Faculty & Research
Sandra J. Sucher

Sandra J. Sucher

MBA Class of 1966 Professor of Management Practice

MBA Class of 1966 Professor of Management Practice

SANDRA J. SUCHER is Professor of Management Practice, Joseph L. Rice, III Faculty Fellow at Harvard Business School and is a member of the General Management unit. She joined the faculty of Harvard Business School after 25 years in industry and nonprofit management, including ten years in fashion retailing and twelve years at Fidelity Investments where she served as chief quality officer. At HBS, Sucher has taught the required MBA course, “Leadership and Corporate Accountability," for ten years and led it for five. For fifteen years she has taught "The Moral Leader" – an elective in the MBA curriculum that examines leadership and moral decision making through literature and historical accounts. Sucher is the author of 109 business cases, technical notes, video interviews, and teaching notes cases on leadership and the ethical dilemmas of businesses and their managers, and two books: The Moral Leader: Challenges, Insights and Tools, (Routledge 2008) and Teaching The Moral Leader: A Literature-based Leadership Course, A Guide For Instructors (Routledge 2007). Her research on layoffs, restructuring and global workforce change has been documented in more than fifteen cases, notes, research reports, and videos and an article, "Layoffs That Don't Break Your Company," in Harvard Business Review. She is currently writing a book on how companies earn trust based on a decade of research on global companies' best practices.
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Featured Work Publications Research Summary

SANDRA J. SUCHER is Professor of Management Practice, Joseph L. Rice, III Faculty Fellow at Harvard Business School and is a member of the General Management unit. She joined the faculty of Harvard Business School after 25 years in industry and nonprofit management, including ten years in fashion retailing and twelve years at Fidelity Investments where she served as chief quality officer. At HBS, Sucher has taught the required MBA course, “Leadership and Corporate Accountability," for ten years and led it for five. For fifteen years she has taught "The Moral Leader" – an elective in the MBA curriculum that examines leadership and moral decision making through literature and historical accounts. Sucher is the author of 109 business cases, technical notes, video interviews, and teaching notes cases on leadership and the ethical dilemmas of businesses and their managers, and two books: The Moral Leader: Challenges, Insights and Tools, (Routledge 2008) and Teaching The Moral Leader: A Literature-based Leadership Course, A Guide For Instructors (Routledge 2007). Her research on layoffs, restructuring and global workforce change has been documented in more than fifteen cases, notes, research reports, and videos and an article, "Layoffs That Don't Break Your Company," in Harvard Business Review. She is currently writing a book on how companies earn trust based on a decade of research on global companies' best practices.

From 1986 until 1998, Sucher worked at Fidelity Investments. As Vice President of Corporate Quality, she focused the firm's division-level quality groups on customer loyalty research. As Vice President of Retail Service Quality, she set service strategy for the retail business and improved service and operations processes, including the processes of opening new accounts, solving customer problems, and transferring assets among financial firms.  Prior to Fidelity, Sucher spent 10 years in fashion retailing at Filene's, a Boston-based department store chain. She wrote the proposal, approved by Federated Department Stores, to expand Filene's Basement from a single store to a national chain. In her last assignment, as Vice President of Customer Service, she improved customer service for Filene's then 14-unit regional business. Sucher has served on two corporate boards and as Chair of the Better Business Bureau of Boston. Sucher received her MBA from Harvard Business School with first- and second-year honors; she also earned a Masters of Arts in Teaching from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a BA from the University of Michigan, High Distinction, Phi Beta Kappa.

Featured Work
The Moral Leader: Challenges, Insights and Tools
Student Textbook

Successful leaders – at any level and in any arena – are inevitably presented with moral and ethical choices. This unique and innovative textbook is designed to encourage students and managers to confront those fundamental moral challenges, to develop skills in moral analysis and judgment, and to come to terms with their own definition of moral leadership and how it can be translated into action. Drawing on the inspiration of major literary and historical figures such as Machiavelli, Conrad, Shackleton and Achebe, and based upon an impressive array of literary sources, including novels, plays, history and biography, the book centers on four questions implicitly asked of all leaders:

  • What is the nature of a moral challenge?
  • How do people 'reason morally'?
  • How do leaders contend with the moral choices they face?
  • How is moral leadership different from leadership in general?

