. But they also introduce significant risk for those doing business in the developing world. Furthermore, observers worry that emerging markets have suffered a productivity slow-down in the last decade and that globalization is in retreat, two factors with profound implications for the entire global economy. GEM provides frameworks to understand the processes of economic growth and development; to develop contextual intelligence regarding emerging markets; to manage within a weaker or less formalized institutional environment; and to think globally and dynamically about capitalism.

Course Content and Organization

GEM consists of three interrelated modules that consider growth and business opportunities in emerging markets from complementary perspectives. First, we work through a framework for understanding the process of economic growth and development, and in so doing develop the ability to analyze an emerging market at the level of the country. Second, we examine companies that need to understand this macro view in order to make cross-industry investment decisions as well as navigate the unique contexts of emerging market. The final module turns to the process of globalization itself, looking at the dynamic relationship between states and markets and between the developed and developing parts of the world economy. The course uses a variety of country and company cases from more than 20 different emerging and frontier markets to accomplish these objectives. The cases range from country cases on some of the fastest-growing economies in the world to cases on education, mining, oil & gas, retail, technology, tourism, and hedge fund companies operating in emerging markets among others.

Other EC courses that complement this course:

MITI, IMaGE, ROGME, and BBOP.

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Career Focus

Science and technology offer an opportunity to address the most vexing problems of our time. Business process innovations alone will not be enough to ensure access to clean water in the face of climate change, provide urgent medical treatments in remote locales, diffuse novel technologies invented in emerging markets, or investigate the possibilities that space exploration opens up. These Grand Challenges, by their very definition, involve considerable scientific and social uncertainty. Even to experts, they may seem intractable, unapproachable, or too big to solve. They demand creative, novel interventions, and require an ability to imagine and engineer new futures.

Although we often imagine government financing fundamental innovations in these domains, and civil society mobilizing to help scale the fruits of that labor, entrepreneurs have an important role to play in catalyzing scientific discovery, developing business models, and scaling up solutions. The course acknowledges that no one individual, organization, or government can “solve” a Grand Challenge. Instead, an entrepreneur takes a position, facilitates scientific advancement, builds coalitions between organizations, develops a narrative, and encourages a sustained, long-term effort to address a problem of pressing social and scientific need. The emphasis is on creating, rather than merely capturing, value and building an ecosystem of innovation. A conjecture is that both returns and risk are higher than the median entrepreneurial effort, given the urgency and scale of Grand Challenges.

This course is distinguished by taking science and technology as its starting point. Although no background in STEM is expected, students should feel comfortable discussing new technologies and reading popular literature about science.

Educational Objectives

The course is unified by attention to the role business can play in identifying, developing, or scaling novel technological or scientific discoveries motivated toward resolving a Grand Challenge. Four threads run through the discussions each week: (i) managing scientific uncertainty, (ii) managing the capital stack (financing and creating value), (iii) managing the ecosystem, and (iv) managing the narrative.

The introductory session focuses on defining Grand Challenges and identifying business opportunities that address scientific and social uncertainty. The next five sessions focus on particular challenge domains:

• Space exploration
• Water scarcity
• Health and the biosciences revolution
• Energy and its ‘greening’
• Talent and its global misallocation

Each thematic session will engage with the fundamental nature of the challenge (from a scientific or technical perspective) and examine entrepreneurs’ efforts, successful or not, in that domain. For example, the week on water technology may touch upon entrepreneurs building new businesses involving cutting-edge desalination processes , the week on health innovation may look at rapid improvements in gene sequencing and opportunities for personalized medicine, and the week on space exploration will address business models around the increasing problem of space debris. Each session will use a case or two of entrepreneurs working at the frontiers of science and technology (e.g., SpaceX, Gogoro,Moderna, Zymergen), some household names and others less popularly known. The course concludes with a session integrating the seminar content with students’ own career trajectories – what does all this mean for the career trajectories of an aspiring young entrepreneur?

Course Content and Organization

This course is taught in a seminar style and discussions are framed by a notably diverse set of materials. Preparation will require drawing from usual HBS case studies, but equally from book chapters, essays, videos, and research articles in science and technology, economics and political science.

There are seven two hour weekly sessions. Grading is determined by class participation (40%), three short write-ups (30%), and a final paper (30%). Each short (2 page) write-up should discuss a successful or failed attempt at resolving one of the featured Grand Challenges. The final paper, which can be completed individually or in pairs, focuses on an entrepreneurial approach to a Grand Challenge.

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Introduction

The purpose of any business is to add some value, in some way, to someone or something outside of itself. However, organizations ultimately exist to satisfy customers and earn revenue from them. A business simply cannot survive—little own thrive—unless it is also able to generate sufficient funds to pursue future innovations, repay and reward investors, or support social and environmental initiatives.

Accordingly, How to Price Anything helps you understand how organizations of any shape, size, and vocation should capitalize on their efforts to stand out in the market and serve their customers. In other words, the course studies the “back end” of a company’s relationship with its customers. It is exactly at this moment, when a company asks individuals or other businesses to trade good money for the products and services it conceives, that ineffective practices tend to creep in and value regrettably “leaks out” of each relationship—making both parties, and often also society, worse off.

The course pushes well beyond the mechanics of setting a price, and the approach that I favour is much more one of general management than conventional marketing. While pricing anything certainly involves an element of “running the numbers,” there is much more that I want to cover.

Career Focus

How to Price Anything suits students who see themselves responsible for the revenue policies and top-line growth of a product or service business. It is also appropriate for students who anticipate starting their own enterprise or seek a career as external advisors or investors.

Educational Objectives

In my experience, many leaders in organizations apply the wrong logic when they think about prices and pricing. For one, they often fail to think strategically about the challenge. Rather, you witness collections of tactics held together by questionable assumptions and crude heuristics that, by shunning customers and obsessing over just about everything else, put financial and brand health in jeopardy.

To counter this predicament, How to Price Anything equips you with the proper concepts and frameworks to tackle contemporary pricing issues with confidence and craft sound a strategy. In particular, the course addresses questions such as:

• How should we think about prices? How can one tell a good strategy from a bad one?
• Are we making the most of the competitive advantage we worked so hard to establish?
• Which costs matter from a pricing standpoint? How should we use cost information to set our prices?
• How should we estimate and act on valuations and willingness to pay information? Can we trust the data?
• Did we set the right price? What is the best way to change it if we have to?
• Are there opportunities to serve different prices to different customers? How can we do this without damaging our image or inciting backlash?
• Does it matter that our relationship with customers passes through an intermediary? What are the best price agreements to persuade channel partners?
• What is the right revenue model for our business? Should we launch a subscription or encourage sharing? Should we perhaps link prices to our ability to deliver outcomes that customers truly desire?
• What is the best way to act against pesky competitors? What does it take to be the price leader in a market?
• How do we stand our ground against customers who demand lower prices? If it comes to it, is it possible to discount our offerings without mortgaging the brand?
• Do we think about prices too late in the game? Should we keep prices in mind when designing our innovative products and services?
• What is the impact of our pricing decisions beyond the company-customer relationship? Is there anything we can do to improve our societal and environmental “footprint”?

Content and Organization

How to Price Anything builds on one critical premise: a business cannot improve its ability to earn revenue from customers unless its decisions are guided by customers—what they value, why they value it, when and how they value it, and so on. This logic is intuitive, yet seldom put into practice. In fact, most of the organizations that I have had the pleasure to study or advise anchor their pricing decisions on an estimate of unit costs and a target margin. They want to “keep things simple,” but in so doing they forget or neglect that customers drive demand in a market, and demand ultimately marks the commercial opportunity. A business that sets prices with a poor grasp of the opportunity it faces is bound to make suboptimal, perhaps even dangerous decisions.

In comparison, a customer-centric approach to pricing starts by understanding “value” from the perspective of customers and, importantly, how this value flows to organizations in the form of income. The course takes you across the different steps in this sequence, identifying the most common problem areas and searching for practical solutions.

A key takeway is that decisions about prices are far more strategic and consequential than typically assumed, as they impact the way organizations relate with customers from as early as product or service design to beyond the moment of purchase. A second important message is that prices serve not only to allocate value among the different actors in a market (i.e., slicing the pie), but also to grow the overall value that is realized in an exchange (i.e., baking a bigger pie).

We will spend most of our time understanding these two core functions of prices. To give a few examples, in the module on “slicing the pie” I will share with you the most popular tools currently at our disposal to elicit valuations and willingness to pay, and ask you to reflect on their respective advantages and disadvantages. I will also ask you to consider the information businesses need to set prices. We will then delve into the delicate task of tailoring prices to fit a heterogenous customer base—with or without the support of intermediaries. To the extent that the market comprises buyers with different attitudes and beliefs, sticking with a single price is a poor compromise. It turns out that there are several ways to solve this sticky problem.

In the module on “baking the pie,” we will discuss whether (and how) businesses should “hold their ground” in the face of stubborn professional buyers and pesky competitors. We will also debate what an efficient revenue model looks like. Should an organization profit directly from what it makes or serves, or should it profit from ensuring access, upon actual consumption, or conditional on performance? Finally, I will ask you to consider how upstream decisions on product or service design may influence downstream decisions on prices. Indeed, we are going to question how early in the process of creating value for customers should a business think about the price it demands for that value.

From a practical standpoint, the 28 sessions of the course comprise case study discussions, in-class exercises, interactive lectures, contributions from guest speakers, and time dedicated to work on the group project. The goal of the case discussions and exercises is to examine important concepts in different managerial settings, and to sample making decisions based on both qualitative and quantitative data. The lectures and guest speakers complement this effort by presenting frameworks, analytical techniques, practical insights, and pertinent examples.

Grading

Grading is based on class participation (40%) and the “Pricing Intervention” (60%). The Pricing Intervention is a project in which groups of students work in collaboration with a client company of their choosing. The work is “real” in the sense that these organizations have demonstrated a pressing need and look to you for critical thinking and advice. Specifically, you are asked to (1) review the pricing performance of your client and (2) formulate thoughtful recommendations.

The first part of the assignment looks to the past. Your group must conduct a diagnosis of the pricing prowess of the organization to this point in time. Always justify your opinions by making smart use of the material covered (or recommended) in the course. The focus of this task is the creation of a diagnostic tool, which summarizes your critique and will be useful to the client as a “reality check” to apply on an ongoing basis. I will guide you to several examples of such a tool.

The second part of the assignment looks to the future. Your task now is to take the lessons from the course and turn them into clear, meaningful, and pragmatic recommendations. While I will provide more details about my expectations when we meet, keep in mind that here I am particularly interested in your ability to apply the material covered in class and the quality of the recommendations.

Note that the assignment is graded by me and the client. I will share with you the two grading templates ahead of time, so that your group can prepare the work accordingly. In addition, I am not going to impose a page limit, as in my mind the point of the exercise is not to write or edit until an arbitrary constraint is met. I leave this decision to your better judgment.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Course Content and Overview

This course requires students to build on learnings from their prior courses at HBS and apply them to real-world business problems in an unfamiliar setting. The course seeks to build students’ global intelligence and team effectiveness skills through project work that leverages human-centered Design Thinking methodology.

Students will be randomly assigned to a team of 5-6 and paired with a Global Partner (GP) in Athens that has a product or service challenge they would like the team to address with their local consumers. To maximize the experience, we strongly suggest that students with significant prior work, travel or life experience in Greece not take this course. The goal is that the project, the team, and Athens itself are unfamiliar.

Developing global intelligence. Global intelligence means developing stronger self and situational awareness to empathize and work effectively across diverse cultures and environments. It is both contextual and cultural. Students will begin to develop a contextual understanding of Athens and their Global Partner during the Boston phase of the course. They will do so through assigned readings and discussions focused on the Greek people and history, economic performance, politics, culture and business environment; team research; and interactions with invited speakers and, from a distance, their Global Partner. During the Immersion in Athens, students will interact with local consumers, their Global Partner and invited speakers, participate in cultural activities, and write personal reflections. The Boston sessions and the activities and experiences during the Immersion will help students better understand when and how prior knowledge may need to be adapted when seeking to create value in a distinctive business and institutional environment and, more personally, will bolster students’ comfort level and capacity to thrive in culturally unfamiliar settings.

Managing team effectiveness. Leveraging their experiences in LEAD, students will work to design, launch and manage their teams, making explicit choices about team design, norms, and processes. Students will assess their team's performance during the semester as well as after the completion of the Immersion. Contribution to one’s team is an important component of the IFC grade.

Practicing human-centered design. In this IFC, students will have the chance to practice Design Thinking, the human-centered design methodology introduced in RC TOM. This methodology is a collection of tools that aims to uncover unmet consumer needs and generate creative solutions to meet those needs. Through an in-class workshop and exercises on Wednesday, November 3rd, students will review and practice the main phases of that methodology. During the Immersion, students will spend the better part of their time in country interacting with local consumers (as well as their Global Partner), and iterating through the methodology’s three phases. While developing facility with Design Thinking and building their innovative capabilities, students’ repeated interactions with local consumers will also enhance their awareness of the many dimensions of contextual difference across countries.

Why Athens?

The City of Athens represents the juxtaposition of old and new. Ancient Greece was the "father of democracy" and the reminders of empires past are visible on a variety of classic sites such as the Acropolis. More recently, however, Greece has struggled economically through a sovereign debt crisis and a resultant economic contraction. Over the decade following the 2008 credit crisis, Greece experienced the deepest depression of any developed country since WWII. Youth unemployment remains high at nearly 35%. In August, 2018, Greece finally emerged from its third bail-out program with its official creditors and must now continue find its own path forward. Tourism had been growing steadily, was negatively impacted by the pandemic but is anticipated to rebound this summer. The economy was also hard hit in 2020 (declined 8.2%) but there are hopes for a significant rebound through tourism and innovation. The international community has taken note: in 2019 Athens was voted the European Capital of Innovation, for the “innovative ways in which it has overcome social and economic challenges and turned them into new opportunities.” Greece’s Prime Minister, HBS alum Kyriakos Mitsotakis, is charged with leading Greece into this new chapter.

Course Structure

This course will have 8 on-campus reserved times for classroom sessions and team time. The sessions will include a FULL DAY on Wednesday, November 3rd. This full day will be used for a design thinking workshop and exercises.

Students will be assigned to a team of 6 and a project with a Global Partner – no choice is offered. Students will work with their team and their Global Partner in Boston in order to make the most of their time in Athens. During the Immersion, students will present a dry run of their final presentation to their faculty and 1-2 other teams to get feedback the day prior to their final presentation with their Global Partner.

In country, we will spend significant time on project work, in addition to conversations with local HBS alums and other business leaders and visits to important cultural and historic sites in Athens. Students will have one open day during the immersion to explore Athens on their own in addition to time spent exploring the city with their team as part of their project work.

Grading

Grading will be 50% based on individual work including participation and engagement, individual reflections, and feedback from your team, and 50% based on team deliverables.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Course Content and Overview

This course requires students to build on learnings from their prior courses at HBS and apply them to real-world business problems in an unfamiliar setting. The course seeks to build students’ global intelligence and team effectiveness skills through project work that leverages human-centered Design Thinking methodology.

Students will be randomly assigned to a team of 5-6 and paired with a Global Partner (GP) in Casablanca that has a product or service challenge they would like the team to address with their local consumers. To maximize the experience, we strongly suggest that students with significant prior work, travel or life experience in Morocco not take this course. The goal is that the project, the team, and Casablanca itself are unfamiliar.

Developing global intelligence. Global intelligence means developing stronger self and situational awareness to empathize and work effectively across diverse cultures and environments. It is both contextual and cultural. Students will begin to develop a contextual understanding of Casablanca and their Global Partner during the Boston phase of the course. They will do so through assigned readings and discussions focused on the Moroccan people and history, economic performance, politics, culture and business environment; team research; and interactions with invited speakers and, from a distance, their Global Partner. During the Immersion in Casablanca, students will interact with local consumers, their Global Partner and invited speakers, participate in cultural activities, and write personal reflections. The Boston sessions and the activities and experiences during the Immersion will help students better understand when and how prior knowledge may need to be adapted when seeking to create value in a distinctive business and institutional environment and, more personally, will bolster students’ comfort level and capacity to thrive in culturally unfamiliar settings.

Managing team effectiveness. Leveraging their experiences in LEAD, students will work to design, launch and manage their teams, making explicit choices about team design, norms, and processes. Students will assess their team's performance during the semester as well as after the completion of the Immersion. Contribution to one’s team is an important component of the IFC grade.

Practicing human-centered design. In this IFC, students will have the chance to practice Design Thinking, the human-centered design methodology introduced in RC TOM. This methodology is a collection of tools that aims to uncover unmet consumer needs and generate creative solutions to meet those needs. Through an in-class workshop and exercises on Wednesday, November 3rd, students will review and practice the main phases of that methodology. During the Immersion, students will spend the better part of their time in country interacting with local consumers (as well as their Global Partner), and iterating through the methodology’s three phases. While developing facility with Design Thinking and building their innovative capabilities, students’ repeated interactions with local consumers will also enhance their awareness of the many dimensions of contextual difference across countries.

Why Casablanca?

Morocco has been at the center of commerce since being conquered by the Roman Empire in 42 AD. Sitting at the southern side of the Straight of Gibraltar, called the Pillars of Hercules by the Romans, it is the only African country with a coastline on both the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. It is an ideal site for a course focusing on the cultivation of global intelligence, since its culture is a composite of three strong cultural influences—Berber, Arab and French. Each has contributed significantly to modern day Morocco’s unique culture that blends the tribal values of the Berbers, Islamic religious and cultural practices, and a cosmopolitan and technocratic inheritance imbued during the French protectorate of the first half of the 20th Century. Morocco achieved independence in 1954 as a constitutional monarchy. It weathered the “Arab Spring” remarkably well. It was the only member of the Arab League that experienced only peaceful protests that led to meaningful reforms.

Morocco has many of the attributes of an emerging economy. It has free trade agreements with virtually every major economy, features a dynamic finance sector, and has largely addressed the extreme poverty that plagues many of its neighbors. Over the last thirty years, the government has actively developed sector-specific strategies that have allowed it to outperform its peer group. However, it remains heavily dependent on natural resources—especially phosphate and its derivatives— textiles, and agriculture. It consistently runs a trade and fiscal deficit, straining its foreign exchange reserves and credit rating. Parastatal companies still account for almost half of output and corruption remains a nagging problem. A number of global companies have a presence in Morocco, but the country lacks the deep reservoirs of managerial talent and skilled labor that would allow it to escape being a source of low cost labor for manufacturers primarily serving Europe. The country’s future hinges on building domestic demand and continuing to professionalize management in businesses and the bureaucracy, alike.

Morocco is a vibrant business environment and a great place to visit. It’s an ideal place for us to advance our learning about design thinking and learn about an engaging culture.

