Vision, Effective Leadership, Organizational Design and Culture, Developing Human Resources and Growing Capabilities are all key levers for transforming public interest organizations. How do leaders, consultants and other change agents strategically operate these levers is the subject of MLD-362M Transforming Public Interest Organizations taught by Grant Freeland. During his years working in the field as managing director and senior partner with Boston Consulting Group, Freeland’s work has focused on driving transformations in large organizations in both the private and public sector. His work included organizational redesigns, creating high performance workforces, fostering culture change, boosting leadership effectiveness, and creating digital and agile organizations.
Bringing this wealth of experience into MLD-362M, Freeland and his students explore a variety of organizations from large government departments; to foundations; to academic institutions; and not-for-profits. The course prepares students for advising leaders, and those leading organizational transformations, and is based on the premise that organizations need to adopt new strategies and policies as their environment changes. This course focuses less on developing those strategies and policies, but more on how to drive change through the organization, in order to more successfully implement that strategy. In addition to exploring multiple case examples, the course develops an integrated view on the levers that drive transformations. Applying that view, students then learn what are the tools to develop a Transformation plan to perform effective change and implementation management. Key areas of such a plan include sequencing phases of change; change analysis; communication; stakeholder identification; stakeholder plans and actions, and creating mechanisms for tracking, accountability and transparency.
Harvard students can learn more by viewing the course video on Canvas and attending the live shopping session on Zoom (schedule linked here)
MLD-362M is offered in the Fall semester at the Harvard Kennedy School. If you have questions about this course, or any other in the MLD curriculum, email Greg Dorchak, MLD Area Administrator.