The Moral Leader is based upon the renowned course of the same name taught at Harvard Business School for over two decades. With an emphasis on decision-making and action, students learn to identify moral problems, to address them systematically, and to develop skills that aid them throughout their studies and their professional lives. At times challenging, insightful, and always illuminating, this book is essential reading for all serious students of leadership, management, business ethics or policy.

Visit the companion website at www.routledge.com/textbooks/9780415400640

Teaching the Moral Leader: A Literature-Based Leadership Course
Instructor Manual

This book is a comprehensive, practical manual to help instructors integrate moral leadership in their own courses, drawing from the experience and resources of the Harvard Business School course 'The Moral Leader', an MBA elective taken by thousands of HBS students over nearly twenty years. Through the close study of  literature--novels, plays, and historical accounts-- followed by rigorous classroom discussion, this innovative course encourages students to confront fundamental moral challenges, to develop skills in moral analysis and judgment, and to come to terms with their own definition of moral leadership. Using this guide's background material and detailed teaching plans, instructors will be well prepared to lead their students in the study of this vital and important subject. Featuring a website to run alongside that links the manual with the textbook and provides a wealth of extra resources, including on-line links to Harvard Business School case studies and teaching notes this manual forms a perfect complement to The Moral Leader core text also by Sandra Sucher.

 

Books
Journal Articles
Cases and Teaching Materials
Research Summary
Trusted: Trust, Power, and Transformation
Professor Sucher is writing a book on how companies earn trust based on a decade of research on global companies' best practices in exercising power in ways that earn trust. The research is based on two questions:
(1) What distinguishes companies that are trusted from those that aren't?
(2) What are best practices in the cultivation of organizational trust?

This research has included the participation of a globally diverse group of companies, including Michelin, Honeywell, Royal Dutch Shell, Nokia, Lincoln Electric, Aramex (UAE), and Recruit Holdings Ltd. (Japan).
Keywords: Trust; Power; Globalization; Leadership; Corporate Culture; Future Of Work; Innovation; Human Resources; Technology Strategy; Automation; Stakeholder Engagement; Employee Attitude; Customer Behavior; Shareholder Value; Government And Business; Impact Investing; Corporate Accountability; Corporate Change And Sustainability; Asia; Europe; South America; Middle East; North And Central America
Managing the Future of Work: Layoffs, Restructuring, and Global Workforce Change

Business leaders and policy makers are consumed, even obsessed, with the future of work. They fear a future where machines will replace humans, putting thousands out of jobs. 

But the “future of work” is happening now and has been for decades. For the last 30 years businesses have addressed future of work challenges largely by relying on layoffs, downsizing, outsourcing, and offshoring. These have hurt employees, communities, and company profits. Worse, the revulsion inspired by these practices has led to a rejection of globalization and a damaging loss of trust in business.

Professor Sucher has found a set of forward-looking companies who are inventing strong and sustainable bridges between today’s economic realities and the future world of work.

Her research is summarized in "Layoffs That Won't Break Your Company," Harvard Business Review, May/June 2018.


Keywords: Layoffs; Leadership And Change Management; Global Innovation; Strategic Decision Making; Multinational Corporations; Organizational Change And Adaptation; United States; France; Germany; Hungary; Finland; United Kingdom; Netherlands; China; Japan; Brazil
Moral Leadership

In 2007 and 2008, Professor Sucher published an instructor manual and student textbook based on 'The Moral Leader,' a literature-based course on leadership that has been taught at Harvard Business School for more than 20 years. The course focuses on core ethical questions that managers wrestle with: What is the nature of a moral challenge? How do people “reason morally?” What do these look like when they are undertaken by leaders – individuals who must make decisions under conditions of responsibility for others?

The Management of Differences
Professor Sucher has developed cases and other teaching materials that aim to provide thought-provoking, real-world examples of the ways in which social identity differences emerge and are managed in the workplace. These materials include "Differences at Work," 11 mini-cases based on HBS students' own experiences of social identity challenges in the workplace (developed with Robin Cherry Glass (MBA/MPA 2007) and Professor Robin Ely), conceptual notes on the individual experience and leadership challenges of managing differences, and "Global Diversity and Inclusion at Royal Dutch Shell," a case that examines the challenges of managing differences in 100 countries around the world.
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