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 aboard for your company as a private entity and later as a public company. 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 a 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 associated with the case materials in a number of sessions.

What are the course requirements?

The basic learning for the course takes place through preparation and participation in class discussion. Thus class participation “quality as well as frequency and your contribution to moving the discussion forward” will count for 50% of the grade. A final exam will account for the other 50%.

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 ask for more case protagonists to attend class than usual. Those to be invited will include Dan Loeb (Third Point), Larry Culp (GE, ex Danaher), Jamie Dimon (JPMorgan Chase), Penny Pennington (Edward Jones), Horst Kayser (Siemens), Ulrich Pidun (BCG), Doug McMillon (Walmart), David Schlendorf (FBI), Sophia Amoruso (ex Nasty Gal), Benno Dorer (ex Clorox) and Linda Rendle (Clorox), Kevin Mayer (ex Disney and TikTok), Nils Andersen (Unilever, ex Maersk), and Irene Rosenfeld (ex Mondelez) [3]. Second, there will be “homework” assignments that are not case preparations but will involve research whose findings you can share in brief presentations to the class. Third, we will include in the regular case classes, current examples of the topic or concept under discussion to be considered in the online breakout format. Fourth, there will be video lectures that you can watch on your own time. Finally, as a tradeoff with somewhat fewer class sessions, there will be assignments asking you to apply the course frameworks to real world examples that will 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.

Educational Objectives

Crafting Your Life (LIFE) is an EC course that was created primarily 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 wish had been available to them when they were MBA students. In our “always-on” culture, in which personal and professional fulfillment grow ever-more elusive (as illuminated by an HBS graduate in this New York Times piece), students increasingly want to know how they can approach their busy lives with more intention. Taught by Senior Associate Dean and Professor of Leadership in the Organizational Behavior Unit Leslie Perlow, this course explores that question, while also building on the conversations sparked by cases in the RC LEAD curriculum, particularly the “Profiles of the Class of 1976.”

Fundamentally, Crafting Your Life is a tactical course about you. It is about preparing and equipping you to better handle the choices, surprises, and tradeoffs that you will inevitably face in the years after graduating from HBS. You will discover what really matters to you, and how to stay true as you navigate not only your career, but the full breadth of your lives—from your personal connections with others to your impact on the world.

Crafting Your Life focuses on new, innovative forms of teaching—including exercises, workshops, and a simulation all developed specifically for the course. The course leverages HBS alumni to learn from their real-world experiences in the years following their own HBS graduation. The course contains many new alumni vignettes and case studies, and there are multiple forums in which you interact directly with alumni, as the course hosts its own unique alumni gatherings, HBS Online case discussion with alumni, panel discussions, and one-on-one conversations.

The course strives to help you to think deeply and intentionally about the following tactical questions:

• What are your values, interests, expectations, and strengths?
• What does it mean to you to live a fulfilling life? What role will happiness, meaningfulness, and impact contribute to your sense of fulfilment? How will you prioritize and cultivate each of these in your post-HBS life?
• How do you use time in your day-to-day life? How would you ideally like to use your time, and how can you get there?
• How do you manage work-life tensions and tradeoffs? How do you think about competing demands between family and career?
• How do you develop relationships that will sustain you—both at work and in life?
• How do you take care of yourself? How might you improve your self-care?
• How do you build your capacity for resilience?
• How do you create and change habits that will keep you learning, growing, and staying true to your values and priorities?

This course is not about creating a rigid 10-year plan. Throughout the semester, you will work to clarify what matters most to you and consider how you will apply these learnings to post-MBA decisions about how you will lead your life. Moreover LIFE is more than a course—it is a lifelong journey that we expect you to continue long after you graduate from HBS. You will leave not only with a better understanding of yourself, but also more prepared to thoughtfully and confidently navigate the choices, tradeoffs, and surprises you will inevitably encounter. You will also leave with a membership in an active community of LIFERs – graduates of the course who have built strong bonds within and across cohorts.

Course Content and Requirements

The course will meet virtually on Thursdays from 1:00-3:00 p.m. The course will entail self-assessments, written exercises, building new habits around self-care and reflection, and multiple interactions with alumni in small groups and one-on-one conversations.

After most classes, there will be an optional virtual session (3:15-4:15 p.m.) to get to know the protagonist(s) or some other related alumni better, to further discuss the week’s class topic, or on occasion continue discussion of a class exercise or take part in a follow-on exercise. These sessions are entirely optional and whether or not you choose to attend will have no influence on your grade. These sessions started last year while the semester was already underway, in response to students’ stated interest to deepen the conversation in a variety of different ways. Students also greatly enjoyed these sessions as opportunities to get to better know their classmates and our guests.

In addition, there will be one required Wednesday virtual evening session (November 18 from 6:30-9:00) to discuss the ways in which you can build effective relationships/partnerships. We welcome you to invite a partner or friend to share the interactive experience of discussing your work-life plans and priorities. This workshop has been designed to be valuable for all students regardless of their current relationship status or their desire to commit to a life-long partnership. Indeed, this is one of the highest rated sessions across the board. After all, none of us live life in isolation, and we can all benefit from considering how to navigate decisions with the most important people in our lives.

A final paper will ask you to take stock of your learnings and how you will hold yourself accountable. Students 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 both near-term actions and to serve as a guide or compass moving forward.

Ongoing Course Development

Most importantly, please understand that this course is a work in progress. LIFE originated with 17 EC students who were part of a year-long independent project (IP) over the 2018-2019 academic year that designed the concepts and materials we use and continue to evolve. Course development efforts continued in the Fall Semester of 2019 with a group of 40 students who piloted the course materials in the HBS classroom during the inaugural semester-long course. Six of the 40 students continued as part of IPs to develop materials during the Spring Semester of 2020.

The course development process—and the course content itself—is more about learning through doing, rather than being provided with all the “right” answers. 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 before you 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, and others will need to be reworked. Your ongoing feedback and help will be part of the experience, and the lessons you take away from the course.

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).

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.

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 anyone who wants to deepen his or her 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).

This advanced negotiation course examines complex corporate deals. Many of the class sessions will be structured around recent or ongoing deals, selected for the complex issues of law and business that they raise. Student teams will research and analyze these transactions in order to present their most important aspects and lessons to the class. For many of these presentations (as well as some more traditional case studies and exercises), the lawyers, bankers, and/or business principals who participated in the transaction under discussion will attend class, listen to the team’s assessment, provide their perspectives, and suggest broader negotiation insights.

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.

NOTE: In order to accommdate scheduling at both schools, the end time will go right up to the next MBA time slot, where there would otherwise be a break built in.

Evaluation will be on the basis of class participation and deal presentation.

This advanced negotiation course examines complex corporate deals. Many of the class sessions will be structured around recent or ongoing deals, selected for the complex issues of law and business that they raise. Student teams will research and analyze these transactions in order to present their most important aspects and lessons to the class. For many of these presentations (as well as some more traditional case studies and exercises), the lawyers, bankers, and/or business principals who participated in the transaction under discussion will attend class, listen to the team’s assessment, provide their perspectives, and suggest broader negotiation insights. 

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 and HLS; all sessions will take place on Zoom.

Evaluation will be on the basis of class participation and bi-weekly journals.

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 course has four modules. The first half of the course is about techniques for appraising specific problems. The first two modules consist 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. In the second module we concentrate on the evaluation of alternatives using decision trees, simulation and preference analysis. We will apply the techniques, if briefly, to auctions and game theory.

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 third module looks at these techniques in the context of business problems. The final module 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 faint at the sight of a formula or a spreadsheet exercise. 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.

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.

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.

China will become the world’s largest economy by 2030. Engagement with China as entrepreneurs, investors, or partners is part of our collective future.

As the coronavirus upends the global economy, Chinese firms-and foreign firms in China-face new challenges and opportunities. Chinese firms are transforming business landscapes at home and now seek a global role. International firms seek to expand their China footprint in the face of global trade and technology wars.

How can you succeed doing business in and with China in the coming decade? In this course, we will consider these questions:

• What are the openings for entrepreneurs as China rebalances from an investment-driven to a consumption-driven economy?
• How do foreign businesses succeed and fail in Chinese markets?
• How are Chinese firms responding to the COVID-19 crisis?
• 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?
• As Chinese firms go global along the “Belt and Road,” what are the opportunities for international partners?
• How can Chinese firms such as Huawei navigate investment restrictions that seek to“decouple” the U.S. and Chinese economies?
• What are the opportunities and risks for businesses in Hong Kong (“Greater Bay Area”) and Taiwan?
• In short, where is China going-economically and politically-and how can you plan your engagement with it?

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, infrastructure, education, and automobiles.

Course Overview

This course prepares Harvard Business School students for their lifetime of engagement with China. It is built around a sequence of new field cases, ranging from internet startups to revitalized state-owned enterprises (SOEs), across a wide range of geographical and product markets. A series of technical notes address the cultural, economic, political, labor, resource and environmental contexts that shape the business environment. Leading China observers and CEOs of major Chinese firms will visit the class.

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 economy and of its regional markets
• The central role of politics in business: How well do you know your Party Secretary?
• The evolution of Chinese SOEs into modern, global corporations
• The challenges of developing communications and government relations strategies outside China
• Challenges and opportunities facing start-ups
• The special and evolving characteristics of China’s capital markets
• Strategies for developing and protecting intellectual property
• The emergence of an increasingly powerful middle class and its impact on the consumer market and corporate social responsibility

Audience

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

Final Project (Q4 Field Course: Planning Your Business with China)

The Q4 class is an optional continuation of Q3, designed for students, working individually or in groups, who wish to pursue an advanced project, under faculty guidance. It assists students who wish to pursue business opportunities in or with Greater China (the People’s Republic, Taiwan, and Hong Kong). It presumes basic knowledge of the Chinese business, economic, and political scene, as taught in Doing Business with China.

The project 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 faculty to identify a topic and relevant source materials.

Career Focus

Entrepreneurship, internationally (with focus on opportunities in Greater China)

Driving Profitable Growth (formerly called Managing Growth, or Operating Strategies for Growth) focuses on understanding and managing the challenges of enterprise growth across the full size spectrum, from young start-ups to global conglomerates. In this course, you will learn how to navigate strategic choices regarding the rate, direction, and method of growth.  You will also gain insight into the ways leaders can address the potential organizational, operational, and cultural problems growth can create. 

Career Focus

The course integrates concepts from the fields of operations, systems dynamics, innovation, corporate strategy, finance, and organizational organizational behavior.  It is suitable for students with a wide range of career goals, including entrepreneurship, private equity, general management in larger enterprises, and consulting.

Educational Objectives

The goal of Managing Growth is to prepare students to formulate and implement robust growth strategies in organizations they may lead in the future. This course provides a set of tools and frameworks for analyzing growth strategies and growth opportunities.  You will gain an understanding how the design of an organization’s operating model can either impede or enhance its growth. In addition, you will develop insights about the leadership challenges associated with managing the evolution of cultures that come with increased scale and complexity.

Course Content

The course is organized three core sets of questions:

1. What is the appropriate growth rate for a company? For instance, when should an organization scale rapidly versus more deliberately? What is the relationship between growth and profitability? How should you manage investor expectations about growth?
   
2. Which growth paths are most appropriate for a given organization? For instance, when should an organization try to grow by penetrating its core markets versus diversifying into related markets? How can you identify which diversification opportunities may be attractive?
   
3. What is the right method for growth? When does it make most sense to grow through acquisition versus organically? When are hybrid organizational models like franchising or licensing appropriate?  What are the challenges associated with each of these methods?
   

The course will draw case materials from a wide-range of industries including airlines, aerospace, automobiles, web-services, retail, restaurants, pharmaceuticals and biotech, health care, fashion and apparel, software, electronics, and others.

Course Requirements

You will be required to write an HBS style case study on an organization facing a growth challenge, along with an associate analytical note illustrating theories and principles discussed in the course.

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 five 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), e-manufacturers, i.e., online sellers of goods and services made by the firm (such as Harrys.com), and two-sided marketplaces, i.e., online matchmakers between supply and demand for goods and services (such as Etsy).

The course is organized into six modules:

Module 1: Customer value chain

Module 2: E-tailing

Module 3: Platforms and Marketplaces

Module 4: DTC

Module 5: Choosing an E-Commerce Strategy

Module 6: The Future of E-Commerce

Questions that will be addressed:

• How to acquire customers cheaply?
• How to practice growth hacking?
• How to craft a path to profitability?
• How to deliver assortment?
• How to deliver low price?
• How to extract value from consumers?
• How to deliver convenience?
• How to create value for manufacturers?
• How to extract value from manufacturers?
• How to compete with Amazon?
• 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?

Final project:

Students will be required to work in groups to develop a novel e-commerce business model in any industry of their choice and in any portion of the customer value chain. During the case discussions, we will discuss critical e-commerce components such as customer acquisition, growth hacking, creating value for manufacturers, extracting value from consumers and from manufacturers, delivering assortment, delivering low price, delivering convenience. Through their projects, students will use these components to build a novel e-commerce business. This structured and generalizable process is designed to aid students for careers in e-commerce.

Grading:

Grading in the course will be based on class participation (40%), group project (40%), and individual exercises (20%). The exercises include 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. All projects can be successfully completed using Excel.

Intro

Career Focus

The Entrepreneur’s Playbook is primarily designed for students who plan to get involved with a new venture at some point in their career. For example, you want to:

• Become an entrepreneur or work in a start-up
• Have a career as an investment professional or VC and evaluate start-up innovators
• Practice as a management consultant or in general management whose practice focuses on startups
• Work at a large firm in an innovation driven industry (e.g. tech, pharma, finance etc) and learn how to source technologies from startups via collaboration or acquisition

More generally, this class is appropriate for anyone who is curious to learn about transforming startups from nascent early-stage ideas into valuable ventures creating long term value.

Educational Objectives

This course provides an integrated strategy playbook for early-stage startups.

Some first-time founders believe that entrepreneurs need to “just do it” and that there is little role for a playbook or thoughtful strategic execution. Over time, however, most founders realize what experienced entrepreneurs and investors already know: two equally capable companies with very similar ideas and founded at the same time can have dramatically different outcomes. One creates millions or billions of dollars in value while the other fails completely. The difference? Strikingly different strategic paths.

In this class, we will cover the 4 choices that make up any of the individual startup play and 4 playbooks that define generic go-to market strategies for innovative startups. Together, these frameworks make up The Entrepreneur’s Playbook. Learning it will transform you from someone with a vague understanding of the “how-tos” of startups to a master of strategic playbooks in a startup environment.

Course Content

Course is organized into three modules.

Module 1 -- The 4 Choices: covers motivation for why entrepreneurs need a strategic playbook and goes over the 4 key choices that compose a single play.

Module 2 -- The 4 Plays: covers the heart of The Entrepreneur’s Playbook. We will go over each of the four different strategic plays that can be used to transform early-stage ideas into valuable companies.

Module 3 -- Designing and Executing Plays: covers how to choose between alternate plays and has you practicing building strategic plans using a playbook for specific ideas and companies.

These modules will be delivered through a mix of case discussions, short primers overviewing entrepreneurship research and findings. We will invite guest speakers who are involved with ventures with different strategic paths to learn about the practical details of executing a certain play.

Course Grading and Final Exam

Course will be graded through Class and group participation (35%), Group Homework (30%) and Final Homework Exam (35%). Final exam involves an individual take-home exam that involves analyzing and providing recommendations to a new venture looking for strategic guidance.

Most startups fail: about three-quarters of venture capital investments do not earn a positive return. Entrepreneurial Failure (EF) explores why startups fail; what entrepreneurs can do to avoid failure; and if they do fail, what founders can do to “fail well” - in ways that leave their relationships and integrity intact, facilitate learning from the experience, and position them for their next career move.

The course may be of interest to students who plan to found or join a startup, and 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.

Course Content

Entrepreneurial Failure is a case-based course with sessions organized into three modules.

• Early-Stage Failure. Seed stage startups confront a Catch-22: they cannot attract resources without demonstrating traction, and they cannot gain traction without resources. To break through this impasse, founders can engage in lean testing, resolving risk with minimal resource expenditures; stage their investments, deferring resource commitments until milestones are met; partner, “borrowing” resources from organizations better able to absorb risk; and propagate a “reality distortion field,” persuading resource providers to ignore risk while ushering in a dazzling future. Not addressing the Catch-22 can lead to an early-stage startup’s demise-as can executing these tactics poorly. The module will explore the interplay between opportunity and resources through cases in which founders: a) identify a promising opportunity but fail to assemble the resources needed to capitalize upon it; and b) attract a solid complement of resources but fail to identify a good opportunity.
• Late-Stage Failure. Surprisingly, failure rates for late-stage ventures match those for early-stage startups. The module reviews two patterns that account for a large share of late-stage failures-and explores ways to anticipate and avoid these patterns:
• With a Speed Trap, strong early growth for startups like Fab.com, Groupon, or Zenefits attracts enthusiastic investors who push for continued aggressive expansion. As the startup saturates its target market, the next wave of new customers doesn’t find the company’s value proposition as compelling as early adopters. So, to sign up more customers, the firm must spend heavily on marketing. At the same time, it must hire many new employees to support expansion. Coordinating their work requires formalized organizational processes, but founders often resist burgeoning bureaucracy. With too little structure, a scaling startup can spin out of control. Burning through cash, the venture’s stock price declines, and investors become reluctant to commit more capital.
• Other late-stage ventures-like Iridium, Better Place, and Theranos-never achieve traction, despite having raised hundreds of millions of dollars. Their founders devised ambitious schemes requiring some combination of radical changes in customer behavior; strategic partnerships with powerful corporations; technological breakthroughs; relaxation of regulations; and vast amounts of capital. Each of these long-shot requirements is “do or die,” so founders hope in vain for Cascading Miracles.
• Failing Well. The final module examines entrepreneurial failure from the founder’s point of view, asking:
• Why is it so difficult for founders to decide whether to pull the plug on their struggling startup? How should they approach this decision?
• 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 should founders do to maximize personal learning from their startup’s failure? To position themselves for their next career move?

