Podcast: Jan Rivkin of Harvard on the Barry-Wehmiller Case Study, Layoffs and Teaching Leadership

Jan Rivkin: So, I teach and do research on business strategy. My original line of research focused on how business leaders get the parts of a company to work together. How do you get R&D, operations, sales, marketing, service, human resources, finance, to all row in the same direction? 
 
And in conjunction with that, I teach business strategy to MBAs and executives. And then in addition, nearly 15 years ago, our dean asked me to co-chair a project on the competitiveness of the United States. My focus there was to start a line of work looking at the lack of shared prosperity in America. 
 
And there, my research is focused on how civic leaders can get parts of communities to work together. How do you get leaders in government, business, nonprofits, educational institutions, faith-based organizations, labor, law enforcement, philanthropy and so forth to come together for the benefit of a community and work toward the goal of shared prosperity? In conjunction with that, I co-lead a leadership development teaching effort where we work with champions in communities across America. 
 
They identify rising leaders in all sectors of their communities, and we bring them here for effectively a boot camp in cross-sector collaboration toward the goal of shared prosperity. So those are the two areas of research and the associated teaching. 
 
Brent Stewart: There's a lot of intersection there between what we think about and talk about at Barry-Wehmiller. 
 
Jan: Absolutely. It's not a coincidence. When I wrote the Barry-Wehmiller case, it was really hard for me to tell whether it was about the strategy work I do or the shared prosperity work I do. 
 
It really brought those two together nicely. 
 
Brent: Yeah. Yeah. So that kind of rolls into how did you hear about Barry-Wehmiller? 
 
So how did all that happen? 
 
Jan: Yeah. So all the credit for me being aware of Barry-Wehmiller has got to go to my coauthor on the case, Dylan Miner. So back in 2015, Dylan was a professor at Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management. 
 
He was visiting Harvard Business School for a period of time. We at HBS are known for our case studies, and while Dylan was with us, he wanted to write a case. So, we were talking about strategy cases we might write. 
 
I said to Dylan, you know, look, many great strategy cases all have the same plot line. 
Here is an industry that's really tough, but here is a company that does really well, even in that tough industry. Well, so let's find a company along those lines. 
 
And Dylan looked at me and said, you know what, I might have one. It turns out that Dylan, with a coauthor at Kellogg, had earlier written a piece on Barry-Wehmiller, and he saw that as being a good fit. 
 
He shared that piece with me. I was immediately intrigued. He got on the line to Rhonda Spencer at Barry-Wehmiller at the beginning of 2016. 
 
By February 2016, we were on the plane to St. Louis, meeting Bob Chapman, meeting the team in St. Louis. Over the following months, we had a whole bunch of back and forth of the team gathering data, doing more interviews, sharing drafts with them, asking for data. And by September 2016, we had the draft of the case.  
 
October 2016, we debuted it here with a group called the Advanced Management Program. This is a group of executives who were here for a long period of campus, typically in their 40s, either in the C-suite or about to enter. And we were very fortunate Bob came out for the debut of the case. So we got him on videotape. He was fantastic in interacting with the executives, had a great debut of the case. 
 
That's the story about how it came about. 
 
Brent: So, what was it that interested... I mean, you know, Barry-Wehmiller, we're a manufacturing company. We operate all over the world. We have a lot of locations in rural America. We have some locations in cities in America. Not anything very exciting, but what was it about Barry-Wehmiller that seemed to resonate with you that it was of the level of a case study? 
 
Jan: Well, for me, exciting in a case study isn't necessarily what industry you're in or where you're located. It's how great are the ideas that students might learn from studying the case. And I saw in Barry-Wehmiller a case that would challenge students to think about things that they had not really questioned for a long time. 
 
So, I think it's a learning thing. 
 
Brent: What were some of those things that challenged the students? 
 
Jan: I think the Barry-Wehmiller case, and we can talk about what the case contains and how it gets taught, but the Barry-Wehmiller case really forces students or executives who are in educational programs to reexamine some deep-seated beliefs that aren't usually on their minds. They're questions like, what is leadership, really? Right? 
 
What's the purpose of leadership! How do we measure success in leadership? To whom are leaders accountable and why? 
 
What's the value of values? What really motivates human beings at work? How are strategy and culture connected to each other? 
 