Course Structure

This course will have 8 on-campus reserved times for classroom sessions and team time. The sessions will include a FULL DAY on Wednesday, November 3rd. This full day will be used for a design thinking workshop and exercises.

Students will be assigned to a team of 6 and a project with a Global Partner – no choice is offered. Students will work with their team and their Global Partner in Boston in order to make the most of their time in Casablanca. During the Immersion, students will present a dry run of their final presentation to their faculty and 1-2 other teams to get feedback the day prior to their final presentation with their Global Partner.

In country, we will spend significant time on project work, in addition to conversations with local HBS alums and other business leaders and visits to important cultural and historic sites in Casablanca. Students will have one open day during the immersion to explore Casablanca on their own in addition to time spent exploring the city with their team as part of their project work.

Grading

Grading will be 50% based on individual work including participation and engagement, individual reflections, and feedback from your team, and 50% based on team deliverables.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

IFC Israel will allow students to explore the Israeli startup ecosystem. Israel has the highest number of startups, venture capital, and patents per capita and over the last 30 years has grown to an exciting innovation and startup community. Students will be asked to work on a go-to-market project with an Israel venture capital-backed startup. The projects will provide an opportunity to integrate learning across a number of areas including finance, general management, technology, marketing, and leadership. Additionally, working with Israeli companies will provide deep insights into factors in a non-US market that promote innovation ecosystems. Most startups will be Series B or Series C and have developed a product or service. The companies will be across a variety of sectors including cybersecurity, big data, life sciences, consumer products, and social enterprise. Students will rank projects and be assigned to teams in early October 2021. Project work will be remote in the Fall. Students will then spend approximately two weeks in January in Israel working on site with the companies. We will also have an opportunity to tour the major cultural and business center of Tel Aviv, explore the historical sites of Jerusalem, and travel south to the Dead Sea and Masada.

This will be the fourth year that Professors Gompers and Ruback have taught the Israel IFC.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Educational Objectives

Our objective is to provide students with perspectives and insight into the eighth largest economy in the world. Although it is dominated by SMEs (companies with annual revenues of below €50m make up 82% of the employed population, and account for 92% of the active companies in the national economy), Italy is the second largest manufacturer and the second largest European exporter. Students will learn how Italy’s companies – that include some iconic brands that leverage the powerful “Made in Italy” label - have found a way to compete in a global marketplace through innovation, design, openness to trade, quality, as well as internationalization, and strategic flexibility. Italy’s family capitalism has shown it can evolve and adjust to a changing world. Students will analyze how it has done so even against longstanding structural, macroeconomic, political, and governance issues that have slowed economic growth, especially since the GFC. This is a particularly opportune time to study the country since it is living a moment of rare national unity with a new government - headed by Mario Draghi, the widely respected former Head of the European Central Bank - supported by the majority of parties across the political spectrum. Having suffered heavily from COVID-19 in part because of its large elderly population (Italy has one of the highest life expectancies in Europe), the country will be the largest recipient of funds from the novel €795bn Next Generation EU recovery package that will allow unprecedented investment in digitalization, the green economy, education, and health. Ranked first in cultural heritage in most rankings and endowed with historical cities, world-renowned cuisine, and geographic beauty, it is one of the top three most visited countries in Europe year in year out, with tourism making up 13% of GDP. Amid such rich cultural heritage lay the foundations of the birth and development of modern capitalism to which Italy has made unique contributions. This course will give a unique and fascinating opportunity to understand and see these first-hand.

Course Content

Classroom Sessions: The course will meet for four on-campus sessions during the fall semester, which will include case discussions and interactive lectures. The goals of the classroom sessions are to (1) provide an overview of the historical evolution and the present business, economic and political situation in Italy, (2) explore examples of how Italian companies innovate and compete, (3) gain an understanding of the structure of the Italian industrial landscape setting, (4) analyze the opportunities and issues of investing in the country and (5) understand the role of Italy in the birth of modern capitalism, including the history of double accounting, banking and its impact on trade and the arts. While on campus, we will visit Baker Library’s Medici Collection, comprising more than 150 ledgers and other manuscript volumes from the late 14th to the early 18th century that shed extraordinary light on the business and personal activities of six generations of one branch of Florence’s Medici family.

Activities while in Italy: We will be visiting Milan from January 10th to January 14th and Florence from the 17th to the 20th. Milan is Italy’s economic and financial capital, whereas Florence is home to some of luxury’s famous brands and the cradle of the Renaissance that played a pivotal role in the birth of modern capitalism. We will be meeting with CEOs, entrepreneurs, investors (fund managers and private equity), US diplomats, historians, academics, and HBS alumni for interactive sessions. We will tour selected companies and factories (including a day trip from Florence to Ferrari and Lamborghini), retail outlets, as well as the extraordinary archives of Banca Montepaschi di Siena (founded in 1472), the oldest surviving bank in the world. We will carve some time in each city for the inevitable need for shopping that Italy elicits in all its visitors.

Deliverables: Students will work in small teams to prepare a group presentation that examines one of the aspects of the course content to be delivered to the entire group at the conclusion of the program. Teams should expect to submit a written paper. Each student will submit a one page reflection paper within a week after returning to campus.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

As the rise in remote work unwinds the advantages of clusters like Silicon Valley, the US can no longer take for granted a claim to primacy as the venue for launching and scaling technology ventures. Other regions – in particular Asia and Europe – have been growing relative share in recent years, and this is likely to accelerate in the aftermath of Covid-19. However, these other venues represent quite different kinds of complexity for entrepreneurs and investors. The UK has always had a complex political relationship with Europe, but its liminal status is part of its appeal, as a bridge between the US and the Continent, London remains the pre-eminent regional hub for capital and entrepreneurship.

This immersion course is designed to provide ‘a view from the bridge’ between the HBS campus and Europe for those who interested in understanding the region’s extraordinary recent explosion of entrepreneurial activity and capital deployment, who want to meet some of the people and companies making that happen, and who are seriously considering heading across the Atlantic after they graduate in search of new ventures.

Students will gain exposure to a large and rapidly growing business community during a crucial period of transition. The landscape of UK and European entrepreneurship has evolved significantly in the last decade. Several European ventures now exceed $50 billion in market value, and it is only a matter of time before one exceeds $100B. Meanwhile, the pace of venture capital deployment in the region is at historic highs, with more than $80B invested over the last 12 months. Accounting for 40% of all regional investment activity, London has clearly emerged as the pre-eminent focal points for UK and European entrepreneurial activity.

Students will develop an intuitive understanding of the challenges and opportunities of starting, scaling, and investing across a culturally heterogeneous and politically complex region. Unlike US start-ups, which can typically take for granted a large and homogenous home market to build scale economies and/or capture the benefits of network effects, few UK/European start-ups have the potential to deliver “venture scale” returns by selling only to domestic markets. For this reason, they must think international from the outset, which presents acute scaling challenges that demand culturally nuanced insight as well as practical intelligence.

Students will get hands-on exposure to start-up organizations and cultures in London. While many behavioral norms (e.g., open plan workspaces) cross national boundaries, others do not (working hours, attitudes to overtime). Immersion is a particularly effective way to gain appreciation of the differences and similarities between US-style entrepreneurship and what’s taking hold in the UK. In addition, this course will provide a valuable career bridge for students focused on relocating to London after graduating – particularly if they aspire to work in technology, an entrepreneurial context, or venture investing.

Course Format

Like other IFCs, the course will have a classroom component in the Fall Term (three to four sessions) and faculty office hours, followed by the January immersion experience in London.

During the fall, students will be asked to form teams of four, and, based on team preferences, they will be matched with London-based startup or growth-stage tech ventures. Each venture will have identified a specific project to assign each team, providing access to members of its leadership team, broader organization, and corporate materials and data. Each team will get grounded in its venture and complete foundational work prior to arrival in London for full-time, in-person engagement during the January immersion. Assignments may include product development, go-to-market strategy, market tests, unit and customer economics analyses, organizational plans, and capitalization strategies, among other topics.

In London, the IFC will host a variety of events to maximize students’ exposure to the city’s tech scene. There will be opening, mid-course, and closing dinners with speakers from leading tech ventures and VC firms based in London. There will be opportunities to visit both VCs and ventures, as well as breakfast speakers at the hotel, on selected days. In addition, faculty will be available for office hours on a scheduled and, as necessary, ad hoc basis on the ground in London for the duration of the visit. The faculty will also host a debrief session in London at the conclusion of immersion to capture learnings and insights from the experience of working with startup ventures in the UK.

Deliverables: At the conclusion of the immersion experience, each team will be tasked with developing and presenting a slide deck summarizing its work, results, and recommendations to project partners and other students in the IFC. A final paper presenting each team’s work will be due in mid-February. The recommended limit for these papers is 3,000 to 4,000 words.

Grading: The final grade for this IFC will be composed of three components – classroom (at HBS) and immersion (in London) participation (50%); final paper (25%); and summary presentation (25%).

Prerequisites: This IFC will complement EC courses such as Launching Technology Ventures, Scaling Technology Ventures, and Founders Journeys, though these courses are not required.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Career Focus

This course will provide students interested in careers in the film and television industry with an immersive understanding of the current marketing and distribution challenges faced by Hollywood. Driven by the twin forces of digitalization and globalization, the industry is undergoing rapid and unprecedented change that has been accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic. Students will undertake consulting projects with both existing players and disruptors. The course will take a general management perspective but students will have the opportunity to obtain an in-depth knowledge of their specific assignment.

Educational Objectives

The U.S. film and television business is a $200 billion industry with profound economic and cultural impacts around the globe. Its traditional business models are undergoing rapid change in response to technological innovation, shifts in consumer behavior, and growing international demand for its products. This course will expose students to issues and challenges faced by both incumbents and challengers as they attempt to chart their course in an ever-changing environment. While the course will have a specific industry focus, the issues faced by Hollywood are similar to those confronted by other industries and students will be able to apply many of the lessons learned in the course to different businesses.

Course Content and Organization

Overview and Introduction: The course will meet for six on-campus sessions in the fall. These sessions are intended to (1) provide students with a basic understanding of the economics of the film and television industry through the use of cases and extensive background reading, (2) highlight some of the challenges and opportunities faced by older companies and new entrants, and (3) allow time for student teams to work together, engage with their project partners, and prepare for travel.

Projects: Students will assemble into five-person teams to work on projects throughout the course. Project partners will range from large studios to Internet-focused distribution companies. Project areas will include domestic, international, and streaming distribution. Students will engage with their partner company throughout the fall and field work in Hollywood will be intense. Each project will focus on solving a specific and well-defined marketing or distribution challenge and will require extensive data collection and analysis. A central component of the immersion will be meetings and talks with studio heads and other key industry executives who will describe first-hand their challenges and strategies.

Deliverables: At the start of the Fall term, students will prepare a Team Launch Document. Students must also deliver a preliminary draft of their presentation and recommendations prior to the immersion trip to Los Angeles. The time in Hollywood will be focused on gathering additional data, refining analyses, and preparation of the final presentation to the partner. Students will present their final project recommendation to their partner organization on Wednesday, January 12.

Non-Disclosure Agreements: Partner companies will provide student teams with confidential information. Given the highly competitive nature of the industry, each partner organization will require students to sign the company’s confidentiality and intellectual property assignment agreement.

Prerequisites: None

Cross-Registration: Due to the small size of the course, applications cannot be accepted from cross-registrants and auditors.

This will be the fifth year that Professor McGee has taught the Hollywood IFC.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Course Content and Overview

This course requires students to build on learnings from their prior courses at HBS and apply them to real-world business problems in an unfamiliar setting. The course seeks to build students’ global intelligence and team effectiveness skills through project work that leverages human-centered Design Thinking methodology.

Students will be randomly assigned to a team of 5-6 and paired with a Global Partner (GP) in Santiago that has a product or service challenge they would like the team to address with their local consumers. To maximize the experience, we strongly suggest that students with significant prior work, travel or life experience in Chile not take this course. The goal is that the project, the team, and Santiago itself are unfamiliar.

Developing global intelligence. Global intelligence means developing stronger self and situational awareness to empathize and work effectively across diverse cultures and environments. It is both contextual and cultural. Students will begin to develop a contextual understanding of Santiago and their Global Partner during the Boston phase of the course. They will do so through assigned readings and discussions focused on the Chilean people and history, economic performance, politics, culture and business environment; team research; and interactions with invited speakers and, from a distance, their Global Partner. During the Immersion in Santiago, students will interact with local consumers, their Global Partner and invited speakers, participate in cultural activities, and write personal reflections. The Boston sessions and the activities and experiences during the Immersion will help students better understand when and how prior knowledge may need to be adapted when seeking to create value in a distinctive business and institutional environment and, more personally, will bolster students’ comfort level and capacity to thrive in culturally unfamiliar settings.

Managing team effectiveness. Leveraging their experiences in LEAD, students will work to design, launch and manage their teams, making explicit choices about team design, norms, and processes. Students will assess their team's performance during the semester as well as after the completion of the Immersion. Contribution to one’s team is an important component of the IFC grade.

Practicing human-centered design. In this IFC, students will have the chance to practice Design Thinking, the human-centered design methodology introduced in RC TOM. This methodology is a collection of tools that aims to uncover unmet consumer needs and generate creative solutions to meet those needs. Through an in-class workshop and exercises on Wednesday, November 3rd, students will review and practice the main phases of that methodology. During the Immersion, students will spend the better part of their time in country interacting with local consumers (as well as their Global Partner), and iterating through the methodology’s three phases. While developing facility with Design Thinking and building their innovative capabilities, students’ repeated interactions with local consumers will also enhance their awareness of the many dimensions of contextual difference across countries.

Why Santiago?

Following 17 years of military dictatorship, Chile’s democracy was restored in 1990. Since then, it has been admired for its political stability and generally well-managed economy. Santiago, Chile’s capital city, is set against the dramatic backdrop of the towering Andes and is home to 7 million Chileans, or nearly 40% of the country’s population. Santiago’s strong economy, museums, grand architecture, and eclectic cultural landscape all combine to create a vibrant community.

Despite being one of Latin America’s most prosperous countries, Chile suffers from high income inequality. In the fall of 2019, large scale protests and civil unrest erupted, sparked by a rise in the Santiago Metro fare, but rooted more broadly in frustrations over increases in the cost of living and economic inequality. The protests led to a successful referendum establishing a process for the writing of a new national constitution. The coming year should be a dynamic time for Chile as the nation emerges from the pandemic, elects a new president, and votes on a new constitution that will shape the country’s political, social, and economic future.

Course Structure

This course will have 8 on-campus reserved times for classroom sessions and team time. The sessions will include a FULL DAY on Wednesday, November 3rd. This full day will be used for a design thinking workshop and exercises.

Students will be assigned to a team of 6 and a project with a Global Partner – no choice is offered. Students will work with their team and their Global Partner in Boston in order to make the most of their time in Santiago. During the Immersion, students will present a dry run of their final presentation to their faculty and 1-2 other teams to get feedback the day prior to their final presentation with their Global Partner.

In country, we will spend significant time on project work, in addition to conversations with local HBS alums and other business leaders and visits to important cultural and historic sites in Santiago. Students will have one open day during the immersion to explore Santiago on their own in addition to time spent exploring the city with their team as part of their project work.

Grading

Grading will be 50% based on individual work including participation and engagement, individual reflections, and feedback from your team, and 50% based on team deliverables.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Over the past decade, the rise of the Internet has blurred the functional lines between product and marketing. Some companies formed in the post-internet era have optimized their organizational structures by combining product and marketing in to a single function called “growth”. The “growth” operating strategy was invented at Facebook and popularized at companies like Pinterest, Lyft, and LinkedIn. While the discipline originated in the consumer tech sector of Silicon Valley, it has spread to entrepreneurial cultures such as New York, Berlin, and Singapore and to companies from non-tech industries, such as Disney, the NBA, and Adidas. Located at the intersection of experimentation, analysis, and strategy, the MBA uniquely prepares students for careers in this expanding discipline.

However, what exactly is a “growth” operating strategy? Current definitions and best practices have not been codified. DGSV provides students with the opportunity to explore this rising discipline by exposing them to the best growth teams in Silicon Valley and applying their learnings to an early stage venture.

Specific learning objectives include:

1. What are the best practices of a “growth” operating strategy?
2. How are the implementations of “growth” across Silicon Valley’s most successful companies the same? How are they different? What drives these differences?
3. Which best practices of “growth” operating strategies are universal and which components need to consider the context of the firm, such as the stage, industry, buyer, product complexity, etc.?
4. How should “growth” be implemented in a startup context? How does the team makeup and priorities evolve as the venture matures?

The course is primarily focused on a field project with a late-stage startup, specifically in the area of the venture’s “growth” operating strategy. In the Fall while on campus, student teams will conduct a series of virtual meetings, research, analysis, and project execution with the project sponsor and other company resources. Students will then spend 10 days in Silicon Valley, with a substantial portion of the visit dedicated to on-site project work. At the conclusion of the trip, the student team will deliver a final presentation to their executive sponsor. Outside of project work, students will conduct site visits to best-in-class “growth” teams, providing students the opportunity to observe techniques used to maximize learning and collaboration. These site visits enable students to view the “growth” team through lenses beyond the growth leader, such as front-line employees like product managers, designers, engineers, and marketers as well as executive sponsors like the CMO, CRO, COO, and CEO.

The class will meet four times in the Fall for two hours each. Class time will be a mix of discussing a case simulation on components of the “growth” operating strategy, framework discussions with growth thought leaders, and Q&A with leaders from most successful growth implementations. Prior participants were from Pinterest, Facebook, Lyft, LinkedIn, and Shopify. The class session objectives is to expose the students to the operations of the most successful growth companies, challenge them on best practice pattern recognition, and provide them with the opportunity to implement the appropriate best practices in their field project. There will also be two one-on-one reviews between the faculty instructor and each project team during the Fall.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

CAREER FOCUS

The course is appropriate for students anticipating a career in which sensing opportunity for new products/services/business models and successfully bringing those ideas to market are key activities. The course will cover a wide variety of contexts and thus be useful for those starting their own companies or joining an established organization with an innovation agenda. In addition to Innovation, the course also addresses Renovation of product lines, optimally modifying, adding, and deleting offerings over time given evolving market conditions.

EDUCATIONAL OBJECTIVES

The course is designed to build student skill in:

1. Sensing new opportunities

• Where do new product ideas come from?
• What are the most useful sources?
• How best to assess potential market size?

2. Specifying the process of new product development and role of various market research procedures

• What can target market customers tell you about their wants? What can’t they?
• How can you best learn quickly at the concept stage before prototype development?
• What new learning opportunities open up with prototype development and beta testing possibilities?
• How are data best converted into useful insights?

3. Launching new products/services

• What are challenges/keys to success for launch into an existing product category?
• What are the special challenges/opportunities when creating a new product category?

4. Managing the product line evolution over time

• When does the product need a refresh?
• How long should the product line be?
• When should you worry about cannibalization? When not?
• How far can you stretch a brand?