Final Paper/Exam

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:

• Write a “pre-mortem” for a going concern, analyzing the factors behind that startup’s imagined future failure.
• Review a founder’s published post-mortem account of their startup’s failure-or interview such a founder. Have they been intellectually honest? Did they learn from the experience? Does their post-mortem fail to address any important issues?
• Using course frameworks, analyze factors contributing to a startup’s failure.

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

The EF course has been fully redesigned for Fall 2020 to ensure an engaging experience and deep learning in the virtual environment. While case conversations will remain the core course format, we have reduced the case count to 15 including a combination of traditional and live cases, and we will have guests & protagonists involved for nearly every case.

We are also incorporating a Startup Labs Project which will allow small Teams of EF classmates to work together with actual startup companies to apply the lessons learned during EF and to ultimately make recommendations to the leadership of these companies. We have carefully crafted the Startup Labs Project to fit inside the expected time commitment for a

3-credit course by reducing the EF class count from 28 to 25 and using some or all of 4 classes for Team collaboration and presentations.

Professors Bernstein and Matheson will have significant time available for virtual 1:1 meetings about the class and career planning, and for small group gatherings with other EF classmates and opportunities to engage with our class guests and other special folks. And if the situation allows, we will also hope to have the opportunity to physically meet with those who are on campus during the fall semester.

Class grading will be based on 40% participation (both during class conversations and also off-line via the EF content platform and with other EF classmates), 40% on the Startup Labs

Team Project (all Teammates will receive the same grade) and 20% on a set of short, individual quizzes and skills tests during the semester. EF 2020 will not have a final exam.

While we will dearly miss being together in Aldrich, we are really excited about the course we are planning and look forward to having you engaged with us this Fall for an Entrepreneurial Finance adventure.

Career Focus

This course is intended for students pursuing a range of career options. First, it should be of interest to those who at some point in their career see themselves as a president/CEO leading a troubled enterprise (small or large) through crisis. Second, it will have relevance for those considering a start-up or search fund purchase early in their career. Finally, it will be of value to those who expect to interface with troubled enterprises as a consultant, private or growth equity investor, or creditor.

Educational Objectives

The focus of this course is the manager as a decision maker and person of action in a Turnaround 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. In short, this is a course about action planning and decision-making based on good analysis. We will examine a broad array of factors involved in a turnaround, including financial, strategic, organizational, and cultural.

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. With this course, Professor Gulati returns to the MBA program after ten years chairing the AMP program.

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).

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

This course pairs well with Q3 Entrepreneurial Failure (it occupies the same slot) and complements Creating Value Through Corporate Restructuring and Financial Management of Smaller Firms.

Course Sessions

Course Requirements and Grading

The course will be graded as follows:

• Class participation (50%)
• Group assignment (50%)

‘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 perspective 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.

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.

This is a new experimental course that will feature background readings, cases, guests - protagonists and subject experts, and raw data.

The course is also suited to students who are interested in public policy, the environment, healthcare, and education.

The course includes newly written and updated cases on companies like Iora Health, Innolith (batteries), and GSV Accelerate (education and human capital development).

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

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 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. 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 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).

Career Focus

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

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.

Educational Objectives

The nonprofit arts and culture industry generated $166.3 billion of economic activity in the US in 2015—$63.8 billion in spending by arts and cultural organizations and an additional $102.5 billion in event-related expenditures by their audiences. This activity supported 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.

Course Overview

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 into a single function called “growth”. The “growth” operating strategy was invented at Facebook and popularized within many Silicon Valley unicorns such as Dropbox, Uber, and Airbnb. 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 Nike, BCG, and the New York Times. 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. This course provides students with the opportunity to explore this rising discipline. The class will meet for two hours once per week. The first sessions will be centered around discussions with leadership from Silicon Valley’s unicorns born out of the “growth” era, such as such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Lyft, and Shopify. We will then organize into project teams, select a startup, ideally in Silicon Valley, and assist the startup in setting up a “growth” operating cadence using our learnings from our initial discussions. Sessions in the latter half of the course will be split between collaborating on project work and exploring more advanced considerations with “growth” strategies.

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. Is “growth” an operational innovation only applicable to a specific industry, region, and time or are the implications timeless and ubiquitous?

Grading will be based on class participation and a final report on the project teams’ work with their assigned startup.

Teaching Mode

Career Focus

You should take this course if you expect to initiate 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 the Business Model module of 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 hiring sales people, analyzing performance, 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 business development (including selling), and then moves to wider topics in growing a customer base. The core modules are:

1. Identifying and Understanding Buyers: Customer Acquisition and Sales Management
2. Marketing Analytics: Customer Selection, the Buying Journey, B2B and/vs B2C markets
3. Marketing Analytics: Price, Pricing Tests, and Price Negotiations
4. Channel Selection and Channel Management
5. Scaling the Venture: Managing Marketing and Business Development

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 instructors will also post projects sponsored by alumni and others. But project teams are expected to focus most of their effort on the application of tools and tactics. Projects can involve designing and testing specific marketing methods for customer-acquisition and retention (e.g., paid advertising, inbound methods, content marketing, SEM, or PR), or aspects of sales management (e.g., hiring, interviewing, designing compensation plans, establishing a performance management process), but not projects involving only 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.
• Draft and test selling scripts for outbound sales reps.
• Develop or change a startup’s Pricing strategy, understanding the links between Pricing, Value Proposition, and the recommended Sales approach.
• Complete some sales calls after developing call plans, then refine the pitch based on results.
• 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.
• Clarify key sales tasks and develop a process and criteria for hiring early-stage salespeople.
• Define the relevant sales funnel and implications for training, coaching, and performance reviews.
• 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 perhaps a final presentation of project results in a forum that may involve others from the startup community beyond HBS. As well as 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Prerequisite

One member of the team, at a minimum, must be enrolled in the Spring Term 2108 - Innovating in Health Care.

Career Focus

Students interested in careers in financing, leading ,or creating innovative health care services, health insurance, health IT, or medical technology.

Educational Objectives

Additional field based experience in innovating new health care ventures on topics chosen by the students or from those made available by the faculty.

Course Content and Organization

Students will meet as a whole on selected dates:

1st Session - Professor Herzlinger discusses research strategies and the course overview

2nd Session - students present their research ideas and plans to their classmates

Last two sessions - students present their results to their classmates. Students are required to email their presentations to Professor Herzlinger and their fellow classmates four business days before their presentation.

In addition, student teams meet with Prof. Herzlinger at a time which will be determined on the first or second session of the course. These meetings will occur on a biweekly basis.

Students must complete a business plan.

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.

The Q4 class is an optional continuation of Q3, designed for students, working individually or in groups, who wish to pursue an advanced project, under faculty guidance. It assists students who wish to pursue business opportunities in or with Greater China (the People’s Republic, Taiwan, and Hong Kong). It presumes basic knowledge of the Chinese business, economic, and political scene, as taught in Doing Business with China.

The project 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 faculty to identify a topic and relevant source materials.

Career Focus

Entrepreneurship, internationally (with focus on opportunities in Greater China)

Educational Objectives

To integrate area-specific knowledge and risk factors (business, cultural, and political environments) with fundamental business planning.

Course Content and Organization

Faculty-guided independent research in groups; group presentations and critiques.

Through project work students will get the opportunity to "practice private equity" in a setting as close to real as possible. Projects will entail many different aspects of private equity and students will work directly with private equity firms and/or portfolio companies. Class sessions will include several external guest speakers addressing a variety of PE topics including deal sourcing, portfolio operations, PE CEO's, first time funds and also raising of capital.

Some team projects may involve travel and limited travel funding will be available through an application process. Private equity firms hosting student projects for the 2020 year will be Abry Partners, Advent, Bain Capital, CD&R, KKR, L Catterton, New Mountain, Odyssey, Summit Partners, and TH Lee.

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 requested of students by organizations. While students are typically not charged a course fee for taking an EC field course it is possible that students will be responsible for minimal out-of-pocket costs (varies per course), however funding is provided for local travel to partner locations.

Overview and Career Focus

Want to learn how to build a product by actually building one? Have a product idea in mind but not sure how to get started? Product Management 101 (PM 101) is designed for students who lack any prior product management experience and will start their own companies or are seeking Product Management careers in startups or larger technology firms. The focus is on B2B or B2C digital products, however many of the concepts covered can be applied to non-digital product roles.

PM 101 is a project-based course that uses a learning-by-doing approach to build basic product management skills. Students test assumptions and hypotheses about user needs and specify functional requirements for a new web or mobile application. Students attend two weekly sessions introducing new concepts and featuring skill-building exercises led by the instructor and outside experts. An important element of the course is weekly peer-to-peer critiques on project work-in-progress; being able to give and receive feedback is a critical skill for any entrepreneur or PM! None of PM 101's sessions will entail case discussion.

While not required, most students in PM101 continue to PM102 in the spring when projects are adequately funded to build a minimum viable product (MVP). There are limited opportunities for new students/product teams not in PM101 to enroll in PM102; funding is not guaranteed for those teams.

Course Content and Deliverables

• The role of the PM and Product Founder and who they work with at different stages of the product life cycle.
• Applying techniques to understand customer needs and validate demand for a product.
• Best practices for user experience and application design.
• The art of no-tech testing and prototyping.
• Common software development methods, technology frameworks and tools used to build mobile and web applications.
  
  

Course content will be similar to last year’s syllabus, with modifications based on specific team needs and guest schedules.

Working in teams of three or four, students will have four major deliverables during the term which build upon each other to create the final deliverable, a Product Requirements Document (PRD). The major deliverables are: 1) a Customer Discovery plan for researching user needs for their proposed application; 2) a Market Requirements Document (MRD); 3) wireframes for their proposed application; 4) plans for and conducting a "lo-fi" test,. There is also a reflection essay due for the final session of the course. There will be short, weekly readings (most commonly, blog format) and small assignments due in each session. Students will regularly present work-in-progress in class, and will be asked to provide written feedback on other teams' work. This feedback is part of each student's individual participation grade.

Projects and Application Process

Ensuring an appropriate mix of projects and participants requires an application review process. An online application, which must be submitted by August 7, will be reviewed by Prof. Perri. Applicants will be informed of enrollment decisions by August 23. All qualified students not accepted will have the option of being on a waiting list and are encouraged to come to the first session of the course in the event Add/Drop opens up spots.

The first session will be held on September 2, and will provide a full overview of the course and its expectations. Successful applicants will be asked to commit to the course by noon on September 6 and will be enrolled by the course administrator; these students will then use the Add/Drop process as needed to adjust other credits for the term.

In the application, candidates are asked to submit a paragraph explaining why they are interested in the course as either a founder or joiner. Founders, who may apply as a team of up to four students, will be asked for some details on their idea's status and, if their proposal is not accepted, whether they wish to be considered as joiners. Please note that applications will not be accepted from students who have worked as full-time PMs for more than one year prior to HBS. Founding teams with less than four members must accept up to three joiners in their project team. There will be a matching process facilitated by Prof. Perri the first week of the course.

Student-originated projects must meet the following criteria:

• For product concepts not yet launched, some effort has been made to understand customer needs and explore potential solutions, but hypotheses have not yet been fully validated. The ideal project still requires a lot of market research, iterative design work, and MVP testing.
• For a product that has already been launched, some preparation has been done to make a significant set of changes or pivot towards a new target customer/use-case (e.g., from B2C to B2B)., and determining how to proceed requires a lot of market research, iterative design work, and MVP testing.

Spring Term Options

PM 101 will develop skills required to evaluate and define a new software application, culminating with a Product Requirements Document (PRD) specifying use cases and functionality. Students will not move projects into their build and launch phases during PM 101. Students who wish to develop product management skills relevant to those phases can do so through the Spring Term field course,  Product Management 102 (HBS course 6702). PM102 provides adequate funding to support the build of the product MVP for those teams that meet specific requirements.

All students who successfully complete PM 101 are automatically eligible to enroll in PM 102; they do not need to apply separately. Subject to capacity and budget constraints, and to an assessment of students’ fit with skill and project requirements, a few students who did not take PM 101 will be enrolled in PM 102 through an application process that will commence in mid-December. All new students in PM102 must join an existing team from PM101. No new projects are accepted into PM102, however some PM101 teams pursue new ventures in PM102.

Overview

Product Management 102 (PM102) is Spring Term extension of the Fall Term field course Product Management 101 (HBS course 6701; see the PM101/102 syllabus here). Like PM101, PM102 is a project-based course that uses a learning-by-doing approach; none of PM102's sessions will entail case discussion. The final project is a demonstrable Minimum Viable Product (MVP).

PM 102 will hone skills required for developing and launching a new software application. Working in teams, PM102 students will select, hire and then supervise developers and/or designers who will build their application.

During development, students will answer designers’ and developers' questions about product requirements; conduct usability tests to ensure that the application being built will meet users' needs; and track development progress, revising priorities as appropriate. Throughout the development process, students will: 1) identify bugs and determine which should be fixed first; 2) monitor early usage, collecting and interpreting data needed to prioritize additional features; and 3) iterate to improve the product. In parallel with these development tasks, students will conceive and implement a marketing plan for their product launch.

PM102's weekly sessions will focus on building and practicing skills required during the software development lifecycle, for example: how to select, negotiate a contract with and supervise a developer; how to write user stories and estimate the development effort required to complete them; how to conduct usability tests; use analytics tools; how to do growth marketing; and how to design and implement an A/B test. In addition to skill-building workshops, PM102's sessions will feature intensive peer-to-peer and outside expert feedback on project work-in-progress.

Deliverables for PM102 will include: 1) a developer contract and cost budget, with ongoing tracking of actual spending against budget; 2) a detailed launch/marketing plan; 3) task scenarios for usability testing; 4) a video demonstrating how a user can complete key tasks using your software; and 5) a reflection essay on lessons learned from the course. Students will regularly present work-in-progress and will participate in a live demo day at the conclusion of the semester.

Application Process

All students who successfully complete PM101 are automatically eligible to enroll in PM102; they can simply complete this survey by January 10 with their request to continue and do not need to complete the application described below. Subject to an assessment of students' fit with skill and project requirements, some students who did not take PM101 will be enrolled to be a Joiner in PM102 by application. Please note that due to budget constraints, applications cannot be accepted for new projects founded by students who have not successfully completed PM101.

Applications, to be reviewed by Prof. Perri, must be submitted by December 23, through this form, which also provides more detail on selection criteria. Applicants will be informed of enrollment decisions on or before January 24. Successful applicants who choose to enroll will use the Add/Drop process as needed to adjust other credits for the term.

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

Learning Objectives

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.

Course Overview

Students in Field Course: Purpose & Profit will participate in the same 14 case method classroom sessions as students in Purpose & Profit (course 1415; see separate catalog entry for details). Students who elect the Field Course will develop a project applying concepts from the course to an industry or company of their choosing in consultation with the instructor that is due at the end of Q2.

Educational Objectives

Of all vulnerable small businesses, minority-owned ones may be most at risk. 
Many were in financially precarious positions even before the COVID-19 lockdowns,
and minority-owned small businesses often are in industries more susceptible to disruption.  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

Cases: Cases and required background readings will examine the range of issues faced by Black businesses including racial discrimination, limited access to capital, and circumscribed distribution opportunities. 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.

Guest Talks: Students will hear from a range of speakers including policy experts and prominent businesspeople who will discuss the challenges and opportunities faced by Black-owned businesses.

Projects: Students will work in three-person teams to tackle a well-defined challenge or growth opportunity faced by a Black-owned business in the greater Boston area.

Non-disclosure Agreement: Students will be required to sign a non-disclosure agreement covering their work in the course.

Course Requirements and Grading

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

Cross-Registrants/Auditors

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 50% based on class participation and in-class exercises and 50% 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.

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.

2020 ZOOM Format

We have been working to find ways to make our course more engaging in the ZOOM format.  Based on our experiences in the spring, we decided to divide each of our sections in half and run most of our case discussions for 40 minutes.  This will, we think, lead to more dynamic discussions and minimize ZOOM fatigue.  We have case protagonists as visitors for virtually all of our cases and believe that these guests provide important learning.  So, we are moving the guests to the evening sessions so all of our students will have an opportunity to interact with them.

