Harvard and Larry Summers

Last week was a sad day- Larry Summers stepped down as President of Harvard. A man with extremely good and innovative ideas ran up against a brilliant, yet inflexible Faculty and it was a no brainer that the President would lose! He fought and fought hard, for four years and decided it was best not to continue.

The key questions are two- Does Harvard, with all its success need to change at all? And if so, did the direction in which Larry Summers wanted to take it made any sense?

Again- the answers to the first question is an unequivocal yes. Any institution needs to continuously reinvent itself to stay at the top of the game and you need to be either a Harvard student or faculty member to know that. But to be told what to do in a manner that may appear non participative and even draconian is not acceptable, particularly to people who consider themselves the very best in the business and this is where I think Larry Summers lost the plot. People will resist any change but changes one after the other, in a manner that does not take into the account the view of the key stakeholders, particularly, in this case, the Faculty can the situation unteneble for any chief executive and the President should have known that. His ideas for an Allston expansion of the campus, of reworking the undergrad curriculum made sense but it needed to be more than a top down approach for it to succeed at any given level and unfortunately it crumbled at the very top. Once that trust is eroded at the top, your every action is scrutinized and every word you utter that is slightly out of the norm makes the realm of controversy- the women in science controversy early last year being a case in point.

I am thinking whether this should be a Harvard case study on change management and leadership. It has all the right ingredients- a great institution needing to reinvent itself, a president who has bright ideas, a faculty that is brilliant, yet intransigent in its ways and powerful stakeholders from students to alumni who have their own million ideas on where to take the institution. The good news out of all this- Harvard is an incredibly resilient institution where very bright people ensure that the standards are consistently highest in the world and the quality of research produces path breaking work that makes us all proud of the motto- Veritas- or the pursuit of truth and excellence in everything we do!