COURSE CONTENT/ORGANIZATION/GRADING

The course is organized around three major modules of approximately five cases each.

MODULE 1: Drivers of Success and Failure

The module begins with two newly developed cases on historical high notes of success and failure. Apple’s iPod has been described as “The Perfect Thing” (Levy’s 2006 book: The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture and Coolness). How did it get to be that way? Did it become more or less perfect over time? At the other end of the spectrum, Coca-Cola’s replacement of its flagship product with “New Coke” is viewed (even by the company) as one of the greatest marketing failures of all time. How did this happen? The module then turns to two current day cases on companies seeing new opportunities, assessing the market potential and investing to capitalize: Carvana’s creation of the totally online car buying experience and Peloton’s creation of the at-home “immersive connected fitness” category. How to estimate market potential and stay on top as potential imitators come to understand your business model and success?

MODULE 2: Process for New Product Development and Contribution of Research Methods

There is no one “optimal” process for new product (or service or business model) development. Rather, the process needs to be customized to the context. A newly developed in-depth note, “From Idea-to-Launch: Process Design and Management,” along with notes on research methods such as concept testing and beta tests provide necessary depth of knowledge, then applied to cases positioned at various points along the path to market

MODULE 3: Renovation: Optimizing the Product Line Over Time

While “Innovation” typically gets more attention and headlines than “Renovation,” some have argued that attention to product line changes often dismissed are “incremental” actually as quite powerful given changing market conditions. For example, Zyman’s book is Renovate Before You Innovate: Why Doing the New Thing Might Not Be the Right Thing and Robertson’s is The Power of Little Ideas. Product line extensions are one of the most debated strategies in marketing – some see as low-cost, low-risk ways to tap new opportunities. Others see as overused, introducing cannibalization and complexity issues to the point of lost profits. The module features a Product Line Extension exercise to flesh out the debate and then cases to pose questions:

• How far can you stretch a brand (e.g. can Shinola with its focus on bringing manufacturing jobs to Detroit manage extension from its initial watch product category to bicycles, jewelry, hotels?)
• How many variants of a product should be offered (e.g. Casper Sleep Inc. achieved early stage success just marketing one mattress type (though various sizes, i.e. twin, queen, king) with the tag line “The One Perfect Mattress for Everyone.” What are the advantages of a short line like this? When/how might one optimize by deepening the line? With high quality/higher price items (trade up) or lower quality/lower price items (trade down)?

Taken together, the cases and notes will provide in depth understanding of sound principles of Innovation and Renovation.

Grading will be based on class participation and a final exam.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Course Overview

This is a course about exploiting the opportunities created by the emergence of a global economy and managing the risks that globalization entails. All managers now face a business environment where international, macroeconomic, and political phenomena matter. Understanding the genesis of financial and currency crises, stock market booms and busts, social and labor unrest, and major swings in politics and policies is a crucial aspect in taking informed managerial decisions. Adverse macroeconomic and political phenomena can have a catastrophic impact on firm performance: witness the strong companies destroyed by the Mexican tequila crisis and those damaged by recent protests around the globe. Yet at the same time, such episodes also create business opportunities – and not just for the hedge funds and speculators that profit from them. Managers that have and use a coherent framework for understanding and analyzing these phenomena will enjoy a competitive advantage.

Career Focus

Internationally oriented careers; careers in global financial management; senior executive jobs; careers in policy-making.

Educational Objectives

The educational objectives of the IMaGE course are threefold.

First, the course aims to provide participants with a basic understanding of how contemporary macroeconomics explains dramatic events in the international economy, such as recurrent banking and financial crises in several countries. Much of this explanation focuses on the role of confidence, expectations, and crowd psychology. These factors result in aggregate behavior - e.g., demand in the U.S. economy as a whole - behaving in a different manner than would be suggested by simply summing individual behavior. This, in turn, justifies the establishment of macroeconomics as a separate discipline, distinct from microeconomics with its focus on individual firm and household decisions.

Second, the course discusses how institutions can be developed which focus the uncoordinated actions of individual households and firms as well as voters and politicians on good, rather than bad, overall outcomes. Such institutions are key determinants of macroeconomic and political outcomes. In some countries, legal, political, and economic institutions are able to coordinate private decisions on stable and productive paths. Where institutional development is weak - as seems to be the case in much of the developing world - private actions are poorly coordinated and the result is greater macroeconomic volatility, higher political risk, and slower growth. Understanding what constitute good institutions and how institutions influence economic and political behavior is therefore crucial.

Finally, the course is intended to develop a simple framework linking institutional design and macroeconomic performance. This framework can be used to evaluate how globalization is likely to change the performance of specific markets and thus assess the associated risks and opportunities.

Course Content and Organization

Most of the cases and class discussions focus on the country level, although several cases look at specific sectors (e.g., the retail industry in Chile, or the startup sector in Israel) or particular policies (inflation targeting in Brazil), and others span multiple countries (Chinese investments in Africa, or the macroeconomic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic). The course itself consists of four modules.

The first module ("Macroeconomic and Financial Dynamics") uses the experiences of two famous economic policy makers (Alan Greenspan and John Maynard Keynes) and several countries which have suffered through tremendous economic dislocation to identify and develop the issues of communication, confidence, coordination, and institutional development that are central to the remainder of the course. It investigates the mechanisms underlying recent macroeconomic and financial crises and explores their institutional underpinnings as well as their economic and political consequences. Representative cases include the Mexico Tequila crisis of 1994-95; Populism, banking crises, and exchange rate crises in Argentina; the 1997 Asian crisis; and the 2008 subprime crisis in the U.S.

The second module ("Competing Institutional Models") studies how the U.S. and other rich countries have developed institutional structures permitting the coordination of individual business decisions on good economic outcomes, as well as their influences on macroeconomic policy design and performance. Moreover, it demonstrates how institutional differences across countries ultimately rest in differences in norms and beliefs, and explores how changes in the environment can render previously successful institutional structures outmoded, thereby creating both opportunities and risks for firms and households. Representative cases include Margaret Thatcher and the Blair wealth project; Latvia navigating the strait of Messina; Eliot Spitzer pushing Wall Street to reform; and Israel between the oligarchs and the startup nation.

The third module (“Politics: Influence and Unrest”) studies the dynamics leading to the creation and fissuring of political consensus on institutions, broad policy orientations, and specific policies. It gives special attention to the role of information influencing politicians’ choice of policy and the people’s preferences, as well as factors generating information bias. It explores the interactions between all stakeholders influencing policy-making (ruling elites, companies, media, and the people) and their impact on business. Representative cases include Lobbying in the chemical industry in the U.S.; Unrest in Chile, Looting at Walmart International; and Populism, fake news, and elite betrayal in the Trump era.

The fourth module ("The Future of Globalization") uses the macroeconomic and political economy tools and insights built in the previous modules to study the latest trends in globalization and their effects. It discusses how the increasing integration of international trade and of the global capital markets can affect the economic performance and generate political turmoil within previously successful and stable nations by undermining the internal coherence of the institutional structures on which their economic performance rested and the policy options available to them. Representative cases include the Trans-Pacific Partnership; Goodbye IMF conditions, hello Chinese capital: Zambia’s copper industry and Africa’s break with its colonial past; the 2012 Spanish labor reform; and the Covid-19 pandemic and the global economy.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Course Overview

Investment Management and Capital Markets is suitable for all students interested in gaining a broad perspective on investing and the asset management business. This includes both those targeting careers in asset management and those interested in learning how to manage effectively their personal wealth, current and future.

The course has an eminently practice-oriented focus. Through the evaluation of specific investment decisions and opportunities, students get a broad understanding of capital markets, assets classes, investing styles, and instruments (equity markets, bond markets, credit markets, real estate, privates, active and index investing, value and growth investing, activism, ESG investing, tail risk hedging, futures and swaps, etc.). Students also explore investing from the asset owner perspective, learning modern practices in portfolio construction for personal and institutional investors (family offices, endowments, pension funds, and sovereign wealth funds): Portfolio construction and risk management, identification of investment talent and skill, investment vehicles, and costs (types of fees, taxes, etc.).

This course makes special emphasis on being current and on hearing directly from investors. The average age of each case in this course is short, sessions on capital markets and asset classes are updated every year, and there are always multiple brand-new cases (nine in Fall of 2020). Classes often feature guest speakers to help students develop an up-close perspective on the issues raised in the case discussion and enhance students’ skills in investment decision making.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

The MS/MBA Capstone is an intensive project that requires teams of students to apply and integrate the skills they have learned across core disciplines developed in the program curriculum. Specifically, teams will be expected to design, build and launch a new technology-based product/service venture, and thereby to demonstrate mastery with respect to three areas of knowledge: Design Knowledge: The use of human-centered design methods to understand users, identify solutions to their needs, and gather feedback via rapid, iterative prototyping. Technical Knowledge: The use of rigorous system engineering methods to plan, design, develop, build, and test a complex technology-based product/service, integrating knowledge across multiple engineering disciplines. Business Knowledge: The use of business model analysis and lean experimentation methods to develop and test a set of hypotheses that capture how the new product/service will create value, including business model design, pricing, sales and marketing, operating model and profit formula.

The Capstone is divided into two parts, the first of which is an immersive course completed during the January term of the G2 year (Capstone I). The subsequent spring course (Capstone II) follows on from and builds upon work completed in January. Given students prior coursework, a working knowledge of human-centered design methods, systems engineering techniques, and business modeling and lean experimentation is assumed. Launch Lab therefore focuses on the practical application of these skills to team projects, supplemented by content in three areas: i) seminars on advanced methods and techniques, ii) workshops that demonstrate how to put these skills and tools into practice, and iii) guest speakers who share their experience in the areas of design, technology and business.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

The MS/MBA Capstone is an intensive project that requires teams of students to apply and integrate the skills they have learned across core disciplines developed in the program curriculum. Specifically, teams will be expected to design, build and launch a new technology-based product/service venture, and thereby to demonstrate mastery with respect to three areas of knowledge: Design Knowledge: The use of human-centered design methods to understand users, identify solutions to their needs, and gather feedback via rapid, iterative prototyping. Technical Knowledge: The use of rigorous system engineering methods to plan, design, develop, build, and test a complex technology-based product/service, integrating knowledge across multiple engineering disciplines. Business Knowledge: The use of business model analysis and lean experimentation methods to develop and test a set of hypotheses that capture how the new product/service will create value, including business model design, pricing, sales and marketing, operating model and profit formula.

The Capstone is divided into two parts, the first of which is an immersive course completed during the January term of the G2 year (Capstone I). The subsequent spring course (Capstone II) follows on from and builds upon work completed in January. Given students prior coursework, a working knowledge of human-centered design methods, systems engineering techniques, and business modeling and lean experimentation is assumed. Launch Lab therefore focuses on the practical application of these skills to team projects, supplemented by content in three areas: i) seminars on advanced methods and techniques, ii) workshops that demonstrate how to put these skills and tools into practice, and iii) guest speakers who share their experience in the areas of design, technology and business.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Career Focus

Launching Technology Ventures (LTV) is designed for four types of students:

1. Those who will start their own companies.
2. Those who will join early-stage startups (typically in a product manager, business development, sales, marketing, or growth role).
3. Those who will work at growth stage technology firms (in a similar range of roles) that try to maintain a similar, nimble operating model as a startup.
4. Those who are interested in investing in startups.

The class focus is on pre-product-market fit technology-based ventures in a range of information technology-based sectors. Business models covered range from SaaS to freemium to e-commerce to transaction-based.

Educational Objectives

The course takes the perspective of founders struggling to achieve product market fit in their early-stage startups. Our cases focus on founder decision during this search and discovery phase, both in the experiments that they design and run as well as the organizations they try to form.

LTV has a tactical, implementation bias rather than a strategic one and will largely avoid concepts covered in Entrepreneurial Finance and Founders' Journey. There is a modest overlap with Product Management 101/102 and Entrepreneurial Sales, and Entrepreneurial Marketing, but LTV is solely focused on pre-product-market fit and the perspective of the founder. In that regard, LTV is a complementary to Scaling Tech Ventures (STV), which focused more on post product-market fit startups.

LTV helps students learn the playbook for finding product-market fit while learning to design business models for success, answering the question why some startups are valued at only 2x revenue while others are valued at 20x.

Course Content

Through a series of case studies and intimate conversations with startup founder, LTV students examine management challenges in early-stage startups and the range of experiments that are conducted during this phase of development. Taking the perspective that a startup is an experimentation machine and that those experiments should cover all facets of the startup’s business model, we will explore six modules:

1. Ideation and Customer Value Proposition Experiments. What are the best methods to develop and test startup ideas early in the development process? What are the right analytical techniques to derive insight into the power of a value proposition, conduct customer discovery, and determine whether a startup has achieved product-market fit?
2. Go to Market Experiments. What is the right mix of direct and indirect selling efforts and at what phase in the startup's lifecycle should each be employed? How can founders themselves be the most effective sales engine for an early-stage company, even though it clearly does not scale as a go to market approach? What is the optimal mix of different customer acquisition methods, such as growth hacking, SEO, SEM, email, and affiliate programs? How should a startup think about working with channel partners or other gatekeepers in the face of asymmetric bargaining power and potentially divergent interests? What are the best practices for attracting and managing developers who can leverage a platform's API?
3. Business Model Experiments. When is the best time to trigger monetization experiments and how should a freemium model be best executed? What are the different pricing and business model approaches that a startup can take, particularly when trying to deploy an innovative model and drive adoption in the context of a network effect-based business opportunity? How does one evaluate the quality of the startup business model and appreciate the relative pros and cons of business model choices?
4. The Startup Organization. What is the best design for a startup organization intended to effectively execute on running startup experiments? When should a seed stage startup recruit its first sales professional and what hiring criteria should they use? The first marketing hire? How can a growth organization be created and how should it interact with the other functions, particularly product and marketing? When is the right time to build a community team? How can modern, flexible product development techniques, such as agile and continuous deployment, be utilized to enhance the rate of experimentation and thus the chances that product-market fit can be achieved?
5. Financing and Exits. What is the best way to align financing needs with a startup’s operating plan, considering the key milestones and valuation inflection points ahead? If things are going well, or (all too frequently) not well, how should a founder consider and navigate exit options?
6. Ethics. What are the important ethical considerations that a startup founder needs to consider, particularly as they face key moments such as financing and exit opportunities? How are a founder’s obligations to stakeholders challenged under pressure and uncertainty? More broadly, why does the startup ecosystem contain so many market failures that lead to biases and inequities – particularly in terms of access to capital for female entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs of color?

The course has 25 cases, 2 exercises (one focused on startup business model deconstruction using current student’s startups and the other on pitching pre-seed/seed stage financing) along with a wrap-up session. In nearly all of the cases, the case protagonist will be a class guest. Case protagonists are 50% female, 50% male, and racially diverse. In addition to meeting the case protagonists in class, coffees and lunches are arranged to allow for more intimate exposure to a wide range of startup founders and investors, helping students build a strong network in startupland.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Career Focus:

Every MBA should understand how law affects business. In addition to serving as a Senior Lecturer at HBS, I am a Securities Litigation Partner at WilmerHale in Boston. I draw upon examples from my practice and have designed the course to develop legal literacy by honing instincts that will help business leaders avoid legal pitfalls, attain a competitive edge and promote long-term success. Expanding well beyond the basic legal concepts introduced in LCA, the course will refine students’ understanding of how law affects all aspects of business, and develop a deeper appreciation of how legal systems operate and how to operate within the boundaries of legal systems. In response to increased student interest in private equity, a module of the course focuses on contracts and understanding legal documentation relating to private equity transactions. The course will also explore legal issues involved in starting, joining or investing in start-ups and decision making from the time an entrepreneur conceives, starts to build and obtains financing through development of exit strategies. The course has a global perspective and should be of interest to both U.S. and non-U.S. students.

No prior legal training is assumed. Class discussion will be based on both business school cases and other materials including excerpts from judicial opinions, statutes, news reports and analysis, and actual deal documentation. Most of the classes will run the usual 80 minutes although a few sessions may be merged for deep dives into selected topics and interaction with class guests who will appear by Zoom or in the classroom.

Educational Objectives:

The course has four objectives:

• Explore the global legal environment, develop an approach to managing and maximizing the value of the corporate legal function, and analyze the dynamic nature of law;
• Develop literacy in: basic agency, contracts, legal documentation, torts, and the dynamics of litigation; explore intellectual property (IP), mergers and acquisitions (M&A), and the basics of bankruptcy; and examine contemporary issues in securities law, private equity transactions and regulatory responses to complex financial instruments;
• Enhance understanding of the legal life cycle of a start-up including structuring and financing issues, tax considerations, founder/investor conflicts, liquidity and exit issues; and
• Consider what’s customary and fair in various transactions and the communication challenges of translating legal advice and analysis into decision-ready advice managers can use.

Course Content and Organization:

• Day 1: Overview of the Course

Module 1: Contracts -- Basic & Complex

• Day 2: Contract Basics
• Day 3: What Does the Contract Say? What Does it Mean?
• Day 4: Complex Contracts: PE – Part I
• Day 5: Complex Contracts: PE – Part II
• Day 6: Contracts – Earnout Provisions

Module 2: Additional Building Blocks

• Day 7: Torts and Toxic Torts
• Day 8: IP – Patents and Patent Licenses
• Day 9: IP – Copyrights
• Day 10: Litigation and Litigation Strategy
• Day 11: Bankruptcy
• Day 12: Securities Law – What is a Security
• Day 13: Securities Law – Operating in the Securities Markets
• Day 14: Regulation of the Securities Market
  

Module 3: Starting & Growing Businesses

• Day 15: Breaking Away – Covenants not to Compete
• Day 16: Coming Together – Forming a Business
• Day 17: Choice of Organization
• Day 18: Financing a Start-up Company
• Day 19: Employers and Employees
• Day 20: Employment – Compensation
• Day 21: Break All The Rules? Uber/Airbnb
• Day 22: Break-down/Wash-outs: Downrounds
• Day 23: The Power of Contract: Downrounds Part II
  
• Day 24: The Start-up vs. The Incumbent

Module 4: Succession & Liquidity

• Day 25: Exit Strategies or Not
• Day 26: PE Exits
• Day 27: IPOs – Old and New
• Day 28: Fulfilling the Promise – Dealing with Lawyers and Course Wrap

The Legal Environment of Business: introduces the concept of law as incorporated in the legal systems of various countries, highlights differences among the major types of legal systems, develops approaches to managing the legal function and maximizing its utility; introduces the concepts of jurisdiction and the basics of litigation.

Contracts and Private Equity Documentation: Introduces contract law and builds on that introduction to develop an understanding of private equity deal documentation and the essential elements of the contracts underlying private equity transactions, including mergers.