How should business affect the world, affect society? So, those are deep questions that the case invites students to think about fresh. I think it both challenges and inspires people. 
 
Brent:  As you were talking about before, that's the intersection of all your work in a sense, you know? How all these stakeholders intermingle with each other and leadership plays a part in how the stakeholders all work together and fit together. 
 
Jan: Absolutely. I think it is both about how the parts of Barry-Wehmiller fit together, but it's also about how Barry-Wehmiller fits together with the rest of the society, the communities in which it operates. 
 
Brent: Yeah, yeah. 
 
Jan: So, you can see the fit for me. I mean, it was a beautiful fit from my perspective. 
 
Brent: That leads us to talking about the case study. I know you probably don't want to give out spoilers, even though it's been taught for several years at this point. But what can you tell us about the case study? 
 
Jan: Well, you're right, Brent. I will not give away the answers. It's not that there are simple answers here. 
 
I can tell you a bit about, first of all, what the case contains. And second, if you like, we can talk about how we typically teach it. So the case is set in 2013, and it begins by focusing on a dilemma facing Ryan Gable, who leads Machine Solutions, Inc. 
 
MSI, which is a small company in the Barry-Wehmiller family of companies. At the time of the case, MSI had been growing nicely, and then suddenly revenue collapsed by a third. 
And then after trying for about eight months to turn things around, Ryan Gable has to decide, is it time to lay off 20 of the about 85 people in the company? 
 
And the decision, and let's be clear, a layoff decision is always a hard decision. The decision here is made especially hard because the company is part of the Barry-Wehmiller family. So, the case goes on to describe three things beyond that dilemma. 
 
First, it describes Barry-Wehmiller's journey from its origins through the arrival of Bob Chapman, the roller coaster ride of highs and lows in Bob's early years, the epiphanies that then lead to his conception of Truly Human Leadership. Second, and within that as well I should say, it also covers the time during the Great Recession when Barry-Wehmiller acted very creatively and forcefully to avoid layoffs. 
 
The second thing the case covers is how Barry-Wehmiller looks in 2013. The portfolio of businesses, the ownership structure, the big functions of the company, the creative business model, especially around looking at the aftermarket as an important part of the business, the people practices, the acquisition processes it follows. And then finally, the case lays out the situation facing MSI in 2013. 

Brent: So how do you guys usually teach the case? How is it used? 
 
Jan: So, this case is a ton of fun to teach. It's an exciting dynamic case with lots of disagreements, lots of ah-has. Typically, the way we teach it is like this.  
 
We start by focusing on the debate around the decision question. Should Ryan Gable lay off people at MSI? After a while, it becomes clear we can't make headway on that question until we really understand what accounts for the economic success of Barry-Wehmiller. 
 
We quickly rule out the industry explanation. 

It's not that Barry-Wehmiller is just competing in industries where even the average player makes a lot of money. The answer has to lie in the competitive advantage that Barry-Wehmiller has. 

We then dive into where does that competitive advantage come from? 
 
There are typically two types of explanations. One is a great business model, and the other is truly human leadership. The students go back and forth. 
 
There are some who believe it's really the business model, which allows Bob Chapman to indulge in his hobby of Truly Human Leadership, or Truly Human Leadership really does contribute to the economic success. I think most come out with conclusion that Truly Human Leadership really doesn't matter. 
 
The next part of the class, we typically go beyond Barry-Wehmiller to ask ourselves two related questions. 
 
First, is Truly Human Leadership typically profitable beyond Barry-Wehmiller? Is this approach profitable? And second, is it ethically right? 

And then we circle back and ask students, now that you understand Truly Human Leadership more deeply, should Ryan Gable lay off people at MSI? We reveal the outcome, which I won't reveal in the podcast. We hear a little bit from Bob Chapman on a video type thing about how he thought about the decision and then open for reflections. 
So, that's the typical approach to the case. You can see how it rolls forward. 
 
Brent: Right now, we're in a time where we're seeing the most layoffs that we've seen since 2020 during the pandemic. And so, over the years that you've taught this case, for the most part, at least in this country, we've been very prosperous. Do students' responses to the case vary with the economic conditions around them and what's happening in the outside world? Have you ever seen any impact of that? 

