Tag: AY 2023-24

MLD-113M: Strategy and Decision with Peter Zimmerman

Greg Dorchak

How can effective leaders learn from experience and decisions in the past to make more effective decisions that advance one’s strategic purpose?

Book Cover: Strategy: A History, by Lawrence Freedman, Copyright Oxford University Press, 2013

Strategy is expressed in the decisions we make every day. There are no choices or actions that are truly neutral with respect to one’s strategic purpose.  Yet few decisions come labelled as “strategic”; instead policy makers, analysts and managers face an unending stream of judgments and choices that arrive in varied frames from every imaginable direction.

No decision stands alone. Today’s decisions are linked undeniably to decisions in the past reflected in the experience of individuals, groups, teams and organizations, even nations.  Experience both enables and limits our perceptions, beliefs, values, predispositions and capabilities. We both learn from the past (it’s all we’ve got) yet our learning can be limited by the deceptive clarity and presumed certainty associated with explanations of past events.

MLD-113M Strategy and Decision with Peter Zimmerman will help students develop more robust explanations of past decisions, their strategic impact and will help students make better predictions of the effects of future decisions.  Taking as the course text cases and stories involving others, from different times and places, and even students’ own stories and experience, students will work on three parallel tracks. First, students have the chance to analyze and explain decisions large & small while experimenting in a tentative qualitative way with how things might come out differently. Next, they explore the science of behavior & decision-making (i.e., what are the sources of influence on decision and what’s going on in the black box?). Finally, they develop a framework to help improve our explanations & predictions and to integrate individual choices into a pattern of strategic decisions.

This course is offered in the spring module 2 semester. If you have any questions about this course, or any other in the MLD curriculum, email Greg Dorchak, MLD Area Administrator.

MLD-802M: Nonprofit Management and Leadership with Arthur Brooks

Greg Dorchak
Arthur Brooks
Arthur Brooks, Professor of the Practice of Public Leadership

Students seeking a broad introductory overview of non-profit management — from historical and legal origins, relationships to government, organizational structure, strategic planning, fundraising and communications, and modes of leadership — will want to enroll in MLD-802M: Nonprofit Management and Leadership with Arthur Brooks.  As President for 11 years of the American Enterprise Institute, and, before that, as a scholar of the non-profit sector at The Maxwell School at Syracuse University, Brooks, now William Henry Bloomberg Professor of the Practice of Public Leadership at Harvard Kennedy School and Professor of Management Practice at Harvard Business School, is uniquely qualified to teach both the academic and practical concepts critical to future leaders of non-profit organizations.

His course is appropriate for students with interests ranging across the sector, from social services, to international aid, to the arts. This course will draw on proven frameworks and real world examples to provide students an intellectual and practical foundation for further coursework and careers in the sector. The course features guest lecturers from premier scholars and practitioners. Past visitors have included HKS pioneering scholar on Public Value, Mark Moore; President Emerita of Harvard University and the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor, Drew Gilpin Faust;  Ian Rowe, founding CEO of Public Prep, a nonprofit network of public charter schools based in the South Bronx and Lower East Side of Manhattan; and social entrepreneur Dan Pallotta.

In addition to his interest in non-profit management, Brooks writes, speaks, and podcasts on a wide range of topics. Find out more at his personal homepage arthurbrooks.com.

MLD-802M will be taught at HKS in the Fall semester.  A complementary course in non-profit financial management MLD-427 Strategic Finance for Nonprofit Leaders with James Honan is offered in both the fall and spring semesters. Both courses may be taken for credit.
HKS also offers several other courses in the non-profit and social innovation areas:

MLD-820         Strategies for Social Impact with Matthew Lee
MLD-830         Entrepreneurship and Innovation in the Private and Social Sectors with Richard Cavanagh
MLD-831         Entrepreneurship and Innovation in the Private and Social Sectors – Business Plan Workshop with Richard Cavanagh
MLD-836M      Social Entrepreneurship/Social Enterprise Deep Dive: How to Operationalize & Scale for Social Impact
with James Bildner and Stephanie Khurana
DPI-312           Sparking Social Change through Arts and Culture with Sanderijn Cels

If you have any questions about this course, or any other in the MLD curriculum, email Greg Dorchak, MLD Area Administrator.

