Nancy Koehn On Harvard Business School | Big Think

Nancy Koehn On Harvard Business School

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HBS has some great leaders marinating.

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Nancy Koehn:

Nancy Koehn is a historian at the Harvard Business School where she holds the James E. Robison chair of Business Administration. Koehn's research focuses on how leaders, past and present, craft lives of purpose, worth, and impact.

Her new book, Forged in Crisis: The Power of Courageous Leadership in Turbulent Times is an enthralling historical narrative filled with critical leadership insights that will be of interest to a wide range of readers—including those in government, business, education, and the arts—Forged in Crisis spotlights five masters of crisis: polar explorer Ernest Shackleton; President Abraham Lincoln; legendary abolitionist Frederick Douglass; Nazi-resisting clergyman Dietrich Bonhoeffer; and environmental crusader Rachel Carson.

Koehn is the author of numerous books, articles, and Harvard Business School cases. She writes frequently for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Harvard Business Review Online. She is also a weekly commentator on National Public Radio and has appeared on many national television programs. She has spoken at the World Economic Forum in Davos, the Aspen Ideas Festival, and in many other venues.

A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Stanford University, Koehn earned a Master of Public Policy from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government before taking her MA and PhD in History from Harvard. She lives outside Boston and is a dedicated equestrian.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: Are you generally optimistic or pessimistic?

Nancy Koehn: I’m optimistic because I believe that the young … The generation of people that are coming into adulthood now – stepping into their maturity – have extraordinary talents and have extraordinary vision. I say vision, how they see the world is very important. So I’m just very optimistic about the people that will begin to lead companies, communities, countries over the next eight to 20 years. That’s one aspect of my optimism. I’m optimistic because I believe fundamentally that the better angel of our nature will prevail in enough places to make a very positive difference. And I’m most optimistic finally because I think that the sense of urgency that looms over issues like the environment, like healthcare, like global poverty and disease … there’s such a sense of urgency to those things that I believe that in the crucible of that intensity will come lasting responses, lasting answers.When we teach change management at the Harvard Business School – I do a lot of work on coaching people … coaching leaders who change – we often teach about creating a sense of urgency. A corporate leader will need to have a very strong rationale to steer a big organization in a different way. See we have the wonderful … call it luxury or a tragedy if you think that way … We have the wonderful luxury at this moment in history of having a number of very, very, very rapidly boiling kettles on the stove, if you will. We don’t need to do anything to turn the flame up higher. It’s plenty high enough. And I think that out of that rolling … out of that rolling boil will come some very important responses.