Jan: I've seen pretty consistent reactions to the case through economic ups and downs. I think there's really a timeless element of this underlying question, how should we care about the people in our company? I mean, when layoffs are more prevalent, it becomes a little bit more close to home. 
 
But it's not a case that really can only be taught during certain parts of the economic cycle. I think the questions that it raises, the questions I referred to earlier, like what is leadership really? These are timeless questions. 
 
They are not cyclical. 
 
Brent: Yeah, for sure. What are the typical audiences that you're teaching the case study to? Like the ages of the students, their experiences, what's the breadth of who receives the case study? 

Jan: One of the things I like about the case study is it plays well with students from a wide range of backgrounds. There are two groups that are most common for me personally. So the first group would be the MBA students here at Harvard Business School. 
 
They are typically in their late 20s. They've probably got four or five years of work experience. They come from all walks of life. 
 
They come from all backgrounds. They come from all industries, all geographies. And the second group would be the participants in our executive education programs here at HBS. 
 
And the classic example there would be our Advanced Management Program. As I mentioned before, it's a program for folks who are typically either in the C-suite or entering the C-suite. And they have much more work experience under their belt and much more particularly leadership experience. 
 
Brent: What are the differences in reaction of those groups? 
 
Jan: Oh man, Brent, I get strong reactions to this case. I think it is probably the case I teach to which I get perhaps the strongest reactions. And the reactions aren't always the same. 
 
And they are certainly not the same across all individuals. So, I have literally had a Marine officer in the class tear up during the case because he felt that he saw in Barry-Wehmiller the way that all organizations should be run. I had many people who were flipped hard on their own leadership practices, on their own organizations and decide that their organizations need to do something different and they need to do something different. 
 
But on the other, you know, extreme, I've had people who have gotten kind of angry at the Bob they see in the case and claim that he's manipulating people in the organization that by committing not to run the organization to make money, he's actually making more money for himself and the shareholders. So, the reactions, they span the gamut. 
 
Brent: To be fair, we are not a non-profit. We are running the organization to make money. 
 
Jan: Absolutely. 
 
Brent: That's interesting. 
 
Jan: Let me just give you a sense, Brent. So, yeah, take those two dimensions I mentioned earlier in describing how the case is taught. Is Truly Human Leadership usually profitable? 
 
And is it ethical? Is it the right thing to do, right? I have had students argue that it is ethically right and usually profitable. 
 
And I would say that's kind of the Bob Chapman quadrant, right? I've had others say that it is ethically right, but it isn't usually profitable, that to keep people happy and motivated, you have to pay them, and that costs money, right? And that's probably the most common combination. 

But I've also had people argue that Truly Human Leadership is really profitable, it is therefore not ethically right because it does not fulfill management's obligation to maximize shareholder value. And I've had people argue that it's usually profitable, but it isn't ethically right because it is manipulative to workers. So, I have had every imaginable response. 
 
Brent: Do the people that argue that it's not ethical because it does not maximize revenue for shareholders, did they read the Business Roundtable's redefinition of a corporation? 

Jan: I've never asked that thought question. That's a good thought question, Brent. I'll try that one out the next time. 
 
Brent: Yeah, just throwing that out there for you. 
 
Jan: But there are folks who think about shareholder maximization, shareholder value maximization, as having a moral foundation. It's not a position I personally hold to, but there are folks who will make that argument. So, one of the pleasures of class is we get to debate these very, very tough issues. 
 
Brent: Yeah. So the way that you described that you teach the case study, if I'm correct in remembering this, you were saying that basically at the beginning, you just present them with the cut-and-dried issue. How do opinions vary between the beginning of when you just present them the issue, ask them the question, and then how do the opinions vary there versus as it goes along? 
 
Jan: Yeah. So, I would say that as we go along, folks become more and more hesitant about the layoffs. Early on, there's a strong argument that MSI has done everything it can to turn itself around, and that the time has come for layoffs. 
 
As folks get into understanding Truly Human Leadership better, many of them come to the conclusion that layoffs at MSI could have ripple effects through all of Barry-Wehmiller, whose negative consequences outweigh anything you gain from the layoffs, and that particularly the strength of the economic model, the business model, depends on highly responsive workers who believe they are cared for deeply. And so, there's typically among most people a trend away from recommending layoffs. But what's interesting is there is a set of people who I think come to a deeper understanding of Truly Human Leadership and say that Truly Human Leadership doesn't mean we never do layoffs ever. 
 