 

 

Signpost with three signs pointing different directions, all staying "Career" on them

MLD-515M: Serving the Public Good: Planning for Career and Life with Grant Freeland

Greg Dorchak

With a career spent weaving together smart organizational strategy and a concern for the people driven to execute towards these goals, Grant Freeland brings unique insight into what it takes to sustain a career in public service. After spending many years in the consulting field and teaching at HKS, Freeland understands that the professional prospects for HKS students are richly diverse, but also, as a result, less structured and harder to forecast than in other fields (e.g., business, law, medicine). To address this challenge, Freeland carefully designed a course, MLD-515M: Serving the Public Good: Planning for Career and Life, to help students navigate careers fueled by aspirations to contribute to the public good.  Drawing on evidence from the study of professional careers and leadership journeys, work-family conflict and integration, and wellbeing, the module adopts a broader “life” perspective and asks students to reflect, explore, and develop options to successfully and sustainably work toward their aspirations in public service.  The course is grounded in the premise that HKS students have agency in determining the direction of their careers. While not everything is planned and certain, self-direction is possible and is likely to be facilitated by actively exploring alternative paths.

Human characters building a bridge of puzzle piecesIn a short 6 weeks, MLD-515M students undertake a substantial course load, with rigorous work in and out of classroom. Students read relevant academic research, conduct expert interviews, and participate in a variety of reflective and interactive exercises. Peer coaching is integral to the teaching model, which is designed to build a lasting sense of community that Freeland hopes will sustain students for years ahead. Course assignments and peer coaching are adaptable to accommodate the diversity of career stages among students in the class.

The module is structured into three blocks: knowing yourself (e.g., aspirations, motivations, values); where are you going and how are you getting there (e.g., negotiating careers, networking, developing a leadership story); and building the resilience (e.g., wellness, work and family). Students in the course also engage with HKS alumni whose own leadership stories help current students make sense of their own potential career paths.

About the Instructor:

Grant Freeland is an Adjunct Lecturer at Harvard Kennedy school, and Adjunct Professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth where he teaches a course on Transforming Public Interest Organizations.  Grant is also a Senior Advisor and Senior Partner Emeritus of the Boston Consulting Group where he was previously a Senior Partner and Global Leader of its People and Organizations Practice, and the Managing Partner of the Boston office. During Freeland’s 31+ years at BCG, his client work has focused on driving transformations in large organizations in both the private and public sector. This work includes organizational redesigns, post-merger integrations, restructurings, creating high performance workforces, culture change, leadership effectiveness, and creating digital and agile organizations.

Portrait photo of Grant Freeland
Grant Freeland

From a BCG leadership perspective, he was one of BCG’s Global Leaders when BCG was one of only two companies rated in the top five best places to work in Fortune’s Best Places to Work survey for eight years in row. Grant was selected as one of Consulting Magazine’s Top 25 Consultants in 2017 and is the protagonist of two Harvard Business School cases, one focusses on BCG’s efforts to improve work life balance. He has contributed over 60 columns to Forbes.com on leadership.

Previously, Freeland was a marketing communications manager for Hewlett-Packard. He received his undergraduate degree in marketing from the Chisholm Institute of Technology (now Monash University) in Australia.  He holds a Master’s in Public Administration from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and an MBA from the Australian Graduate School of Management, where he was the medal winner for corporate strategy.

MLD-515M: Serving the Public Good: Planning for Career and Life will be taught in the Fall 2 module in 2023. For questions about this course, or any other in the MLD curriculum, email Greg Dorchak, MLD Area Administrator.