Also, we are adding a new feature to our FMSF course: a series of short videos from a searcher during his due diligence process for a small firm acquisition.  We think these videos give a fabulous sense of the process of buying a small business and we think FMSF students will find the videos fascinating.  We will be assigning one block of those videos each week (usually less than 10 minutes in total for each block) and be discussing them in the evening before our first class of the week.

So, classes will be shorter and more dynamic and there will be the evening sessions to round out the offerings.  We understand that our students have a variety of commitments that could make the evening sessions difficult to attend live so these sessions will be recorded to view by students at their convenience.  We will have a mechanism for students to submit questions after class but before the guest sessions.

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

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.

Educational Objectives

Founders' Journey deals with the *people* side of building a venture that matters and provides value. 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 starts with an examination of the choices a founder makes in selecting a founding team and choosing a business model. Subsequent modules explore the decisions entrepreneurs make in growing an organization, creating value, and eventually in exiting the business. It covers successful companies as well as companies that are struggling or failing. The course's goal is to give students a strong conceptual foundation and to give them practical tools for addressing the interpersonal situations they are likely to face in entrepreneurship. This course is for students who are interested in being involved with high growth ventures, working with entrepreneurs as investors or advisors, or working in entrepreneurial environments that are dynamic, complex and changing.

Course Content and Organization

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

Founding a venture: What are the key considerations involved with founding a venture? How do you attract and motivate a co-founder and a team before you have the resources or direction fully worked out? How do you create a foundation for effective working relationships? How should you deal with differences in experience and motivation and work with prior friendships or family relationships? What happens when the venture outgrows your ability to lead it?

Building a venture: 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?

Exiting a Venture: What does success and failure mean in the context of entrepreneurship? How do you navigate these dynamics, such as 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 do the business model and team choices you have made in the earlier stages of your journey influence your choices later in the journey?

Most classes are structured around a mix of cases and experiential learning. In most classes we work through actual decisions facing the founder, and about 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.

Course Overview:

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.

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

Course Objectives

The course will focus on three broad questions:

• Why 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.,/li>
• 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.

This course will explore a variety of contexts in which experiments are used, 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. Tentative guests include managers and data scientists from organizations such as Uber, Facebook, and Yelp. The course will involve a final project. No technical background is required.

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.

Educational Objectives

This course is designed to help students better tailor a firm's strategy to its business environment. It develops a novel framework, based on the presence of market imperfections, for understanding the basis upon which firms create and sustain superior performance, potential forces that might undermine it, and formulating effective responses to these changes.

Overall, the course takes a broad perspective on business environment. Apart from competition, it highlights the role of laws, regulations, and social norms. Additionally, through supplemental readings and targeted discussions, the course encourages students to become effective consumers of academic research.

Course Content and Structure

The intellectual basis of the course is the economic theory of market imperfections: features of a market that soften effective competition. A wide range of firm strategies depend on the presence of market imperfections to yield long-term above-normal profits, as any excessive return would be eventually competed away in a fully competitive market.

Identifying the mechanisms through which a strategy softens competition is, thus, a valuable starting point for analyzing competitive advantage. Apart from value capture, market imperfections are also powerful indicators for opportunities to create value (by mitigating these imperfections in creative ways). But this analysis is incomplete in isolation. Market imperfections are often reduced by competition. Furthermore, many forms of government intervention also seek to preserve or enhance competition, putting the savvy strategist in tension with the determined regulator.

In Module 1 (“Market imperfections and strategy”), we introduce three types of market imperfections: imperfect information, transactions costs (e.g. identifying partners, executing and safeguarding agreements), and market power. We dive deep into private responses to these imperfections. Relevant questions are: Are there imperfections in the market? How severe are they? What business opportunities do they imply? How do competition and technological changes affect market imperfections and, in turn, incumbent firms’ performance?

In Module 2 (“Strategy and the Rules of the Game”), we introduce another type of market imperfection: externalities. This module focuses on public responses to market imperfections. What are the motivations of regulators, law makers, and social actors such as media and activist groups? How can firms better anticipate how these public players will respond to market imperfections and understand the consequences to firm performance? How can firms effectively formulate strategies to respond to these interventions? Should firms seek to shape the rules of the game (such as through lobbying)?

Grading

Grades will be based on class participation (50%) and a final paper from a group project (50%).

Separately, I will be happy to advise students for their Independent Projects. The IPs can expand on the project chosen for the course or on other topics that the students are passionate about and better prepare them for the next phase of their career.

Class schedule

There will be complementary readings available over the course.

Career Focus

The course is designed for students who are interested in entrepreneurial approaches to the biggest challenges of our time, particularly those that disproportionately affect the fast-growing and populous emerging markets. Invariably, these challenges require solutions that beggar the imagination, and that require an embrace of science, with all its excitement and uncertainty. To misquote Peter Thiel, “We wanted flying cars, let’s not be satisfied with 140 characters.”

The course is appropriate for would-be entrepreneurs, as well as those interested in the financing and curation of economic activity at the exciting edges of the knowledge frontier.

Educational Objectives

The course develops a framework to understand grand challenges, and to learn from entrepreneurs’ attempts at curating financially viable novel solutions. There are four short modules.

Mapping Grand Challenges

Grand Challenges are near-intractable, global problems, that offer the tantalizing prospect that even a partial resolution will dramatically improve some facet of human existence. Success requires individual creativity to break down a problem into constituent manageable parts, coupled with imaginatively catalyzing collective action in society.

Typically, mapping the challenge requires understanding mismatches between science (technology) on the one hand, and a challenge on the other. The science might not adequately exist in some instances, while in others, it might well have eclipsed available rules to adjudicate its use. In either case, a framework based on identifying institutional voids, or inadequacies in the enabling environment, helps in specifying opportunities and in ‘naming’ problems that might bedevil otherwise well-constructed business plans.

Cases tackle:

• Commercialization of space.
• Plant-based substitutes for animal protein

Entrepreneurial Efforts to create Public Goods

The Greek philosopher-mathematician, Archimedes of Syracuse, famously said, “Give me a place to stand, and a lever long enough, and I will move the world.” In this module, we consider entrepreneurs’ creation of platforms that address a grand challenge directly, and by enabling the creative energies of others.

Cases tackle:

• State-of-the art biometrics to tackle dual problems of identity and privacy
• Vaccines for pandemics that are as yet unknown
• Genome sequencing for biodiversity conservation and re-engineering materials

Entrepreneurial Efforts to build on Public Goods

Here, we consider for-profit ventures that identify an actionable part of a particular grand challenge. The creativity is in curating or carving out that opportunity, and that in turn is a function of the state of the science base and the institutional context within which the entrepreneur is operating. Of particular interest are available financial instruments and the state of play regarding intellectual property rights.

Cases tackle:

• Drones for last-mile delivery
• Clean energy transportation and reimagining the electric grid
• Fundamental biosciences for disease eradication

Evolution of ventures

All creative efforts take on a life of their own. Here we will look at some ways in which ventures have evolved, usually spawning a vibrant ecosystem that collectively meaningfully addresses a grand challenge.

Cases tackle:

• Multiple efforts to tackle climate change
• Tertiary healthcare for five of the world’s seven billion people

Course Content and Organization

The half-course consists of 14 sessions. Grading is based on class participation (50%) and a final project, done singly or in teams (50%). The project can either map the opportunities embedded in a grand challenge, or offer the contours of a business plan towards addressing part of a grand challenge.

Conversation is remarkable, pervasive, fraught…and necessary. You must converse effectively with others to achieve success in every aspect of business and life. This course will focus on helping you sharpen your ability to talk (and listen) in a wide array of one-on-one and group conversations using the TALK framework:

Topics: Prepare, select, shift, and end topics effectively-at every moment of every conversation.
Asking: Break free from egocentrism by asking (and answering) questions effectively.
Levity: Create (and appreciate) moments of humor, playfulness, and joy (even if you’re not hilarious).
Kindness: Execute the 3 R’s of conversational kindness-Reflective (think about others when you’re not together), Responsive (listen attentive), and Receptive (engage effectively with opposing views).

You will:

• Study the TALK framework to understand conversation as a fundamental part of the human experience-a complex, repeated game we play with others every day.
• Participate in many immersive exercises (both silly and serious)-enacted with students in the course and others outside of HBS.
• Practice specific tactics (grounded in rigorous scientific evidence) to converse more effectively.
• Record and listen back to yourself to reflect on your conversational performance and progress.

Course logistics:

• 28 session course: ~20 class sessions with exercises and debriefs + individual final project (in lieu of some class sessions)
• 2 sections of 60 students
• Course guests will likely include experts on comedy/humor, matchmaking, conflict management, designing work meetings, and conversational AI.
• Grading is based on class participation, assignments, and a final project.
• No technical background required.

This course seeks to bring increased empathy and clarity to the discussion of workforce differences. Chances are, no matter what industry or role you’ll take on after HBS, you’ll find yourself in a position of leadership, managing diverse talent. How can you do so effectively? Using powerful frameworks and unforgettable shapes, this course will introduce a new definition of inclusive leadership: Leadership is about making other people better as a result of our presence in a way that lasts into our absence. With this definition at this core, the course will take students on a journey of the key ingredients that are needed for this type of leadership to be effective. In our presence, as leaders we need to engender trust, empower others, and create the conditions for more and more varied people to thrive. In our absence, we need to be thoughtful about strategy and culture. For each key ingredient, we will explore concrete strategies we can embrace as leaders. For instance, to be truly inclusive we need to act as brokers, leveraging our experiences to help others understand their differences and have productive conversations across divides. And we’ll also explore the implications of getting the recipe right: when we create inclusive environments, collaboration occurs more easily, and respect becomes a basic ingredient baked into every interaction.

Inclusive Leadership fundamentally challenges our view of the type of leadership that is needed in a world that is increasingly divided and in organizations that are increasingly diverse. Inclusion, in such a world, is an organizational advantage that is fundamental to our core mandate as leaders. The course will provide tools, pattern recognition, and perspective intended to help you navigate difference successfully in your career and to build and lead organizations that are truly inclusive.

This is a general leadership course and as such will not, for example, provide all of the specialized skills a D&I leader may require.

The materials for the course will include cases, book chapters, articles, documentaries, websites and experiences. Throughout the course, as instructors, we will be fully committed to students, individually and collectively, and will provide extensive opportunities - including outside the classroom -- to explore the crucial, urgent topic of leading difference.

Course Requirements

Students are required to prepare a business plan, which employs the framework of this course, to explore an entrepreneurial opportunity in health care, and to evaluate their classmates' plans.

Career Focus

For students interested in careers in entrepreneurial health care management, consulting, and investing.

Educational Objectives

Innovating in Health Care (IHC) helps students to create successful entrepreneurial health care ventures by enabling them to:

• Identify the alignment between an entrepreneurial health care venture and the Six Forces that shape health care - structure, financing, technology, consumers, accountability, and public policy.
• Create a business model that responds appropriately to any misalignments. Innovating in Health Care embraces every part of the health care sector, including insurance, services, IT, medical devices, biotechnology, diagnostics, and pharmaceuticals. The course has a global focus with case studies set in Brazil, India, Spain, the U.K., and the U.S., among other countries.

Content and Organization

The course is organized into four modules (see syllabus):

• In the first, Innovating in Health Care introduces students, through case studies, to the analytic framework of the Six Forces that critically shape new health care ventures and their impact on business models for three different kinds of health care innovations: consumer-focused, technology-driven, and consolidations.
• The next module uses case studies to discuss each of the Six Forces in detail.
• The third module discusses case studies of firms that succeeded or floundered in response to their alignment with the Six Forces, typically with the case protagonists present.
• In the last module, selected students present their business plans to the class.

As an example of the discussion of the Six Forces, one section focuses on how the financing force affects new ventures, i.e., how do innovators get paid? The answer differs from that in most other sectors of the economy because the health care industry in virtually all developed countries is typically financed by a third party, not its users. In the U.S., employers are the primary sources of payment through private health insurance companies. State and federal governments pay for most of the health care expenses for their employees, the elderly and the poor. The health care expenses in other developed countries are typically paid by governments.

The "Note on Financing" explains the overall financing of health care in the U.S. and other countries, the interest of consumers in these financing mechanisms, the different kinds of insurance plans used by employers and government, and the accountability and public policy issues they raise. It is accompanied by case studies of four health insurance firms-one is an integrator (WellPoint). The other three describe entrepreneurial firms which newly offered HMOs (THG), high-deductible insurance (Consumer-Driven Health Care: Medtronic), and vertically integrated health care in Brazil (Amil). The "Note on Health Insurance Coverage, Coding, and Payment" explains how these processes operate for various types of medical technology products and related service providers. Cases about an innovative medical technology company (ABC) and a health service integrator (MedCath) enable students to apply these principles.

Business Plan Requirements

Students must prepare a business plan, which employs the IHC Framework to explore an entrepreneurial opportunity in health care. Some ideas for projects are posted on the course platform but you can devise your own project, as well, after Prof. Herzlinger approves it. Please let Prof. Herzlinger know if you would like to pursue any of the course platform projects for your business plan.

You will prepare a 5 minute presentation of your business plan idea for health care, its alignment with the Six Forces, and the resulting business model. I will randomly select 6 or more people to make this presentation in class. Those selected will need to email your presentation materials to my faculty assistant the Monday before your presentation. Presentations will be in mid-October.

You business plan should cover the following topics:

• The type of opportunity
• Six Forces alignment
• Next steps

Grading

Students are expected to attend every class unless excused in advance in writing. Class participation will account for a significant percentage of the grade, and the business plan will account for the remainder.

Appointments/Correspondences

Meetings with Prof. Herzlinger can be made through her faculty assistant. Appointments are made on a first come, first serve basis. All appointments will require a resume and an agenda two business days prior to the meeting. Be sure to cc the faculty assistant on all class emails.

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 and macroeconomic 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 analyzing these phenomena will enjoy a competitive advantage.

Career Focus

Internationally oriented careers; careers in global financial management; 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, economic, and social 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 they can be designed to influence economic and political behavior in desirable directions 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 tax system in Slovakia) or particular policies (inflation targeting in Brazil), and others span multiple countries (Chinese investments in Africa, or the COVID-19 pandemic). The course itself consists of three 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.

The second module ("Creating macroeconomic institutions") uses the European experience to illustrate how different countries have developed institutions that permit coordination of individual business decisions and domestic policies on good aggregate economic outcomes. Moreover, it demonstrates how changes in the environment can render previously successful institutional structures outmoded, thereby creating both opportunities and risks for firms and households.

The third module ("Globalization meets national institutions") discusses how the increasing integration of the global capital markets can affect the economic performance and generate political turmoil within previously successful and stable nations by acting to undermine the internal coherence of the institutional structures on which their economic performance rested and the policy options available to countries.

Educational Objectives

Leading advanced design projects requires the integration of multiple skill areas and ongoing learning about the best concepts and tools to guide development. This course in leadership and design practice trains students to lead multi-disciplinary, integrated teams capable of envisioning a meaningful project direction and developing seamless product and service experiences. Students learn strategic design and design leadership alongside the history of design and the principles, processes and techniques of intermediate to advanced Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and UX, graphic design, psychology of design, and design decision-making tools and tradeoffs. Students learn the skills needed to become not just an engineer or a manager, but integrated engineer-designers who have the unique capabilities needed to lead entrepreneurial projects. They learn to use collaborative sensemaking to find the most meaningful problem to work on, and to do this through an iterative cycle that integrates the technical, user experience, and interface design elements of a solution. The course is structured to provide a comprehensive education in all stages of the new product design process: from idea generation to concept development, detailed design and prototyping, testing and integrating data into design decisions.

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.

Course Overview

IMPPI is suitable for all students interested in gaining a broad perspective on investing and the asset management business, including those targeting careers in asset management and those interested in learning how to become sophisticated consumers of investment services and products to manage more effectively their personal current and future wealth.

This course makes special emphasis in understanding where markets, opportunities, firms, and products are today and likely to be in the future, through the analysis of markets and specific investing deals, adopting an investment decision making perspective. 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. As such, in the Fall of 2020 this course will examine the impact of the covid crisis in a large array of markets, including stock markets, bond markets, credit markets, and commodity markets, and it will also include at least three new cases focused on investment deals during the Covid-19 crisis.

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.

The topics covered in the course are selected to capture the most pressing issues in investing, grouped under four broad key managerial and investment themes:

• Evaluating specific investment opportunities in an array of public and private markets from an investment decision making perspective
• Structuring and implementation of investment decisions
• Building investment portfolios in a world of low and uncertain interest rates and returns
• Innovating in the asset management industry
• Managing the investment firm

The course has an eminently practice-oriented focus, so cases or market analyses will be the main assigned reading for each class. Sometimes students are assigned supplementary readings designed to enhance the understanding of the issues at hand in the case.