It means you have to work very hard to avoid them. And when you do them, you've got to do them in a way that displays care to those who are affected. And so, there is a subset that come through the discussion actually feeling even more strongly that layoffs might be necessary. 
 
But layoffs that are consistent with Truly Human Leadership, not what you see in some companies that don't display care toward the, what Barry-Wehmiller could respond to as team members, but others refer to as employees. 
 
Brent: How often do you see students or executives, whoever you're teaching the case to? How often do their personal experiences work into this? 
 
Because chances are, I come from, I mean, just myself, you know, my dad was a coal miner until the mid 1980s, which is an industry that went downhill very sharply in the 1980s. He was laid off. It was a very traumatic thing for him. 
 
Something that I can still remember at the age that I was at that time. How often do you see these personal feelings become part of the discussion, and how does that weigh one way or another for people? 
 
Jan: Yeah. The personal feelings almost always come up in this discussion. The personal histories weigh heavily on individuals. 
 
One thing I love about the case is that it evokes that reaction. It causes people to reflect on their backgrounds, on their underlying assumptions, how they've come to the judgments that they have, how they think about leadership, how they practice it. And probably the strongest reflection of the fact that individuals' experiences do play into this is that I see different reactions from the MBA students and the executives on average. 
 
You know, first of all, I should say that there's wide reaction, wide range of reactions within the MBAs, a wide range of reactions within the executives. I don't want to convey that there's a typical or average or dominant reaction either, but there are differences between the two that I think reflect the differences in the experiences of those two sets, right? I'd say that the case tends to stick with the executives a little longer and kind of hit them harder, if you will, on average, right? 

And I think the reason is straightforward. The executives have had more experience leading people. They have seen how their decisions affect the lives of those in their care. 
 
They have seen how it affects the lives of the families of those individuals. And sometimes from executives, I even get a sense coming out the case, a sense of kind of almost guilt or, you know, a reflection that they really need to change in some way. I think in the MBAs, you know, they typically, on average, have been employed for a few years. 
 
They've typically been the employees, not the employers. So, many react to the case by thinking, wow, I'd love to have leaders who care for me. I'd love to be a leader who cares, him or herself. 
 
But there isn't the same sense of looking back with either regret or, you know, some sense that they've behaved in the way they wanted to behave. Does that make sense? 
 
Brent: Yeah, yeah, definitely. 
 
Jan: Yeah, but no, there's definitely people's personal experiences come back on them. 
 
Brent: So, you've taught this in America, obviously, but you've also taught this in Japan, which would be quite a cultural difference from the U.S. Can you talk about that a little bit and tell me if there's a difference in teaching it here as in teaching it in Japan? 
 
Jan: I've got to say, teaching the case in Japan was fascinating. I've done it several times now, and it taught me a lot about my assumptions and about Japan in some way. You know, large Japanese companies have a long history of avoiding layoffs, of lifetime employment, if you will. 
 
And so when I first taught the case to executives in Japan, I thought I might get a lot of yawns. I might get a lot, but yeah, people are saying, oh, yeah, of course, this is exactly the way that companies are run. But instead, I got a different reaction. 
 
I got almost a sense of nostalgia. What the Japanese executives said, many of them said, this is the way the Japanese executives used to be run, used to be run before shareholder premises started to creep into the Japanese system, but it's no longer that way. So, perhaps, sadly, I actually saw less difference between Japanese executives and American executives in their reaction to the case than I thought I had, thought than I thought I would. 
 
The tendencies have been toward convergence across the two, at least on this dimension. 
 
Brent: That's interesting. That nostalgia aspect of it is interesting. I wonder, you know, it's funny because I didn't expect that reaction being, you know, when you think of Japan, I think of Toyota, I think of Lean, the birthplace of Lean, you know, and so I would have thought that it was more ingrained in their culture. 
 
Jan: I had the same reaction. And they basically said it used to be ingrained in our culture, right? It used to be ingrained in our business environment, and that has shifted over time. 
 