MLD-355: Public Narrative with Marshall Ganz — A Leadership Practice Translating Values into Action

Greg Dorchak

According to MLD’s  Marshall Ganz, the Rita E. Hauser Senior Lecturer in Leadership, Organizing, and Civil Society, “To lead is to accept responsibility for enabling others to achieve shared purpose in the face of uncertainty.” But where should a student aspiring to lead for the the greater good begin?  For Ganz, the process of leadership starts with the “self” and builds outward into a constituency, creating “us,” a group that’s ready “now” to meet the challenges on the path to shared goals.  In MLD-355: Public Narrative Ganz and his highly collaborative teaching team introduce students to the discursive process through which individuals, communities, and nations learn to make choices, construct identity, and inspire action. The goal is teaching students to link their our own callings to that of a community that shares a call to action, translating deeply held personal values into effective action. Ganz continues, “Because it engages the ‘head’ and the ‘heart,’ Marshall Ganz's Public Narrative Leadership Pedagogy: Head, Heart, Handsnarrative can instruct and inspire – teaching us not only why we should act, but moving us to act.” Based on a pedagogy of guided reflective practice, students work in groups to learn to tell their own public narrative. Developing their own personal practice of public narrative builds students’ leadership capacity, and is especially critical when they are called to respond in moments of challenge like facing loss, lacking power, confronting inequality and difference, and enacting meaningful change.

Over the years Ganz and his course graduates have introduced public narrative training widely across the globe including in  the Obama presidential campaign (2007-8), Sierra Club, Episcopal Church, United We Dream Movement, the Ahel Organizing Initiative, (Jordan), Serbia on the Move (Belgrade), Avina (Bogata), National Health Service (UK), Peking University (Beijing), Tatua (Kenya), Community Organizing Japan (Tokyo) and elsewhere, proving the relevance of narrative practice across disciplines, professions, and cultures.

Students seeking to extend their narrative practice and learning often follow up MLD-355 in the spring by enrolling in Ganz’s other courses MLD-377M: Organizing: People, Power, Change, and the MLD-378M Practicum, in which students put into practice what they’ve learned in organizations, movements, and campaigns of their own.

Beyond HKS, Ganz and graduates of his teaching have established the Leading Change Network, a global community of organizers, educators and researcher aiming ” To meet the challenges to democracy by developing the leadership to organize communities which build power and realize the values of equality, solidarity, and dignity.”

To learn more, view a complete (~75 minute) mini-workshop with Marshall Ganz introducing public narrative pedagogy on the YouTube channel of The Resistance School which was founded in March of 2017 by graduate students of HKS and other Harvard schools. Lesson 1 of the 15 short videos is below; the full set is here.

Well before COVID-19 moved HKS teaching online during the 2020-21 academic year, Ganz and his team with HKS Executive Education were pioneering the teaching of leadership and organizing online. With over 10 years experience developing his online public narrative Exec Ed course Ganz and his team have created an exceptionally strong model of experiential, interpersonal, and interdependent learning. For a sample of, and in-depth introduction to their online teaching pedagogy, view here a (~60 min) video of an online interactive session led by Ganz for Harvard Kennedy School faculty on his approach to online teaching.

MLD-355 will be offered at the Harvard Kennedy School in the fall semester, and MLD-377M and MLD-378M will be taught in spring. For questions about these courses, or any other in the MLD curriculum, email Greg Dorchak, MLD Area Administrator. You may also contact Emily Lin, Program Director for Ganz’s Practicing Democracy Project (emily_lin@hks.harvard.edu).

MLD-304: The Science of Behavior Change with Todd Rogers

Greg Dorchak

Leverage insights about human decision making to develop interventions that improve societal well-being.

This is the primary learning goal of MLD-304 The Science of Behavior Change taught by Professor Todd Rogers.
The fast growing research field dubbed “behavioral economics” or “behavioral science” examines the mechanisms of, and influences on, human judgment and decision making, especially in the areas where our choices differ from the rational and the optimal.  Insights from this research has provided a new set of tools that complement standard economics and policy levers for influencing behavior (namely, incentives and information) and allowed us to improve implementation of interventions promoting the public good.  These new tools and ideas have relevance across fields ranging from healthcare, education, criminal justice, social welfare, electoral politics, personal finance, and beyond.
In addition to learning more about the science of how humans make judgments and decisions, students in MLD-304 will also be taught how to improve the quality of their own judgments and decisions by identifying areas of thinking prone to errors and cognitive biases. Some of these errors are particularly important for real world problems.  This course will also increase students’ familiarity with randomized experiments, enabling them to be smarter consumers of claims that interventions cause certain outcomes.

