Effective leaders must understand how the success of their organizations is intertwined with broader ethical and social issues. And they must recognize that sustainable economic growth is not possible without considering the needs and demands of broader society.
Tuck requires each student to take at least one minicourse (1.5 credits) that explores the complex ethical and social challenges of business.
Electives that satisfy the requirement include, but aren't limited to, these courses:
BUSINESS AND CLIMATE CHANGE (BCC)
Professor Charlie Donovan
This mini course aims to help prepare business leaders to navigate the business implications of climate change. Given the need to mobilize trillions of dollars of new investment from the private sector to avoid the most severe consequences of global warming, we will seek to understand corporate climate action through the lens of investing. Tuck students will gain grounding in key tools for identifying, quantifying, and managing climate-related risks. Over the term, we will critically examine contemporary examples of how firms are seeking to capitalize on new investment opportunities and how global capital markets are adapting to shifts in technology, government policy, and consumer preferences. The overall objective of the course is to provide managers with a solid grounding in the future consequences of climate change and help them get ahead of the curve in spotting strategic and financial implications.
BUSINESS AND ETHICS AT THE BASE OF THE PYRAMID (BOP)
Professor Susan M. Hanson
As we navigate the complexities of the 21st century, characterized by both unprecedented affluence and far-reaching crises, markets prove to be a dynamic context where social mission and profit incentives may intersect. Making a profit while serving low-income or marginalized consumers presents a host of challenges, and the storied failures give pause to entrepreneurs lured by the dream of profits.
Business leaders, with dual aims to overcome the challenges of access and serve un-tapped markets, may find themselves sharing ground with development advocates, social entrepreneurs, and social activists who also seek to harness the power of markets to spur progress.
Driven by the promise of new markets and the imperatives of corporate responsibility, this minicourse explores the pursuits of profit generation and poverty alleviation through a business ethics lens.
Aligned with the ESR (Ethics and Social Responsibility) requirement, this minicourse asks students to use ethical decision-making tools, to examine the challenges that may emerge for business leaders in their efforts to overcome barriers to essential resources such as healthcare, infrastructure services, basic nutrition, and environmental sustainability.
This course is designed to provide students with opportunities to ponder questions of ethics and corporate responsibility, to hone their ethical analysis, and to practice their ethical voice. We begin the course by establishing a foundational understanding of Philosophical Ethics through core background readings, which serve as an indispensable resource throughout the course to understand and navigate the value-laden stakeholder debates that frame market competition.
Case readings focus on the central challenge of access and are drawn from both emerging market as well as mature industrial country contexts, where marginalized consumers are the targeted market. Throughout the course, selected cases position the pursuit of profit in the context of stark disparities between haves and have-nots in the crosshairs of our analysis: testing the possibilities and limits of using markets to achieve dual aims of greater access and profits, putting the company at risk when the role of governmental actors and/or societal-based actors and platforms is in transition, and inquiring into the possibilities and limits of corporate responsibility.
BUSINESS AND SOCIETY (BAS)
Professor Curt Welling D'71, T'77
Governments and societies around the world are increasingly focused on intractable social issues: problems of poverty, health, education, the environment and social justice. There is an accelerating demand for sustainability. In this context, expectations for business accountability are rising, and the social contract between business and government is under scrutiny and in some cases under attack in markets and countries around the world. The very nature and purpose of “capitalism” are being questioned. At the same time, new technologies and new models of collaboration between business, government and civil society are emerging. And new perspectives about investing and raising “social purpose capital” are being tested. Business “stakeholders”—communities, employees, governments and “civil society”—are increasingly demanding a role in corporate governance and accountability. And now we are in the Age of Covid 19: the immediate and longer term realities of the pandemic will challenge all of our assumptions, expectations and models about the “social contract".
Through a series of readings, cases and speakers, this introductory minicourse is designed to give students an integrated perspective on the unique roles which government and business play in society, the sources of authority for, and limits to, those responsibilities, and the ways in which the traditional roles and organizational models are being challenged, questioned and changed.
The course will also explore the role that capital markets play in this context: sustainability is impossible without mobilizing capital. The course will examine markets from a number of perspectives: as facilitator of social policy, as allocator of capital and instrument of organizational accountability, as manifestations of social priorities and as mechanisms for reflecting moral and ethical priorities.