Liability: Torts, Crimes, and Litigation over Major Transactions: explores the various types of liability and litigation encountered by businesses including basic torts and tort litigation, Merger and Acquisition litigation, IP lawsuits, antitrust suits, bankruptcy litigation, and criminal prosecution in the context of securities regulation and international white collar crime.

The Legal Environment for Entrepreneurship and Exit Strategies: explores the role of the legal systems in creating and sustaining a climate that facilitates entrepreneurial activity and the role of counsel in helping to launch, grow and protect new businesses. It considers the following stages in the life cycle of a start-up: Formation (pre-formation issues, different forms of business organization, NDAs, contractual arrangements and other legal protections for corporate assets and opportunities, and governance and control under VCs); Employment Relationships (certain legal aspects of developing, rewarding and retaining employees, including non-competition agreements, assignments of rights, and employment litigation); and Growth and Exits (strategies for maximizing the value of intellectual property, founder/VC disputes , wash-outs, and legal aspects of exit strategies, including PE exits and IPOs).

Grading:

50% of the final grade will be based on class participation and 50% on a self-scheduled final exam.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Leadership Execution and Action Planning (LEAP) focuses on the tenacity, tactics, and grit required to influence action across a wide range of organizational challenges. While traditional leadership courses contemplate “what” is leadership, LEAP focuses on “how” leaders must take action at critical moments to shape their organizations and their careers. The course helps transition students from a classroom understanding of leadership to the often messy reality of rolling up one's sleeves and getting things done. It takes the point of view of a leader who: (1) is new to a situation, (2) must take action, and (3) is asked to operate within a system that she or he may not fully control or has not designed.

New leaders often stumble when tasked with closing the gap between a desired end-state and executing an action plan to achieve a desired outcome. LEAP is designed to give students pattern recognition and practice in developing action plans across a variety organizational challenges they are likely to face early on in their careers, including: transactions, turnarounds, crisis management, scaling, and organizational reinvention. The course will develop skills in diagnosing, designing, and executing complex actions in organizations. It forces students to contemplate the managerial tradeoffs and constraints they will face when tasked with achieving results.

An additional underlying theme of the course focuses on managerial failure, highlighting the major missteps and early career challenges that many leaders fall into. Through the lens of a variety of case protagonists in various stages of their careers, LEAP gives students the opportunity to practice devising implementation plans and identifying execution traps. The course will ask students to evaluate their own blind spots and shortcomings with regard to leadership style, execution management, and career development.

LEAP is an integrated leadership course, building on concepts from organizational behavior, strategy, marketing, finance, and general management. It brings these themes together in a variety of case discussions and exercises that focus on the personal decisions general managers face in high-performance, high-stakes, and career-defining situations. Students will examine leaders in a variety of private and publicly owned companies, family businesses, and non-profits. The course will analyze the successes and missteps of the protagonists in each case, nearly half of whom will be present in classroom to discuss their own views and, in some class sessions, to solicit student feedback about their ongoing execution challenges.

Course Objectives

LEAP has the following key learning objectives:

1. To enable students to get things done successfully.
2. To understand the risks, trade-offs, and constraints leaders face when tasked with achieving results under conditions where they have limited skills, time, and resources available.
3. To develop the leadership capabilities and interpersonal skills required to become an effective “implementer /operator.”

Underlying Themes and Goals

The industry, organization, and protagonist settings in the course are highly diverse. Cases will focus on protagonist perspectives ranging from the CEO to initial-entry positions (i.e., of the type that many students may experience soon after graduation). It offers a manager’s perspective on how to drive program execution in a variety of settings.

This course will develop implementation and project management skills. A critical skill required of program managers is triage — developing and assigning priorities based on their urgency and importance. Successful execution also requires making tradeoffs given constraints of time, capital, talent, and political capital. LEAP will introduce students to several general tactics, common traps, and tools related to execution.

This course will focus on execution. The course focuses on the alignment of tactics required to drive performance across a range of business activities. Case Students will develop implementation approaches for existing business problems in each module. The course will illustrate how difficult projects get done, how policies and procedures get carried out, and how improvements are delivered.

This course provides frameworks to guide the process of developing and implementing action. LEAP demonstrates “how” to lead implementation efforts — from diagnosis to design to execution. It presents several frameworks to help students with various action-planning challenges:

• How to determine whether the “agreed upon” goal is actually an “achievable” goal.
• How to evaluate tradeoffs among resources.
• How to manage stakeholders in positions of power, both formal and informal.
• How to create alignment among the culture, formal organization, people, and critical tasks.

This course will emphasize learning from failure. A running theme throughout the course is overcoming adversity and learning from failure. Students are challenged to grapple with their own prior failures while analyzing management teams that have experienced major setbacks. Each module includes at least one business case where the leadership team failed to achieve their goals. Students will discuss how to manage failure, seek feedback, and make mid-course corrections. The intent is to develop the student’s ability to learn from failure, and discuss how to overcome early failures in a career in order to continue professional advancement. Frequent protagonist participation will also provide students with access to seasoned executives who will discuss their biggest execution failures.

Course Module Structure

The course is organized into six modules that illustrate execution challenges where leaders may have the right set of objectives and a sound strategy, but “getting things done” is difficult and results often fall short of desired outcomes. While there is some overlap between modules with regard to processes of action planning and execution, the distinct lessons of each segment of the course are outlined below:

Module 1: Transactions Business transactions, particularly post-merger integration, are among the most difficult of leadership challenges business managers face in their careers. Even seasoned merger experts make catastrophic (and career-sabotaging) mistakes while leading through these complex periods of change. The transactions module discusses the common leadership pitfalls of merger integration, highlights management styles that seem relevant in successful merger leaders, and it offers approaches that can serve as a starting point for leading a merger process. Other topics include:

• Rigorously designing and executing integration.
• Choosing the right leadership team.
• Addressing organization and culture issues, and retaining key talent.

Module 2: Turnarounds in For-Profit and Non-Profit Organizations Turnarounds represent a high-risk execution challenge for leaders. Leaders must make decisions about what to cut, who to cut, what to keep, and how fast it all must happen. This module focuses on the common mistakes, management styles of successful turnaround leaders, and action plans that can serve as the starting point for a leader tasked with managing a turnaround. Other topics include:

• Evaluating the conditions for change.
• Creating and communicating a turnaround narrative.
• Protecting the base business while changing direction and creating forward movement.

Module 3: Crisis Building on the turnaround module, here we examine how the added elements of restricted time and lack of information combine to create unique challenges for companies in crisis situations. Unlike a turnaround, a crisis can be a catastrophic event, or a series of seemingly small events, that often surprise leaders. Most organizations are not designed to prevent or manage crises; it is not a question of if a crisis will happen, but when, and what kind. Other topics include:

• Examining tradeoffs between taking immediate action and acting with an untested approach.
• The challenge of leading in situations where confusion and chaos often exist.

Module 4: Scaling Expansion is inherently risky to an incumbent organization’s existing architecture. Scaling a business, particularly into new geographical markets or product categories, involves addressing cultural, administrative, and economic tradeoffs. Successful leadership in these scenarios requires managers who are capable of action planning for growth, as well as exerting control and influence across cultural, political, and economic divides. Other topics include:

• Establishing systems and integrated structures across growing geographic footprints, while simultaneously allowing for local innovation and preferences.
• Developing an organizational architecture that supports the expansion into new product-classes and market categories.
• Maintaining an organization’s culture and values while attempting to professionalize and create formal systems and structures.

Module 5: Reinvention Reinvention is a process whereby established organizations respond to external environmental shifts that threaten to upend their core business model, technologies, cultural values, and/or operational norms. Reinvention represents a managerial paradox: executives must both preserve and change aspects of the business that once made them successful but could render the organization obsolete in the near future. This module will examine several mature businesses that faced a near collapse and how their leaders attempted to redefine the organization to attract new consumers and markets. Other topics include:

• How innovations affect mature organizations and how to respond to technological shocks.
• How firms both preserve and change elements of “what we do” (their strategy) and “who we are” (their organizational identity).
• How to attract new talent and infuse confidence back into a workforce that has suffered a significant downfall.

Module 6: Action Planning Your Career The career module focuses on analyzing career paths, tradeoffs between personal ethics and success, and, importantly, navigating failure. The module provides students an opportunity to contemplate their objectives, and provides students with examples of overzealous life planning and the unforeseen interpersonal or ethical dilemmas that might derail a career plan. Additional key topics are:

• The tradeoffs between mapping career goals and maintaining work-life balance.
• Career resiliency and overcoming early failures after graduation.
• Individual action plans related to career transitions that students will face in the next 5-10 years.

Format of Class Discussions

Cases, supplemental readings, and guests will form the basis of class discussion. Because LEAP is focused primarily on action, each session will devote time to dissecting a series of “micro-moments” within each case. Students will design a set of actions to address various challenges. Many of the classes will also feature a protagonist or key team member in the classroom so students develop a first-hand appreciation of their leadership style, thought processes, action planning skills, and responses to problems. In addition:

• Some classes will have a non-case protagonists in attendance to share a practitioner's perspective on the case being discussed.
• Failure presentations given by select students will highlight lessons learned from early career experiences, learning from failure, and the value of applying the course’s learning objectives in the real world.
• An alumni panel will include students 3-4 years out of HBS. These alums will talk about the challenges they faced post-HBS after reentering the workplace.

Grading and Evaluation

Class participation, a written action planning exercise, and a final exam are the three evaluation methods used in LEAP.

Class participation will comprise 50% of the grade. Participation will be evaluated for both frequency and quality. Absences and lack of preparation will have a significantly negative impact on participation grades. As part of the participation grade, students will also submit a short written analysis of a failure they experienced in their professional endeavors prior to (or while at) at HBS. The essay will describe a significant failure, discuss lessons learned from the failure, and how the student dealt with the aftermath. Several individuals (4-5) per section will be chosen to present their failures and the lessons learned to the rest of the class at the end of the semester.

A midterm written exercise that outlines an action program will comprise 10% of the grade. The final exam will comprise 40% of the grade. Submissions will be evaluated for thoroughness and practical assessment of the tradeoffs needed to devise and execute a thoughtful action program. It will be scheduled during the exam period following the last day of class. Students are not required to be on campus to take the exam.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Albert Schweitzer once said, “Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success.” Was he right? Sort of. According to the best research available (which we will read in this class), to be a successful leader, you need to understand happiness and manage to it—yours and others’. Unfortunately, most leaders have to learn this fact by hard experience. Furthermore, they are never exposed to the expanding science of happiness, which contains a wealth of information on how to be happier as a leader and make others happier as well.

This class has three objectives:

1. Students will create a map of their own happiness, desires, motivations, strengths, and weaknesses. In short, they will know themselves much more deeply.
2. Students will learn tactics and strategies to raise their levels of well-being and life satisfaction.
3. Students will learn how to lead others in a way that increases happiness.

Students will take the best surveys on happiness, read some of the most influential modern research on the topic, discuss the research in class, and apply their knowledge to leadership scenarios. They will leave after seven weeks prepared to use the material during the balance of their time at HBS and in the workforce. Not only will this give them a competitive advantage in the labor market; it will also help them enjoy their work and lives.

This will take place as a hybrid class if possible, subject to HBS guidelines and available classroom resources in January, 2021. But if it is entirely online instead, the material will be optimized for that environment, including asynchronous lectures and interviews that students can consume on their own schedules (and as many times as they want), and virtual discussion sessions in manageable sizes. No matter the format, this class is designed to provide a straightforward experience in which students learn a lot and enjoy the work, without undue ambiguity or stress.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Career Focus

People Analytics is designed to help you use data to improve employee-related decisions and practices in your role as a general manager. The best way to increase your data fluency is to build hands-on skills by analyzing and interpreting data, which we do in this course in ways that complement the frameworks and intuitions you already use to guide your actions as a manager. At a deeper level, you will sharpen your ability to think analytically through a data-driven lens.

Educational Objectives

Students are not required to have a background related to data analyses or statistics to take this course. The first module will provide a foundation in using and statistically analyzing data that we will then build on throughout the semester. Students will develop an analytic approach to diagnosing the varied forces that influence individual, team, and organizational performance, leading to more effective interventions and actions.

The goal is not to turn students into data scientists, but instead to help them gain an analytic advantage, whatever their formal role. Direct experience analyzing data will help students achieve this goal. While developing analytic skills and trying out tools and techniques, students will come to appreciate the opportunities, limits, and tensions involved in using data analytics to inform people issues, while simultaneously gaining deeper insight into the substance of the business issues in question.

Course Content

In their next job, most students will use technologies and platforms that collect data about the people they manage, and themselves. This trend will accelerate in coming years, making it possible for algorithms and analytics to inform (or even perform) many management activities. Students will need to decide whether and how to gather and use employee data ranging from traditional HR data to digital traces of virtually everything we do at work.

Given these trends, effective leaders must understand how data can be used (and misused) to leverage people’s skills, talents, and insights. This premise is at the heart of the rapidly emerging field of people analytics, which organizations are embracing as they use data to help manage and develop employees.

The course is organized around five modules:

• Foundations of Analytics. We will introduce key statistical concepts and techniques to build foundational skills that are necessary to turn data into actionable insights. To do so, we will use cases that include datasets to be analyzed by students as part of their preparation. Our goal will be to create a community for individual and collective learning, helping everyone gain skills from their own starting point.
• Managing with Analytics. Using the foundational skills developed in the first module, we will address a variety of people-related business challenges, such as performance management, promotion decisions, and employee engagement, in a range of company situations. Students will learn how companies are experimenting with new technologies and practices for engaging employees, organizing their work, and measuring their activities. This module will give students exposure to principles of data visualization, analytic techniques, and related tools for using data to drive organizational change.
• Team and Network Analytics. As the traditional organization chart becomes less representative of the way work actually gets done, especially with the challenges of remote work wrought by the pandemic, organizations are turning to a variety of tools and practices to collaborate through networks and teams. We will use network analyses to reveal and improve collaboration patterns, and test new technologies to gain insight into group dynamics and communication effectiveness.
• New Frontiers in People Analytics. What data are you automatically generating as you go about your work (and your life)? What additional data could you purposefully gather about yourself that might be helpful? We will discuss and debate different ways to use new tools and data to become more effective.
• Privacy, Control, and the Future of Work. How are others, including your employer, using the data you generate to accomplish their goals, either with or without your knowledge or consent? As leaders, this module will help you think clearly about the tradeoffs and dilemmas involved in using various sources of employee data to help individuals develop while driving organizational performance.

We will use the statistical program R as our primary analysis tool in the course (though we will also gain exposure to other programs and tools along the way). No previous experience with R is required; the beginning of the course is designed to give students a foundation for using R and statistics to inform specific organizational decisions and problems. Each case that includes a dataset will also include R "starter code", which you will learn how to run. As we work our way through the course, you will learn to add to the starter code to produce your own analyses. If you have experience with R and statistics, you will have ample opportunity to continue to develop your skills. For everyone, it will be imperative to come to class with a learning orientation so we can all improve together. We will focus on learning -- and applying -- practical analytic techniques that organizations use most frequently.

Please email Professor Jeff Polzer directly with any questions: jpolzer@hbs.edu

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Markets are everywhere - and where they’re not, you can build them!

Career Focus

Over the past twenty years, entrepreneurs have created and captured enormous value by launching new marketplaces. Examples include Airbnb, Alibaba, ClassPass, Craigslist, eBay, eHarmony, Etsy, Gerson Lehrman Group, Google, IEX Group, Lending Club, Kickstarter, OpenTable, Rakuten, Uber, Upwork, and many more.

Making Markets (M²) is intended for students who want to manage in marketplace environments and remedy market failures by building new platforms and marketplaces from scratch or by redesigning existing ones - or who want to advise or invest in entrepreneurs who pursue such opportunities.

Educational Objectives

Students will learn how to identify market failures and determine when those failures create opportunities to launch or redesign marketplaces.

First, we will explore how markets function and what makes them fail. Next, we will examine how effective marketplace design-or redesign-can address market failures and improve efficiency, liquidity, and fairness. Then, we will take the entrepreneur’s perspective, studying the key barriers to organizing new marketplaces and devising strategies for overcoming them. Along the way, we will pay special attention to settings in which marketplaces create more value for transaction partners than relying only on unmediated exchanges. As we will see, marketplace design can often “square the circle,” solving seemingly intractable problems simply by reducing transaction costs or barriers to entry.

Case contexts will range from ultra-local (e.g., the HBS EC course lottery) to truly global (e.g., container shipping); will examine private and public/social enterprise settings; will profile both online and offline marketplaces; and will span all stages of marketplace launch and development.

Course Content

Through case studies, simulations, and the occasional interactive lecture, M² will examine the design, launch, and management of marketplaces and marketplace platforms. Core lessons include:

• The Structure and Purposes of Markets: Markets create value by enabling parties to execute mutually beneficial transactions - exchanging goods, say, or sharing ideas. They are everywhere that transacting parties face incentives - from classic contexts like financial or product markets to dating, recruiting, and the sharing economy.

  Some markets are completely unstructured, but most are subject to at least some rules that shape participation. In this course, we will focus in particular on markets that are organized through marketplaces that combine rules for participation with infrastructure to facilitate interactions and transactions.

• Common Sources of Market Failure: In many markets, institutional frictions combine with incentives to produce suboptimal outcomes - socially wasteful transactions occur, or productive ones do not. When such market failures occur, entrepreneurial opportunities arise: reshaping the market to improve efficiency creates value that can be captured(!).

  To understand how to fix markets, however, we must first understand how and why market failures occur. The course will classify different types of market failures, and highlight entrepreneurial responses to each.

• Strategies for Launching and Managing Marketplaces: When launching a marketplace or other market intervention, it is essential to mobilize a critical mass of market participants so that there is enough liquidity for valuable transactions to occur. Once running, a marketplace must maintain balance between its supply and demand sides, or else participants may leave to transact elsewhere. Yet at the same time, marketplaces must avoid crowding that makes it hard for participants to find high-value transaction partners.

  The course will provide strategies for promoting participation and trust in marketplaces, especially early on. Then, we will learn techniques for growing marketplaces, and combating the problems that marketplaces face at scale, such as congestion, “unraveling” (e.g., when recruiters pressure candidates with early and exploding offers), and the risk of disintermediation.

• Types of Marketplace Mechanisms: Markets work in many different ways. Some compel participants to seek out their own transaction partners; others use centralized transaction discovery and execution systems like auctions and recommendation algorithms. The mechanisms that a marketplace uses to identify and process transactions can be the difference between success and failure.

  Choosing among marketplace mechanisms requires careful attention to market participants’ needs and transaction attributes. The course will provide guidelines for adopting mechanisms best suited for different market contexts.

