Professor Nitin Nohria?s 22-year-old love affair with Harvard Business School on the banks of Charles River reached its zenith on Tuesday, when the premier business school named him as 10th dean. The India-born Nohria, currently Richard P Chapman Professor of Business Administration at HBS, takes over from Jay Light, who announced his retirement in December. Nohria will be the first India-born dean at HBS, which has produced eminent graduates like Henry Paulson (former head of Goldman Sachs and later US Treasury Secretary) and James Dimon (CEO of JPMorgan Chase).
At HBS, Nohria is known for the MBA Oath he promoted, a movement which encouraged management graduates to adopt a vow of ethics like aspiring doctors and lawyers. In 2008, when the US slipped into a deep recession dragging the rest of the world down with it, Nohria co-authored an article in Harvard Business Review, which said that managers and businessmen had lost legitimacy in the last decade. Business and business education have lost society?s trust, he said in a letter on the HBS website. Clearly, Nohria is not one to be satisfied by status quo in business management and studies.
Commented Drew Faust, president, Harvard Business School: ?Nohria is someone with both a deep knowledge of HBS and its distinctive culture and a clear appetite for innovation and change in the service of sustaining HBS?s preeminence among business schools worldwide.?
Said Nohria: ?I joined Harvard Business School because its values resonated so deeply with those of mine.?
?What struck me about the school from the start was that it was not just trying to be better than other schools; it was trying to be distinctive. Put simply, I fell in love with the school and have been in love with it ever since. I love all the work I have had the privilege of doing at HBS, but most of all I have loved teaching the amazing students we have,? he added.
Before joining the Harvard Business School faculty in July 1988, Professor Nohria received his PhD in Management from the Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a BTech in Chemical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai. In 2007, he was honoured by IIT Mumbai as its distinguished alumnus. Nohria lives in Lexington with wife, Monica and two daughters. Nohria teaches courses across the MBA, PhD, and executive education programmes at HBS. He has also chaired HBS? organisational behavior unit from 1998 to 2002, and served as director of the division of research in 2003 to 2004, and as senior associate dean for faculty development from 2006 to 2009.
A lot of water has flowed under the Charles River Bridge since Nohria entered Harvard?s pristine premises in 1988. ?As business itself has lost society?s trust, so has business education. People are no longer sure we are educating leaders who have the requisite competence and character to fulfill the responsibilities that come with their positions of power and privilege,? Nohria said.
Now his challenge will be to steer HBS through these challenging times, when the collective greed of big business is widely believed to have helped precipitate the financial crisis. It?s going to take a while. Meanwhile, the romance on the banks of Charles River continues.