Brent: Yeah, yeah. You know, going back a bit to the current atmosphere, we are seeing a much different environment than we've seen in quite a long time, barring a dramatic event like a pandemic. I think the last count I have is that there were more than a million layoffs to date in October. 
 
What do you think this case study could teach some of these executives in terms of today's current events and our current environment? 

Jan: Yeah, so I think that there is a deep but subtle lesson in the case for the current environment, particularly the current environment around layoffs. And for this, I would highlight the work of my colleague Sandra Sucher, who has studied layoffs, their short-term and long-term effects, for a long time. I've learned a lot from her as well as from this case. 
 
I think that the case would allow executives and MBA students to reflect on the second-order consequences of the layoffs, right? And I mean that in two senses. First of all, what are the consequences on the human beings? 
 
And second, what are the consequences for the business, for the motivation of those who remain, and for the message that is sent to current and future employees by how the layoffs are handled? The second thing that the denouement of the case would allow executives and students to reflect on is when it becomes necessary to have layoffs, how would you do them? Is there a way that takes into account the impact on the human beings in the executive's care and also, as a consequence, might actually have less damaging long-term consequences for the company? 
 
The executives in these situations are in extraordinarily difficult conditions, and I'd hope the case would allow them to broaden the range of ways they might think about the situation they're facing. 
 
Brent: When you had Bob there to discuss the case study, when it came to the question posed to him of his Barry-Wehmiller success due to its business model or its culture, I think Bob gave an answer that surprised a lot of people. Can you talk about that a little bit? 
 
Jan: Yeah, no, we definitely had exactly the exchange you described. We had a situation where we probed whether it was the business model or the culture of Truly Human Leadership that really contributed to Barry-Wehmiller's success. I think many of the sectors in the room expected Bob to immediately go to the culture, to Truly Human Leadership, because they knew that was in his heart. 
 
But he had a very different answer. He said, look, the business model was the engine and the culture was the fuel, right? That without an effective business model, the culture would not be possible. 
 
And, in fact, part of your responsibility as a leader who wants to take care of the people in the company is to make sure you piece together a really effective business model. I thought the realization of the combination of the two, how they relate to each other, was novel. And I can tell you a lot of the executives looked at each other and looked at me with a kind of look of surprise on their face. 
 
Now, we're going to have to ask you, how well does that connect to how Bob tells the story, how his recollection of the experience? 
 
Brent: That's exactly how he tells it. 
 
Jan: And fortunately, we got that on tape. We play that one back to folks when we're not fortunate enough to have Bob visit with us. 
 
Brent: The one thing that he talks about in terms of the business model is that if you don't have a good business model, you're going to hurt people. It's the virtuous cycle, right? If you want to care for your people, you have to provide something that will care for them. 
 
And he'll talk a lot about some of the things that we do at Barry-Wehmiller in terms of how we look at attrition in the organization. 

And he also talks about it in the terms of the spirit of continuous improvement. You know, you always have to be looking at your businesses, the areas of your business to make sure everything is there because it should be there or is there because it's effective or why something is there. 
 
You always kind of need to be re-looking at the why. And it shouldn't just be this is the way it's always been. You know, we need 10 people in this department doing this thing. 
 
Is that really effective? And is there a way that we can re-structure that to make it more fulfilling for everybody involved and make it more effective? You know, you always have to be looking at those things in the spirit of continuous improvement. 
 
And that's something that he's been talking about a lot lately as well. In terms of the business model, if you're at the point where your business is doing layoffs, have you been thinking enough about things in advance to where you've done enough continuous improvement within your company? You know, are you looking in terms of attrition? 
 
In terms of manufacturing, obviously, we have an older workforce, and so this is continually an issue for us as we go along, because it's also hard to hire for these jobs as well. 
 
So, these skills aren't, you know, they're not as prevalent as they were in the 1970s or 1980s and even the 90s. So as we're approaching people who have been with our companies for a very long time, as they are cycling out, it's becoming harder to cycle people in. But we're also trying to look at our processes and make sure it's the right process, you know?  Is it the right process in 2025? That was the process in 1995 or 2005, you know?  
 
So, all of that is in the spirit of making sure you have a good business model and caring for your people. 
 