Career Focus

Global capital markets are vast and dynamic, with over $60 trillion in listed public equities and more than $80 trillion in sovereign and corporate bonds outstanding. Every day, public markets set prices for CEOs and CFOs, financial institutions, and investors, all seeking to raise and invest money in a way that drives the economy forward. A public exit - "whether through an initial public offering of common stock or a stock-financed merger with an already public acquirer" - remains a critical step in corporate transformation by private equity investors and innovation by venture capitalists. Because public capital markets play such a key role in the global economy, government regulators and policy makers continually monitor their health and pay heed to the signals they are sending.

Investment Strategies is most directly applicable to students interested in pursuing careers in finance including mutual funds, hedge funds, pension funds, endowments, wealth management, financial consulting, marketing and client service, sales and trading, investment banking, private equity, venture capital, and corporate finance. However, many students have found that a thorough understanding of public capital markets and the business of investment management is valuable in a wider set of careers outside of finance and in managing their personal wealth.

The focus of Investment Strategies is financial markets, principally equity markets, taking the perspective of an institutional portfolio manager and considering the efficacy of value investing, growth investing, arbitrage, macroeconomic investing, and other active investment strategies.

Educational Objectives

The goal of this course is for you to develop an investment philosophy, a set of guiding principles that shape your approach to understanding and investing in public capital markets. While this philosophy is directly applicable to professional investment management, it is also relevant for corporate finance, investment banking, and personal finance. A cornerstone of any investment philosophy is a view on the efficiency of markets.

An efficient market is one where prices reflect true fundamental values. In an efficient market, there is little value in the selection of individual securities. Higher returns come only from bearing greater risk. Investing in efficient markets means minimizing transaction costs and choosing maximally diversified portfolios that deliver an optimal tradeoff between risk and return.

An inefficient market, by contrast, is one where prices differ - sometimes substantially - from fundamental values. Behavioral finance is a useful framework for understanding market inefficiencies. According to behavioral finance, the combination of investor biases and institutional constraints can lead prices to diverge from fundamental value. These deviations from fundamental value create opportunities and risks for sophisticated investors, in both security selection and asset allocation.

Content and Organization

The course is organized into two parts. The first part develops a conceptual framework for the functioning of markets, spread over four topics:

1. Introduction
2. Market Efficiency
3. Execution and Risk Management
4. Applications: Relative Value Investing and Systematic Investing

The second part puts these ideas into practice, examining the selection of individual securities and the execution of broader investment strategies, divided into five topics:

1. Value Investing
2. Forensic Accounting
3. Asset Value
4. Earnings Value and Activism
5. Growth Investing

The materials consist of cases, class polls, and two course textbooks. A number of classes are built around visits from successful and well-known money managers.

This is a University course and part of a new initiative with the Office of the Vice Provost Advances in Learning (VPAL). These courses are being deliberately designed to bring the entire Harvard student community together in united class sessions with dedicated sections. All graduate and undergraduate students should enroll in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences version of the course, GENED 1171. EC students would follow cross-register steps at FAS for the course.

The course explores classical and contemporary theories of justice and applies them to the ethical issues raised by the COVID-19 pandemic. For example: Does the state have the right to require people to stay at home during a pandemic, or is this a violation of individual liberty? Is it objectionable to use “immunity passports” to determine access to schools, workplaces, and college campuses? What about retail stores, restaurants, and public facilities? Should the government use surveillance tracking of citizens to enforce social distancing and enable contact tracing? Should we be willing to accept a certain number of deaths to resume normal economic activity? Is it wrong to pay people to submit to life-threatening risks, such as testing coronavirus vaccines? What, if anything, does the experience of the pandemic suggest about how our economy and society should be organized? The course addresses debates about equality and inequality, individual rights and the common good, the role of markets and government. Readings include Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, and John Rawls, and articles on contemporary controversies. The course invites and equips students to reflect critically on their moral and political convictions, in relation to the pandemic and beyond. Course site: https://locator.tlt.harvard.edu/course/colgsas-216258/2020/fall/18135

Educational Objectives

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 EC year (Capstone I). The subsequent spring course (Capstone II) follows on from and builds upon work completed in January. In Capstone II, dedicated mentors will be allocated to each team based upon the specific projects they are completing. 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.

Educational Objectives

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 EC year (Capstone I). The subsequent spring course (Capstone II) follows on from and builds upon work completed in January. In Capstone II, dedicated mentors will be allocated to each team based upon the specific projects they are completing. 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.

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 industry focus is on pre product-market fit technology-based ventures in a range of information technology-based sectors. Business models covered range from subscription to SaaS to freemium to e-commerce to developer-driven.

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.

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 four modules:

1. Ideation and Customer Value Proposition experiments, such as experiments that explore hypotheses regarding who is the target customer, what is the pain that they are facing and how can the startup seek to address that pain.
2. Go to Market experiments, such as exploring hypotheses regarding the optimal sales model (direct vs indirect, outbound vs inbound), optimal choice of channels, the best partners and how to construct growth experiments.
3. Business Model experiments, such as the right timing for turning on monetization, how to construct the optimal pricing framework, and how to evaluate the quality of the startup business model and appreciate the relative pros and cost of business model choices.
4. Financing, Exits and Ethics. What is the best way to align financing needs with a startup’s operating plan, taking into account the key milestones and valuation inflection points ahead? 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?

Each of these modules study startups during a rapidly evolving organization. The founders are often joined by a handful of employees at the time of the case and the challenge of creating the organization from scratch is a backdrop to the founder’s process of business model experimentation. Building these functional capabilities to run effective experiments include hiring the first sales representative, the first marketing executive, creating a growth function, and designing the optimal technology and operations model to optimize for experimentation.

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. 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.

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:

Module 1: Contracts -- Basic & Complex

• Day 1: Overview of the Course
• Day 2: Basics: Formation
• Day 3: PE First Look: When what you agreed to isn’t what you want
• Day 4: PE Second Look: What’s the deal? Scrapes, Sandbagging, Buckets, Baskets and Caps
• Day 5: PE Contracts Exercise: Earn-outs+

Module 2: Additional Building Blocks

• Day 6: Torts – Environmental Disaster
• Day 7: IP – Patents and Patent Licenses
• Day 8: IP – Copyrights
• Day 9: Litigation Strategy – Trade Secrets
• Day 10: Bankruptcy
• Day 11: Securities Law – What is a Security
• Day 12: Securities Law – Operating in the Capital Markets
• Day 13: Securities Law–Facing an SEC Investigation
  

Module 3: Starting & Growing Businesses

• Day 14: Breaking Away – Covenants not to Compete
• Day 15: Coming Together – Forming a Business
• Day 16: Choice of Organization
• Day 17: Financing the Business – Venture Capital
• Day 18: Employers and Employees
• Day 19: Employment – Compensation
• Day 20: Break All The Rules? Uber/Airbnb
• Day 21: Break-down/Wash-outs: Downrounds
• Day 22: The Start-up vs. The Incumbent
  

Module 4: Succession & Liquidity

• Day 23: Family Businesses, Governance and Succession
• Day 24: PE Exits
• Day 25: IPOs – Old and New
• Day 26: 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.

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.

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.

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

Career Focus

To inspire and guide students who want to help transform health care -- or other industries -- by learning from life-changing advances from the past.

Course Content and Organization

Media routinely tout “revolutionary” medical advances that often fizzle. We will study the case histories of treatments and tests that have already proven to have profoundly altered medical practice and the healthcare industry. These case histories, drawn mainly from the last quarter of the 20th century, reveal patterns still common in medical innovation today. They show how protracted “multiplayer” innovations - not dramatic solitary leaps - typically produce transformational results.

A framework of practical knowledge provides an overall guide to multiplayer innovation while the twists and turns of each story contain memorable lessons on their own.

In addition to the core case histories, the course material includes: 1) Traditional ‘decision’ cases designed to develop skills in applying historical lessons; and 2) Readings on techniques that enable multiplayer innovation in any industry.

Two introductory case histories exemplify the power and difficulties (pdf) of multiplayer innovation: developing tests and treatments for HIV/AIDS and permanently curing ulcers with antibiotics (instead of treating them with antacids). The next three modules successively examine the development of life-changing drugs, devices, and surgical procedures.

While we comprehensively analyze each advance, we emphasize different tasks and techniques of innovation. Thus, in the HIV/AIDS case, we focus on ‘goal setting and problem specification’; later, readings and discussions of drug development highlight the forming of ‘conjectures’ and then ‘testing and evaluation’ of those conjectures.

Grading and Administration

Course grades will be based on class participation (50%) and a final paper (50%) that may be written individually or by teams of up to 3 students.

The instructor will be happy to ‘virtually’ meet students in Summer and Fall - and hopefully in person in the Spring semester. To arrange a meeting, please email abhide@hbs.edu (or amar@bhide.net).

Career Focus

This course is intended for students whose career ambitions involve exposure to and/or participation in global financial markets across a broad set of asset classes. Building on material introduced in RC BGIE, it discusses the sources and consequences of macro risks arising from economic and geo-political developments, focusing on how the implied opportunities and risks can be exploited and managed. In particular, it develops a framework for assessing the interaction among macroeconomic shocks, financial market structures and policy responses, with the goal of identifying where trading opportunities lie.

Educational Objectives

The proposed course is intended to focus on the character of macroeconomic and geopolitical risks, their potential impact on financial markets and business opportunities, and how the design of financial structures and policy institutions shapes the resulting opportunities and threats.

Macro risk is distinctive in several directions. Notably, macro risk is unavoidably Knightian in nature, given the strategic interactions that play out among and between market participants and policy makers. The course would seek to explain how such risk can affect economic behaviour and shape the behaviour of markets in ‘uninsurable’ ways, implying an important role for macroeconomic policies and institutions in stabilising the economy.

The course seeks to develop a simple macroeconomic framework capturing the essence of how policy makers think about the economy and their influence upon it, which incorporates the Knightian aspects of macro risk. On this basis, a number of market episodes are explored to develop an understanding of how the strategic interactions between policy makers and markets create market opportunities. These lessons are then applied to contemporary events.

Course Content

The opening module of the course introduces the concept of macro risk and explores its relationship with the macroeconomic, geopolitical and policy environment. More concretely, the Mexican “tequila crisis” of 1994 is used as a vehicle to explore “boom-and-bust” cycles characteristic of economic liberalisation programmes, where financial markets support self-sustaining but ultimately unsustainable surges in economic growth and financial activity.

The second module of the course seeks to develop an insight into the standard macroeconomic framework, in a deeper and more structured manner than is possible in BGIE, using cases that explore some of the seminal macroeconomic events of the past two centuries of macroeconomics, drawing heavily on experience outside the US. Given the shortcomings revealed in this standard framework in recent years (notably by the global financial crisis and its aftermath), the course would then offer an opportunity to critique the ‘conventional wisdom’ that prevailed in the late 1990s / early 2000s, which essentially assumed that many macroeconomic problems had been solved. Recent financial crises and the fall-out from COVID-19 have (in different ways) put paid to this complacency.

Having developed this macro / market framework, the course then explores various recent financial / macroeconomic crises, with a focus on where the market opportunities they presented lay and how these opportunities were exploited. In short, the key question will be “what is the trade?” Beyond the global financial crisis of 2008-09, episodes covered include the European exchange rate crisis, the Asian financial crisis, etc. The final module of the course will take a forward-looking view of current macro market tensions and opportunities, interacting with guests from both the financial markets and the policy making community. Anticipated guests include the chief equity strategist of Goldman Sachs, the chief strategist of PIMCO, the chief economist of Wellington Asset Management and former policy makers from the Fed, ECB and Bank of England.

Note on format

Case discussions on Zoom will be complemented by discussions with case protagonists and/or market participants with relevant experience or insight. In parallel with the regular class discussion of case material, students would (1) define a ‘macro trade’ towards the start of the class and monitor its performance through the course of the class; and (2) as a final written assignment, prepare a ‘trade recommendation’ including the macro thesis on which the trade is based and a discussion of how that thesis should be implemented in the structure of the trade.

Grading will be based 50% on class participation and 50% on the written submission of a trade recommendation.

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.

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

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

Course Methods and Content

HBS cases will be augmented by exercises, workshops, live cases, tool application sessions, and class visitors.
There will be opportunities for students to discuss and develop their own venture interests.

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 acquisitions, strategic alliances, cross-sector partnerships, and 'extended enterprise' networks. 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.

Course frameworks and tools will be applicable to a wide range of ventures and leadership situations in many sectors throughout the world, from big and established to small and new. Case situations will include classic business transformation using innovative business models in an Asian bank, a Canadian cooperative, a Chinese manufacturer, and a European marking giant; institutional reinvention, such as reinventing U.S. (and international) high schools; identifying alternative approaches to controversial issues such as gun safety, from mobilizing investors to a technology startup; opening new possibilities for change, such as adding financing tools to save the health of the oceans, or dealing with the Syrian refugee crisis by creating an Uber-like platform to match skilled refugees with talent-hungry companies; and applying technology to big social issues, such as building a rapidly growing social media company to level social divides in Latin America; among others.

This wide range of problems and potential solutions will be analyzed using a set of common frameworks and tools, which will then also be applied to students’ own interests and aspirational projects. The result will be enhanced leadership skills for envisioning and executing significant social change through innovative projects and ventures.

Course Overview

Managing Global Operations is designed to equip students who will manage, consult, or analyze global businesses with skills in how to effectively manage global operations in face of global uncertainties such as challenges related to immigration, the outbreak of global pandemics, etc. The course will also conduct a deep dive into the newly emerging operating models of ‘work from anywhere’ and ‘all-remote’ and how these operating models might help managers address these challenges.

The goal of effectively managing global operations is to allocate and optimize the operations' global resources, such as talent, knowledge and intellectual property to best fulfill the strategic objectives of the firm. However, as Microsoft realized in China and India over more than a decade, intrafirm frictions related to moving knowledge, R&D funds and other firm resources across borders constrain the global operation of the firm. You will be also be introduced to challenges of managing operations under temporal distance, i.e. the distance imposed by differences in time zones and we will explore managerial approaches to addressing these challenges. In addition to managing intrafirm frictions, the management of global operations is affected by uncertainty related to regulation and the outbreak of global pandemics. The Taiwanese firm Sercomm, with manufacturing operations in China, Philippines and Taiwan had to decide how to manage global operations in view of the Coronavirus outbreak in China. The course will help you think through approaches to dealing with the management of global operations in presence of such uncertainty.

The course will then conduct a deep dive into frictions related to moving people across borders. For example, uncertainty around the H1-B visa work program in the United States and immigration policies around the world has affected the management of global operations of firms across industries. Beyond immigration issues, as young Associates at McKinsey realized, cultural distances and dual career issues might impede geographic moves. You will learn about the ROPE framework related to the costs and constraints faced by workers experiencing geographic mobility.

Finally, the course will also conduct a deep dive into newly emerging operating models of organizing resources that attempt to mitigate these frictions. We will discuss this work from anywhere model in detail and will discuss how machine learning technologies are facilitating these operating models. We will then extend the model further by examining the all remote operating model being adopted by companies such as Gitlab, where there are no physical offices or no collocated workers and will debate whether this operating model might generalize to other firms and other industries beyond the current pandemic. We will also examine how adoption of these operating models might lead to millennial workers becoming digital nomads and/or experiencing reverse brain drain, returning to countries, cities, and smaller towns of their choice.

Grading will be based on either a final paper or a final exam.

Career Focus

The Managing Human Capital course has been specifically designed to teach practical skills for the future general manager (not just the human resource practitioner) who seeks to manage both other people and her or his own career with optimal effectiveness. As such, at its core, this course is intended to sharpen three capabilities: people development; people management; and career management. We will explore, at a more advanced level than was possible in LEAD, those people-related issues and challenges that any good general manager should understand to be effective.

The term human capital implies that people have the capacity to drive organizational performance. The basic premise of this course is that how one manages and develops others can be the source of sustainable competitive advantage for organizations and for individual leaders within them. Any and all students who believe they will need to effectively manage other people to produce superior business results (revenues, profits, growth) while also creating a unique place to work (such that superior business results are sustainable) should take this course.

Educational Objectives

The objective of Managing Human Capital can be captured in a simple question: How can I create places where talented people will gather, produce, develop, and thrive?

While the question is simple in concept, it is remarkably difficult to execute. Future graduates of HBS, like the population at large, will have more and more choices about how to work and how to manage work, especially given advances in “big data,” AI, and other workplace technologies. They, and their companies--from the great global enterprises of the 21st century to the smallest entrepreneurial venture--will struggle with common questions and concerns about the people who work in their organizations, such as:

1. Module 1 (Hiring): What kind of people do I need, and how do I hire them?
2. Module 2 (Socialization): How do I effectively on-board them, setting them up for success?
3. Module 3 (Performance Management): How do I keep them fully engaged and productive?
4. Module 4 (Compensation and Rewards): How do I make sure they are properly incented to do what the organization needs them to do?
5. Module 5 (Coaching Effective Managers and Talent Development): How do I develop them over time, so they are prepared to take on bigger roles down the road? How do I let go those who are not contributing?
6. Module 6 (Structure): How do I architect my group, team, division, or organization to make the management of human capital easier, not harder? And, as we enter an age in which technology has made the boundaries within organizations far more fluid, how do I make sure the “organizational” or “workplace” structures upon which organizations have traditionally relied actually yield the “collaboration structures” we need to get work done?

