Harvard Names Nitin Nohria As New Dean
Harvard Business School has ended its search for the next dean; Nitin Nohria, the Richard P. Chapman Professor of Business Administration, will succeed Jay Light and step into the role of the school’s 10th dean on July 1st.
A scholar of leadership and organizational change, Nohria joined the HBS faculty in 1988 and has previously been the School’s senior associate dean for faculty development and chair of its organizational behavior unit.
Nohria plans to focus on business ethics, a cause he has long championed, particularly during the financial crisis. With fellow HBS colleague Rakesh Khurana, Nohria co-authored a 2008 Harvard Business Review article arguing for a Hippocratic Oath for Management, which students eventually adopted and launched a voluntary MBA Oath.
The new dean tells the Wall Street Journal one of his goals is to instill more public trust in MBAs. “Society’s trust in business has taken a hit,” Nohria says. “I believe that management education has been overly-focused on the principles of management.”
In a statement announcing the appointment, university president Drew Faust calls Nohria “an outstanding scholar, teacher, and mentor, with a global outlook and an instinct for collaboration across traditional boundaries.”
Outgoing dean Light also praised the choice for his successor, saying Nohria is “widely respected within our extended community as a perceptive scholar of leadership and as a thoughtful and able academic leader. He believes deeply in the distinctive mission of the School and its role in the world. He will effectively carry forward the objectives and the strategies that make this institution a very special place.”
Nohria and Amanda Pepper of HBS’s Leadership Initiative collaborated to create the video below in order to generate a discussion of the value and importance of leadership to address some of society’s most pressing problems.
“It is my desire to inspire people of all ages and social demographics to think about leadership on a broad level, contemplate what it means to them and what individual impact they can have when it comes to leading,” says Nohria. Read more about HBS’s new dean here.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuuTlQ0FzEU[/youtube]
