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    Is a Business School-Industry Collaboration Needed to Attract Black Talent to Campus?
    30 Jun 2020What Do You Think?

    Is a Business School-Industry Collaboration Needed to Attract Black Talent to Campus?

    by James Heskett
    SUMMING UP:James Heskett's readers suggest that recruiting minority students to business school must be matched with programs to retain them.
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    SUMMING UP

    Do We Need Business School Courses On Inclusion and ‘Voice’?

    Responses to this month’s column suggest that the issue it raised—recruitment of minority talent into business careers—was somewhat narrow and off-target. Kristin Wolfe, for example, commented that, “If we want to attract diverse talent to business school, we must demonstrate in both deed and word that business on a wide scale is a powerful change agent and that the avenue to being part of that change is through a business school education.” The following is an effort at course correction.

    Responses yielded a number of suggestions, including starting early (Kcorey: “How about connecting with … youth at an earlier age who are interested in business?”), emulating efforts to bring women into management education (Roslyn Payne: “In the 1980’s when University of Michigan realized that there were not enough women in the MBA pipeline, it joined with Catalyst to undertake research. The result was a coalition of large companies and multiple business schools to create Forte which had as its mission to fill the pipeline for women to get MBA degrees.”), expanding the effort to include other ethnic groups (Zake: “Good for Blacks. My concern is Hispanics which wield significantly more economic buying power, land ownership … It seems to me that everywhere I look Hispanics are being left out.”), and more systematic mentoring (Paul, a graduate of HBS, recommended “… asking each HBS professor to recruit and mentor a minority student as a DBA-- doctor of business administration--student.”)

    David Wittenberg was more to the point, arguing that it is not inadequate recruitment efforts that are producing disparate enrollments. “Let’s do everything in our power to improve outcomes for students from historically disadvantaged groups.” As EAM put it, “Success will require a variety of strategies deployed at the same time.”

    Black Man was among those suggesting one element of such an effort. “When I was in college, it was always difficult to find a group to work with… even when I found a group to work with, I was hardly listened to.” He’s suggesting that the issue of recruitment may be overshadowed by those of inclusion and “voice.” Comments by others from the business world lead one to believe that minority talent retention is of greater importance than recruitment, that the high expectations with which those with minority backgrounds enter business schools as well as post-graduate employment are soon dashed by an inability or unwillingness on the part of organizations to tap into and retain that talent.

    In business, the economic and social cases for diversity are strong. But it does little good to recruit effectively only to allow talent to slip through our fingers. Rather, retention and personal development are the name of the game. Inclusion and voice are important ways of achieving them as well as the innovation and outstanding long-term performance that organizations seek. But how many of us, in our business school curricula, have experienced a course in inclusion and voice?

    Could such courses taught in greater numbers represent more effective means than recruitment to not only attract minority talent to business organizations but also to retain it? What do you think?


    Original Post

    Diversity and inclusion in organizations enhances various kinds of performance, from creativity to profitability. A growing body of research tells us this. So they are not just the right things to do; there is both an economic and social argument for them.

    We are reminded of this in a time of police violence against Black citizens and resulting Black Lives Matter marches and protests. It prompted Harvard Business School Dean Nitin Nohria to send an email (which quickly became public knowledge) to faculty, staff, and others associated with the School on June 15 in which he characterized the School’s efforts to recruit Black students as “painfully insufficient.” He also cited the same inadequate results for recruiting Black faculty and staff. He might as well have been talking about most major business schools; the problem is not unique to Harvard.

    The email brought to mind an effort in which Dean John Macarthur and several of us (including our first faculty, Profs. David Bell, James Cash, Marie-Therese Flaherty, John Kao, and myself) engaged in creating a Summer Venture in Management program at the School in the summer of 1983. The thesis behind the effort was that many potential students from minority backgrounds did not apply to HBS because of intimidation, poor counseling, or other notions that they didn’t qualify. The idea was to bring undergraduate students of minority backgrounds between their junior and senior years in college to campus for an intensive week (three case studies per day, challenging discussion, etc.) of typical business school study.

    We were confident that if we deployed our outstanding recruiters to Black and other college campuses across the United States, we would be flooded with students eager to spend a week of classroom work and socializing activities at Harvard at no expense. Once having been introduced to MBA-style teaching, they would be more confident and likely to apply for business school education, with some of them applying to HBS after their senior years. That would increase our talent pool and eventually the proportion of minority students in MBA programs.

    It didn’t work out that way. Our recruiting team returned from the field with a fraction of the potential students we needed to field a program. Clearly, we had misjudged something. Then two members of our administrative team (Tim Armour, now President and CEO of the Cure Alzheimer’s Fund, and John Lynch, later Governor of New Hampshire) had a bright idea. Our friends in large business firms seemed to know how to recruit minority summer interns with the potential for longer-term employment. Why not sell them on the idea of including in their summer internships a week at HBS at no cost? It would make their offering more attractive and get us some great talent with no recruiting effort.

    It was not a hard sell. After just a few phone calls, we lacked enough seats for all the companies that wanted to send interns. And as I look now at a booklet commemorating that first “class,” I recognize some who later came to HBS. More probably ended up in other MBA programs. And others probably concluded that business wasn’t for them. To this day the program still thrives.

    So here we are, 37 years later, with an HBS class comprising roughly the same 5 percent of Black students that the School has been able to attract for the last several years as well as insufficient (in the Dean’s judgment) numbers of Black faculty and staff. Are there ways that businesses could help as part of efforts on everybody’s part to increase diversity in business school ranks?

    How about some form of co-op program for potential MBA students? How about greater sharing of teaching or administrative talent, similar to what IBM and other organizations have done in the past—in this case, sabbaticals with the potential of career change? Only a select few might be able to meet the demanding standards of an academic career, but a few is better than the current number.

    Or are these the kinds of ideas that just leave us with frustration and the same degree of diversity we have experienced for years? In fact, is the problem inclusion, not diversity? Once attracted to business school campuses, are we sufficiently sensitive to including Black students in the exchange of ideas basic to academic performance at HBS and other schools?

    Is a joint industry-business school effort needed to attract minority talent to campuses? What do you think?

    Reference:

    Patrick Thomas, “A Decade-Long Stall for Black Enrollment in M.B.A. Programs,” The Wall Street Journal, June 17, 2020, wsj.com, accessed June 17, 2020.

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    James L. Heskett
    James L. Heskett
    UPS Foundation Professor of Business Logistics, Emeritus
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    Nitin Nohria
    Nitin Nohria
    Professor of Business Administration
    Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor
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