In each module, we will intentionally discuss cases that frame both traditional and bleeding-edge “Future of Work” approaches to each human capital challenge. The ‘answer’ will often lie somewhere in-between the extremes but will, with regularity, come back to a set of guiding criteria that connect how human capital is managed with the goal of organizational performance. We will also aim to collectively answer the question: how can I be ready for the way human capital will be managed when I come back for my 10th or 20th reunion--and what experiments should I conduct in my teams and organizations the interim to stay on the leading edge (without accidentally reinventing the wheel and rediscovering things we already knew)? In each module, and indeed within almost every session, we will explore these topics through three lenses: managing others, being managed by others, and managing our own human capital.

Course Content and Organization

We are all in the class to learn new ways to manage human capital. But we all learn differently. As a result, this course will draw on a range of different ways to learn.

Cases. A majority of classes will be case-based, using materials that highlight and illustrate issues in the management of human capital.

Workshops. Learning can sometimes be best done in exercises designed to apply and practice what I teach about the management of human capital. I have carefully selected (and, in some cases, designed) workshop exercises that relate to most modules of the course.

Research and Technical Knowledge. An article or chapter that discusses good practice for each of the levers discussed in the course will accompany most case discussions.

The Class. This is a discussion-based class, where we learn from each other. With these topics, there will be ample opportunity for people to wrestle with the best way to manage. As always, our best conversations will be when we choose to find both areas of difference and areas of agreement.

The Instructor. My career, both prior to academia and now as an academic, has been focused on exploring how to run organizations such that they make their people more effective, not less. I hope to share my own perspectives, as well as those from more general research, during our classes.

Guests. We will have a wide range of guests in our class. We will have guests who are protagonists in a case, subject matter experts, and successful C-Suite executives. My goal with these guests will be to understand their perspective on the core issues of the class.

Brief “Live Case” Assignment. I believe we learn best when we are engaged directly with organizations and the people leading them. The brief “live case” assignment will be an opportunity for you to talk directly with a small handful of the 2600+ alumni of the MHC course about their experiences, including the most and least successful ways in which their human capital has been managed by others (bosses, mentors, etc.) over their careers to date. (Think of this as a chance to hear both their best and worst stories and then make sense of those stories using the lessons of the MHC course.) We will devote one session, facilitated by an expert, to teach us how to effectively conduct such a discussion about a person’s development and career path. The final deliverable will be a short, written “live case”: a short memo that ties the alumni experiences back to some aspect of the course. My hope is that seeing these concepts in action will help you understand what works well and what doesn't. (Note: The alumni interviews will be conducted by groups of students, but the memo will be written individually.)

The final grade will be determined 50% on class participation, 50% on written work (the final exam and the brief live case assignment). For the written work component of the grade, students may request to substitute the exam for a more significant version of the live case assignment if desired.

In the Fall of 2020, this course will be entirely virtual so that we can take full advantage of that medium. That will include drop-in guests from around the world, “secret strategy” advice videos from notable people managers, and a virtual teaching studio and platform designed specifically for this course. Furthermore, “class participation” will explicitly include both verbal and written forms of participation in our discussions. Out of respect for your calendars, all required class time will fit within the normally scheduled session times, but I am also devoted to findings ways for us to interact—informally—in smaller groups, just as we would have in the hallways of Aldrich and Hawes in prior years.

Because of the nature of the exercises, workshops, simulations, and conversations in MHC, each section will be limited to 65 students. As a result, cross-registrants are rarely accepted but may submit a request via this link.

Please email professor Ethan Bernstein (e@hbs.edu) directly with any questions.

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:

Course Content:

Managing Trade and Investment Fall 2020

Career Focus

MITI is relevant for anyone who will pursue a career in an industrial or service company that has international assets and operations, who may engage in various forms of foreign direct investment and wants to learn how to interpret the unfamiliar landscape they might face. It is also for those students who expect to participate in the global financial markets through the liquid capital markets and want to explore the impact of economic and geopolitical developments on various asset classes.

Educational Objectives

The course aims to teach how to recognize, assess and manage the risks and opportunities inherent in doing business or investing abroad. Markets and industries can vary dramatically between nations and for managers and investors, understanding the differences will be a primary determinant of success.

Managers that do business across borders need a whole new set of skills: reassessing competitive advantage; evaluating diverse political environments and legal structures; considering the impact of different policies and regulations; assessing currency, sovereign, credit and other financial risks; bearing in mind trade regimes; as well as understanding widely disparate cultures, regulations and business norms. Investors that transact internationally must acquire an understanding of how to analyze and interpret global macro issues and their likely impact on various asset classes in a world where fast-changing global political and economic events continuously shape financial markets.

MITI's practical framework of analysis hinges on a systematic evaluation of the informal and formal rules that define the markets for goods, services, and capital. We analyze real-life situations in a broad range of contexts and geographies through company cases. We also make use of carefully selected guest speakers. The goal is to see the issues through the eyes of managers and investors rather than mostly through those of policymakers, as was often the case in BGIE.

Course Content

After a high-level examination of what it means for firms to be participants in the global economy, the course will develop into three modules.

The first module focuses on International Trade and in particular on the politics and the rules associated with it. We explore how local and global politics influence trade developments and the evolving role that formal, as well as informal institutions, play in shaping the rules that govern exporting and importing among nations. We will examine how such rules are being challenged by the current backlash against globalization and the trade wars. Previous class guests in this module included the US Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs and the Chairman of the US-China Business Council.

The second module concentrates on Foreign Direct Investment. FDI captures a very wide spectrum of activities by firms that look to expand internationally. These might include minority and majority investments, Greenfield or Brownfield investments, purely private or public/private projects, acquisitions or partnerships and joint ventures. By looking at successes and failures in a wide assortment of industries and geographies, we examine the complexities of making such decisions in a cross-border context. We learn how to predict and navigate key risks such as evolving national and international regulations, local and global political agendas, government relations and economic and financial developments but we also learn how to take into account the social and cultural aspects of the target markets. Whenever possible, the case protagonists will come to class.

The third module investigates Portfolio Investment. In a world where capital moves quickly and financial markets across asset classes and jurisdictions are ever more interconnected, international investing must account for the potential evolution of the macro scenario. Major opportunities or disappointments can result from the degree of understanding of the consequences of monetary and fiscal policy decisions or the change in macroeconomic variables. In several of this module’s sessions, we avail ourselves of selected senior players from the world of international finance that will share their views on global macro investing and discuss the most current financial market developments and outlook. Past guests have included, among others, the Chief Strategist of JP Morgan Asset Management, the Chief Economist of GE, the Chief Economist of PIMCO, the Chief Investment Officer of Omega Advisors, the Head of International Economics Research at Goldman Sachs, the Chief Macro Strategist of Perella Weinberg, the Chief Equity Strategist of Rockefeller & Co, the CIO of Franklin Templeton and the Greek Finance Minister.

Course Overview

Organizations today face an unprecedented and growing number of internal, external, and systematic risks - from intellectual property theft to cyber hacking to COVID-19. These risks pose significant economic, regulatory, and reputational challenges to organizational leaders. In this course, we will examine how organizations assess these threats and develop strategies to manage such risks in an uncertain world.

Each week, we will have leaders from the private and public space join us to describe how they confronted risks to their organizations - both successfully and unsuccessfully. We will use these discussions to better understand how risk management fits within the broader strategy of an organization. Ultimately, we will develop both qualitative and quantitative approaches to more effectively anticipate, prioritize, and mitigate threats.

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.

Overview

In Managing and Innovating in Financial Services (formerly Managing the Financial Firm), we examine the challenges and opportunities faced in financial services as incumbent firms and startups try to navigate and shape an environment with rapid changes in competition, technology and regulation.

Context

Financial services firms play a central role in the global economy. They provide capital for growth, payments infrastructure for transactions, and the tools to manage risk. These financial services are provided in an array of organizational forms from FinTech startup to multi-trillion dollar global bank - in an industry undergoing unprecedented change and disruption stemming from the financial crisis and advances in technology.

Content

We will be looking at a variety of financial institutions including banks (community banks, regional banks, global banks, and investment banks); insurance companies; and “shadow banks” - entities that don’t have bank charters but provide key banking services. This last category arguably includes finance companies, hedge funds, money market funds, marketplace lenders, and payment firms. For the most part, we will be looking at decisions through the lens of these firms with government policy as an important factor in the background, but for some of the course we will look at issues through the government’s public policy lens.

The course is divided into four basic modules. In the first module, we’ll study the basic business model of banking. I believe you can’t really understand innovation and fintech startups without understanding the basics of banking. Critically, unlike most firms, banks make money on both sides of their balance sheets, and we’ll study why and how, and the challenges they face in doing so. In the second module, we’ll study the spectacular failure of the banking system during the financial crisis - how banks mismanaged both sides of their balance sheets - and the unprecedented response of the government to stabilize the financial system. We will also look at the regulations that have been put in place to achieve longer-term financial stability. In the third module, we study non-bank financial intermediaries, some of which grew or morphed in response to the financial crisis and new regulations. This module includes discussion of fintech companies, finance companies, securitization entities, and insurance. The fourth module will explore innovation in payments and the potentially large impact such innovation will have on the financial system.

About 3/4 of the class sessions will be traditional HBS cases, most of which are set in the last five years. The rest of the class sessions will be devoted to discussion of academic articles or memos that I have prepared. We will have visitors or case protagonists for many of the class sessions.

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.

Fall 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.

Spring Overview

Leaders of groups and organizations face moral decisions throughout their careers. These may entail operational issues where the boundary between right and wrong is blurry, changing, or hotly debated. They may involve the moral propriety of an enterprise or undertaking. Often the hardest cases are those where conflicting obligations, all legitimate, are at stake.

This course looks to the arts - principally novels, plays, and biography - to illuminate how such issues may be responsibly understood and managed. Dr. Robert Coles, of the Harvard School of Education, launched the initial version of this course almost 30 years ago. He observed that: "Novels and stories are renderings life; they can not only keep us company, but admonish, point us in new directions, or give us the courage to stay a given course. They can offer us kinsmen, kinswomen, comrades, advisers - offer us other eyes through which we might see, other ears with which we may make soundings." When such works are read and analyzed in class, students and teachers alike learn from one another's perspectives.

Educational Objectives

The aim of the course is to enable students to craft a personal definition of moral leadership that they can apply in their professional, community, and family lives. Students thus develop:

• Moral Challenge, in which students explore a variety of moral problems and various strategies used to meet them;
• A deeper appreciation of the power (and limitations) of various moral frameworks; and
• A richer understanding of social, contextual, and personal circumstances that affect how moral issues are perceived and resolved.

Course Content and Organization:

Readings are drawn from around the globe and span many centuries, from ancient Greece through the early Renaissance up to contemporary times. The course is comprised of three modules:

• A heightened awareness of emerging moral challenges so that timely and wise decisions can be made;
• Moral Reasoning, in which students are introduced to principles and modes of analysis that help justify (or discredit) decisions made in complex situations.
• Moral Leadership, which builds on the first two modules by providing students with examples from business and the public sphere where prominent figures confronted difficult moral choices.

Format, Requirements, and Grading

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

The Moral Leader in spring term only is considering linking the course to a research study; enrolled students will be called on to participate in short pre-and post-course online surveys and in brief interviews after the course is over and class sessions will be videotaped. The study will look for patterns of engagement and learning across the class as a whole; results will not identify the comments or participation of individual students in any way.

Prof. Sucher will share more details on Canvas.

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, 25% based on the group project, and 25% based on a brief exam at the end of the semester.

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.

Fall 2020 Faculty Notes

Senior Lecturer Kevin Mohan

Assistant Professor Amit Goldenberg

enior Lecturer Andrew Wasynczuk

Fall; Q1Q2; 3.0 credits
28 Sessions
Exam
Enrollment: Limited to 60 students per section

In Fall 2020, Professors Mohan and Wasynczuk c, and Professor Goldenberg for a Zoom only approach.

Overview and Objectives

Managerial, executive, and entrepreneurial success requires the ability to negotiate.  Whether you are forging an agreement with suppliers, trying to ink a deal with potential customers, raising money from investors, managing a conflict inside the firm, or tackling a dispute that is headed towards litigation, your ability to negotiate will significantly impact your performance.  This course will enable you to become a more effective negotiator by teaching you how to:

• Make wiser decisions in negotiation;
• Avoid common biases and mistakes;
• Design and execute agreements that create maximum value on a sustainable basis;
• Capture an appropriate share of the value that is created;
• Achieve superior results in a vast array of competitive environments, including those that entail uncertainty, complex issues, high stakes, intense pressure from competitors, negotiating from a position of weakness, negotiating in multi-party environments, and negotiating under the threat of litigation;
• Resolve disputes and achieve desired outcomes even when others are becoming emotional or appear irrational;
• Think strategically in competitive contexts (e.g., bidding wars) by anticipating the strategy of others;
• Understand the vital role of ethics in negotiation;
• Work with people whose backgrounds, expectations, perspectives, and values differ from your own;
• As a leader, create environments that will lead to wiser negotiations.
• Introduce a negotiation framework that will help you analyze, prepare for, and execute negotiations more systematically—and hence, more effectively—in a wide variety of contexts. 
• Build a negotiation toolkit that consists of strategies and tactics for creating and capturing value in negotiation, and which can be put to use as soon as you walk out the door.
• Create an environment which helps diagnose your individual skills, and allows you to identify techniques for mitigating your weaknesses and leveraging your strengths.

At its core, the course is designed to help you audit and refine your negotiation skills, and to provide an opportunity for you to develop a negotiator’s lens for diagnosing and acting on threats and opportunities that involve the decisions of others. 

Approach

You will engage in a number of (increasingly complex) negotiation simulations, receive feedback on your strategies and performance, debate alternative approaches, and work with classmates to discover new insights. The course will allow you to test your analytic ability and your tactical skills, and to experiment with new ideas. This approach allows us to:

• Introduce a negotiation framework that will help you analyze, prepare for, and execute negotiations more systematically—and hence, more effectively—in a wide variety of contexts.
• Build a negotiation toolkit that consists of strategies and tactics for creating and capturing value in negotiation, and which can be put to use as soon as you walk out the door.
• Create an environment which helps diagnose your individual skills, and allows you to identify techniques for mitigating your weaknesses and leveraging your strengths.

Content

This section of negotiations uses a broad definition of negotiations: Decision making involving two or more parties who do not have the same preferences. If you are looking for a narrower class on haggling over price, this is probably not the section for you.

Some of the content we will cover includes:

   -Price negotiations

   -Job Negotiations

   -Ethics in negotiations

   -Negotiating over ethical issues

   -Noticing opportunities in negotiations

   -Thinking about the decision of others

   -The behavioral economics of negotiations

   -Systematic and predictable mistakes that even the best and the brightest make. 

   -Reservation prices and bargaining zones

   -Finding the Pareto efficient frontier in negotiation

   -Designing the structure of transacting

   -Multi-party negotiations

Instruction Regarding Simulations – READ THIS CAREFULLY

Missing a class in which we are conducting a simulation is a very bad idea, because you are essentially missing out on two classes (exercise and debrief). Do whatever you can to avoid this.

If you are unable to participate in a simulation for any reason, you must notify my faculty support specialist (Elizabeth Sweeny) before the scheduled exercise in writing, as soon as possible—early enough so that we can adjust the groupings. Otherwise, your group will be left stranded, and this will diminish their learning.

Conscientious preparation and conduct of simulations is essential. Under no circumstances is it acceptable to adopt the attitude, “I didn’t try because it was not a real negotiation.” Failing to take a simulation seriously (or pretending to have not taken it seriously after you perform poorly) is unfair to your counterpart, who is counting on you to provide a realistic experience.

For each simulation, you will receive “confidential role information” with which to prepare. This information is for your eyes only. You are not allowed to show or discuss your confidential role information with anyone else, at any time. During the negotiation, you are allowed to say whatever you want, but you CANNOT show your confidential role information to the other side. 

You are prohibited from searching the web or other sources to obtain information about the simulations used in the class.

Grading

1/3 based on Class Participation.  We are going to do this one differently than it is typically done.  Class involvement is critically important.  But, I want the best class discussion possible, rather than competition to make the most comments.  So, after each of the 14 class days, I will assess the 3-6 most useful comments.  I will not use the rest of the comments for grading.  Thus, only very high quality comments will be assessed.  Comments that simply provide description (“she said, he said”) may be useful for the conversation, but will not be among the most useful comments.  I will use frequency of comments as feedback to me on who I should call on more often, but not for grading.

2/3 based on Final Exam.  The final exam will have one essay question designed to assess your understanding of the core concepts in the course, and your ability to think about these concepts as a leader, where you want to influence negotiations beyond those negotiations where you are actually present.  The answer will be limited to 500 words.

Adjustments.  I reserve the right to adjust your grades up or down for unusual positive contributions to the learning environment or for failure to fully follow course policies.

Course Policies

Cell phones and other devices: Before each class session begins, please turn off ALL cell phones.  While we will all be on our computers, I ask that you only use your computer to connect to zoom – no online searches or email.  Violation of this policy will reduce class grade by one full level for each offense (1 to 2, 2 to 3).