CORPORATE RESPONSIBILITY (CRSP)
Professor Paul A. Argenti
This minicourse starts with the premise that corporate social responsibility is good for business and focuses on how leaders can balance the needs of their organizations with responsibilities to key constituencies. Through cases focusing on the social, reputational, and environmental consequences of corporate activities, students will learn how to make difficult choices, promote responsible behavior within their organizations, and understand the role personal values play in developing effective leadership skills.
Impact Investing: Capital for Social Impact (IICSI)
Professor Curt Welling D'71, T'77
The concepts of “impact investing” and “social impact capital” have exploded on the marketplace in recent years. The last decade has seen the dramatic acceleration of attempts to find new ways to harness capital and capitalism in the search for solutions to intractable social problems and concerns about corporate accountability. New organizational paradigms and new investment perspectives have emerged, and the volume of capital seeking social impact has grown exponentially.
A critical component of this dynamic has been the exploration of new approaches to creating, allocating and evaluating investment capital. Whether in new approaches to philanthropy (Venture Philanthropy), corporate philanthropy (Corporate Cause Marketing), venture capital (Social Entrepreneurship), shared-value capital (double bottom line investing), private and public market values-based investing (Impact Investing and public market ESG investing)--virtually every major aggregator of investment capital—Black Rock, Vanguard, Bain Capital, Goldman Sachs, etc) has allocated significant resources to developing investment products or financing approaches which respond to these trends.
Through a series of readings, lectures, and speakers this course will examine the sources, markets, costs, risk and return tradeoffs, and accountability mechanisms in the emerging markets for Social Impact Capital.
LEADING DIVERSE ORGANIZATIONS (LDO)
Professor Sonya Mishra
Using insights from cutting-edge behavioral and psychological research, this course provides students with skills to identify and address issues related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) within organizations. Students will develop an understanding of the barriers to DEI, such as systems of inequality, denial of privilege, biases that hinder support for DEI, and the many biases facing marginalized groups. Through lectures, in-class role-play exercises, and case discussions, students will also learn about how organizational characteristics (e.g., power hierarchies, social networks, work culture) impact the efficacy of DEI interventions. Finally, students will learn how to improve organizational DEI at the individual level (e.g., addressing bias, allyship, empathetic leadership, psychological safety) and at the organizational level (e.g., hiring practices and workplace policies that measurably improve DEI). By the end of this course, students will be adept at identifying and addressing sources of inequity, having difficult conversations, mitigating problems associated with stereotypes, and managing diverse, equitable, and inclusive environments. Importantly, this class teaches students how to advocate for DEI issues in organizational settings, equipping them with the necessary research, persuasion tactics, and analytical skills needed to be advocates, even in the face of resistance.
MANAGING FOR SOCIAL IMPACT (MSI)
Professor Bob Searle T'96
Twenty years ago, few people except social scientists evaluating the results of large-scale development programs talked about social impact. Google the term now, and millions of hits pop up—an explosion of interest that is both promising and problematic.
On the one hand, its currency attests to the growing number of organizations and individuals who recognize—and want to help remedy—the enormous social, economic, and environmental problems facing our planet. On the other hand, it’s hard to know what the term actually means other than doing something good for society.
If social impact were simply a buzzword this sort of broad generalization wouldn’t matter. But social impact is a real phenomenon. And while there are undoubtedly people who’ve seized on the term simply because it’s the new-new thing, most of those who are talking about it do so with genuinely good intentions. The problem, in the words of inventor Thomas A. Edison, is that “a good intention, with a bad approach, often leads to poor results.”
MSI’s overarching goal is to help you appreciate what it takes to turn good intentions into good results for society. To this end, the class will require you to consider a number of fundamental questions, including:
These questions are particularly pointed for the charitable nonprofits, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and philanthropic foundations that constitute the nonprofit (or social) sector. Why? Because these are the only organizations that exist solely for the purpose of bettering society. If they are unable to deliver on the statement of purpose (or mission) that is their reason for being, it doesn’t matter how big, or well-known, or well-intentioned they are: they have failed. So, using them as a primary lens for discussing these questions allows us to explore the challenges of managing for social impact in their most demanding form.
That said, every organization has a social impact (as does every individual), even if its decision makers choose not to acknowledge that, let alone manage for it. This is why we will also use our time together to consider where questions of social impact might appear in the context of business decisions or government policies, and what some of the key trade-offs in these contexts might involve. You will also have time and space to develop your own perspective on social impact and to reflect on how it might affect your decisions and choices going forward. Guests who have wrestled with these issues themselves will share their experiences and lessons learned, as will your professor.
