General Management

- June 12, 2025
- Article
How to Build a Life: Dare to Act Differently and Be Happier

By: Arthur C. Brooks
- June 12, 2025
- Article
How to Build a Life: Dare to Act Differently and Be Happier

By: Arthur C. Brooks
- 2025
- Chapter
Critical Choices in Designing a Board: An Overview

By: Suraj Srinivasan and Lynn S. Paine

Board design is never one-size-fits-all. It’s a series of critical choices—each with trade-offs—that can define how a board functions, governs, and delivers strategic value. That’s the premise of "Critical Choices in Designing a Board", a chapter for the newly released "Public Company Series: Board Structure and Composition", a manual of corporate governance published by the NYSE and J.P. Morgan. In our chapter, we outline six key decisions every board must address: What is the board’s purpose? Who should serve on it? How should the board be structured? How to clearly define roles and responsibilities? Which processes help the board function most effectively? What norms foster the right dynamics and culture? We draw on research, boardroom case studies, and our experience at teaching board governance programs Harvard Business School to offer a practical framework for boards navigating complexity—from CEO succession to stakeholder engagement and regulatory scrutiny. The full volume brings together insights from legal advisors, investors, and governance experts and covers topics ranging from board refreshment and audit committees to shareholder activism, cybersecurity, and global governance trends.
- 2025
- Chapter
Critical Choices in Designing a Board: An Overview

By: Suraj Srinivasan and Lynn S. Paine

Board design is never one-size-fits-all. It’s a series of critical choices—each with trade-offs—that can define how a board functions, governs, and delivers strategic value. That’s the premise of "Critical Choices in Designing a Board", a chapter for the newly released "Public Company Series: Board Structure and Composition", a manual of corporate...
- June 1, 2025
- Article
How Universities Die: It Has Happened Before in Centers of Learning Such as Berlin and Beijing. Is Boston Next?

By: William C. Kirby
- June 1, 2025
- Article
How Universities Die: It Has Happened Before in Centers of Learning Such as Berlin and Beijing. Is Boston Next?

By: William C. Kirby

About the Unit

The General Management Unit is concerned with the leadership and management of the enterprise as a whole. This concern encompasses:

the personal values and qualities of effective general managers and enterprise leaders;
the philosophies, values, and strategies that inform successful enterprises; and
the relation of enterprise to the broader community and other external constituencies.

The Unit's work is conceived and carried out principally in four interest groups, each of which has its own leadership, research agenda, and teaching programs:

Management Policy and Process
Management Information Systems
Society and Enterprise
Leadership, Values, and Corporate Responsibility

Recent Publications

How to Build a Life: Dare to Act Differently and Be Happier

By: Arthur C. Brooks

June 12, 2025 |
Article |
The Atlantic

Citation

How to Build a Life: Why Wittgenstein Was Right About Silence

By: Arthur C. Brooks

June 5, 2025 |
Article |
The Atlantic

Citation

Governing Sustainability in a Shifting Context

By: Lynn S. Paine

3 Jun 2025 |
Talk |
Faculty Research

Citation

Critical Choices in Designing a Board: An Overview

By: Suraj Srinivasan and Lynn S. Paine

2025 |
Chapter |
Faculty Research

Board design is never one-size-fits-all. It’s a series of critical choices—each with trade-offs—that can define how a board functions, governs, and delivers strategic value. That’s the premise of "Critical Choices in Designing a Board", a chapter for the newly released "Public Company Series: Board Structure and Composition", a manual of corporate governance published by the NYSE and J.P. Morgan. In our chapter, we outline six key decisions every board must address: What is the board’s purpose? Who should serve on it? How should the board be structured? How to clearly define roles and responsibilities? Which processes help the board function most effectively? What norms foster the right dynamics and culture? We draw on research, boardroom case studies, and our experience at teaching board governance programs Harvard Business School to offer a practical framework for boards navigating complexity—from CEO succession to stakeholder engagement and regulatory scrutiny. The full volume brings together insights from legal advisors, investors, and governance experts and covers topics ranging from board refreshment and audit committees to shareholder activism, cybersecurity, and global governance trends.

Keywords: Governing and Advisory Boards

Citation

Read Now

How Universities Die: It Has Happened Before in Centers of Learning Such as Berlin and Beijing. Is Boston Next?

By: William C. Kirby

June 1, 2025 |
Article |
Boston Globe

Keywords: Business Admnistration; University; University Administration; Harvard University; Higher Education; History; Boston

Citation

Find at Harvard

Read Now

An Empirical Examination of Business Climate Alliances: Effective and/or Harmful?

By: Matteo Gasparini and Peter Tufano

2025 |
Working Paper |
Faculty Research

This research studies business alliances that seek to address climate change, offering empirical evidence to address claims advanced by alliance supporters and critics. We study eleven major alliance mostly focused on financial services firms and 424 major publicly-traded financial institutions–some of which joined these alliances. We use diff-in-diff and other approaches to identify the effects of alliance membership and to study "booster", network, and peer effects. Financial service firms that join climate alliances show increased adoption of climate-aligned management practices; greater adoption of emissions targets; reductions of own-emissions; mixed evidence of increased funding for green projects; and greater pro-climate lobbying. We find no evidence of traditional antitrust violations in the form of pricing power or market concentration; no reduction in funding to oil and gas companies; and no lower risk-adjusted shareholder returns than non-alliance members. We find that participation in multiple alliances ("booster effects") is correlated with adoption of practices, emission targets, emissions reductions, and pro-climate lobbying–albeit with diminishing returns; and we find some evidence of network and peer effects.

Keywords: Antitrust; Climate Change; Financial Institutions; Competition; Network Effects; Alliances

Citation

Read Now

How to Build a Life: A Way to Understand Pope Leo XIV’s Mission of Love

By: Arthur C. Brooks

May 29, 2025 |
Article |
The Atlantic

Citation

Trade and Industrial Policy in Supply Chains: Directed Technological Change in Rare Earths

By: Laura Alfaro, Harald Fadinger, Jay Schymik and Gede Virananda

2025 |
Working Paper |
Faculty Research

Trade and industrial policies, while primarily intended to support domestic industries, may unintentionally stimulate technological progress abroad. We document this mechanism in the case of rare earth elements (REEs)—critical inputs for manufacturing at the knowledge frontier, with low elasticity of substitution, inelastic supply, and high production and processing concentration. To assess the importance of REEs across industries, we construct an input-output table that includes disaggregated REE inputs. Using REE-related patents categorized by a large language model, sectoral TFP data, trade data, and physical and chemical substitution properties of REEs, we show that the introduction of REE export restrictions by China led to a global surge in innovation and exports in REE-intensive downstream sectors outside of China. To rationalize these findings and quantify the global impact of the adverse REE supply shock, we develop a quantitative general equilibrium model of trade and directed technological change. We also propose a structural method to estimate sectoral input substitution elasticities for REEs from patent data and find REEs to be complementary inputs. Under endogenous technologies and with complementary inputs, input supply restrictions on REEs induce a surge in REE-enhancing innovation and lead to an expansion of REE-intensive downstream sectors.