Archie L. Jones

Most leadership books are written for people who are already labeled as “leaders”—corporate execs, high-ranking managers, entrepreneurs. They may not speak to the underrepresented young person or uncommon experienced person with a dream to create change in the world, or that entry-level employee with big ideas about how their organization could be better. But these individuals have just as much capacity to lead as a CEO,  just as much entrepreneurial drive as a startup founder, and they can benefit from lessons in leadership from an honest, authentic teacher and coach.

Leadership, as Archie L. Jones Jr. explains it, is the power of social influence that maximizes the efforts of others toward the achievement of a goal. Anyone with a goal that they need to enlist others to help achieve is, at least potentially, a leader—whether they are a student or a professor at Harvard Business School.

In The Treasure You Seek, Jones sets out to share his lessons with an audience beyond his classroom.  Readers will learn how to establish, build, and leverage their leadership capital—their resources and influence— utilizing the “5 Cs” framework—Capability, Culture, Communication, Connection, and Confidence— to  achieve their goals. Your treasure may be social impact, political influence, productive community engagement, or creating and leading a healthy, happy family. Whatever treasure you seek, leadership capital is the resource to help you get there.

This course addresses the issues faced by managers who wish to turn opportunity into viable organizations that create value, and empowers students to develop their own approaches, guidelines and skills for being entrepreneurial managers.

This course teaches students how to:

• Identify potentially valuable opportunities.
• Obtain the resources necessary to pursue an opportunity and to create an entrepreneurial organization. 
• Manage the entrepreneurial organization once it has been established.
• Grow the business into a sustainable enterprise.
• Create and harvest value for the organization's stakeholders.

The Field Course: Investing for Impact was born out of the efforts of HBS students and faculty in the spring of 2020 and offered for the first time in fall semester of 2021.

This course seeks to help students understand why certain business founders lack access to capital and whether small investments of $25,000 to $50,000 (made from an intermediary Donor Advised Fund) might help these businesses grow to deliver financial returns and measurable community impacts.

In addition to a weekly seminar (which includes case discussions, panels of expert guests and field experience), students work in small groups with their faculty mentors to conduct due diligence on a business for possible investment. Working closely with entrepreneurs to understand each company’s needs and opportunities, groups are responsible for completing a full diligence report and bringing their investment recommendation to the Investment Committee for discussion and approval. The course is designed to provide students with hands-on experience and training that they can use to pursue careers in the growing field of impact investing. 

This course examines the role of finance in supporting the functional areas of a firm, and fosters an understanding of how financial decisions themselves can create value.

Topics covered include:

• Basic analytical skills and principles of corporate finance.
• Functions of modern capital markets and financial institutions. 
• Standard techniques of analysis, including capital budgeting, discounted cash flow valuation, and risk analysis.

The FIELD Global Immersion (FGI) is a semester-long first-year (RC) MBA course. The course is a capstone of sorts, and it requires students to build on learnings from their first-year courses and apply them to real-world business problems. At the beginning of the semester students are paired with a Global Partner (GP) company in one of 16 cities that has a product or service challenge they would like the team to address with their local consumers.

The course culminates in a one-week Immersion at the end of the semester, at which time students travel to their assigned Immersion location and meet in person with their GP and local consumers. To maximize the experience, students are asked to travel to a city and country in which they have no significant prior work, travel or life experience.

Scaling Minority Businesses (SMB) is a field course designed to 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. The course utilizes three approaches to learning—traditional case-based classes, talks by subject experts, and hands-on consulting assignments with Black-owned businesses in the greater Boston-area. 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.

The arc of the course covers three modules: (1) Challenges of Systemic Racism and Inequities; (2) Challenges of Access to Capita; and (3) Challenges of Access to Customers.

The growth of private equity internationally has been dramatic, to the point that the asset class has been both lauded as the savior and vilified as the cause of our current economic malaise. Over the past two decades, private equity- ranging from venture capital to buy- outs and even to certain activities by absolute return funds (hedge funds) -has come to play an increasingly important role in shaping our economy. Their promise of "above market" returns has attracted investments from pension funds upon which millions of our elders rely and universities which educate future contributors to society. Yet private equity organizations often operate in mysterious ways, with little public visibility. This course seeks to understand how these organizations work, why they take the forms that they do, and where crucial problems-and opportunities for innovation-exist. We examine the strategies and incentives of the various players and how they maneuver through the business cycle. Cases are recent and class speakers are common so the current private equity environment and the changing landscape are features of every class.