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Photo of Nancy F. Koehn

Unit: General Management

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Nancy F. Koehn

James E. Robison Professor of Business Administration

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Nancy F. Koehn is a historian at the Harvard Business School where she holds the James E. Robison chair of Business Administration. Koehn's research focuses on effective leadership and how leaders, past and present, craft lives of purpose, worth, and impact. Her forthcoming book, Forged in Crisis: The Power of Courageous Leadership in Turbulent Times spotlights how five of history’s greatest leaders managed crises and what we can each learn from their experience.

Koehn is also the author of Ernest Shackleton:  Exploring Leadership (2012); Oprah (Brand) Renew (2011);Oprah:  Leading with Heart (2011); The Story of American Business:  From the Pages of the New York Times (2009); Brand New: How Entrepreneurs Earned Consumers' Trust from Wedgwood to Dell (2001) and The Power of Commerce: Economy and Governance in the First British Empire (1994), as well as a contributor to Creative Capitalism:  A Conversation with Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and other Economic Leaders (2008); Remember Who You Are: Life Stories That Inspire the Heart and Mind (2004); Beauty and Business (2000); The Intellectual Venture Capitalist: John H. McArthur and the Work of the Harvard Business School, 1980-1995 (1999); Creating Modern Capitalism: How Entrepreneurs, Companies, and Countries Triumphed in Three Industrial Revolutions (1997); and Management Past and Present: A Casebook on American Business History (1995). She has written and supervised cases on Starbucks Coffee Company, Ernest Shackleton, Oprah Winfrey, Bono and U2, Whole Foods, Stonyfield Yogurt, Wedgwood, Estée Lauder, Henry Heinz, Milton Hershey, Madame Walker, Marshall Field, Dell Computer, and other leaders and organizations.

Koehn consults with many companies and speaks at the World Economic Forum in Davos, the Aspen Institute Ideas Festival and the World Business Forum.  She is a frequent contributor to “American Experience” and has appeared on the PBS NewsHour, A&E's "Biography," "Good Morning America," Bloomberg Television, CNBC's "Moneywheel," CNN's "Money Line" and other television programs. She writes for the New York Times, the Washington Post, Huffington Post, and the Harvard Business Review, and is a weekly commentator on National Public Radio. In 2012, Poets and Quants ranked Koehn as one of the World’s 50 Best Business School Professors. She is a director of the clothing retailer, Fashion to Figure.

Before coming to HBS, Koehn was a member of Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences for seven years, first as a graduate student in history and then as a lecturer in the History and Literature concentration and the Department of Economics.  A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Stanford University, Koehn earned a Master of Public Policy from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government before taking her MA and PhD in History from Harvard.

Koehn lives in Concord, Massachusetts and is a dedicated equestrian.

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Featured Work Publications Research Summary Teaching Awards & Honors
  1. And now: President CEO

    During the 2016 campaign, Trump parlayed his fame as a celebrity real estate developer into a winning pitch to voters as a Washington outsider. Emphasizing his decades of experience as a wheeler-dealer building luxury hotels, casinos, and golf courses around the world, Trump pledged to use his business savvy and hard-charging leadership style to “drain the swamp” of the Washington bureaucracy and deliver results for the American people.
  2. How should companies navigate polarized politics in the Trump era?

    How should companies navigate the new political climate under President Trump? From political Super Bowl ads to Trump-brand boycotts, we seem to be seeing the rise of a new partisan consumerism. Economics correspondent Paul Solman reports.
  3. Whiteboard Session: The Ingredients of Great Leadership

  4. Why Lincoln Hid His Strongest Feelings from the Public

  5. Lincoln’s School of Management

    The legacy of Abraham Lincoln hangs over every American president. To free a people, to preserve the Union, “to bind up the nation's wounds”: Lincoln's presidency, at a moment of great moral passion in the country's history, is a study in high-caliber leadership.
  6. Harvard's Koehn on Government, Corporate Leadership

    Nancy Koehn, a professor at Harvard Business School, talks about government and corporate leadership. Koehn speaks with Betty Liu on Bloomberg Television’s “In the Loop.” 
  7. Leadership Lessons From the Shackleton Expedition

    by Nancy F. Koehn, December 24, 2011

    A HUNDRED years ago this month, the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen and four teammates became the first men to reach the South Pole, arriving in triumph five weeks ahead of Robert Falcon Scott. The Amundsen crew would return safely to its base, but, heartbreakingly, Scott and his four British companions died on the return journey.

    The race to the pole has long attracted leadership experts, who like to contrast the Amundsen focus on efficiency and innovation with Scott’s more deliberate dedication to scientific pursuit.

    But another polar explorer — Ernest Shackleton — faced harsh conditions in a way that speaks more directly to our time. The Shackleton expedition, from 1914 to 1916, is a compelling story of leadership when disaster strikes again and again.
  8. From Calm Leadership, Lasting Change

    She was a slight, soft-spoken woman who preferred walking the Maine shoreline to stalking the corridors of power. And yet Rachel Carson, the author of “Silent Spring,” played a central role in starting the environmental movement, by forcing government and business to confront the dangers of pesticides.

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Why Do Americans Prefer Workplace Equality Over Equality At Home?
10 Dec 2018
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Outrage nation: Can America overcome its addiction to anger?

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