Welcome, Nitin, to our latest How conversation. It's a genuine pleasure to welcome you. I've admired your work for a long time, and so I'm delighted to be a part of this conversation. Nitin is a professor, the 10th dean of the Harvard Business School, where Nitin served as dean from 2010 to 2020. And above all, I admire you for being a teacher devoted and passionate about our next generation. You were the co-chair of the leadership initiative and focused on organizational behavior. If I had to net it out, I would say the human condition and why and how we do what we do has been at the essence of your life's work. Fair enough?
Yes, thank you so much. It's been an extraordinary privilege for me to now have spent almost 40 years of my life thinking about this great mystery of leadership and what allows human beings to be experienced as leaders, what allows people to follow leaders, and what allows people to find the best leadership in themselves.
So tell us about your personal journey—growing up, experiences that shaped you into the person and leader you are, experiences that turned into life lessons or adages that guide your work, and especially maybe some experiences that centered your work around the human side of business.
So I was born and brought up in India and was very fortunate. I often say that the greatest lottery in life is the lottery that determines who your parents are. My father was one of six children and the only one to end up getting a college education and going abroad. As a result, the arc of his life changed, and the opportunities he was able to give me and my sister and our family were fundamentally different. I very early on came to appreciate how much education can change the opportunities any human being is given. It became the most profoundly important value in my life: get the best education you can. If anything, try and build on the foundations my father gave me to do better yet. He ran a company involved in the electrification of India at a time when less than 50% of the country had electricity. He was part of the project to bring electricity into homes—motors, transmission systems, substations. I ended up traveling with him as new plants were built, and they described how this company had changed their lives, bringing opportunities they could not have imagined. So very early on, it made me realize that business can be a powerful force for good in society.
What about those experiences informed your choice to be a scholar and professor and teacher as opposed to a more conventional businessman?
I'll be honest, I'm an accidental academic. My initial goal when I left India was to become an entrepreneur. My father had served entrepreneurs as an employee, and I felt the next thing I should achieve is to build a business of my own in India. Like any innocent person who thought about it at that age, the place where you made money was America—the great American dream. So my aspiration was to go to America, make some money, accumulate capital, and come back to build a company. I wanted to do an MBA. Life is full of moments where you just have to get lucky. I only got one scholarship out of all the places I applied to. It happened to be at the institution I most wanted to attend. It was extreme coincidence that I got into the PhD program at MIT, and it was the only place that gave me a scholarship. And that began a journey that led me to even begin to imagine the opportunity to be an academic.
And looking back over those 40 years, what has that career at its core been about?
I think my career at its core has been about exploring what I really think of as this extraordinary mystery of what makes human beings tick, what makes leaders become leaders. It feels like there's just infinite curiosity to apply in this sphere. It's been 40 years. The mystery continues.
But are there some pillars, some things that you feel more confident in saying form any framework of what you consider good moral leadership is about? Do you have some fixed points?
I think leadership at its core is about competence and character. It's about both, and it's really important that we emphasize both. Why is it that we would ever defer to someone and treat them like a leader? It's because we have to put our trust in them. To put your trust in someone, you have to at a minimum believe they're competent. If someone is for sure going to lead you to ruin, there's very little reason to follow or trust them. But we also care about their character. We want to know they're good people, that they're not going to lead us morally astray, and that they care to do things not just for their own self-interest. They're not so self-centered that they won't do things that are good for you or good for the company. So I think this simple diad of competence and character is probably the most durable thing I have learned in 40 years of leadership.
Aristotle once said that educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all. And I know that as an educator, you've combined competence and character by educating both the mind—because Harvard Business School does educate the mind and creating excellence from an understanding of dimensions of business—but educating the heart. How have you gone about educating the heart, the seat of character, if you will?
Dean Clark, who was then the dean, said to me—we had just finished the crisis of Enron, and some of the principal characters in that story were Harvard Business School graduates. Jeff Skilling was a graduate of Harvard Business School. So Kim said, 'We need a course that reminds people that the world will judge them as much for their character as for their competence. While we have always been proud of the extraordinarily capable leaders we produced, we need to have a course that—' I said to him, 'We had people on our faculty who were ethicists and legal scholars, and there had been a course on moral leadership at Harvard Business School, which was an elective for a long period. Why don't you call on some of those people to design this course?' He says, 'No, I actually in the end want it to be a course on leadership. So you can recruit any team you want, but I want you to be the person who builds this course as a required course in the Harvard Business School curriculum.' So I had this privilege early on of creating this course. I recruited onto this team my colleagues who had much more intellectual expertise in this area. We called it Leadership and Corporate Accountability. It was a course that tried to have, by virtue of being a required course in our curriculum, a reminder to our students that the greatest mistakes they would make in life would be moral mistakes. And if they made moral mistakes, the difficulty of recovering from a moral mistake was much greater than recovering from a business mistake.
How do you maintain fidelity to a commitment not to make moral mistakes, and if anything to continue to pursue moral excellence in a context where you're in some zone where business, through budgeting, planning and controls and spreadsheets, we're going to just superimpose outcomes in a more amoral way? How do you really inspire people to remain faithful to what you just said in that kind of context where we're abstracting away some of this by saying things like the business of business is business, morality and business as somehow being opposed to each other—that being moral is being anti-business?
That juxtaposition itself needs to be challenged, right? Another case I used to love was on Malden Mills. Malden Mills was a company that made Gore-Tex and was the inventor of Gore-Tex jackets, which we all now wear as fleece. They had a factory right here next to where I live in Boston, in Malden. The factory burned down in a big fire. Aaron Feuerstein, who was the founder and CEO, decided the morally right thing to do was to rebuild the factory. The factory was economically unviable if it hadn't been depreciated. So he rebuilds the factory, is lauded as a moral leader because he's doing the right thing. The company goes bankrupt three years later. So we used to teach that case to say it's as immoral to bankrupt a business, because in the end a bankrupt business is doing nobody any good. Running a business that is economically viable is not just an economically good decision. It's a morally good decision. But at the same time, running a business that learns lots of profit but could then end up finding itself bankrupt as Enron did is an equally problematic thing to do. The art of being a good business person is to find a way through this paradox—to recognize that you can run a business that makes a decent profit, because if you don't you're not running a good business, but you should be able to run a business that makes a decent profit decently.