Final Project

Working alone or in pairs, students will write a short paper that:

1. identifies a setting where market failures lead to shortfalls in value creation and/or capture, and
2. proposes either a new marketplace or substantive improvements to the existing marketplace that would address those failures.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Career Focus

Managing Change and Transformation prepares entrepreneurs, innovators, top leaders, and investors seeking to have significant impact on major social and environmental issues by creating new organizations or transforming existing ones. It will be immediately useful for entrepreneurial ventures that are scaling; new business development and venture oversight; consulting and private equity; and project management for innovations.

Educational Objectives

The core of leadership increasingly involves the ecosystem and not just the enterprise, as innovative leaders tackle problems of climate change, health, education, race/gender disparities, and the future of cities. While aiming to solve some of the world’s biggest problems, successful leaders must also deal with continuing human challenges of innovation in the face of uncertainty. They must know how to overcome resistance to change, and forge coalitions of diverse people and groups whose interests vary and who are not fully under the leader’s control.

This course will arm students with practical skills and hands-on tools for

• identifying the need for change and barriers to change;
• developing new ideas and crafting a compelling, persuasive narrative;
• identifying and building coalitions to attract allies and resources, while minimizing opposition;
• planning and guiding systemic change (major strategic shifts, business turnarounds, merger integrations, and cultural transformations);
• leading social movements and managing specific change projects;
• diagnosing sources of resistance and overcoming obstacles in the middle of venture creation;
• scaling innovations that can grow in impact and "change the world."

Course Methods and Content

HBS cases will be augmented by a portfolio or practical tools and tool application sessions, along with dialogue with diverse class visitors. There will be opportunities for students to discuss and develop their own interests. The human side of change – how to deal with people issues – will be prominent.

The course will emphasize “thinking outside the building” to challenge conventional wisdom and find novel solutions, sometimes incorporating new technology. This will increase understanding of action across organizational and institutional boundaries, such as mergers and cross-sector partnerships. The course will also focus on creating and incubating new ventures and managing the tensions between mainstream, well-established activities - heritage and legacy systems - and innovations that challenge the status quo. Leaders’ motivations and styles across many kinds of change will be a focus.

Course frameworks and tools will be widely applicable to many sectors throughout the world, from big/established to small/new. Case settings will include digital transformation in a media company; employee empowerment and business transformation in an Asian bank, a Canadian cooperative, a Chinese manufacturer, and a European marking giant; institutional reinvention and opening new possibilities for change, such as adding financing tools to protect the oceans against climate change, or dealing with the Syrian refugee crisis by creating an Uber-like platform to match skilled refugees with talent-hungry companies; cross-sector coalitions to close the racial longevity gap; and national leadership.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Introduction

Customer value is a proven source of profitable growth. Firms are increasingly engaging with the concept of customer-based valuation with the understanding that much of the growth dynamic of their business depends on how successfully they acquire, develop and retain their customers. At the same time, the digitization of business has led to the potential for an extraordinary atomization of customer metrics and firm decisions, with personalization and individual targeting coming to the forefront. To succeed in that space, it is vital that firms strategically align their customer management goals with the digital infrastructure — including data, machine learning and artificial intelligence tools — that enable them to grow customers profitably.

This course focuses on how customer-centric firms achieve customer growth. In doing so, we will explore the fundamentals of customer-based valuation, analyze firms’ strategies for customer acquisition, retention and development, as well as explore (and apply) customer analytics tools and technologies that enable firms take a data-driven approach to their customer management activities. Accordingly, we will combine case discussions with practical exercises using (individual-level) customer data.

Who Should Take this Course?

This course is designed for students who plan to create, build or invest in digitally-driven firms that pursue growth through customer acquisition, retention and development.

The course is appropriate for:

• Students interested in marketing- and growth-related roles, responsible for creating, nurturing, and managing customer relationships
• Entrepreneurs looking to create and grow their own customer-centric firm
• Students seeking positions in venture capital, private equity, or investment management firms, seeking to identify firm’s growth potential and better understand how to value customer equity
• Consultants engaged in strategy roles such as business development and growth

There are no prerequisites for the course. The course is designed to meet the needs of those with no prior technical experience.

Learning outcomes

• Increase the ability to identify customer-driven growth opportunities.
• Gain familiarity to leverage data to better acquire, retain and develop customer relationships.
• Understand the principles of customer-based firm valuation.
• Have an appreciation of and get experience with the key analytical tools and technologies associated with a digitally enabled marketing operation.

Tentative Assessment

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Course Overview

The course approaches globalization from the perspective of firms, asking students to consider the choices that managers face as they participate in and shape cross-border trade and investment.

Career Focus

This course should interest any student who plans to work for a firm with transnational interests or investments or students with significant interests in the global and domestic politics that affect trade and capital flows.

Educational Objectives

The course aims to equip students with a deeper understanding of globalization and international business by focusing on three broad themes. First, we will consider the variety of domestic institutions and the relationships between institutions, markets, and competitive advantage. We will consider how various organizations of labor markets, financial markets, and regulatory regimes, for example, create opportunities and barriers for multinational firms. Second, we will focus on the more informal domestic “rules” that shape international openness and, therefore, the strategic environment for transnational business. These informal rules and bargains include the political coalitions that sustain globalization and the dynamics of international business in different contexts of economic and political inequalities. Lastly, we will consider transnational firms as political actors, creating and shaping domestic and international politics rather than simply reacting to the decisions of policy-makers.

Course Content

The course will be divided into three modules. The first covers the multilateral and domestic institutional contexts for international trade and capital flows. The cases will allow us to consider how firms succeed and fail by understanding, or failing to understand, the political and social arrangements, in addition to economic conditions, that surround international openness. We will also consider the fragility of globalization itself by emphasizing openness to trade and capital flows as political choices that are subject to change. Students will understand and evaluate, for example, the rise of the WTO and how China’s entry into the WTO affected international trade. The second module looks at varieties of capitalisms, meaning the profound differences in market organization in different countries and regions. We will focus on cases in which an understanding of domestic rules, formal and informal, creates opportunities and constraints for transnational firms, for example examining Shell in 1990s-2000s Russia, Google in Europe, battles between financial firms and states in sovereign debt markets, and Chinese firms on the “belt and road.” The final module looks at firms in contexts of change and uncertainty. Here, we consider the profound changes to the global business landscape accompanying the rise of illiberal populisms and competition, even confrontation, between the US and China, and the interdependence of technology and digital markets. We will look at how firms confront markets and politics in technological innovation and competition (data access and management, financial technology, semiconductors), in frontier markets (platform e-commerce in Iran and free trade zones in North Korea), and amid global hostilities (the US vs. Huawei in 5G).

Service organizations are complex and diverse, and they continue to grow in prominence. They account for 63% of the global economy, 80% of the U.S. GDP, and 86% of the jobs taken by last year's graduating class of Harvard Business School MBAs.

Managing Service Operations (MSO) teaches students how to effectively design, manage, and improve service organizations. Students will learn:

• How to create distinctive and sustainable service strategies,
• How to execute service models that enable customers, employees, and owners to simultaneously thrive,
• How to productively leverage data and analytics, and;
• How to adapt to evolving customer needs and changing competitive landscapes.

A general management course, MSO resides at the intersection of strategy, marketing, and operations. It draws upon cutting-edge research and field examples from a broad array of industries, including financial services, government, healthcare, hospitality, professional services, restaurants, retail, and transportation. The course is useful for students planning to work in, advise, or invest in service organizations.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Career Focus and Educational Objectives

The nature and scope of work is changing rapidly, creating massive business challenges in the shadow of broader political and social shifts. HBS launched a major initiative in 2017 on Managing the Future of Work to define these workplace issues and highlight their implications for business leaders. The Managing the Future of Work course reflects some of the learnings from this initiative and will cover the following main themes:

• Automation and its impact on jobs and different segments of the workforce
• Mismatch between skill demand and supply, including demographic factors and geographic differences across places
• Evolving labor models, including the gig economy and remote work in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic
• Actions steps around training, policy, and entrepreneurship.

The course allows students to examine different perspectives around the future of work, taking on the lens of business, policy, and workforce development institutions in advanced economies. The material gives a modest edge to implications for business leadership in corporations (i.e., what opportunities might be available for firms like Apple or Unilever, and what should they do?) and emerging business concepts and applications in start-up companies.

Embedded in the approach is the assumption that tackling these complex workplace issues will require new competencies for executives, including the ability to collaborate with and understand the needs of labor stakeholders, policy leaders, and educators. Part of becoming a leader versed in future of work issues is the ability to understand tradeoffs, and fully contextualizing the costs, benefits, and spillover implications of decisions or policies requires familiarity with data. A key component of the will center around data fluency in debates and projects where original data analysis is used to inform conclusions.

This course is a great fit for students who want to position themselves for careers in the future of work landscape. These roles could be as a startup founder for a company related to the future of work, as a business executive guiding a larger firm through its required transformation, as a leader within policy and labor groups interacting with firms, or as a learning and development leader playing an important role in training and reskilling.

The class is taught by Christopher Stanton. Class sessions include case studies, primers that layout the core issues on topics, and playbook reports designed for business and policy leaders. We also mix in multi-media content (podcasts, videos, etc.) where best suited. Class guests are frequent.

Course grades are based on class participation (40%), exercises and presentations of analysis (35%), an individual writeup reflecting on group exercise 2 (15%), and short-answer responses to pre-class questions (10%).

Course Content and Objectives

Module 1: Future of Work Drivers and Scenarios. The course begins by tackling the question: What is the future of work? There is much prognostication on this question, with widely varying focuses. Issues range from the pace of technological change to demographic timebombs to the fissuring of traditional employment relationships. The beginning of the Module 1 focuses primarily on technological change to build frameworks for understanding the different paths for technical advancement. A core question is what will be the impact of AI and robotics on jobs, and when? We will concentrate on which features are required for emerging technologies to affect occupations as they currently exist, i.e. when will autonomous driving become competitive with human drivers or when will robotic arms have the dexterity to do many non-standardized manual tasks? With an understanding of requirements, we evaluate different scenarios for the arrival of new technology, while ultimately forecasting what jobs will be more or less affected if technology evolves in different directions.

Module 1 also features sessions on demographics and regional differences across places. Demographic challenges are often associated with the age structure of a population and the simultaneous care needs for the young and old. Japan is the most prominent example, in part due to dwindling fertility and also because immigration has historically been limited. We also consider a hot topic domestically: regional differences across the United States and the urban-rural divide. Historical perspective on the location of economic activity will allow an informed discussion of the future of cities due to remote work and its escalation during the pandemic.

Exercise 1: The discussion of geographic differences across places will dovetail with our first exercise on good jobs and their location. We will use data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS) to understand the geographic distribution of occupations and industries across the United States. The ACS is the building-block to understand a wide variety of issues around infrastructure, neighborhoods, jobs, demographics, and the workforce. This early exercise will build familiarity with the ACS data and will expose students to the richness of the micro-data. The exercise dovetails with emerging policy papers that seek to understand the definition of good jobs, living wages, and affordability crises in cities.

Module 2: New Labor Models for the Future of Work. The second module evaluates how the labor models used by firms and workers is changing because of these technology and demographic drivers. We consider the development and future of the gig/contractor economy, businesses’ responsibility toward employees, and regulatory issues around employee classification. The second module presents the perspectives of firms managing the choice between contractors and W2 employees and tensions from this difference, platforms trying to sell flexible work solutions to enterprises, and enterprises’ adoption decisions of different work arrangements.

In the background of this discussion is implications for worker welfare. David Weil, head of the Wage and Hours Division of the Department of Labor in the Obama Administration, frames these trends as the fissuring of the workplace, and worries that traditional benefits and protections are disappearing. Others point to workers’ preferences for flexibility as a driver of new work arrangements, and present a much more positive view. We will tackle questions about the evolution of gig economy work arrangements, where we would expect these arrangements to gain share, and what the implications and responsibilities will be for managers. Module 2a concludes with potential new workplace arrangements addressing increasing care responsibilities borne by employees (young children, aging/elderly parents, etc.), fair chance employment practices, and the ways that companies are boosting their talent supply chain.

Module 3: New Policy and Education Models for Future of Work. The second module continues with a perspective that extends beyond the individual firm to consider potential policy and education sector models for the future of work. We consider national policies like Universal Basic Income and regional interventions that enhance local capacities. We also consider apprenticeship models, competency-based education, and related education/reskilling innovations seeking to build “durable” skills and career pathways for workers.

Exercise 2: Our second exercise explores topics of students’ choice, either from a business or a policy perspective, subject to the exercise involving a data-driven or analytical component. Professor Stanton has sourced several possible projects for students who don’t have their own ideas. The exercise will involve work in groups of 3-4 with plenty of consultation with Professor Stanton and several class days dedicated to getting feedback.

Taking Action: Our class wraps up with exploring how you can take action now for managing the future of work.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Educational Objectives

How should managers measure, and increase, the social impact of their projects and businesses? How should donors assess the impact of potential beneficiary organizations? Unlike profits, metrics of societal impact cannot be inferred from accounting statements. Yet measurement is a critical prerequisite to management. Fortunately, tools from data science and econometrics have been developed to navigate the nuances of assessing impact.

Measuring and Managing Social Impact (MMSI) is intended to train students to become informed and discriminating consumers of evidence so as to enable the more effective management of impact. The course aims to develop data literacy even amongst managers who never plan to implement statistical analyses themselves. MMSI will be of core interest to students with aspirations in social entrepreneurship, socially responsible business, impact investing, and effective philanthropy. But, while class discussions will center on social impact, the methods utilized in class extend to any question of causal inference, including questions about whether a particular endeavor increases a firm’s profits, raises customer engagement, etc. It will therefore also be of interest to any manager that aspires to commission and evaluate data analysis as a part of their workflow.

This course requires an openness to -- but no prior background in -- statistical analysis and quantitative thinking.

Course Content and Overview

MMSI rests on two foundations: rigorous frameworks for assessing social impact, and an introduction to the tools required to measure it. The course will provide a broad exposure to a variety of analytical methods, presented so as to be accessible to students with no prior background in statistics. Students will learn the conceptual underpinnings and limitations of methods such as randomized controlled trials, difference in differences analyses, and regression discontinuities, among others. For each of these methods, students will conduct guided statistical analyses and discuss how their conclusions inform managerial problems. Students will also benefit from abundant practice interpreting existing evidence and applying it to pressing managerial challenges.

Grades will be based on in-class participation, several at-home statistical exercises, and a final paper (completed in groups of up to 3), in which students will assess the impact of an existing or aspirational social enterprise.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Overview

This course uses works of literature, primarily novels, in place of case studies. Its aim, as a former student put it, is to show "how people develop the skills, courage, and perseverance to use power, money, and influence in constructive ways."

The course readings for this course come from many countries, they include novels, short stories, plays, and excerpts from classic works of moral philosophy. The readings also span many centuries, ranging from ancient Greek plays to Shakespeare to contemporary works.

Educational Objectives

Literature provides a distinctive and important perspective on leadership. First, it offers a strong dose of realism. None of the novels in the course is a simple, inspiring tale of moral heroism or sainthood. This authenticity provides a valuable learning opportunity: it is easier to learn from people who are like most of humanity - complicated and flawed - than from a gallery of heroes and villains. Realism also reveals leaders' struggles and failures and displays the blind spots, assumptions, and behavior that can derail leaders.

In addition, fiction lets students see leaders from the inside. In real life, people in charge rarely give complete, unvarnished accounts of their thinking. In contrast, fiction lets us watch leaders reflect, worry, scheme, hesitate, commit, exult, and regret. As one former student put it, "To enter the mindset of the characters, to be them, to feel what they feel...This is the privilege of the fiction reader."

Finally, leaders have to make hard decisions, and this course draws literature and on classic works of moral philosophy to provide a practical framework for making these decisions. The course is organized around this framework. The first part focuses on accountability, the second on character, and the last on pragmatism.

Format

The course meets in the afternoon block for two hours. Enrollment is limited to 60 students in order to foster in-depth discussion and wide participation.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Career Focus

This course gives students frameworks and tools for (i) understanding what motivates people and (ii) designing incentive systems, broadly defined, that motivate employees and others associated with an organization to engage in behaviors that further the organization’s value-creating purpose. The course is useful for students in all career tracks and with any industry focus.

Educational Objectives

By the end of the course, students will:

• Understand the wide range of motivational factors that drive human behavior in an organizational context, including pay, perquisites, promotions, opportunities for skill development, social approval, fairness, stress, emotional states, autonomy, self-identity, and values
• Have the skills to build and manage effective incentive systems, whether based on monetary compensation or based on other forms of rewards, that tap into people’s underlying motivations and promote value-creating behavior
• Understand how an organization’s incentive systems shape the mix of individuals who are attracted to, promoted within, and retained by the organization
• Know how to design organizational processes, such as hiring procedures and training programs, in ways that complement the organization’s formal incentive systems
• Have the analytical tools to connect an organization’s motivational strategy to the precise mechanisms by which the organization creates value

Course Content and Organization

The course takes an interdisciplinary perspective overall and draws heavily from behavioral economics, the field that combines insights from economics and psychology to understand human decision making.

In order to establish a baseline from which the rest of the course builds, Module 1 explores the classical economic approach to analyzing organizational incentive systems. Using an extremely simple view of motivation, the economic approach provides a large number of useful insights. The key observation is that it is impossible to perfectly measure and therefore impossible to directly reward the value that is created by an individual on behalf of an organization. When contending with this challenge, the designer of an incentive system faces an important tradeoff between inducing high levels of motivation and inducing the right types of behavior. All incentive systems represent different strategies for managing this tradeoff.

Module 2 challenges and expands the classical economic approach by considering a much richer perspective on what motivates people. Relying primarily on a psychological lens, this module examines how the design of incentive systems should account for the relevance of non-monetary rewards, the social nature of the workplace, the emotions experienced in a work environment, and the role of meaning and purpose in shaping motivation. These factors can cause well-intentioned incentive systems to backfire, but these factors simultaneously represent an opportunity for a skilled manager to harness a powerful set of motivators for the purposes of value creation.

Module 3 synthesizes the ideas from earlier in the course and embeds them in the broader context of an organization’s overall strategy and operations. The module will analyze the interaction of formal incentive systems with other organizational processes that may undermine or reinforce value creating behavior. The module will also critically examine common assumptions regarding the sources of value creation. Finally, students will have the opportunity to reflect on how their own personal values should interface with their objectives and approach when designing incentive systems to shape others’ behavior.

Group Project and Evaluation

Students will work in groups of four or five to prepare a presentation on a frontier topic in the broad area of motivation in organizations. Examples: students might present a “mini-case” on a company that uses innovative incentive practices; students might report the results of a laboratory-style experiment exploring a novel source of motivation; or students might share a synthesis of lessons learned from a handful of interviews conducted with interesting thinkers in the field. The instructors will suggest a number of pre-approved topics from which students can choose, and students can also propose their own topics (subject to instructor approval and enough interest from other students to form a group). This project is not meant to be a full-fledged final course assignment, but instead a lighter-touch opportunity to explore an interesting idea in line with the course framework.