Letting everything be the way it's always been is not necessarily the way it should be. To kind of wrap up the case study, how widely have you seen it taught? What's kind of the numbers right now of the impact of the study? 
 
Jan: Yeah, so we're fortunate at Harvard Business School to have a very strong system and team for distributing cases widely. And my friends at Harvard Business Publishing tell me that the case has now been taught at over 200 colleges and universities. It's been taught to over 30,000 students. 
 
It's been designated a best seller. It's been translated into Japanese and Portuguese and Spanish. And I think that's all a testament to what an important set of lessons that Barry-Wehmiller story, not necessarily the case, but the underlying story and the company. 
 
What an important story it tells to those who wanted to learn about business. 
 
Brent: Well that's great to hear because it's the impact that we hope to have. That's the reason why we tell our story. 
 
Jan: It's one of the things I admire about the company is that you've got active effort and outreach so that folks beyond the company can benefit from what the company has learned and has done. 
 
Brent: Speaking of that outreach, one thing I also want to tap into your years of experience as well, one thing that's also on our hearts too is working in business and education, not just as an example in the case study, but we have an outreach team that works for universities to help them with leadership curriculum. 
 
Jan: I spoke with Brian Wellinghoff and his team. 
 
Brent: Brian is our guy. 
 
Jan: Yep, and you've got some strong allies like Michael Pearson at Fordham and so forth. So yeah, no, absolutely. 
 
Brent: So, in your years of teaching and especially what you're seeing right now, how are these MBA students looking at their career as business leaders? It's something that Bob likes to say is that we don't necessarily teach leadership in universities, we teach the skills of the market once. When you look at students, when you're talking to students, how do you feel like they're looking at their careers? 
 
Or they are looking at their careers as like accumulating wealth, or is it about accomplishment, or is there more talk about purpose and fulfillment now? 
 
Jan: Yeah. One of the great charms of my job is that every year I get a year older, but my students are always the same age. They're always like 28 years old on average. 
 
And so, I have gotten to see how the thoughts and motivations of a very selected set of 28-year-olds has evolved over time. And the first thing I say is the motivations to pursue a career in business are as varied as the people who are pursuing that career. So, I don't want to generalize too much. 

But I do think there's some patterns and trends that are worth noting. The big one, and I will focus on what I see in HBS here because that's just what I know as well. The big pattern I see is a rising interest in purpose at work. 
 
If we go back about 25 years ago, I'd say there was a greater emphasis on paycheck. But over time, I see that my students, they still want a paycheck, right? But they want to also feel a sense of purpose at work. 
 
I mean, I routinely now speak with students who are taking pay cuts to go work for companies whose values align with theirs. 
And the other pattern I'd highlight is that we see a real surge of interest in 
entrepreneurship. In last year's graduating class, 17% of our students started their own company on graduation. 
 
That's up from 12% in 2021, so a pretty rapid rise. And many of those startups have some element of purpose. When I look within the purposes they're serving, I'd say the leading ones are efforts to address the climate crisis, to address the lack of shared prosperity, to make sure the benefits of education are make sure the benefits of education are enjoyed by the broad set of human beings, are enjoyed by more of the world's populations. 
 
I think the focus of Barry-Wehmiller and Truly Human Leadership, caring at work and caring leadership, is not as common a focus. 

It's there, but it's not. But the clear, clear trend toward our students wanting purpose at work. 

Brent: So, you're not necessarily seeing people interested in maybe the values of caring leadership, but it's more about purpose. 

Jan: Well, I think that those two overlap, right? But, and certainly one form of feeling purpose at work is being able to care for others and feel cared for oneself. 
 
But for sure, the biggest trend is this kind of pattern of increasing emphasis on purpose. 
Along with that, often comes some greater emphasis on work-life balance or work-life integration, as some would refer to it. But again, the kind of purpose-to-paycheck ratio has definitely gone up. 
 
Brent: Yeah. So, again, you can only kind of speak to what you know, but you, I'm sure you network with a lot of colleagues and you have some impressions of what's happening kind of generally across the spectrum. What do you think the state of business education is at the moment in terms of leadership, how it's perceived and how it's taught? 
 
