Lessons from Harvard’s Global Alumni Leadership Summit
By Joel Schapero
I have just gotten back from Harvard’s Global Alumni Leadership Summit and I am considering what I really learned there. The Global Alumni Leadership Summit is open to all alums of Harvard Executive Educations long programs: the General Management Program (GMP), the Program for Leadership Development (PLD), the Owner/President Management (OPM) program, and of course the Advanced Management Program (AMP).
The summit is about reconnecting with old classmates, catching up on what’s happening in their world and considering how our program impacts us, and then sharing several days of programs: high profile guest speakers, select researchers from across the river at Harvard University, reliving the case study experience and spending time with our favorite professors. It is an intense three days.
Highlights for me included the opening sessions where Robert Kaplan, HBS professor and now President/CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, summarized his views on authentic leadership. It is also where Harvard Professor of Psychology and Ted Talks speaker (16 million views, among the most popular ever) Daniel Gilbert spoke on happiness, with his critique of “Mom’s” advice on happiness[1] — spoiler alert — she missed a bit. We joined several fireside chats, including a timely, slightly terrifying, interview by Professor Dick Vietor with Professor David Gergen of the Kennedy School and CNN, discussing recent events in America’s leadership crisis in the subtly-named “American’s Changing Role in Global Affairs”.
The most impactful session was a moving talk and a tribute to determination, which was the program’s closing session with Clay Christensen. Clay has been afflicted by what must be a great theorist’s worst nightmare, a stroke. It has weakened his ability to walk, to think and to speak. It must surely be the ultimate frustration, but with our patience and his, Clay’s fierce intellect and boyish charm ultimately delivered a thoughtful analysis of the theoretical process, and a model for seeing disruptive innovation as being a truly unique and special occurrence, one that can change the world.
In Clay’s model, there are three kinds of innovation: Sustaining, Efficiency, and Disruptive. Sustaining innovations make good products better. Efficiency innovations are focused on creating free cash flow. While these are valuable, they don’t change companies, industries, countries, or the world.
To illustrate this, Professor Christensen showed how impoverished 1950’s era Japan and Korea were — where he started his adult life as a missionary — and how even the United States were changed and brought into the modern era with Disruptive Innovation. Isaac Singer recognized that women spent 60% of their time making their family’s clothes. His sewing machine reduced their drudgery, while making America prosperous: bringing clothes, jobs, and economic growth. Henry Ford took a toy for the wealthy and made it available to the masses, building an industry — again, bringing jobs and economic growth. IBM did not change the world with mainframes; it was its PC for the masses that did it. Samsung’s simple, low-cost creation of the oscillating fan — practically a life saver for the young missionary Christensen — and Kia’s cheap three-wheeled car started Korea on its path to prosperity. However, today, Russia, Nigeria and Venezuela, with all their oil wealth, are held back by seeking only Sustaining and Efficiency innovations in their extraction industries.
Christensen believes that in current times, it is not Tesla’s $100,000 electric car that will disrupt the auto industry: Tesla will first have to fend off Mercedes and BMW. For autos, it is likely to be China’s ShiFeng[2] with its USD4,000 high quality, cheap electric car. Or India’s Godrej ChotuKool, or “little cool”, refrigerators[3]. Their plastic body weighs less than 10 pounds, uses a cheap thermoelectric chip to cool using a 12-volt DC current which can be plugged into a car battery or left unplugged for hours, and priced at less than half that of a traditional refrigerator. Or Indo Mie, who introduced Nigeria to noodles, and is taking the country by storm[4].
In the end, Sustaining and Efficiency innovations are critical to their companies’ medium-term success, but watching Clay Christensen take us through his disruptive theoretical lifetime was priceless.
[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy
[2] https://tangland.en.made-in-china.com/product/qjNxRHgvrYkZ/China-High-Quality-Cheap-Electric-Car-ShiFeng-.html
[3] https://www.innosight.com/client_impact_story/godrej/
[4] https://www.vice.com/en_au/article/3d9p5y/how-indomie-became-insanely-popular-in-nigeria
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About the author:
Joel Schapero is John Clements’ partner for the Corporate Learning practice in Hong Kong. He was a Director of Insured Financial Structures Ltd., London, the corporate finance consultant at the Geneva law firm of Lalive & Partners, Partner and Head of Corporate Finance for Private Equity firm Peter Wodtke & Partners (UK) Ltd, and the Director and Head of Structured Finance at UBS (then the Swiss Bank Corporation).
Joel has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Massachusetts in Legal Studies, with studies in Economics. He holds an MBA from the same university with concentrations in Finance and Information Systems.