The components of the overall course grade are as follows: 50% based on class participation, 10% based on the group project, and 40% based on an exam at the end of the semester.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Career Focus & Educational Objectives

Managerial success requires the ability to negotiate. Whether you are forging an agreement with your suppliers, trying to ink a deal with potential customers, raising money from investors, managing a conflict inside your firm, or resolving a dispute that is headed towards litigation, your ability to negotiate will determine how well you perform.

Because others do not have the same interests, perspectives, and values as you, negotiation skill is critical-professionally and personally. This course will enable you to become a more effective negotiator by enhancing your abilities to:

Identify (often-overlooked) value-creating potential in different situations;

Design and execute agreements that unlock maximum value on a sustainable basis;

End up with an appropriate share of the value that is negotiated;

Understand the vital role of ethics in negotiation, even where the parties' ethical standards vary dramatically;

Work with people whose backgrounds, expectations, perspectives, values, and ethical standards differ from your own; and

Reflect on-and learn from-your experience.

This course will teach you how to analyze, prepare for, and execute negotiations at a sophisticated level-through actions both at and away from the bargaining table. It will give you the opportunity to enhance your strengths as a negotiator and to shore up your weaknesses.

Course Content

Moving from simple (two-party, one-shot, price deals) to complex (multiple parties and issues, internal divisions, long time-frames, cross-border deals), the course integrates three complementary perspectives: analytic, behavioral, and contextual. While we will analyze a number of traditional case studies, the heart of the course is a series of interactive negotiation exercises. These exercises will give you hands-on negotiating experience. You will learn first by actually negotiating, and then by stepping back to compare your approach and results with others. You will be able to test your analytic ability and tactical skill, and to experiment with new approaches.

The course is a laboratory in which you will be both experimenter and subject. Sometimes the most important learning comes from apparent "failure"-and so the course is designed to let you fail in the safe setting of a classroom, and thus help you avoid costly real mistakes.

All of the sections of EC Negotiation will cover the foregoing in considerable depth, though individual faculty members may vary in their emphases, case material, and sequencing.

Grading & Course Requirements

Grading will be based on class participation and the final exam (or paper if permitted by instructor). The exact weighting may vary from section to section. In all instances, however, diligent completion of the negotiation exercises is essential.

Please note this course is offered in both Fall and Spring terms.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Career Focus

This is an advanced corporate finance course focused on the private equity (PE) industry as a whole. The course does not cover venture capital or real estate segments of PE; however, it offers a deep dive into growth equity and buyouts, as well as private debt, distress investing, and some energy and infrastructure. The course also illustrates how these strategies are adjusted depending on the geographical focus. Case settings will focus not only on North America and Europe, but will also explore the forces in emerging markets that affect the strategies employed by PE organizations.

The goal of the class is to understand sources of risk-adjusted value-add in the private equity space as well as institutional features of the industry, and recent developments. The students will gain exposure to a set of practical skills including deal assessment and due diligence, valuation, deal execution, capital structure, governance, restructuring, and risk management issues. In addition, a substantial part of the course will be spent on strategic elements of the deal making. Guests will attend many of the classes.

Structurally, the biggest part of the course integrates a range of topics from an investor’s (PE) perspective. The last module will dive into understanding PE compensation structure, fund of funds model, secondary transactions, and limited partners’ direct investing strategies.

The course is intended for students who are interested in working for a private equity firm, investing in private equity as limited partners, or providing investment banking or consulting services to private equity firms. This course is also appropriate for all students who are interested in a detailed and rigorous exploration of corporate finance, as many of the decisions taken by PE firms have a direct parallel to the decisions taken by companies more broadly.

Educational Objectives

This course has two objectives. First, it builds a rigorous approach for analyzing, negotiating and structuring investment opportunities. The second goal of the course is to provide students with a deep understanding of the private equity industry in a broad sense, its common tools, strategies, and factors that had been affecting its evolution. These elements are studied in a variety of contexts including buyout and growth equity funds of all sizes, and debt investing.

Course Content and Organization

The course has 28 sessions, followed by a final exam. Class participation and the final exam will each count for 40% of the course grade. A few cases will include exercises, which will count for 20% of the grade.

The course is organized into five modules.

• Module 1: Deal Sourcing and Valuation
  This module will explore various strategies employed by private equity firms to identify and evaluate investment opportunities. Important tools for evaluating investments-including LBO investment return models, financial statement analysis, and broader due diligence questions-will be examined.
• Module 2: Deal Execution
  This module highlights the critical levers utilized by private equity investors in structuring transactions. Capital structure, security choice, and broader capital markets issues will be central to the cases in this section. A detailed exploration of the structure and functioning of credit markets and their central role in private equity transactions will be highlighted.
• Module 3: Deal Management
  This module explores the important choices that private equity firms make after closure of the transactions. In particular, the critical operational levers that drive value creation will be examined, as well as governance and debt management.
• Module 4: Realizations
  This module examines timing of the exit and highlights the critical mechanisms for realizing value. A variety of realizations will be presented, including leveraged recapitalizations, strategic and financial sales of portfolio companies, initial public offerings, and secondary transactions.
• Module 5: Private Equity Firm Strategic and Management Issues
  This module takes a step back from deal-level analyses and looks at the organizational and strategic issues of private equity organizations. The goal is to understand why and which practices are likely to deliver sustained profitability in the future, and also to reflect on LPs pressures and needs.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Career Focus

This course is designed for students who may found, join, or fund private startup companies that sell to (or around) governments to solve giant problems or who may want to become extreme innovators inside government at some point themselves. The cases feature a broad range of contemporary technology applications, and the course may be of particular interest to students curious about AI, autonomy, blockchain, sensors, crowdsourcing, platforms, and related topics. The course also tackles career questions for students who wonder how to spend time making a difference in both the private and public sectors.

Course Content and Organization

Four modules make up the bulk of the course.

Ideas: What should public entrepreneurs work on? We tackle “problem-finding” and “solution-finding”. We touch on customer discovery to understand needs of citizens and public workers. We meet entrepreneurs who used the tools of design thinking and explore how they can be adapted for public problems.

Risk. How can public leaders and their private partners take on riskier projects? And how do we navigate obstacles to that? We consider whether lean startup techniques can be applied to these efforts.

Opportunity.How can businesses bring new products and services to the public? We look at ways of choosing channels, customers, and modes of revenue-generation. We weigh selling to governments or selling around them. We also look at raising capital for these business models and investing in them.

Scale. We ask how do private and public leaders bring these efforts to transformative levels? We look at the idea of government as a platform and ways to leverage their network effects for growth.
We tackle these topics mostly through case discussion, and we spend time with many guests. Three-quarters of the cases include some private company angle. One third of the cases have a non-U.S. component.

Grading and Course Requirements

Grading is based on class participation and a final exam.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Overview
The world’s largest investor, Blackrock CEO Larry Fink, wrote in his 2020 letter to CEOs that “purpose is the engine of long-term profitability. . . . The importance of serving stakeholders and embracing purpose is becoming increasingly central to the way that companies understand their role in society.” Is this really true? Does the pursuit of social purpose and stakeholder capitalism support or detract from maximizing shareholder value?  Can corporate leaders embrace a social purpose in ways that actually deliver better economic performance? 

This course offers an expanded vision of competitive strategy by incorporating social purpose as a source of new business opportunities, improved productivity and competitive differentiation using the framework for creating shared value, developed by Professor Michael Porter and Mark Kramer.
Rather than viewing social impact as a matter of corporate social responsibility or license to operate, this course offers corporate leaders practical guidance in driving business results through measurable social impact, using Professor Porter’s competitive strategy frameworks to connect social purpose with competitive advantage.  Professor Porter, who co-authored several of the cases, will also deliver a guest lecture on the core principles of competitive strategy and competitive clusters.

We examine both purpose-built companies and the delicate balancing act required for large public companies to adopt shared value strategies in response to changing societal and shareholder pressures. We also devote a module to shared value investing, exposing the flaws in ESG ratings and linking social purpose to alpha.

In addition, we will examine the ways companies perpetuate inequality and structural racism, confronting controversial questions about whether we can rely on capitalism to create an equitable and sustainable world. Finally, we will touch on the broader topic of meaning and purpose in life to help students clarify their own life purpose in connection to their careers.

At the end of the course, students should have an understanding of how social impact can be a source of competitive advantage and a framework for implementation, as well as a clearer sense of purpose and meaning in their own lives. This course is relevant for anyone who recognizes the growing importance of social issues to corporate success and the power of companies to change the world.

Course Content and Organization
The course includes 16 recent cases along with supplemental readings and a dozen inspiring guest protagonists. We will meet for 24 classes and, in place of the last four classes, students should plan to devote roughly 25 hours to their final project.

The cases provide a clear and actionable framework for building social purpose into strategy and putting the concept of shared value into practice in both large multinationals and smaller entrepreneurial companies across a wide range of industries, in both developed and emerging markets. All cases demonstrate the power of corporations to gain a durable competitive advantage by measurably improving stakeholder outcomes at scale on issues such as health, education, poverty and the environment. We will explore what it means for a company to adopt a social purpose, and the challenges involved in shifting organizational culture and processes, measuring social impact, engaging investors, and managing public-private partnerships. We will also explore the way public-private partnerships among businesses, NGOs and governments can amplify value for all three sectors, employing the collective impact framework.  A module on investing covers the shortcomings of current ESG approaches and offers newer thinking that can deliver alpha.

Supplemental readings will include excerpts from books and articles that raise questions about the darker side of capitalism, structural racism in the United States, and the immorality of markets that undercut the potential for capitalism to deliver positive social impact. We will also explore the ways that a personal sense of purpose can give meaning to life and ask students to draft a short personal purpose statement as a guide to their own careers.
Target Audience
P&P is intended as a mainstream strategy course for future corporate leaders and entrepreneurs who want to understand how social purpose intersects with corporate strategy to create new opportunities for competitive advantage. The course is also suited to students who aspire to work in government or social enterprises that partner with businesses to deliver social impact.   A limited number of cross-registrants from other schools will be accepted to enrich the class discussions.
Course Evaluation and Grading
50% of the grade will be based on class participation and 40 % on a final project and 10% on the personal purpose statement. Students will be expected to devote roughly 25 hours to the final project.  The project assignment is to draft a detailed memo to the CEO of an existing company, or a short business plan for a start-up company, in an industry of the student’s choice articulating (a) the strengths and weaknesses of the company’s current purpose, if it has one, or (b) why you believe the company should adopt a purpose if it does not have one. The project should include research into the specific social or environmental issue involved and an explanation of how the company, through its operations, can affect that issue at scale.  It should also include an analysis of the economic and competitive advantages that the social purpose will bring relative to industry competitors, and the implications for organizational structure, investor and shareholder expectations, and impact measurement necessary to bring the purpose to life throughout the company.
This course is part of a portfolio of courses relevant to Social Enterprise. For a full listing, see the Social Enterprise Initiative website.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

In the face of global challenges from widening inequality to a climate in crisis, it is becoming increasingly clear that many consumers want the values of brands they engage with to align with their own, and business is responding. What was once a niche differentiation strategy is now a nearly ubiquitous manifestation of Corporate Social Responsibility or CSR. However, it is no longer enough for a business to simply align its image, products, or services with a particular cause. Instead, businesses are expected to be purpose-driven and committed to incorporating beliefs and causes into the core of their brands and supporting long-term initiatives for the sake of an equitable, sustainable and prosperous world. In return, purpose-driven businesses have been shown to experience faster growth and increased customer satisfaction.

Purpose-driven marketing is a vehicle through which businesses or brands connect with target stakeholders on their shared values. Consumers are increasingly asking, “why should I buy from you?” Employees are asking, “why should I work for you?” And nonprofit partners are asking, “why should I partner with you?” Success in this space hinges on the ability of businesses or brands to effectively engage with, build relationships with, and influence stakeholders in ways that move toward positive change.

In this course, students will examine purpose-driven marketing from multiple perspectives including that of the firm, consumers, employees, and partners. Towards this end, this course will significantly enhance students’ understanding of what constitutes a purpose-driven firm, ability to lead a purpose-driven organization, recognize the unique challenges that come along with doing so, and effectively create and capture value for customers and other stakeholders while delivering mutual benefits to businesses and society. Students will also learn how to think critically about purpose-driven marketing and how to avoid strategies that may lead to “purpose washing”. This course will use a combination of cases, background readings, and guests (e.g., protagonists and subject experts) to better understand how to connect with stakeholders around purpose.

Career Focus

This course is designed for students who will work in, advise or invest in purpose-driven organizations as well as for those who want to better understand the challenges and opportunities involved in engaging stakeholders around purpose. This course is also suited to those who may work in or with social enterprises, including nonprofits. Finally, this course is relevant to those generally interested in the role of purpose in business and the value of it to society.

Educational Objectives

Purpose-Driven Marketing teaches students how to effectively connect with their stakeholders around purpose. Specifically, students will learn:

• What constitutes true purpose-driven marketing,
• How to build brands or brand initiatives rooted in a core purpose, mission and/or values that are designed to help the greater good,
• How to think critically about, as well as how to leverage, purpose-driven marketing and branding to better connect with target stakeholders such as customers, employees and partners,
• How to identify effective, ineffective and potentially damaging purpose-driven marketing strategies.

Grading

Grading is based on class participation (50%) and a project (50%).

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Career Focus

This course is an intensive introduction to the commercial real estate investment industry, taught by an entrepreneur and practitioner through the lens of real estate private equity. It is a great option for students who are interested in a real estate career, whether that be investment, management, development, or services. It will also help any general manager who must deal with real estate decision-making, whether that be in a professional context or their personal investment account (including a short course on how to buy a home). The course is a solid introduction to the fundamentals needed for Real Estate Investment: Successes and Failures to be taught in Q4.

Educational Objectives

A successful student in this class will understand roles real estate professionals play and how to: Invest smartly in real estate, access the real estate risks and opportunities, understand the real estate capital markets and be a future leader in the industry.

Content and Organization

Conceptual Framework: The course is taught entirely through case studies and is divided into three modules with exposure to domestic and international real estate:

• The first module covers the basic analytic framework for real property investment. This module will cover help provide a foundation of skills in understanding relative strength of real estate locations, real estate risks and opportunities, market supply and demand analytics, financial analysis and the vocabulary of the real estate.
• The second module examines each of the five main product types in real estate (industrial, apartments, office, retail and hotel), and will also include a detailed understanding of land investment. Niche real estate types like self storage and seniors housing will also be discussed.
• The final module will discuss the function of the real estate capital markets including real estate debt investment and real estate investment trusts (REITs). This module will also explore how real estate investment outside of the US entails different risks and opportunities.

Pedagogical Mix

Real estate lends itself to case method teaching extremely well. Almost every real estate decision involves some level of both quantitative and qualitative analysis. Successful practitioners have to develop practical solutions given constraints and obstacles. The best in the industry tend to see both the big picture and obsess over small details of the trade, while being able to think quickly and speak extemporaneously. My goal is to prepare you to be a future leader. This requires an above average workload, detailed case preparation and significant class participation, including participating in polls.

There will be two graded homework assignments and a final exam. The initial graded homework is to level set individuals with regard to their real estate analytics, while the second is a larger project required to be completed in groups.

Textbook and technical notes supplement the cases. Industry leaders will be in the majority classes and generally available to the students for lunches after class. Optional events outside of class will allow students to experience different elements of the real estate industry, including a visit to an active development project.

Career Focus

This course is intended for any student interested in a career in private market investing. Specifically, we cover topics pertaining to investing, managing, and developing investments in real estate and private asset backed companies. The focus has a decided private equity real estate bent as opposed to the analysis of an individual building.

The course is divided into three modules. The first module focuses on portfolio construction and understanding investment risks associated with private investments. Among the guests in this module are Karsten Kallevig of the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund, Howard Marks, founder of Oaktree Capital, and Hasty Johnson, CEO of Hines. The second module consists of the analysis of specific transactions with an emphasis on whether to pursue a specific transaction or not based on its investment merits. This section of the course will be run as an investment committee. Among the guests are Barry Sternlicht, founder of Starwood Capital, Ken Caplan co- head of Real Estate for Blackstone, John Grayken, founder of LoneStar, Ed Shugrue founder of Talmage and Richard Georgi of Grove Capital. The final module consists of a focus on private investment firms, their compensation structures and how they impact behavior. In lieu of an exam, students will be asked to develop an investment concept and present it via a paper and investment proposal. Industry leaders will judge the final presentations.

Educational Objectives

1. How to construct a private investment portfolio
2. How to assess the risks and returns in private investments and real estate portfolios
3. How to perform relative value analyses of differing investments
4. How to manage troubled investments (when to "hold 'em and when to fold 'em)
5. How to understand how compensation issues affect performance

Course Content and Organization

The course is divided into three parts with special emphasis on real estate private equity financial analysis for transactions and portfolios. The course will analyze issues associated with both successful and troubled investments. We will address the issue of when to "double down" on an underperforming investment. We will incorporate a relative value approach in differentiating more attractive investments based upon their risk adjusted returns. The first module focuses on portfolio level issues, the second will review individual transactions and the third will look at the management and investment issues from the perspectives of both general partners and limited partners. The analysis will also include a study of firm economics and the resulting incentives from the 2/20 standard compensation model. Finally, students will prepare an investment proposal and present the investment concept.

Pedagogical Mix

Private equity real estate investments lend themselves to the case study method as virtually every subject requires both quantitative and qualitative analysis, judgment calls and development of a practical action plan. "Cold calling" is a frequent and important component of the class. Polling will be done frequently.

Textbook readings and technical notes supplement the cases, while additional optional books and articles are suggested for more exposure to theoretical concepts. A very significant component of the course will be presentations by case protagonists including leading industry figures. Senior executives from the industry will be in class to discuss the case and offer practical perspectives on lessons learned from the case. Out-of-class review sessions are offered by the professor to supplement concepts included in the case, particularly with regards to modeling certain concepts included in the given case. The workload and preparation is above average for the HBS EC courses.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Career Focus

This course is intended for any student serious about a career in managing, developing, or investing in real estate. Due to its rigor, it will be more than sufficient for those thinking about real estate as a hobby or for those considering real estate for limited personal investing.

Educational Objectives

The class goals are to show how real estate works, how to assess the risks, how to be a better deal maker, how to manage a project and how to be a leader in the industry.

Content and Organization

Conceptual Framework: The course is divided into five modules with additional exposure to international real estate.

The first module covers the analytic framework for real property development and investing, market analysis and basic financial analysis. Students will also gain an introduction to the general vocabulary of the business.

The second module examines each of the main property types (office, hotel, industrial, retail, multifamily, single family and senior living), including their general characteristics, market analyses and metrics used in evaluating and operating each of these asset types, and particular risks or opportunities with respect to these types of projects and buildings.

