Barbara Dyer
Senior Lecturer in Work and Organization Studies
Thomas Kochan
George Maverick Bunker Professor of Management
Christine Kelly
Senior Lecturer in Managerial Communication
Leigh Hafrey
Senior Lecturer in Behavioral and Policy Sciences
Why this course
Today’s world requires a new definition of leadership that emphasizes empathy, listening and the ability to lead and contribute to difficult conversations. This course teaches students to embrace complexity and avoid oversimplification or compartmentalization of people and their beliefs.
Through a fascinating set of readings, discussions, and fieldwork, students examine the role of business in establishing balance between communities, individuals and the common good, while building resilience and bridging divides.
Course Highlights
Course Objectives:
This course has multiple interlocking objectives:
Deepen understanding of America’s divides as well as possible solutions.
Explore the resilience of individuals, communities and the American experiment.
Address specific challenges through projects in partnership with leaders across the U.S.
Strengthen leadership qualities.
Specifically, students will:
Develop an understanding of place, work and community through the prisms of history, and contemporary thought and immersion in field work.
Examine varying conceptions of the common good and individual liberty to gain greater perspective on what divides and what unites Americans.
Hone analytic/research tools along with those of teamwork, dialogue, collaboration, and coaching in fieldwork and in the classroom.
Assess local/regional opportunities for innovation as they complete well-defined projects that are material to the progress of the host organizations.
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Biography
Barbara Dyer is a Senior Lecturer and Executive Director of the Good Companies, Good Jobs Initiative at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. She arrived at MIT in 2017 to launch the Initiative, which sponsors research and course development and facilitates the cross-fertilization of ideas at the intersection of technology, people, and profits. Dyer’s own work concentrates on how work is changing and the implications for low-wage workers.
Previously, Dyer was President and CEO of The Hitachi Foundation, where she shaped a multi-year strategy regarding the role of business in society and was a member of Hitachi’s North American Executive Policy Council and Advisor on CSR. She has had an extensive public policy career, serving as Special Assistant to the Secretary of the United States Department of the Interior and holding senior positions with the National Governors’ Association, the Council of State Governments, and the National Academy of Public Administration.
Thomas Kochan is the George Maverick Bunker Professor of Management and a Professor of Work and Employment Research at the MIT Sloan School of Management, as well as Co‐Director of the MIT Institute for Work and Employment Research. Kochan focuses on the need to update America's work and employment policies, institutions, and practices to catch up with a changing workforce and economy. His recent work calls attention to the need for a new social contract at work, one that anticipates current and future technological changes in ways that build more broadly shared prosperity. His most recent book, with Lee Dyer, is Shaping the Future of Work: A Handbook for Action and a New Social Contract. Kochan, who is a member of the MIT Task Force on the Work of the Future, holds a BBA in personnel management and an MS and PhD in industrial relations from the University of Wisconsin.
Christine Kelly is a Senior Lecturer in Managerial Communication at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Her teaching and research interest is on interpersonal influencing strategies, leadership communication, working in teams, conflict and conflict resolution, and dialogue and learning. Kelly has taught at Stern School of Business, New York University; Columbia Business School; UCLA Anderson School of Management; Manchester England Business School Senior Executive Program; Helsinki School of Economics and Business Administration; and MIT Sloan. She also consults with professional practitioners and business faculty in the United States and abroad.
Kelly is the founding director of Management Communication at New York University, Stern School of Business and Columbia Business School. She holds a BA in English literature and speech and an MS in theater and speech from Kansas State University and an EdD in organizational communication and adult education from Teachers College of Columbia University.
Leigh Hafrey is a Senior Lecturer in Behavioral and Policy Sciences at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Since 1995, he has offered courses in communication, ethics, and leadership in the MBA and other graduate programs in the U.S. and abroad. He has also taught at Harvard Business School and for more than 20 years has moderated seminars in programs of the Aspen Institute. He serves on the boards of the Green Rural Opportunities Fund and ClassACT HR73, an alumni initiative of the Harvard-Radcliffe Class of 1973.
A former staff editor at The New York Times Book Review, Hafrey is the author of two books on values and leadership, The Story of Success: Five Steps to Mastering Ethics in Business and War Stories: Fighting, Competing, Imagining, Leading. Hafrey holds an A.B. in English Literature from Harvard College and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Yale University.