Disability: I (Max) am committed to making the class accessible for all students. Any student needing accommodations because of a (short-term or long-term) disability should speak with Aldo Pena Moses, the Disability Coordinator for the MBA Program (amoses@hbs.edu), as soon as possible so that accommodations can be provided in a timely manner.

Academic integrity and professionalism: I expect full academic integrity from students in this course. All work handed in must be your own. Substantial paraphrasing or borrowing of ideas without appropriate citation can be construed as plagiarism, so be sure that you understand what constitutes a breach of academic integrity.

Attendance and participation: Class attendance is essential for understanding this material. Late arrivals are disrespectful to other class members.

A Note on Research

The results of the simulations and related polls provide rich material for class discussion, but may also be useful for research. Analysis of data from prior courses has contributed to the curriculum we use today. Only aggregate, statistical information, if any, would be used; complete anonymity would be guaranteed. If you are uncomfortable with this possibility, please contact my Faculty Support Specialist (esweeny@hbs.edu), and she will ensure that your data is always removed from any archived results that might subsequently be used for research.  She will not tell me the name of anyone who has made such a request.

Class Schedule

9/2       Negotiate and debrief Mt. Scopus Negotiation

            Overview of Course

9/8       Negotiate and debrief Hamilton Real Estate Negotiations

9/9       Fairstar case

            Influence Strategies

9/14     Negotiate and debrief El-Tek Negotiation 

9/15     Bounded Ethicality

            Biases and Behavioral Insights

            Noticing in Negotiations

9/21     Negotiate and debrief Viking Negotiation

9/22     Road Rage

            Commodity Purchase: In-Class Exercise and Debrief

9/28     Job Negotiations (asynchronous)

            Peer Feedback (Hamilton, El-Tek, and Viking)

9/29     Frasier Case

            Slice (Initial presentation)

9/30     Slice

            Airbnb

10/5     Auctions

            Malhotra video series (asynchronous)

10/6     Cuban Missile Crisis

            Negotiate Rio Curico

10/13   Debrief Rio Curico

            Endesa Case   

            Negotiating with Putin (asynchronous)

10/14   Negotiate and debrief California Family Negotiation

            Final Q&A, Discussion of Unanswered Issues in Negotiation, Exam Prep, and Wrap-Up

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.

Introduction

This is a course about understanding power and influence dynamics and learning to use them as effective tools for analyzing your surroundings and achieving your goals. It is a course about getting things done in the real world, where politics and personalities often seem to hinder rather than help you. Power and Influence is a course for those of you who want to make things happen, despite the obstacles that might stand in your way. This course is also intended to unearth your implicit theories and feelings about power and influence. These have a profound impact on how you perceive problems and opportunities, and subsequently, how you decide upon particular courses of action. To help you develop a realistic point of view, you will start from day one to become aware and to test your assumptions about power and influence.

Course Objectives

This course includes conceptual models, tactical approaches, self-assessment tools and simulation exercises to help you develop your own influence style and understand political dynamics as they unfold around you. By focusing on specific expressions of power and influence, this course provides you with the opportunity to observe effective and ineffective uses of power in different organizational contexts and career stages. It will also introduce difficult ethical questions associated with the use of power and influence. By design, this course will challenge you to define for yourself what will constitute the ethical exercise of power and influence in your life. The objectives of the course are to help you:

1. Develop a conceptual framework for understanding power and influence. You should be able to define power and influence and begin to appreciate how essential they are for your own career. You will learn how to identify critical sources of political conflict, and how to use tools to assuage conflict or harness it to produce constructive outcomes.
2. Practice diagnostic skills that will enable you to map out the political landscape, understand others' perspectives and power bases, and learn to predict and influence their actions.
3. Assess your own power bases and influence style and consider strategies for expanding them.
4. Begin to build a repertoire of influence tactics that will enable you to be effective in a variety of contexts and situations.
5. Develop your own strategy for building and exercising power and influence ethically and responsibly.

Course Content

After introducing you to the volatile dynamics of power and influence at work, the course will help you develop a deeper understanding of political issues through three interrelated modules:

Power and influence in interpersonal relationships: How to influence others?
What is power? Where does it come from? In the first module, we begin to explore the nature of power and influence in interpersonal relationships. We will discuss personal, positional, and relational sources of power. In particular, we will analyze the importance of networks of relationships as sources of power. This module includes an exercise (Network Assessment Exercise) designed to help you assess your own network of relationships.

In this module, we will also consider how to leverage personal, positional, and relational power bases through influence tactics that fit individual and situational needs. We will learn how to understand our "influence targets," so as to tailor our approach accordingly. What motivates people to respond to influence attempts? How can you cater your influence approach to the different needs and preferences of those around you? How can you recognize when your influence attempts are not working, and how do you change approaches when this happens?

We will explore these questions through a series of cases about people in very different situations with different opportunities and constraints on the influence tactics they can use. We will also use two exercises. The first one is a coaching exercise that will enable you to get feedback on your communication skills. It is meant to help you better project both warmth and strength and address the particular challenges that you may face as a public communicator. The second exercise is the Influence Style Questionnaire (ISQ), which will provide you with personal feedback on how your influence style is perceived by co-workers and the extent to which you adapt your style to situational requirements.

Power and Influence in organizations: How to navigate organizational politics?
This module addresses the question of how power and influence manifest in organizations. To be successful in getting things done in organizations, it is critical that you be able to comprehend the patterns of interdependence among organizational participants and to diagnose their relative power. Our focus will be on learning to read and diagnose the political landscape in organizations. How do power and influence dynamics work in organizations? What are the key sources of power in organizations? Why do we see political conflict in organizations? How can political conflict be handled to serve constructive ends?

We will consider how to address these questions over the course of your career. We will map out typical political challenges at different career stages with an emphasis on early career issues. We will cover several topics including building credibility quickly, cultivating mentors and networks, and managing ethical dilemmas. We will consider strategies for acquiring power over time in an effective and ethical manner and explore common early career transitions with an eye towards crafting strategies for navigating inflection points successfully. In order to do so, we will use cases as well as a self-assessment exercise (Self-Monitoring Questionnaire), which is designed to help you understand how much you adapt your behavior to fit situations.

We will also discuss the challenges of change implementation in organizations. To implement planned organizational changes, you will need to overcome the potential resistance of other organizational members and persuade them to adopt new practices. Organizational change implementation is thus an exercise that requires the effective use of power and influence. How can you be an effective change agent in your organization? What are the factors that are likely to affect your success? We will address these questions through case discussions and through a simulation (Change Pro) that will give you the opportunity to practice change leadership in a team.

Finally, we will discuss the challenges and opportunities of co-leadership in organizations. Under what conditions can co-leadership be effective? What are the challenges associated with co-leadership? What are the potential benefits of co-leadership?

Power and Influence in society: The challenges of transforming your environment
In this final module, we will look at power within the context of society. We will think about the challenges of influencing your broader environment. Who are the powerful in society and how did they obtain their power? Can individuals affect the distribution of power within a larger system? How can power be used to produce great benefit or harm? Can the use of power be both self-enhancing and self-destructive? Why do even the most powerful fall? To address these questions, we will use cases that are meant to make you think about how to possibly influence your broader environment. We will also use a simulation (Star Power) in order to help us think about the challenges of changing existing power hierarchies in society. Reflecting on these issues is crucial for anyone who wants to make a difference in the world.

Course Pedagogy

The course relies on a mix of traditional case studies, biographical case studies of historical figures, exercises/simulations, films, and class visits by influential people. The exposure to the development and use of power in many different social settings and at various points in history allows a comprehensive analysis of power in action. Self-assessment tools are included throughout the course to help you assess your own bases of power and influence style. A number of readings, both required and recommended, supplement the case material.

Grades will be based on two components (each accounting for 50% of the final grade): (1) class participation (including class attendance, contribution to class discussions and completion of the different exercises and simulations), and (2) final paper assignment. Below is a more detailed presentation of these different exercises, simulations and assignments. (Please note that some exercises and simulations may be added to this list over the course of the semester).

Network Assessment Exercise
The Network Assessment Exercise is designed to help you identify patterns in your networks of relationships.
Public Communication Coaching sessions
This individual coaching exercise is meant to help you better project both warmth and strength and address the particular challenges that you may face as a public communicator.
Influence Style Questionnaire
The Influence Style Questionnaire (ISQ) is designed to allow others to provide you feedback on your influence style. This information can help you identify the more and less productive methods you use to exert influence on others.
Self-Monitoring Questionnaire
The Self-Monitoring Questionnaire is designed to help you understand how much you adapt your behavior to fit situations.
Change Pro Simulation
This simulation gives you the opportunity to practice change leadership in teams.
StarPower Simulation
The StarPower simulation is an in-class face-to-face exercise designed to help you experience how people react to shifts in power over time.

Final Paper Assignment
The course ends with your final paper in which you apply the lessons of the course to your own situation. The final paper should be thought of as the last and the most important case study in the course. The final paper is designed to help you improve your power and influence skills in your own career. You have two options:

Option 1
You can analyze a political situation you experienced at work before you came to HBS or during the summer. Ideally, you will choose a situation in which you felt politically blind-sided, or felt that you came out in a disadvantaged position. Alternatively, you may simply analyze the politics of your last job. In addition, instead of focusing on your last job, you may also use experience you may have gained in another organizational setting, such as a political or volunteer organization, as the focus of your paper.

Option 2
If you have a job by the time you begin writing this paper or are choosing among alternatives, the final paper will give you an opportunity to apply the concepts and lessons of the course to your new position. In addition, instead of a new job, you may also use a new (or future) position in another organizational setting, such as a political or volunteer organization, as the focus of your paper.

Introduction

The purpose of any business is to create some value, in some way, to someone or something outside of itself. However, a business cannot survive—little own thrive—unless it is also able to earn a return commensurate with the value it establishes in the market.

With this mind, Pricing Strategy helps students understand how organizations of all shapes, sizes, and vocations can better capitalize on their efforts to stand out and serve customers. The course studies the “back end” of a firm’s relationship with its customers, if you will. It is exactly at this moment, when a business asks the market to trade good money for the products and services it dispenses, that ineffective practices tend to creep in and value “leaks out” of the exchange—which regrettably makes the business, customers, and often also society worse off.

Career Focus

Pricing Strategy is designed for students who will be responsible for the revenue policies and top-line growth of a product or service business. It also suits students who anticipate starting their own enterprise or seek a career as external advisors or investors.

Educational Objectives

In my experience, senior leaders in organizations appreciate the importance of getting prices right, yet they tend to act without the proper mindset and frameworks in place. Rather, you often 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, Pricing Strategy equips students with the logic, skills, and confidence necessary to tackle contemporary pricing issues and craft sound strategies. In particular, the course addresses questions such as:

• How should we think about prices and pricing? 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? Are we squandering it?
• What is the impact of technology on the way we earn revenue? Are we behind the times?
• What is the best revenue model for our business? Should we launch a subscription or encourage sharing? Are there options that we are neglecting?
• Are we selling at the right price? What information do we need to make this judgment with confidence?
• How should we estimate and act on valuations and willingness to pay information? Can we trust the data?
• Are there opportunities to serve different prices to different customers? How can we exploit this chance without damaging our image or incite backlash?
• How do we stand our ground against demanding customers and sell value with confidence? If it comes to it, how should we discount our offerings without mortgaging the brand?
• What is best way to act against pesky competitors? Can we delay the forces of commoditization?

• · What does a sophisticated pricing organization and internal structure look like?

Content and Organization

Pricing Strategy 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 certainly involves an element of “running the numbers,” there is much more that I want to cover.

In fact, the theory driving the course can be construed as a pyramid. We start at the tip with one irrefutable fact: you cannot improve the pricing performance of any business, or even judge its current performance for that matter, unless your decisions center on customers—what they value, why they value it, when and how they value it, and so on. The reason for this is that customers drive demand in a market, and demand marks the opportunity. If you do not grasp the opportunity, then you are essentially making decisions with a blindfold. This logic is relatively simple, yet most organizations produce prices starting from—and ending with—internal considerations of costs, risk, and acceptable returns. They also fail to understand that a proper pricing strategy is part economics, part sociology, and part psychology. These are the roots of all the problems we discuss in the course.

Next, we want to understand how value flows froms customers to organizations. We are particularly interested in mapping the different steps along this journey and identifying the leaks that may occur. I call this process “cakeonomics.” It is an important exercise because without this insight we simply do not know what needs fixing, and in which order. This is not a situation you want to find yourself in when every improvement, no matter how small, can have a disproportionate effect on the success of the business or on the satisfaction of customers.

Finally, we take each of the steps identified above and, in turn, work hard to stop the leaks. To give a few examples, I will ask students to reflect on the choices businesses make with respect to communicating and selling value to customers, and with respect to defending one’s position in the face of competitors. We will also question what an efficient (i.e., cake-maximizing) revenue model looks like. Should an organization earn revenue simply by selling what it makes, or should it earn revenue from ensuring access, upon actual consumption, or conditional on performance? Third, students are going to examine the process of integrating information on costs, customers, competitors, and the company itself to settle on the right sticker price. Finally, we will delve into the delicate task of tailoring prices to fit a heterogenous customer base. To the extent that the market features customers with different attitudes and beliefs, sticking with a single price is a poor compromise, yet it is exactly what most customers insist on. It turns out that there are several ways to solve this sticky problem.

From a practical standpoint, the 14 sessions comprise case study discussions (roughly 60% of class time), exercises (25%), interactive lectures, and contributions from guest speakers (15%). 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 a final paper (60%). The assignment, called “Pricing Audit,” gives students the opportunity to apply the concepts introduced in the course in a setting they find personally stimulating. Specifically, students are asked to (a) review the pricing performance of an organization or business unit and (b) formulate thoughtful recommendations.

The first part of the assignment looks to the past. Students need to read the article How do you know when the price is right? and use the diagnostic tool therein to critique the current pricing performance of the target company. Students should address the 10 dimensions described in the article. The second part of the assignment looks to the future. Students now take the lessons from the course and turn them into clear, meaningful, and practical recommendations for the organization.

I will share with students my grading template ahead of time, so that they can prepare their work accordingly. I follow these criteria religiously when assessing one’s work. 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 students and their better judgment. That said, please keep in mind that it’s relatively easy to spot reports that, for the sake of brevity, do not provide sufficient information to make a compelling argument or, conversely, reports that are excessively long and contain information that is irrelevant or redundant.

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.

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.

Course Overview

In 2020, the world’s largest investor, Blackrock CEO Larry Fink wrote in his annual letter to CEOs that “purpose is the engine of long-term profitability” and that companies must serve the interest of all stakeholders. Is this really true or is it just hyperbole? Does having a social purpose beyond making a profit support or conflict with maximizing shareholder value? More important, how can corporate executives and investors embrace a social purpose and “stakeholder capitalism” 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, building on the ideas first introduced in the 2011 HBR article Creating Shared Value by Professor Michael Porter and Mark Kramer. The cases demonstrate how large multinationals and smaller entrepreneurial companies in a wide range of industries, in both developed and emerging markets, gain a competitive advantage by embracing a social purpose and improving stakeholder outcomes in health, education, poverty and the environment. Classes will highlight the unique role that companies can play in advancing social progress and the way public-private partnerships among businesses, NGOs and governments can amplify value for all three sectors. A module on investing covers the shortcomings of current ESG ratings and offers newer thinking that links social purpose to Alpha.

Rather than viewing social and environmental issues as a matter of corporate social responsibility, this course offers corporate leaders practical guidance in driving business results through measurable social impact. The course uses core strategy frameworks to connect social purpose with competitive advantage and includes a guest lecture by Professor Porter on the principles of competitive strategy.

The course includes newly written and updated cases along with provocative readings and a number of inspiring guest protagonists. We will explore what it means for a company to adopt a social purpose, and the challenges involved in shifting organizational culture, measuring social impact, engaging investors, and managing public-private partnerships. Cases will cover companies “born” with a social purpose, as well as those rethinking their purpose in response to external pressures in rapidly changing industries.

P&P is intended as a mainstream strategy course for future corporate leaders, entrepreneurs and investors who want to understand how social purpose intersects with corporate strategy to create new opportunities for innovation and profitability that competitors miss. Future business leaders will therefore find it important to understand and be able to apply this thinking over the course of their careers.

The course is also suited to students who aspire to work in government or social enterprises that partner with businesses to deliver social impact. It is relevant for anyone who recognizes the growing importance of social issues to corporate success and the power of companies to change the world.

Grading will be based equally on class participation and a short final paper applying class concepts to a company of the student’s choosing. A limited number of cross-registrants from other schools in related disciplines will be accepted to enrich the class discussions.

Career Focus

This course is intended for any student interested in a career in private market investing. Specifically, we will cover topics pertaining to investing, managing, and developing investments in real estate and private asset backed companies. The course will be divided into three modules. The first module will focus on portfolio construction and understanding investment risks associated with private investments. Among the guests in this module will be Karsten Kellweig of the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund and Howard Marks, founder of Oaktree Capital. 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. We will focus on the attributes of both successful and unsuccessful transactions. Among the guests we will include Barry Sternlicht, founder of Starwood Capital, AJ Agarwal head of the Americas for Blackstone, 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. 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

Conceptual Framework: 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.