Jan: Yeah. Again, I'll speak first from my experience in HBS, it's just because I know that well, I know that the best. We are certainly seeing some curricular response to the student desire for purpose and also from the professor's desire to fulfill that student desire. 
 
For example, we've got a required course on the purpose of the firm. It's been added to our curriculum in the first year of the MBA. We're now, this year, teaching it for the fourth time. 
 
We've got electives like Social Entrepreneurship and Systems Change. We've got a course that's not taught right now but has been and probably will be again on Reimagining Capitalism, which looks at the question, can capitalism be a solution to some of the world's hardest problems like climate change and inequality, rather than what I think most people would say that it's a cause of those problems. There are also popular elective courses that allow students to reflect more deeply on themselves as leaders and how it fits into their lives. 
 
We've got a very popular course on Leadership and Happiness, how leadership causes or prevents happiness among others, and how one can be happy as a leader. We've got the course on Authentic Leadership Development, which is about reflecting on what kind of leader one would like to be over a lifespan. We've got a course on Crafting Your Life, which is all about how to plan for not just your career, but for your overall life. 
 
So, at Harvard Business School, I see a lot of responses in the curriculum. I think in the wider academy, I believe and hope that there is greater emphasis on teaching people about caring leadership. On that, the first thing I'd say is, I think the responsibility for doing that typically begins before business school. 
 
I don't want to absolve business school of responsibility. I would say I hope we teach people to care before that stage. And I know some of Bob Chapman's emphasis these days is on earlier stages, but business clearly has its responsibility as well. 
 
I'm happy also to talk about kind of what I see in the wider academy, if you like.  

Brent: Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah. 
 
Jan: I mean, I think there is a... To get the academy to focus on caring leadership, there's a lot of work to be done on both the demand and the supply side, right? On the demand side, we need to generate demand for the skills of caring leadership among both students and employers. And that probably means making the moral case for caring leadership. That's the right thing to do. 

It also means making the economic case. That employees who are cared for and are more motivated are more committed and more effective, right?  

On the supply side, it means convincing the professors that these are the right skills to teach and providing course materials so it can be taught well. It's one of the things I appreciate about Barry-Wehmiller's outreach effort is trying to provide some of the, not only the case for caring leadership, but also the material that the company's developed over the years, right? 
 
But I do think it's also important to convey the size of the lift here. It's a, it is a very challenging task because it involves changing institutions, right? The institution of business education, which has a definite trajectory in history, which I'm happy to talk about a bit, needs to be bent a bit in a different direction. 
 
If you want to understand these issues and see the size of the lift, there is a book I'd recommend by my colleague Rakesh Karana. He wrote a book called From Higher Aims to Hired Hands. And let me just, just so I get the subtitle right here, “The Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession.” 
 
So, Rakesh documents the long-run trajectory of the rise of business schools in the United States and around the world. How it emerged around 1900, when business first became a real career. And the first business schools had an ambition to craft business as a profession, comparable to law or business or even the ministry, right? 
 
With a body of knowledge that needed to be mastered and enforceable standards of conduct. And Rakesh kind of accounts how that ambition evolved over time in the face of the Progressive Era, the Great Depression, the post-World War II boom, the kind of free-wheeling capitalism that came after that. And I think the abstract is worth quoting, so I get this right. 
 
This is how he comes down. He says, “Today, business schools have largely capitulated in the battle for professionalism and have become merely purveyors of a product, the MBA, with students treated as consumers. Professional and moral ideals of once-animated and inspired business schools have been conquered by a perspective that managers are merely agents of shareholders, beholden only to the cause of shared profits.” 

Now, Rakesh wrote that in 2008, so this is a little dated. But still, that's kind of what we're up against. And I say that not to discourage folks, not to discourage those who want to change business education, but to make sure we're doing it with clear eyes about the level of the lift. 

I believe deeply that greater change is possible. I see the beginnings of it. I see it being led by students who are looking for a greater purpose. 
 
But I think it requires a movement. Requires a movement. And within that movement, I see the people of Barry-Wehmiller as being a potential beacon, right? An embodiment. An illustration of what is possible when a company is committed to Truly Human Leadership, when it measures success by the way that its leaders touch the lives of people. So, we have a long way to go. I am hopeful. I see us progressing there, but it truly does require a movement. And Barry-Wehmiller can play an important role in that.