Watch Professor Rogers describe an example from his work on voter mobilization:

Read an extensive piece the HKS alumni magazine about Todd Rogers’ recent work.

Join other students at HKS and across Harvard interested in behavioral science in the Behavioral Insights Group which brings together an outstanding group of decision research scholars, behavioral economists, and other behavioral scientists. BIG’s staff are always happy to talk with students. Please feel free to reach out to Program Manager, Maja Niksic (maja_niksic@hks.harvard.edu), follow BIG on Twitter, check out BIG’s LinkedIn Network where behavioral science-specific jobs are posted, or access the resources of the Behavioral Insights Student Group.

MLD-304 is offered at Harvard Kennedy School in the Fall semester with 2 sections available. If you have any questions about this course, or any other in the MLD curriculum, email Greg Dorchak, MLD Area Administrator.

Fundamental Negotiation Training at HKS: MLD-215 with Rob Wilkinson and MLD-223 with Kessely Hong

Greg Dorchak

Among the signature curriculum of the Harvard Kennedy School, negotiation training has always stood out as among the most popular due to its practicality and necessity across all sectors and policy domains. Founded by one of the luminaries of negotiation science, Howard Raiffa, HKS faculty have always been at the forefront of negotiation research and training. Furthermore, we recognize negotiation skills are a critical contributor to effective leadership of organizations, campaigns, and social movements of all types.

With the two introductory negotiation courses outside the MPP core, MLD-215 Negotiation and Leadership: Essential Theory and Practice for Enhancing Your Personal Effectiveness with Robert Wilkinson and MLD-223 Negotiating Across Differences with Kessely Hong students can learn the fundamental, time-tested frameworks of negotiation analysis. Both courses introduce the core concepts of distributive bargaining, value creation, stakeholder analysis, trust-building, barriers to agreement, and strategic approaches to negotiation.

Portrait photo of Robert Wilkinson, Lecturer in Public Policy and Leadership
Robert Wilkinson, Lecturer in Public Policy and Leadership

MLD-215 (Wilkinson) will provide students with the fundamental principles, theory and practice of the field of negotiation, but MLD-215 is especially distinctive in blending leadership and negotiation principles in a single course. The curriculum will balance theory and practice, and draws on the classic literature, as well as more recent work. Students will learn using the case study method, active simulations, group work and lectures to bring the conceptual material to life, as well as to build students’ personal negotiation and leadership skills. Drawing on his extensive experience as a practitioner in the field, Wilkinson will emphasize bringing in international examples and cases throughout the course, to provide both domestic and global perspectives on negotiation and leadership.

 

 

Kessely Hong smiling and teaching students in a Harvard classroom
Senior Lecturer Kessely Hong

MLD-223 (Hong) offers more complex, multiple-stakeholder cases and simulations, some of which include salient cultural or power differences and multi-party dynamics. Students are challenged to navigate differences in expectations, attitudes toward risk, culture, power, status, and partisan perceptions. In Hong’s course, students read and analyze a variety of very rich real-world cases, in which interpretations of the protagonists’ actions provide illuminating insights into similar spectrum of dynamics (personal, psychological, political, cultural, etc.) at play in negotiations over public policy.

 

 

Both MLD-215 and MLD-223 serve as pre-requisites for MLD-280M Advanced Workshop in Multiparty Negotiation and Conflict Resolution, the January-term course, taught by Brian Mandell, Mohamed Kamal Senior Lecturer in Negotiation and Public Policy.  Students wanting to additional venues to study, research, and design new ways of negotiation practice will be interested in exploring the Negotiation and Conflict Resolution Collaboratory. Established and directed by Brian Mandell, the NCRC develops ways to connect students of negotiation with practitioners on the frontlines and faculty leading cutting-edge research. They seek to advance the field of experiential learning and motivate innovations in teaching advanced negotiation in simulated environments. In addition, NCRC faculty affiliates within the Center for Public Leadership engage in the interdisciplinary study of developments and trends at the intersection of negotiation and leadership.

MLD-215 and MLD-223 are offered at Harvard Kennedy School in Fall semester. MLD-280M is offered in January term. If you have any questions about these courses, or any other in the MLD curriculum, email Greg Dorchak, MLD Area Administrator.