Career Focus

This course is designed for students who may be interested in pursuing a career in real estate, future business leaders who will head organizations that require the use/ownership of real estate, or civic leaders who need to better understand the relationship and interdependency of real estate, communities and the environment. It is a multidisciplinary course that requires analytical rigor as well as broad strategic thinking. No prior real estate experience is required.

Educational Objectives

The class goals are to give students a basic understanding for real estate. Students will learn about the interplay of capital structures, building characteristics, tenant relationships, and legal parameters. Beyond that, students will be expected to apply those tools into a wider context of how buildings fit into a broader societal context.

Content and Organization

The course is divided into 6 modules.

1. The Basics of Real Estate Underwriting and Valuation- Through analytical cases and exercises, students will learn how to value properties. There are three traditional methods of valuing assets although much of this process is an art as well as a science.
2. Decision Making Without All the Facts- Developing, owning, and managing real estate requires the constant balancing of risk vs. reward. How can you minimize or shift risks? How can you be compensated for the risks you assume?
3. Real Estate and the Common Good- Who are the stakeholders beyond the traditional landlords, tenants, and financiers? What are their needs? Do they have a voice? Do they matter? What is the impact of real estate on the broader community and society?
4. Negotiations- Confessions from 60 years of doing deals. Any acquisition, sale, financing, leasing, or restructuring is a transaction that requires direct negotiations. Cases as well as class exercises will help students develop practical tactics and skills.
5. The Age of Covid-19- Are buildings incubators of great ideas, social networking, and collaboration? Or, are they merely petri dishes for the next pandemic? How have recent covid-19 events impacted traditional ways of viewing real estate?
6. Portfolio Investing Across Borders- Real estate is the world’s largest asset class of $228 trillion. How do real estate practices and conventions in the US compare to those overseas? This module will focus on globalization, emerging markets, sustainability, and infrastructure.

Pedagogical Mix

Because real estate is such an interdisciplinary area, the topic is best learned through the case-method. Pre-class analytical preparation will be critical, and several pre-class polls will be assigned. However, open classroom discussion and debate will also be encouraged. Thinking on one’s feet will be important and “cold calling” will be frequent. We expect that students will be prepared as most classes will have the case protagonists or other industry leaders present. Many guests will be available for brown bag lunches. The workload and preparation are above average for the HBS EC courses. The course will have a final exam.

A final note, because there will be some overlap of cases with the fall Real Property Course, students will not be able to enroll in both courses. Also, given the uncertainty of guest schedules and the academic calendar, the professors may need to change the order of certain modules.

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.

Before moving to the second module, we will have a panel session on the effects of Covid-19 on the different segments of Real Estate.

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. Students seeking advanced real estate modeling on Excel and ARGUS can seek optional outside sessions. However, these skills will not be necessary for the Real Property coursework. There will be several outside optional events covering building sites, career development, and meetings/luncheons with industry leaders.

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 to play 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.

The course differs from a number of excellent offerings that explore related issues in at least three 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. Finally, we will rely both on cases and readings drawing from literatures in management, law, psychology, sociology, and economics.

Seminar Description:

Private equity and venture capital have been a potent sources of innovation and job generation in the global economy. In the U.S., the majority of new jobs are generated by entrepreneurial firms. Private equity has transformed entire industries. Academics and policy makers have long highlighted the critical role that these sectors play in promoting a dynamic economy and opportunities for sustained competitive advantage. This research seminar looks at academic research on private equity and venture capital to answer critical questions about what these investors do and how they transform the industries in which they invest. Each session will be two hours in length. The first hour will focus on discussing three or four academic papers. The second hour will be question and answer with a guest on the week’s topic.

The course will have six two hour sessions in Q1. There will be a one hour short answer exam for those who enroll in the 1.5 version.

Students who choose to enroll in the 3-credit version of the course will participate in Q1 sessions and then continue for the second half of the term and write a supervised 20-page research paper on some aspect of venture capital or private equity.

Week 1 – Measuring Risk and Return in Private Equity Performance – The Academic Evidence

Week 2 - Asset Allocation, Private Equity, and Venture Capital

Week 3 – How Do Venture Capitalists Create Value?

Week 4 – What Do Private Equity Investors Do?

Week 5 – Issues of Gender and Diversity in Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital

Week 6 – The Real Economic Impact of Private Equity and Venture Capital

Seminar Description:

Private equity and venture capital have been a potent sources of innovation and job generation in the global economy. In the U.S., the majority of new jobs are generated by entrepreneurial firms. Private equity has transformed entire industries. Academics and policy makers have long highlighted the critical role that these sectors play in promoting a dynamic economy and opportunities for sustained competitive advantage. This research seminar looks at academic research on private equity and venture capital to answer critical questions about what these investors do and how they transform the industries in which they invest. Each session will be two hours in length. The first hour will focus on discussing three or four academic papers. The second hour will be question and answer with a guest on the week’s topic.

The course will have six two hour sessions in Q1. There will be a one hour short answer exam for those who enroll in the 1.5 version.

Students who choose to enroll in the 3-credit version of the course will participate in Q1 sessions and then continue for the second half of the term and write a supervised 20-page research paper on some aspect of venture capital or private equity.

Week 1 – Measuring Risk and Return in Private Equity Performance – The Academic Evidence

Week 2 - Asset Allocation, Private Equity, and Venture Capital

Week 3 – How Do Venture Capitalists Create Value?

Week 4 – What Do Private Equity Investors Do?

Week 5 – Issues of Gender and Diversity in Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital

Week 6 – The Real Economic Impact of Private Equity and Venture Capital

The EC Retailing course focuses on delivery mechanisms for consumer goods and services. The course will primarily concentrate on retail stores but we will also study web and catalog based businesses. "Delivery" encompasses all activities of the company that have direct dealings with the consumer including, but not limited to, buying, storing, merchandising, selling, store siting, expansion strategies and marketing. Since the course considers all aspects of the management of retail companies, it may be viewed as a general management course.

The EC Retailing course aims to develop students' understanding of retail strategy, retail operations management, innovation in retail, and the key issues impacting growth in retail firms (including exposure to issues facing retailers in international settings). The course will be especially helpful to students exploring careers in a retailing firm. The course is also intended to support the needs of students interested in selling products or services to retailers, private equity investment in retailers, retail consulting or analysis.

The course will begin with a look at the strategic options available to retailers and how the choices made impact the operation of the firm and the financial model of the firm. This is followed by an analysis of branding in retail and considerations in store design and location determination (physical or virtual).

This strategy focus is followed by a module devoted to the operation of retail chains. The module will explore key issues in and tensions between retail supply chain management, store operations, merchandising and procurement management, and customer segmentation/management.

The course then explores issues retailers face when attempting to grow. Students will explore these issues in innovative startups, companies in the midst of rapid growth, companies in mature industries, companies using format differentiation for growth and established companies entering new markets.

Road to the White House, A Businessperson’s Perspective on Presidential Politics

In this course we will explore, analyze, and debate the strategic and operating decisions made in a US presidential election. We will focus on the 2020 election and draw upon lessons learned from other presidential campaigns with the assistance of practitioners and strategists that have been involved at the highest levels of presidential politics. We will do so from a businessperson’s perspective, drawing upon principles of corporate strategy, marketing, organization and finance as well as entrepreneurial frameworks such as minimum viable product, product ~ market fit, structured experimentation and staged financings. In many ways a campaign functions like a business and in many fascinating ways it does not – due to the context, incentives, and rules-of-the-game.

We will review the evolution of the US presidential election process and the implications for the current presidential election. Each major aspect of the campaign will be covered – strategy, messaging, advertising, organization and finance. We will also cover debates - a feature unique to political campaigns. We will dive deeply into the debate prep process and strategic options, with a class sessions scheduled for the day before and the day after the critically important first presidential debate between President Trump and Vice President Biden.

Students will be required to decide the best course of action by each campaign and how to react and respond to real time developments as events unfold during the semester. The course will focus on critical thinking, strategy and execution rather than ideology or partisan political philosophy in this hyper- polarized climate.

The course is intended for any student who wants to understand the presidential election process and designed to engage students with any level of political experience. Students from all countries are encouraged to participate.

Each session will include a guest(s) that has been in the political arena, including: past presidential candidates, campaign strategists and operatives, political ad makers, journalists that have been embedded in presidential campaigns and covering the White House, and Political Action Committee experts. Both sides of the political aisle will be represented. Through the collective experience of the participants throughout the semester, we will get a full understand of how the political world works and how it differs from the business world.

Students will be expected to make strategic and operating decisions facing the campaigns and defend their positions. Assignments will include some cases, assigned readings and lots of attention to campaign developments and world events. Grading will be based on 25% class participation, 25% weekly short written submissions and 50% final paper.

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.

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.

Career Focus

This is a SALES course. You can have the most sophisticated technology, the most innovative product, or a fascinating idea for new services; but, at the end of the day, nothing happens without a sale. Sales is the fundamental backbone of trade and business and, thus, this course is vital if you expect to run a business or manage an organization at some point in your career.

Specifically, students should take this course if they expect to join an organization (for-profit or non-profit) where the primary form of go-to-market activity involves personal selling (that is, the use of a sales force to go to market). Students who expect to undertake a leadership role in the management of employees (particularly salespeople) will benefit from this course by learning how to effectively motivate, evaluate, compensate and, therefore, manage these salespeople.

Many industries (including but not limited to management consulting, investment banking, private equity, technology, retail, healthcare, B2B) execute with personal selling. Furthermore, many in the professional service industries, traditionally not known for sales (such as private practice law firms and auditing/accounting firms) also rely on personal selling as a main method to go to market. This course will provide the fundamental tools to 1) properly apply sales processes and tactics, 2) effectively manage the people who are responsible for sales, and 3) appropriately execute sales strategies.

Educational Objectives

Personal selling is the primary (and sometimes the only) form of go-to-market activity for many organizations, especially in a business-to-business context.

This course focuses both on the tactical components of sales and sales force management as well as the strategic components of sales strategy. Hence, the course will provide the basic frameworks of sales management and strategy. Also, this course will cover the strategic element of linking the sales strategy with the firm’s overall strategy.

The case studies used in the course will cover a variety of industries (door-to-door, enterprise software, professional services, micro finance, medical equipment, pharmaceuticals, automobiles and parts, digital transformation solutions, retail electronics, software-as-a-service, etc.) across various countries (Finland, India, Japan, Sweden, U.S., etc.) both for large-sized, well-established firms (Siebel, Microsoft, Qualtrics, etc.) and medium-sized firms.

Course Content and Organization

The course will begin with a module on personal selling which includes sales tactics (and sales management) in B2B enterprise software, direct sales in emerging markets, sales of professional services; and one or two lectures on selling techniques.

The course will then move onto a module on sales force compensation, the primary form of motivating salespeople to exert greater effort. The contents of this module focus on how to use various different components (e.g., salary, commission, bonus, quota, overachievement rewards, etc.) of compensation to effectively motivate people.

Next, the course will cover key topics in sales such as sales force management, inside sales and sales transformation. The course will end with a capstone case study that links sales management and sales strategy with the overall firm strategy.

Grades will be composed of 50% participation and 50% final exam.

Students who would like to complete 3 credits can contact the instructor to discuss consideration for a half-term 1.5-credit IP.

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 growth stage ventures. Cases focus on scaling ventures in the DTC e-commerce, digital media, mobile, and enterprise software sectors.

Educational Objectives

The course defines a scaling venture as one that has achieved product-market fit or 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 product management, sales and marketing, business development, and engineering and technology.

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, STV examines executive leadership and functional management challenges in scaling ventures after the "search and discovery" stage of startup evolution. These challenges include:\

Strategy: In what directions should a new venture grow? When should a startup expand into new geographies/markets or diversify product lines versus expanding 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 and without VC financing? How do growth ventures use unit and customer economics to make their case to investors? How does a venture size its total addressable market? How can a venture optimize 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 approach when they "inherit" a scaling venture? How should ventures onboard experienced executives hired into senior 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 new arrivals?

For a significant number of cases, the course will host case protagonists - a founder, CEO, leadership team member, and/or investor - as class guests. Students will have the opportunity to participate in round table lunches to connect more informally with class guests. The course will also convene several optional workshops focused on product management, performance marketing, and other topics of current interest.

Students may choose 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 with a scaling venture, and then prepare a report documenting

The objective of this course is to help students develop the skills necessary to build a successful business career, navigate challenges and opportunities presented in the workplace, and most effectively leverage their talent. This objective will be met by 1) case discussions on how individual star women navigated their own successful careers (with many protagonists appearing virtually as guests) and 2) by panel discussions with star CHROs who will give students an insider’s perspective on the systems that organizations leverage to manage their talents and what works and what doesn’t.

Prof. Groysberg created this “How Star Women Succeed” EC course several years ago, and it was well received and oversubscribed. Prof. Groysberg then stopped teaching in the MBA program to focus on Executive Education, where he teaches in the Owner/President Management (OPM program) and co-chairs the Women on Boards program.

This iteration of the “How Star Women Succeed” course builds upon these three courses (the original EC How Star Women Succeed course, as well OPM and Women on Board Executive Education courses) and is a more enriched and diverse version of the original, with powerful cases, lectures, exercises and guests. The experienced panelists will give students a competitive advantage when it comes to understanding the systems they will be required to navigate in order to succeed in their careers and how leaders make human capital decisions in organizations. The course will leverage the tools on Zoom to maximize participation and engagement, but most importantly, we will use this platform to bring many guests to students to diversify their sources of learning.

Lastly, the course will end with a project. Students will select female senior executives and board members to interview about the topics they care most deeply about and write a report summarizing their findings.

Grading will be based on 50% participation and 50% project.

Course Overview

Modeled after book club discussions, each week’s 2-hour session will focus on a set of readings drawn from an annotated list of books and articles, organized into topics. In the first session, we will discuss options and collectively choose the set to read and discuss in the remaining sessions.

In each class, we will reflect on the ideas conveyed in the readings and their implications for how students will live their lives, manage their careers, and lead others. Discussion format will vary from full group to subgroup to pairs, with and without faculty.

Following are the course objectives:

• Expose students to a broad range of views on gender, race, and their intersections in the workplace.
• Give students opportunities to reflect on and discuss gender and/or race as presented in the readings, and experienced at HBS, at work, and in their lives more broadly.
• Create a safe space for exploration and discussion of these topics.
• Prepare a small group of students for actively engaging in conversations and action related to gender and race in organizations as they become leaders of the future.
• Give Kathleen and Robin insights into students’ interests, ideas, and experiences related to gender and race in the workplace.

Following is a partial list of possible topics:

• Race and gender* inequality in the workplace, including individual, organizational, and societal barriers to advancement
• Impact of race and gender on paths to leadership
• First person narratives
• Strategies for resisting and opposing inequality
• Men and masculinity in the workplace
• White racial identity
• Relationships at work: among women; between white women and women of color; across racial, ethnic, and other cultural differences
• Parenting and partnering
• “Diversity and Inclusion” (D&I) strategies in companies, including critiques of the business case for diversity
• Anger and resistance
• Research on how gender/race have influenced students’ experiences at HBS and in their careers over the generations

* Readings that consider the intersectional effects of race and gender are given priority across all topics

About the faculty

Kathleen’s research centers on gender and employment both in and outside of the U.S. Robin conducts research on gender and race relations in the workplace and on diversity more broadly. We hope to learn as much from the students – and one another – as they learn from us.

Course format

• Prior to 1^st class, review list of readings and topics and be prepared to talk about your preferences.
• Read before class & prepare short reflective memo.
• Reflect and discuss in class.
• Pairs of students will sign up for responsibility to lead specific discussions.
• The class will meet on Zoom, in full group and subgroups.

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 following: economics (macroeconomic performance and prospects, trade and supply chains, investment flows, technology); political economy and business (form of capitalism, role of the business firm, corporate governance); and national security (geopolitics, geoeconomics). This will be an atypical HBS course. A seminar capped at 25 students, it will be reading- and discussion-intensive. It will not be case-based. It will emphasize practitioner-oriented readings (e.g. articles drawn from Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy, think tank reports from Council on Foreign Relations, Brookings, Belfer and Carnegie), supplemented by a mix of book chapters/essays, scholarly journal articles, podcasts, newsletters, blogs, videos and guest speakers. Through these media, students will be exposed to American and Chinese perspectives, as well as other Asian and European views.

Throughout the course, students will be encouraged to respectfully challenge perspectives and taken-for-granted assumptions--those of the assigned reading authors, the instructor’s, classmates’, and their own. 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 or three. The assignment will ask students to creatively ideate potential “solutions” to an aspect of the US-China rivalry that both interests and concerns them. (This could, but need not, target solutions to address particular concerns of the business community.) Students will likely find that this assignment affords them an opportunity to productively draw on concepts and frameworks from multiple HBS courses they will have taken. In addition, this seminar will introduce students to (or refresh their recollection of) selected tools from negotiation and design thinking that will be useful in their creative ideation process.

