This post is part of our Social Enterprise Initiative 25th anniversary blog series, which highlights some of the faculty, staff, students, and alumni who have been a part of SEI throughout the years. In this post, HBS student Azeez Gupta (MBA 2019), shares his perspective on social enterprise. [...]

Before coming to HBS, I worked for a number of years in financial services in Asia. It was not uncommon for me to wonder what real benefit, other than to provide my clients with the ability to make more money, I was providing to the world. That desire is one of the reasons I wanted to come to HBS. I recently took the class “Investing in the 21st Century: Return, Risk and Impact,” taught by Professors Shawn Cole and Vikram S. Gandhi. Through this class I learned that my previous career could actually provide a positive impact on the world, and that impact investing is becoming more mainstream in the United States. There are many impact funds that manage to achieve market rates of return while at the same time generate positive impact. In the past decade, the ability to measure impact has improved, enhancing the investor’s confidence in this sector. [...]

Entering HBS I knew what my fundamental professional ambition was: leading profoundly positive change in society by working at the cross section of engineering and technology, business, and government. I was able to experience such a role during my summer at the City of Detroit Office of the Mayor. Specifically, I served as a policy associate for Detroit’s Chief of Mobility Innovation, Mark De La Vergne. One of my section-mates was also on the same team this summer; it was fantastic working with her daily and debating the merits of various ideas out loud. [...]

This year’s graduating MBA class will re-enter the work force ten years after the onset of the greatest economic recession in a generation. While the stock market has since recovered, business leaders today face an increasingly complex web of ethical and legal challenges amidst a rising level of public scrutiny of their actions. As members of the MBA class of 2018 preparing to enter this world of uncertainty, we are reviving an effort launched by alumni who graduated into the depths of the financial crisis: to recruit our classmates to take an MBA Oath pledging to lead socially responsible and ethical careers. [...]

I’ve known for a while that I want to be a community developer, and I want to start that work in my hometown of Detroit. I desire to create beautiful spaces and experiences for people that enhance the fabric of a neighborhood, community, and city. Having been involved in community-based organizations and non-profits since I was child, and working in public service in New York City after college, my pivot to HBS was to dive into the hard skills and action-based work that I was missing to make my community development goals more realized in a more fulfilling way. I plan to do this through real estate development and business investment. Having studied architecture before transitioning to urban and African-American studies in my undergraduate program, it was a relief to discover that developers, not architects, actually build buildings – a lesson that came alive this summer as I worked on a community-based real estate project in Detroit. [...]