The third module reviews capital markets including private equity syndications and deal making, mortgages and real estate investment trusts (REITs). Examples illustrating the development process continue to be used throughout this and other modules to highlight both real estate development issues and choice of capital structure.

The fourth module consists in a project competition. The range of eligible projects is broad, both geographically and in terms of project asset class or objective.

The final module discusses important emerging trends in the industry including novel asset classes, Fintech, globalization and opportunities in emerging markets, sustainability and infrastructure.

Pedagogical Mix

Real estate lends itself to case method teaching as virtually every subject requires quantitative and qualitative analysis, judgment calls, thinking on one’s feet and development of practical action plans. "Cold calling" and active participation are frequent and important components of class.

There are at least two graded homework assignments and a final exam. Most homework assignments are required to be completed in groups. Additionally, polls will be used frequently and are considered an important aspect of class participation.

Textbook readings supplement the cases, while additional, optional books and readings are suggested for more exposure to theoretical concepts. Mini-lectures and a considerable number of technical notes are used throughout the course along with a tool-kit with materials for future use. The workload and preparation is above average for HBS EC courses. There will be several outside optional events covering building sites, career development, and meetings/luncheons with industry leaders.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Free market capitalism is one of the great achievements of mankind, bringing prosperity and economic freedom to billions of people and contributing to a flowering of individual freedom and possibility that would have been unimaginable to our ancestors. Today, however, increasing global crises are posing the greatest threat this economic system has faced.

Growing income inequality, poor or declining educational systems, unequal access to affordable health care, and the fear of continuing economic distress are putting stress on political systems worldwide and challenging the credibility of business. At the same time, environmental and ecosystem degradation are increasing due, in part, to unchecked greenhouse gas emissions, leading to sea level rise, climate destabilization, and a mass extinction of plant and animal life. Robust political responses based on strong social support are crucial to meeting these challenges, but action by the private sector will also be critically important.

This course is designed for students who want to explore the idea that business has a role in dealing with these big environmental and social challenges. We will examine how private firms can play a major role in solving them in today’s world. We will also explore the ways in which accomplishing this monumental goal may require changes in how firms and leaders consider their obligations and engage with the issues, as well as rethinking the “rules of the game” by which capitalism is structured.

The course seeks to make students reimagine the role of the corporation and capital in society. We will focus on the institutions that support capitalism in order to hone our ability to collaborate in designing a new generation of institutions to address the existential crises that require immediate attention. Moreover, several classes will provide students with an opportunity to think not just about large institutions but also about their own choices, such as becoming an entrepreneur versus joining an established organization, and how these choices can empower them to affect their individual impact on the world. Throughout the course, students will continue develop the tools necessary to create and implement corporate strategies to address the big challenges that are the focus of the course.

The course differs from a number of excellent offerings that explore related issues in at least four respects. First, we explicitly challenge the boundaries of the current system, asking whether there is a different way to run firms and shape the institutions in which they are embedded (e.g., the notion that shareholder value comes at the expense of stakeholder satisfaction). Second, we explore the degree to which “purpose driven” leaders that root their actions in their most deeply held values can act as change agents within the larger system, and we examine how and why your own career might help to accelerate change. Third, we rely both on cases and readings drawing from literatures in management, law, psychology, sociology, and economics. Finally, we devote significant time throughout the course to developing concrete strategies for implementing changes within the current system and within corporations, designing new ways in which the private sector can have broad societal impact.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Over the past 20 years the world of retailing has fundamentally changed. Retailing is a fundamental industry with global sales of $25 trillion, $20 trillion of which is conducted in stores. With dramatic shifts in consumer expectations, global competition, and the advent of new technologies and business models, retailers have been challenged to find new ways to cost effectively and seamlessly satisfy customer needs. Many pundits have declared the world of brick-and-mortar retailing dead, but the reality is that retailing has evolved to the point where there is no such thing as a pure play online or offline retailer. To paraphrase Mark Twain, “The news of retailing’s death has been greatly exaggerated.” Even the most dominant players in pure play online retailing have invested billions of dollars in opening or acquiring brick and mortar stores. The era of interconnected, omnichannel retail is here. Expectations are that even with continued rapid growth of online purchases, by 2025 online sales will still only account for 20% of total global retail revenue. Although there have been a record number of bankruptcies in the space during the last two decades, intrepid retailers have been able to find ways to use their TIPS assets (Technology, Inventory, People, and Space) to find success by combining the online and offline realms, creating more value for consumers, employees, and shareholders.

The retailing course is a general management offering that looks at the greatest challenges and strategic mistakes that have led to bankrupt retailers as well as the practices that have made the best retailers thrive in this new, vibrant environment. It is also a look at what are likely to be the most important practices and areas for change in the sector going forward. This article on the Future of Retailing encapsulates many of the ideas we will discuss in the class.

The retailing course covers three main modules: retail strategy; the basic operations of retailers (marketing, buying, and merchandising, supply chain and logistics, and store operations); and how retailers may choose to grow (in new geographies, through new product offerings, through new format development-including seamless omnichannel integration, etc.). About half of the classes have guests who are the protagonists in the cases being taught. These leaders in the industry provide real time insight into how retailing is continuing to evolve and what it takes to thrive in this hyper competitive space.

The course is suitable for anyone interested in a career in general management as well as students interested in the retailing space. It is also ideal for consultants who may be working in retailing after graduation and would greatly benefit investors in retail companies (VC and PE), real estate professionals, and suppliers to retail establishments.

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Perspective of the Course

There is broad scientific consensus that to avert the most catastrophic consequences from climate change we would need to limit global increase in temperature to less than 2 degrees Celsius (2DS). To achieve this scenario there are multiple future carbon pathways with most of them pointing to the need to reach net zero emissions across many geographies approximately in the middle of the 21^st century. This transition to net zero creates a host of risks and opportunities for organizations and their investors. Should this goal not be reached and inaction with respect to climate change prevail this will lead to increasing physical risks from natural disasters and changes in the natural environment.

The course examines holistically all these climate-related risks and opportunities, under different scenarios, with an emphasis on measuring, valuing, and designing data analytics, investment processes, products, and contracts through the lens of climate change.

Course Description

This is a field course where students apply newly learned skills on measuring climate-related risks and opportunities to make investments, valuing climate-related risk and growth, and designing contracts that incorporate climate metrics. The course covers major risks and opportunities arising from climate change, specifically transition risks and opportunities and physical risk.

The course draws from academic and practitioner research, focuses on data analytics and practical applications, and is non-case based. The course looks at various applications of climate-related risks and opportunities and is not focused narrowly on clean tech or energy.

Drawing from readings in the academic and practitioner literature and working actively with live cases and data, students will learn to:

1. Use climate scenarios to determine a science-based target estimating what should be the carbon emissions of a company aligned with a 2 degrees scenario.
• More than 1,000 companies have measured their science-based target in the last five years.
  
2. Use carbon footprint methodologies to construct portfolios and indices with lower exposure to transition risk using a variety of climate data.
• Dozens of low carbon products with hundreds of billions of dollars in assets under management have been launched in the last few years.
  
3. Design a turnaround strategy that identifies poorly managed and priced climate-related risks and opportunities and engage with a company as an active owner to change its business strategy.
• Dozens of business strategy turnarounds are underway across multiple sectors
  
4. Negotiate and structure a bond contract that makes the coupon rate contingent on climate metrics (i.e., sustainability-linked bonds).
• These sustainability-linked instruments have raised hundreds of billions of dollars.
  
5. Identify and price emerging transition opportunities in the transportation, infrastructure, real estate, agriculture, energy, and industrial sectors that are critical to achieve net zero.
• Trillions are required in investments in the next two decades.
  
6. Structure a financial product designed to protect natural ecosystems, such as coral reefs and forests.
• These novel products not only provide significant, direct benefits to surrounding communities but also help mitigate climate risk through carbon sequestration.

Career Focus

This course is aimed at all students who, at some point in their career, will need to measure and value risks and opportunities emerging from climate change and make investment decisions using climate change as a lens through which they assess the resilience, growth, and value of a business. This course will be particularly beneficial to students who are seeking a career in asset management (investment managers, hedge funds, private equity, and venture capital), investment banking, management consulting, and technology focused on data and analytics.

Course Format

The course has 13 2-hour in-class sessions in the afternoon allocated throughout the semester.

Grading Criteria

Your course grade will be comprised of 40% class participation and 60% performance on the applications.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Course Overview and Objectives

This course is about one question: What is the proper role of the government in the market economy? We study the role of government as it plays out in the real world, using vivid case studies from many countries, decades, and policy angles. At the same time, we align these cases with a rigorous theoretical framework that clarifies the circumstances under which government intervention in the market can improve outcomes.

The goal of this course is to deepen your insight into and influence on the debate over economic policy. Private-sector managers are better able to position their organizations, both defensively and offensively, if they understand why and how governments act. Moreover, exceptional private-sector leaders are now widely expected to provide informed, intelligent leadership on the policy issues at the heart of this course.

Career Focus

The course is designed for students who aim to lead private-sector institutions of systemic importance, influence public debates over government policy, or occupy policymaking positions at some point in their careers. The skills and knowledge it develops, however, are increasingly valuable to the broad range of businesses, non-profit organizations, and civil society institutions whose activities intersect with government policy.

Course Structure

The course opens with a case on why a hypothetical competitive market economy can be used as a starting point for analyzing what role government should play. Market economies are miraculous when at their best: flexible, decisive, and self-correcting.

But markets are not always at their best, and the first module of the course confronts major real-world departures from this hypothetical starting point. These departures mean that government policy can improve the efficiency of the economy, in principle making all individuals better off. Policy areas addressed here include antitrust regulation, environmental protection, education, health care, and fiscal and monetary policy.

We may want the government to do more than remove inefficiencies, so the second module tackles questions of economic justice and their implications for the government's role. In particular, in this module we study central debates over the taxation of individuals and firms, the provision of economic assistance, and the determination of the boundaries of policy.

As this summary shows, the cases we discuss take us step-by-step through a rigorous conceptual framework that provides the intellectual backbone for the course. At the same time, each case gives us a chance to examine an important policy area in some depth. Accompanying each case are a set of core concepts and suggested readings. The core concepts represent fundamental insights into the role of government, so an understanding of them can substantially increase one's ability to analyze a given policy decision. The suggested supplemental readings are starting points for pursuing areas of particular interest in greater detail. They include many foundational pieces of scholarship, as well as newer and less scholarly works that shed light on these issues.

Course Administration

Course grades will be based on class participation (50%) and a short paper (50%). For the paper, students will apply the tools and ideas from the course to prepare, with one or two partners if they wish, an analysis of a government policy problem of their choice. The course is designed so that the time required to prepare the paper is comparable to the time a student would devote to a final exam. Throughout the term, Professor Weinzierl will be available to meet with students by appointment. To arrange a meeting, please contact his assistant, Deannah Blemur, at dblemur@hbs.edu.

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Career Focus

Scaling Technology Ventures (STV) is designed for students who plan to found or join a rapidly growing digital technology venture, or who plan to invest in similar growth stage ventures post-HBS. Cases focus on scaling ventures in DTC e-commerce, mobile apps and media, two-sided platforms, AR/VR, and enterprise software.

Educational Objectives

The course defines a scaling venture as one that has achieved product-market fit and secured at least one round of institutional financing. Adopting the perspective of a CEO, a founder, or a functional leader, cases in the course frame many of the predictable opportunities and challenges associated with activating rapid growth, and then managing such rapid growth as a venture scales. Scaling situations are presented through a variety of functional lenses, including sales and marketing, business development, product management, and engineering and technology.

In nearly every class, the course will host case protagonists – usually founders and CEOs – as in-person class guests. Students will have the opportunity to participate in round table lunches to connect more informally with guests. The course will also host several optional workshops. In prior years, topics have included performance marketing, product management, the future of remote work, and managing the customer and/or user experience.

STV is a natural companion to the MBA elective Launching Technology Ventures (LTV). LTV focuses on early-stage ventures that are searching for product-market fit, while STV focuses on later-stage ventures that have confirmed product-market fit.

Course Content

Through case discussions and dialogue with company founders, STV examines executive leadership and functional management challenges in scaling ventures after the "search and discovery" stage of startup evolution. These challenges are organized around six modules that represent external and internal enablers of successful scaling:

Strategy: In what directions should a new venture grow? When should a startup expand into new geographies/markets or diversify product lines versus growing its customer base for existing offers? How does a venture gauge market readiness, and what does it take to “cross the chasm” to the early majority?

Speed: When is scaling a venture premature, and at what pace should a scaling venture grow? How fast should a venture drive its internal processes, such as strategic decision-making, market and purchase funnel testing, and cycle times of service operations and supply chain? What role can metrics play, such as OKRs?

Staged Resources: In what ways can scaling ventures finance growth with or without VC financing? How do scaling ventures use analyses, such as unit and customer economics, to make their case to investors? How does a venture size its total addressable market? How can a venture maximize valuation through composition of revenues?

Structure: When and how should a rapidly scaling venture introduce more formal roles, systems, and processes? How quickly should scaling leaders design organizations to assure cross-functional integration? How does governance, starting with the board of directors, evolve as a venture matures and scales?

Senior Team: When should a scaling venture replace its founder-CEO? How do professional CEOs differ in their approaches when they "inherit" a scaling venture? How should ventures onboard experienced executives recruited into leadership positions, and when does it make sense to start hiring specialists instead of generalists?

Spirit: How do leaders in rapidly growing ventures shape culture? How do they assimilate hires who are less mission-driven and more political than the first wave of recruits? How can they mitigate the friction between the "old guard" and newer talent?

Students have a choice between taking a final exam and completing a final project that applies course concepts to a scaling venture. For the final project, students are encouraged to work in teams while engaged with a venture (which may be their own or one they intend to join) and then prepare a report presenting their analyses and conclusions.

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Course Content and Objectives

The US-China bilateral relationship is in its worst shape since the two nations normalized diplomatic relations in 1979. The deterioration in Sino-American relations, and the intensely competitive rivalry that has developed, have important implications for the rest of the world, including the business sector. This course has three principal goals: (i) to leave students with a significantly better understanding of this most consequential bilateral relationship, and of the multiple dimensions of the rivalry; (ii) to expose students to a range of perspectives, encouraging them to challenge and refine their own; and (iii) to engage students in creative ideation toward progress—as they define that—in some aspect of the US-China relationship.

Among the rivalry dimensions on which class sessions will focus are the competitions (i) of economies and political systems; (ii) for national security; (iii) for technology leadership; and (iv) for “global leadership” (as each principal conceives it). The course will be reading- and discussion-intensive. It will not be case-based. It will emphasize practitioner-oriented readings (e.g. articles from Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy; Council on Foreign Relations, Brookings and Belfer Center reports; book chapters; speeches, transcripts and official policy statements; and a few articles from scholarly journals). The course will also feature several guest speakers (a small number of whom may need to be scheduled outside class hours to accommodate speaker schedules/time zones). Assigned readings and guest speakers will represent a diversity of views. The course aims to help students further refine the substantive world views they will have been developing at HBS, while enhancing their capacities for empathy and perspective-taking.

The final paper assignment may (but need not) be completed in teams of two. The assignment will include an opportunity for students to creatively ideate promising ideas for progress in an aspect of the US-China rivalry that interests them. Students will likely find that the course, and the final assignment, will afford them an opportunity to productively draw on concepts and frameworks from multiple HBS courses they will have taken.

A broad range of students should find this seminar interesting and relevant. Among them: those for whom the subject matter is intrinsically fascinating; those who expect that Sino-American geopolitics may significantly impact the broad context of their professional lives; and those whose careers (e.g. in strategy consulting, corporate leadership, equity investing) may be still more directly shaped by this pivotal bilateral relationship.

Course Administration and Grading

Students will be graded based on the following: (i) 40% on class participation; (ii) 20% on short-answer assignments submitted prior to class meetings; and (iii) 40% on the final paper.

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Social entrepreneurs don’t just build organizations, they change systems. This course looks at social entrepreneurship through the lens of traditional entrepreneurship, but asks how people motivated by disrupting entrenched and often inequitable systems differ from traditional entrepreneurs: from their mindset and character, to their capacity for systems thinking and empathetic product design, to how they navigate diverse sources of capital to build either for-profit, nonprofit, or hybrid organizations. The course also looks at how systems change requires entrepreneurs to think beyond their own organizations to collaborate within their field and to motivate collective action, and to combine direct impact with the indirect effects of changing culture and shaping policy.

The course asks a set of core questions: Who are social entrepreneurs and what makes them tick? How do they make the right strategic choices to scale their organizations to create meaningful, lasting change? From team building to capital raising to measuring effectiveness, what are the building blocks of effective social enterprises? And at a time when there is increasing skepticism of business and philanthropy, why are social enterprises still the best positioned to be catalysts for meaningful social change?

The course features a diverse group set of protagonists in diverse contexts (issues, geographies, stages, organizational forms), but also asks students go deep on a single social entrepreneur of their choosing over the course of the semester, culminating with an integrative final assignment that through a peer review process leads to the development of a new case study for the following year’s class.

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COURSE OVERVIEW

No industry is more important to the future of humanity than the space industry, and that industry is currently undergoing a historic revolution. These are bold claims, but in this course we will engage them as we discuss the rapid progress being driven by companies such as SpaceX, Blue Origin, Made In Space, Spire, and more. We will be joined by leaders in the industry, including alumni, eager to help you join them in building a new space age with the private sector as its engine. We will learn about the history of space agencies like NASA and debate their role in the future. And we will study the economics and finance underlying the sector, where public-private linkages are deep and essential. Space is already essential to our lives in countless ways, but its role today is negligible compared to its potential. Realizing that potential will require gifted business leaders; this course will help you become one of them.

Course Administration

Course grades will be based on class participation (50%) and a short paper (50%). For the paper, students (working alone or in groups of up to three) will analyze a space company or policy as a component of the overall space sector and its evolution, drawing on the lessons and examples explored in the course. The course is designed so that the time required to prepare the paper is comparable to the time a student would devote to a final exam.

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Introduction

This course is intended for students interested in creating their own private markets investment firm either upon graduation or at some point later on. Specifically, this course will address the myriad of issues one faces in creating a firm specializing in venture capital, private real estate, or private equity. Starting such a firm is difficult and complicated given the competitiveness of the market, regulatory environment, tax issues, and the access to capital for a new fund. In this course, we offer a roadmap as to how one can establish such a firm that will hopefully increase the likelihood of success. We assume the firm will use the limited partner structure and the firm will serve as the general partner.

Educational Objectives:

This course will be multidisciplinary and will draw upon the expertise of industry leaders in each of the categories listed below. In this course, we will focus on legal, marketing, and organizational considerations. Specifically, topics will include:

• State of the Private Markets
• Initial Investment Strategy
• General Partner/Limited Partner Structure
• Regulatory Considerations
• Economics of a Private Investment Firm
• Internal Governance Issues
• Creating Internal Processes for Investment Decisions and Firm Management
• Marketing and Fundraising Strategies
• Creating a Winning Culture

Pedagogical Mix

The course will integrate case studies, selected readings, mini-lectures, presentations by industry experts and panel discussions. The legal component of the course will include technical discussions of the firm’s corporate structure as well as the tax issues affecting the corporate structure and portfolio investments. “Cold calling” is a frequent and important component of the course.