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

The intention is for this course to use a Hybrid Classroom format, in which students will have the option of attending in person or via Zoom. Should circumstances require a switch to all-Zoom format, details will be on Canvas prior to term start.

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.

Combining the tools of philanthropy, business, advocacy and movement building, social entrepreneurs seek to promote systems change by building organizations that address long-standing problems like economic opportunity, global public health, social justice and climate change. Some social entrepreneurs use purely charitable approaches while others build attractive for-profit ventures; some rely on policy changes to scale their impact, while others build movements or seek to change cultural norms. 

But who are these social entrepreneurs? What’s in their DNA? Are the organizations they start traditional non-profits, but just bringing business discipline into their management? Or are they traditional for-profit companies that have spotted new markets and opportunities in the delivery of social or environmental benefits that purely profit driven companies don’t see? Or, are they something entirely new? What kind of capital, from venture philanthropy to impact investing, is being used to fuel these organizations as they grow from early stage ideas to national or international demonstration models? How do social enterprises measure success, not just of their product or service, but of the enterprise, and of their peers and competitors in their collective ability to affect long term systems change? And how does the field respond to a growing critique that social enterprise doesn’t address the root cause of social problems, but instead might exacerbate inequality and injustice through implicit bias or explicit practices?

This course draws on the extensive experiences of the instructor, Brian Trelstad, in investing in social entrepreneurs at as the Chief Investment Officer at Acumen Fund and as a partner at Bridges Fund Management. It will start with a more theoretical definition of social entrepreneurship, and then move into more practical applications, using cases to illustrate the typical life-cycle of social enterprise formation. Centered on the perspective of the social entrepreneur, the course will cover the journey of innovation and ideation, to systems thinking and opportunity assessment, to raising capital and team formation, to the scale, sustainability, and impact of a social enterprise. 

While a few students will launch or work for a social enterprise during their careers, most will work for businesses or public-sector organizations that are being influenced, if not transformed, by the rise of social enterprises. The course will provide a better understanding for how this new set of actors engages with traditional philanthropic, corporate and government organizations and equips students with a critical lens on how to differentiate among fads and fundamental shifts in the approach to long-standing problems, both domestically and globally.

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. For Fall 2020, no cross-registrants or auditors will be allowed. For Spring 2021, cross-registrants may be allowed based on class capacity and fit for the course; no auditors will be allowed.

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.

• SFE takes an integrated view of the strategic challenges faced by entrepreneurs as they move from conceiving an idea to creating, a large sustainable enterprise
• The course tracks the progress and pitfalls of disruptive tech entrepreneurs as they seek out hypergrowth business opportunities and transform them into successful businesses.
• The course uses case materials and speakers to cover a number of disruptive technology sectors that are transforming how people live (e.g. BrainTech, FinTech EnergyTech.)
• In each sector, the course examines several examples of companies at different stages of development
• Participants will have the opportunity to meet many of these entrepreneurs and/or the financiers who backed them. There will be a special focus on how to fund a new business (e.g. venture capital, venture builders) that delves into non-intuitive risk/reward tradeoffs.
• Logistics: double sessions covering two or three case examples.
• Grading: 60% class participation, 40% paper
• Paper is a business plan of the student’s choice for a start-up
• Cross registrants welcome

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.

Career Focus

The world faces challenges including rapid urbanization, declining public health as seen with Covid-19, increasing pressure on the environment and on basic resources, and the growing difficulty governments face in managing the confluence of these trends. This class will appeal to students who would like to explore tools and examples that help investors, entrepreneurs, and policy makers understand and address these issues. Students interested in infrastructure, private equity, real estate, business and environment, and social enterprise also will find the course to be useful.

Educational Objectives

This course looks at pragmatic action in the face of three huge global trends: 1) rapid and massive migration to cities as people seek opportunity (or flee from other problems); 2) current and worsening scarcity of basic resources, for example not enough clean air, clean water, land, food, energy and too much traffic and garbage; and 3) the apparent inability of federal governments to do much about these issues. Both climate change and the onset of global pandemics further exacerbate these challenges. What role can the private sector play in using the tools of business and finance to help address this set of the world's problems? Where will there be opportunities for investment and entrepreneurship in urban infrastructure? The course takes a "cities first" approach because a) cities are often the political unit that can act; b) investments in cities can have a cumulative benefit as they add to each other; and c) investors understand city scale projects: for example a toll road, water processing, or set of power transmission lines.

The course also takes a "built environment" approach. This is not the only way to understand cities. But it is useful since it looks at components of cities that can be directly influenced by private capital: the physical structures like roads, transit, water, power, buildings and more that are needed to support other attributes like jobs, schools, housing, and hospitals.

The five modules build skills in these areas, with consideration both of current best practices and of what is coming in the future. Cases are drawn from both emerging economies and developed economies, and from both new cities and existing cities. Real estate, project finance, infrastructure finance, and the delivery and operation of these elements of cities play prominent roles in each module.

Course Content and Organization

The course develops skills in five modules that build on each other. The frameworks and points of view are set out to shape a comprehensive ability to engage in investing, policy development, entrepreneurship, and large company leadership in an increasingly urban world.

I. Buildings in Cities; Project Delivery Strategies starts with the first commercial component of cities: buildings and real estate. This module also covers high level aspects of contracts, bidding, and project delivery.

II. Infrastructure Finance and Public Private Partnerships introduces a basic toolkit of large project finance, with particular attention to how to engage private actors in multiple sectors in the built environment.

III. New Cities, Economic Development, and Urban Policy looks at the interface between investing in hard infrastructure and the potential resulting benefits to both economic growth and to social and environmental sustainability. This module also touches on urban planning and design in several megaprojects and self-proclaimed new cities.

IV. Climate Adaptation and Financing Resilience introduces and raises awareness of concepts and approaches including infectious diseases, climate change and sea level rise, wildfire, drought, municipal waste, and waste to energy to underscore choices and financing of resilient infrastructure that moves energy, people, goods, waste and water through cities.

V. Smart Cities, Technology, Business Models, Opportunity, Obstacles suggests tools and approaches to address the many perils and challenges touched in the course, with particular emphasis on action to create business and investing opportunities, to impact policy, and to consider both elite and less elite groups of people facing urban, environmental, and climate challenges in the US and around the world.

Cases are drawn 1/3 from the USA, 1/3 from Asia including both India and China, and 1/3 from the rest of the world, notably Latin America and Africa. There are historic cities and newer cities. Infrastructure sectors include roads, rail, power, water, municipal solid waste, commercial real estate, and more.

Course Administration

Final exam. There are also several smaller assignments and polls. No final paper or final project. Cross-registrants are welcome, with advance permission of the instructor. HBS Finance 1 or HBS Real Property, or equivalent, are required prerequisites for cross registrants.

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.

We will embrace the tools of Zoom with the opportunity to learn and share in small groups. Grading will be a combination of class participation, periodic written reflections and a final written case done in small Teams.

Career Focus

This course is designed for students who may start, fund, or join an enterprise in the education sector, or may become a board member, or volunteer of a school or non-profit organization to help change the life trajectory of students, especially those from low-income communities. No prior experience in education is required.

The education sector is arguably one of the most important sectors to ensuring civil society and building a better world ahead. By providing a close examination of the complexities of the education sector, students in this course will gain insight into how to make a difference and strengthen our communities and our society.

The cases feature social entrepreneurs leveraging entrepreneurial and managerial practices to deliver “pattern-breaking,” change in K-12, Higher Ed, education non-profits, etc. The course covers adaptive and personalized learning, disruptive innovations driven by technology such as AI and machine learning, achieving system level change amidst competing goals, and a deepened understanding of the complexities and constraints of the sector to ferret out what works. Cases are set in various markets including U.S., China, and India. Many of the sessions include visits from case protagonists.

Course Content and Organization

In addition to an introductory module which will provide background and context of the education sector, there are six modules

• Personalizing learning: How can schools meet the unique needs of each student? What role can technology play in this effort and how is it changing the role of the teacher and the classroom?
• Redefining success: How can social entrepreneurs partner with schools and educational enterprises to better define success beyond test scores? What are the skills and aptitude necessary for the future?
• Achieving coherent systems: What are the ways in which leaders are re-organizing the school system to align resources to help the neediest students while creating the conditions for greater success for all?
• Scaling change: How can entrepreneurs and leaders scale what works? What are the challenges in replicating, scaling, and sustaining successful models?
• Disrupting higher education: This module will explore the rapid changes and innovations occurring in colleges and universities. How are entrepreneurs using technology and new business models to bring quality post-secondary education to all?
• Exploring new frontiers:How are entrepreneurs completely reimagining traditional K-12 schools? How is machine learning and AI changing the landscape?

Grading and course requirements

Grading is based on class participation and a final paper

At the root of the transformation occurring in the health care industry—both in the United States and internationally—is the fundamental challenge of improving clinical outcomes while controlling costs. Addressing this challenge will require dramatic improvements in the processes by which care is delivered to patients. This, in turn, will involve fundamentally different approaches to care delivery, the development of novel therapies, a rethinking of incentives, and a fundamental shift in the roles played by individuals and organizations throughout the health care sector. While the current COVID-19 pandemic has created a sense of urgency around many of these topics, they will remain salient issues as the health care system settles into its "new normal" mode of operation. This course will equip students with strategies and tools to help navigate the ever-changing landscape of the health care industry.

Career Focus

This course is appropriate for students interested in understanding the fundamental improvement challenges facing the health care sector and developing strategies for addressing them. Students may have career interests in organizations that provide health care (e.g., hospitals, medical groups, retail clinics) or in firms that partner with, supply, consult to, or invest in such organizations (e.g., payers, biopharmaceutical and device companies, health information technology, venture capital and private equity).

Educational Objectives

This course will help students develop the managerial skills required to identify and implement transformational change. It will draw upon a range of approaches for improving value in healthcare delivery, including continuous improvement, organizational redesign, population health management, precision medicine, patient engagement, digital health, payment reform, and the creation of appropriate incentives for innovation. For each of these approaches, the course will emphasize the importance of identifying improvement opportunities, implementing relevant changes, and measuring their effects on performance.

Course Faculty and Format

The course will be co-taught by Professors Amitabh Chandra and Robert Huckman.

Professor Chandra is the Henry and Allison McCance Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, where he directs the MS/MBA joint-degree program in the life-sciences, and the Ethel Zimmerman Wiener Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. He serves on the advisory boards of a number of private health care companies and has been a consultant to several public companies.

Professor Huckman is Albert J. Weatherhead III Professor of Business Administration, the Faculty Chair of the HBS Health Care Initiative, and the Unit Head for Technology and Operations Management. He studies topics related to performance improvement, digital innovation, and consumer engagement in health care. He is the Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Brigham and Women's Physicians Organization serves as an advisor to several private health care companies.

The primary, though not exclusive, teaching approach in the course will be case discussions using Zoom. Professors Chandra and Huckman will alternate as the primary faculty for each session, with both of them engaged in all class discussions.

Typically, students in THCD have formed a close-knit community to support each other's interests in learning more about the health care industry. We expect this year to be even more active in this regard. To that end, Professors Chandra and Huckman will host optional, small-group "coffee chats" about current topics in health care. They also will help connect students with HBS alumni and other health care experts who can provide insight and advice related to course projects.

Course Content and Organization

The course will be organized into four modules:

1. Designing for Value:  This module will present the basic components of the value-based health care framework, including the integration of care delivery around specific medical conditions, cost and outcome measurement, payment reform, disparities in access, and the management of population health.
2. Implementing Improvement: This module will consider the key challenges associated with implementing value improvement within the constraints of the current delivery system, including the appropriate use of standardization, the integration of new delivery approaches into existing organizations, and the adoption of information technology. 
3. Rethinking Care Delivery:  This module will consider the benefits and limitations of nascent efforts to improve value in health care through more fundamental changes to the process of care delivery, such as primary care innovation, retail clinic models, and digital health.
4. From Care to Cure? Inducing Transformational Innovation: This module will examine the development of new therapies that could shift the focus of health care toward preventing or curing illness rather than treating it.  It will address topics related to pricing, precision medicine, and approaches for inducing innovation.

Students will be evaluated on the basis of class participation, a blog post, and a final project that involves developing a short case (and teaching note) that applies course themes to a specific organization. These projects will be completed in teams of 2-3 students.  Teams will be able to select their own organizations to study and will receive further guidance from Professors Chandra and Huckman early in the semester.

The Headline: This is a class “by practitioners for future practitioners.”

Introduction

The growth of venture capital and private equity (“VCPE”) globally has been dramatic. The asset class has been both lauded as the savior of capitalism and vilified as an example of conspicuous greed. Regardless, VCPE investments (ranging from seed venture capital to large-capitalization buyouts) increasingly shape and reshape our global economy. 

And, it is here to stay. The promise of "above market" returns has attracted trillions of dollars from pension funds, upon which millions of our elders rely, sovereign wealth funds investing on behalf of their citizens, universities which educate future contributors to society, and high net worth individuals investing their personal assets.

Yet, VCPE organizations often operate in mysterious ways, with little public visibility, even though some firms are now publicly traded. 

This course, taught by long-time industry practitioners, provides an insider’s overview. It seeks to “peel back the covers” and show how VCPE organizations work, why they take the forms that they do, how their contracts influence motivations, and where crucial problems and opportunities for innovation exist. 

We also will examine the strategies and incentives of the various players and how they maneuver through the business cycle. We will learn about the types of VCPE, such as venture capital, private equity, private debt, infrastructure, impact investing, and real estate. 

In recent years, the course has been revamped. Most cases are recent, and guest speakers will be frequent. So, the current environment and the changing landscape will be part of every class.

The course will be capped to two sections.

Instructors

Each instructor has over 20 years of VCPE experience . The guests each have years of VCPE experience and generally are the protagonists of the respective cases.

Grading

Class participation 45%, short exercises and polls 10%, final paper 45%. There is no final exam. The final project is described in more detail below.

Career Focus

This course is “by practitioners and for future practitioners.” It is designed for students interested in entering some aspect of the VCPE industry:

• Directly, as a practitioner or supplier of capital.
• As an entrepreneur or corporate manager who is financed by VCPE.
• As a banker or advisor involved in VCPE transactions.
• As a regulator.

In addition, a solid understanding of VCPE tenets can be useful for those students interested in applying them to other settings, whether within large corporations or in international development.

Educational Objectives

The course focuses on:

• The "VCPE cycle" and starts by considering how funds are raised and structured, with attention paid to the differing perspectives and incentives of institutional investors, "gatekeepers," fund-of-fund managers, and private equity investors.
• How investments are evaluated, structured, and overseen. We examine the crucial problems that firms seeking private equity pose to investors, and how private equity organizations address these problems.
• Addressing the often-problematic ways in which VCPE investors harvest their investments.
• Investigating the future. We consider both the internal management challenges that VCPE firms face as they grow and contend with an environment that is increasingly international and in which they play an increasingly larger role. One fundamental question posed is how firms can outperform the market when funds have become large, even at the seed level of venture capital.

This course is differentiated from, and complements, the course on Private Equity Finance. This class focuses on an overview of the industry, the incentives of the various parties, and investment strategies. PE Finance delves more into capital structures and transactional economics; however, certain VCPE cases do involve transactional economics.

Course Content and Organization

Class Sessions: 

There will be 25 cases plus a wrap-up session. There will be three modules, with the first focusing on the industry, the various industry participants, and their respective interests and incentives. The second module reviews the various industry verticals in the context of specific transactions. The third looks to the future of the industry in terms of new models, innovative ways to address industry issues, and the potential structure of new firms and business models. It also will include a focus on general partner and limited partner issues.

The cases will cover multiple industry verticals: venture capital, leveraged buyouts, private debt, infrastructure, real estate, and impact investing.

Small-Group Discussions:

As a result of COVID-19, and to foster greater connectedness, we have eliminated two cases and have substituted course-discussion sessions. Each group will have fewer than 10 students and will meet every other week for one hour until Thanksgiving. The workload of these sessions will be roughly equivalent to the time associated with preparing for and attending two classes.

The goals of these sessions will be to:

• Analyze specific topics that relate to the prior weeks’ cases
• Delve into specific issues in more detail than could be covered in class given the breath of the course material
• Provide a format that allows for greater social interaction among students.

Specific topics will be provided in advance, and preparation will consist of thoughtful responses to the questions posed. No additional reading will be required other than short news articles. These sessions will be mandatory and will be graded as part of class participation.

COVID-19 permitting, the sessions will be in-person for those on campus and will be by Zoom for those residing outside of Boston. 

Short Exercises:
A few cases have short exercises or night-before polls associated with them.

Final Paper:
Each student chooses his/her own final-paper topic, which can cover any of the broad topics covered in the course. The paper can be a theoretical paper or a case-like paper based upon a specific company. Students may work in teams of two. The project could be an ideal way to network with industry participants. 

Students are required to “check in” with their respective Professor regarding the topic and to have at least one peer-to-peer meeting with another student and/or team to discuss their paper. 

Each Professor will choose the best papers in that section; those student authors will present their findings to the section.