We will use textbook readings, articles and technical notes to supplement the cases.

Career Focus

The course is designed for those with some basic familiarity of the Venture Capital, Private Equity or Real Estate and are interested in someday being your own boss and managing capital for third parties. The course will also be of interest to those who want to work for a firm in one of these industries or to entrepreneurs who want to receive capital from these firms. We will provide a glossary for those who may not know all the “parlance” of the industry, but the conversations, especially on the legal issues, will be technical. Legal knowledge is not required, but some basic understanding of the relevant terms will be beneficial.

Who Teaches This Course?

The course will be taught by Nori Gerardo Lietz and Bob White. Nori founded PCA, which was the largest real estate investment and advisory firm in the United States based upon client assets. Bob was a member of the founding team of Bain Capital which has grown from an original fund of $38 million raised in 1984 to a collection of funds that manage over $100 billion across five asset classes in eight countries.

Enrollment

The course will be open for cross-registration, but enrollment will be limited to 60 students.

Students who took the SIP this past January should not take the course as it will be much of the same material.

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Overview

This course explores the unique aspects of creating effective management and investment strategies for technology-intensive businesses. What strategies can win in markets with strong network effects? How can firms leverage technology to build multi-sided platforms? How can firms create and capture value from intellectual property? What are the unique challenges of governing technology-intensive firms? And how can firms build and sustain competitive advantage in new, emerging technologies with high degrees of uncertainty?

The course provides a series of concepts and frameworks which students can directly apply to strategic problems they may encounter post-graduation. We will study firms ranging from pre-revenue startups to large multinationals, and industries that include artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, cloud services, e-commerce, social networking, semiconductors, operating systems, streaming media, intellectual property, 5G wireless communications, voice assistants, electronic ink, virtual and augmented reality, video gaming, and blockchain.

Course Content and Organization

The course is structured into seven modules:

Network Effects and Increasing Returns: Technology-intensive businesses have unique attributes, which make their products increasingly valuable if more consumers buy their product or if more complements become available. Also, the cost structures of some technology businesses differ fundamentally from traditional manufacturing or service industries. What are the implications for market tipping, pricing, and growth strategies?

Strategy Rules: To become a great strategist in the technology world, we can learn critical lessons from the most successful CEOs in the sector over the last 3 decades: Bill Gates, Andy Grove, and Steve Jobs. This short module explores two principles of great strategy: “Look Forward, Reason Back” and “Make Big Bets, Without Betting the Company.” The following modules dive deeper into the critical role of platform thinking, tactics, and governance.

Multi-Sided Platforms: The most important competitive battles in technology are no longer between standalone products or services but between platforms. The most successful companies are those that build multi-sided platforms (MSPs), which spawn large ecosystems of users and third-party complementary products and services. Why and how do MSPs differ from "normal" firms? What are the key strategies for creating successful MSPs?

Tactics-Judo & Sumo Strategy: Fast-moving technology businesses face critical challenges that are tactical in nature. How and when should firms cooperate and/or compete with firms within their industry? How can small firms use the larger competitors' size to their own advantage? When and how can large firms impose their will against other players in their ecosystem, without running afoul of anti-trust laws?

Intellectual Property: A defining characteristic of technology industries is the disproportionate share of value which resides in intellectual property (IP) assets such as patents and copyrights. This module covers how the patent system works, why the market for IP is inefficient, and how licensing and open-source business models can capture value from their IP.

Governance of Technology Firms: Technology firms face two special governance problems: extraordinary uncertainty and asymmetric information between management and boards of directors. This module explores solutions to these challenges in both early-stage startup firms and large, incumbent players.

Look Forward, Reason Back: One of the most critical problems in the technology world is trying to understand how the future landscape will evolve. We use cases and exercises to explore how to “look forward” into the emerging technology markets of tomorrow and then “reason back” to concrete strategies for today. This module looks at the future of media streaming, voice as a user interface, robotaxis, cryptocurrencies, wearables, and virtual reality.

The course utilizes lectures, case analyses, independent reading, and will have visitors from entrepreneurial and large companies. Only 15 of the 27 sessions are traditional HBS cases. Grades will be based on class participation, participation in pre-class polls, a short written assignment, and a final paper.

Each section will be limited to 65 MBAs.

Career Focus

The course should be of particular interest to those interested in managing a business for which technology is likely to play a major role, and to those interested in consulting, private equity, or venture capital. The course may also be valuable for students who do not necessarily plan to pursue a career related to technology: the concepts and frameworks covered (e.g., network effects, judo strategy, multi-sided platforms) apply well beyond technology industries.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Enrollment: Limited to 45 students per section

EDUCATIONAL OBJECTIVES

Professionals employ judgment to offer valued services to their clients. Professional Service Firms (PSFs) include strategy consulting, investment banking, asset management, legal services, IT consulting, and communications firms, as well as architectural practices, academic institutions, and public service organizations.

This course focuses on drivers of long-term success for PSFs and the professionals working in them. Owing to PSFs’ distinguishing characteristics—their outputs are valued services, and their strategic assets are their professionals and their clients—their success drivers differ from those in typical commercial and industrial firms.

Through studying the elements essential for organizational and personal success, the course will help you understand what it takes to be an effective professional and a member of a thriving PSF. It is meant to be useful whether you work in an established PSF, set up a PSF as an entrepreneur, or work as a professional in a commercial firm.

COURSE CONTENT AND ORGANIZATION

Course Structure
The course is organized in seven modules: (1) service market strategy; (2) capital market strategy; (3) corporate and organizational strategy; (4) talent strategy; (5) strategy implementation, leadership, and culture; (6) professionalism; and (7) strategy for professional and personal success.

In the first module on service market strategy, we discuss the segmentation of professional practices, the drivers of economic success in a professional practice, and the importance of aligning the organization with its position on the practice spectrum. We focus on the importance of an excellent reputation and high client loyalty for PSFs and discuss ways to achieve these goals. We also study the prospects and challenges of establishing an entrepreneurial PSF—identifying and leveraging market opportunity, building momentum, leveraging technology, and managing growth. Representative cases: entrepreneurial start-up Moksha; global edtech firm Emeritus; consulting firm International Profit Associates; and professional talent network Axiom Law.

In the second module on capital market strategy, we discuss the importance of aligning ownership goals with service market objectives. We discuss the pros and cons of private versus public ownership, how to value targets when considering acquisitions, post-merger considerations, and transactions that can potentially unlock value—all within the context of PSFs. Representative cases: Goldman Sachs IPO; Cap Gemini’s acquisition of EY Consulting; and the Finsbury Glover Hering merger transaction.

In the third module on corporate and organizational strategy, we first discuss expanding the scope of a PSF, geographically or in service lines, and the challenge of managing a multi-practice PSF. We next focus on three key elements of organizational strategy in PSFs: structure, particularly the challenge of managing a matrix organization effectively; systems, particularly compensation system in a professional partnership; and processes, particularly client service process in a PSF. Representative cases: Egon Zehnder’s expansion beyond executive search; Ernst & Young’s bolstering of its China practice; and partner compensation in Brainard Bennis Farrell.

The fourth module on talent strategy emphasizes the centrality of aligning a PSF’s talent strategy with its service market strategy. In this module, we discuss the topics of recruitment and retention of star professionals, motivating and developing professionals, and nurturing robust, high-performance teams in PSFs. Representative cases: partner promotion at Bain & Company; leveraging stars in Ecolab; video case on a friendly fire incident in the U.S. military; and Lehman Brothers Equity Research.

The fifth module on strategy implementation emphasizes the role of leadership and culture in ensuring that a PSF effects its desired strategy. The module focuses on leading change in a PSF, as well as ensuring organizational resilience in the face of external challenges. Representative cases: New York Police Department’s transformation under Bill Bratton; Linklater’s Clear Blue Water initiative; video case on terror attack at the Taj Mahal Hotel; and video case on Shackleton’s journey to the Antarctic.

The sixth module on professionalism identifies the distinguishing characteristics of professional service, and the consequent responsibilities and rights of professionals and PSFs. We discuss why professionals are held to specific standards of conduct, and the implications of these standards on competition and industry structure in the professions, as well as the role of professional associations. Representative cases: KPMG’s dispute with Prince Jefri of Brunei; quandary faced by consultant Sherif Mityas at A.T. Kearney; and challenges confronting the International Chamber of Commerce Court of Arbitration.

The seventh module on strategy for professional and personal success takes the individual as the unit of analysis. We focus on the arc of professional careers and discuss considerations that can lead professionals to productive careers and a sense of personal fulfilment. Representative cases: panel discussion with professionals; demands faced by the consultant Bob Anderson; and success from the perspectives of professional William Fox.

The course follows an outside-in and broad-to-narrow learning trajectory. We begin by studying how a PSF can succeed within the context of its service environment. Next, we focus on capital market considerations of ownership and governance. Thereafter, we study the scope of the firm and its internal organization. We proceed to study how to develop and leverage professionals effectively. We investigate the sources of societal expectations of professionals and how professionals and their firms and associations can meet those expectations. Finally, we ask how individuals can succeed as professionals.

Approach of the Course
The course employs a combination of inductive learning through case studies, compare and contrast across multiple cases, reflections of case protagonists and experts, and discussions of research findings and concepts related to professional services.

Our primary learning tool is the case study method. We will discuss a mix of cases—some examining the current challenges facing PSFs, others focusing on landmark events that have influenced particular professions significantly, and yet others that look at classic themes that have stood the test of time. Many of the case studies take a longitudinal perspective, following professionals and their enterprises over extended periods of time. Thus, we have the opportunity not only to determine the sources of performance at any given time, but also to identify the capabilities and processes that sustain success over time and to learn how PSFs respond to change.

The cases are situated in different professional service settings: management consulting, financial services, accounting, law, medicine, academics, and government. We will study established industry leaders as well as entrepreneurial PSFs. Case protagonists or external experts will attend some of the class sessions and engage in the discussion and reflection process.

We will also utilize other learning tools besides printed cases. In one of the sessions, we will have a panel discussion in which alumni will share their experiences and perspectives. Some sessions will include lectures on concepts of relevance to PSFs and professionals. In some sessions, we will employ video cases to discuss topics of relevance and importance.

Our class size affords us the opportunity to conduct the sessions more as seminars and workshops than as traditional large case-based classes. Thus, we will discuss salient aspects of case studies, but we will also go beyond the specifics of the focal cases to discuss concepts as well as similarities and counterpoints with other examples.

Course Administration
Course grades are determined by two elements: class participation (50%) and a final paper (50%). The paper also offers you an opportunity to contribute meaningfully to course development.

Copyright © 2021 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.

Career Focus

This course is appropriate for students interested in pursuing careers in any management function (e.g., operations, marketing, finance) in firms that make, sell and/or distribute physical products, or in organizations (e.g., consulting firms, investment banks, private equity firms, software providers, transportation providers) that analyze, invest in, and/or offer products and services to those firms.

Educational Objectives

Supply Chain Management (SCM) builds on aspects of the first-year Technology and Operations Management (RC TOM) course. However, whereas RC TOM focuses primarily on producing and developing products and services, SCM emphasizes managing product availability, especially in a context of rapid product proliferation, short product life cycles, and global networks of suppliers and customers. Hence, topics not examined in RC TOM such as inventory management, distribution economics, and demand forecasting are explored in depth in SCM.

SCM also differs from RC TOM in that RC TOM concentrates primarily on material and information flows within an organization, whereas SCM focuses on managing material and information flows across functional and organizational boundaries. Due to the boundary-spanning nature of supply chain management, the SCM course also has strong links to the first-year courses in marketing, leadership, and strategy. The course emphasizes the "general manager's perspective" in managing supply chains. Cases in the course illustrate that barriers to integrating supply chains often relate to organizational issues (e.g., misaligned incentives or change management challenges) and operational execution problems (e.g., misplaced SKUs in a retail store) that fall squarely in the domain of the general manager. The course makes clear that suitable information technology and appropriate use of analytical tools are necessary, but by no means sufficient, for supply chain integration.

Grading

Grading will be based on class participation, engagement, and a capstone project consisting of playing a week-long “Supply Chain Game” simulation and writing a corresponding report.

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Career Focus

This is an investing/finance course, designed to build on skills introduced in the RC finance course, but with an emphasis on how and whether investors should incorporate what have traditionally been considered “non-financial” criteria in their decisions: for example, climate risk, environmental sustainability, minority representation on boards, and even the potential to create social good. Covering both public and private markets, the course will present rigorous approaches to business model assessment, valuation, transaction structuring and exits, as well as equity selection and portfolio construction. The course also explores incentives, decision-making, and the crucial problems and opportunities within the industry itself.

This course is geared toward students interested in working in the investment industry - whether directly, as an asset manager/investor, advisor or private individual, or indirectly as an entrepreneur or operator receiving investment capital. We will emphasize practical skills, including pitching stocks, performing diligence, measuring impact, and evaluating portfolio performance.

This course will be differentiated from other excellent offerings at HBS by focusing on the intersection of investing/finance and key global challenges, guided for example by the Sustainable Development Goals, including climate, gender equality, and poverty reduction. Emphasis will be placed on the analytical tools needed to understand the financial perspective and make investing decisions; however, students will also be learn to rigorously assess investments in the context of non-financial objectives. Investing - Risk, Return, and Impact is a finance course, which could be taken on a stand-alone basis or as a complement to Private Equity Finance, VC/PE, and Entrepreneurial Finance, Investment Management or Investment Strategies.

Course Content and Objectives

An increasing share of assets globally are subject to a non-traditional (environmental, social, and governance [“ESG”] and impact screen), including over 25% of all professionally managed assets worldwide (ca. $30 trillion). This approach is growing - for example, in 2018, Larry Fink, CEO of the world’s largest asset management firm, Black Rock, wrote in a public letter: “To prosper over time, every company must not only deliver financial performance, but also show how it makes a positive contribution to society.”

This statement reflects an increasingly broad-based sentiment that asset owners should include ESG and impact criteria in their investment process. Most large asset managers (e.g., Goldman Sachs, Bain Capital, TPG, Blackrock, State Street) are establishing sustainability, “ESG” or impact investment practices, and developing products to meet the demands of capital owners, including pension funds, endowments, and family offices.

The promises are seductive: better long-term risk management, “doing well by doing good”, even new sources of alpha. Skeptics argue a focus on non-traditional criteria may distract from and reduce returns, or, on the other extreme, shift funding away from worthy philanthropic causes. Using tools from both the asset pricing and corporate finance toolkits, this course examines these questions in detail: What does it mean in practice to incorporate non-traditional preferences and criteria? How do such activities affect risk and return? Do these new practices actually alter company behavior, or create social value? How is and how should social value be defined and measured?

In public markets, we evaluate the costs and benefits of negative screens, ESG integration, and activist investing. Private market cases cover venture capital in Asia and Africa, private equity in the US renewables market, as well as instruments involving the public sector, such as social impact bonds.

Cases critically examine the logical and market case for a wide range of models, ranging from those that seek (and obtain) above market returns, to those designed to use the power of financial contracting to unlock innovation and help transform the social sector. Cases will require rigorous financial and investment analysis, building on and extending skills acquired in the RC finance courses.

The landscape is changing quickly; nearly every case was written or updated for this course in the past twenty-four months; most classes will feature protagonists as guests. The course will be jointly taught by Shawn Cole, Professor in the Finance Unit and Vikram Gandhi, Senior Lecturer and a practitioner in investment banking and impact investing.

Course Organization

The first module provides an overview of the industry, an introduction to key challenges, and the existing evidence base. The second module investigates private market activity with a focus on how firms make investment decisions given both traditional and non-traditional objectives. The third module examines the challenges related to defining, measuring and managing “impact” or non-traditional goals and objectives. The fourth module explores objectives and implementation in the public market context including negative and positive screens, engagement and activism and ESG integration. The fifth module looks at the frontiers of this practice including robo-investing and the evolution of large-scale financial institutions.

Class Sessions: The course has approximately 28 cases, some of which include simulations or group exercises. Class participation and other activities will account for 60% of the grade.

Paper/Project: The Paper/Project will account for 40% of the grade.

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Course Overview

Tough tech ventures face both high levels of technology and commercial pathway uncertainty, and therefore demand their own strategies and tactics for managing risk vs. reward. Historically, most entrepreneurship courses (at HBS, and elsewhere) disproportionately focus on consumer- and /or software-centric business model and product experimentation tools (e.g., business model canvas, Lean Startup methodology) which are optimized for venture opportunities with relatively low technological and/or market uncertainty.

While tough technology has the potential to transform incumbent industries and tackle our most pressing societal issues, the tough tech ventures which design and deploy these solutions confront a number of challenges that are distinct from those faced by more mainstream startups. This course has been built from the ground up to dig deeply into these challenges and to provide impactful and actionable frameworks which build on all the tools learned so far at HBS to overcome them in order to drive impact at scale.

Career Focus

This course has been specifically designed for students who are considering founding, joining or investing in tough tech ventures upon, or soon after, graduation. While the course is focused on advanced technology, students need not have a technical background, merely a passion for making an impact through participation in these ventures. The primary objective of this course is to enable students to holistically understand and evaluate tough tech ventures at the various stages of their development, identify specific commercialization frictions and apply a set of strategies to overcome those challenges and successfully lead these ventures to scale in order to generate financial returns and deliver the intended impact.

Key Learning Objectives

• Understand key founding and funding models for tough tech innovation
• Define tough tech R&D and product roadmaps, incorporating intellectual property concerns and “technoeconomic” forecasting
• Articulate paths to market and business models while accounting for tough tech value chains and competition
• Explore and negotiate strategic partnerships and investments
• Analyze the tough tech lifecycle financing sources and tradeoffs from early grants and equity to later stage deployment capital
• Examine global and local market failures that affect tough tech ventures and policy interventions that may stimulate (or stymy) the investment in, and scalability, of these ventures
• Identify best practices for designing, building, incenting and leading successful tough tech teams
  
  

Course Content & Organization

The main class tool will be case discussions based on a variety of tough tech ventures, including those pursuing frontier clean energy, material science, biotech and aerospace technologies. We will have case protagonists and guests in every class including tough tech entrepreneurs, investors and domain experts so you can engage directly with these practicioners from the burgeoning tough tech venture ecosystem. Additionally, the course will borrow heavily from Professor Matheson’s activities in founding, leading and investing in tough tech ventures and Professor Krieger’s research on R&D strategy and tough tech ventures.

Grading will be a combination of class participation, periodic written reflections and a final written case done in small Teams.

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