As MBAs. your skills will be in high demand. MSI will be useful whether you decide to apply them professionally or privately. This course will be particularly relevant if you are currently serving on the board of a nonprofit or NGO or plan on joining one hereafter.
MORAL REASONING: FROM MACHIAVELLI TO THE BOMB TO AI (MORE)
Professor Joshua Lewis
How did President Harry Truman decide to drop The Bomb, and did he get it right? Machiavelli’s The Prince is among the most influential leadership tracts ever written, but is it a pragmatic handbook for leaders or a rationalization of thuggery? How did Katharine Graham think about the business risks and ethical dilemmas involved in defying a President and pursuing Watergate? Is Sir Thomas More, whose severed head King Henry VIII had put on Traitor’s Gate, an exemplar of moral reasoning? What can Kazuo Ishiguro’s masterpiece The Remains of the Day teach us about the pitfalls of amorality (and work/life balance)? Do AI deployment decisions have moral elements?
Leaders regularly confront dilemmas with moral dimensions. They often arise urgently and unexpectedly, are generally complex, and can be career-defining. This course will introduce you to the tools required to grapple with them and to lead an organization through them. It is both abstract, in that it explores complex questions and philosophical frameworks used to address them, and intensely practical, in that it deals with the types of challenges that business leaders actually face. MORE’s objective is to enable you to better navigate the challenges of the business world and the complexities of life as it is actually lived.
Course content includes renowned fiction, autobiography, journalism, moral philosophy, history, and film. It covers a diverse set of protagonists spanning centuries, continents, and cultures. In the final class you’ll use the tools you sharpened over the term on complex AI deployment cases.
Allie Farina T25 and Mike Villareal T25 will be serving as TAs for the 2025 version of MORE. Prospective students are encouraged to contact either for insights into the course, which both took last year. In addition, students may find the podcast Tuck recently made about MORE helpful to their enrollment decision.
Professor Lewis notes: “MORE is a humanities course designed for a business school. In addition to the business-oriented objectives noted above it is designed to provide tools for finding the right questions, critical thinking, challenging assumptions and conventional wisdom. The course focuses less on what to know and more on how to think. While success in business requires both hard skills – strategy, finance, management, operations – and soft skills, over my 30+ year career in venture capital and private equity I found that this third type of skills, which the study of humanities can provide so effectively, were every bit if not more valuable.”
RESEARCH TO PRACTICE: AI-DRIVEN ANALYTICS AND SOCIETY (RTPAS)
Professor James Siderius
The last decade has brought us tremendous advances in the power and sophistication of data- driven decision-making techniques at our disposal. Encouraged by this progress, we are witnessing a broad deployment of these techniques across the world. They now touch on and sometimes even govern just about every aspect of how businesses, and even people, operate on a day-to-day basis.
However, as much as these techniques were deployed with the promise of bringing a decisively positive change, it has become abundantly clear that they often are a mixed blessing, at best. Indeed, it turns out that the interface of algorithmic decision-making and society is rife with subtle and non-obvious interactions, undesirable feedback loops, and unintended consequences. How should we make sense of and navigate these issues?
The goal of this seminar is to survey some of the key challenges emerging in the context of the societal impact of data-driven decision making, as well as to create a forum where the students can discuss potential approaches to addressing these challenges. We will aim to discuss questions such as: How should businesses responsibility use, interpret, and make decisions from the output of machine learning models? How can we ensure big data sets are unbiased, fairly labeled, and being used responsibly by companies? What challenges will we face as businesses shift toward using generative AI and large language models for operations such as online customer service? Why does fake news spread faster than truthful news on online platforms like social media, and how do we combat it? Will automation replace unskilled labor, or simply make workers more productive?
Intense student involvement in both the presentation and the class discussion of the scientific papers is required. Like all RTP seminars, there will be a focus on using academic research to help you learn the analytical rigor to be an effective manager in an increasingly complex world.
RESEARCH TO PRACTICE: PEOPLE ANALYTICS (RTPPA)
Professor Julia Meilin
To have a competitive advantage in business, organizations must leverage data to improve workforce practices and outcomes. Yet, many managers lack the analytical skills to identify whether their business practices create disparities in opportunity and/or outcomes for their workers. This seminar introduces students to data-driven approaches for understanding and addressing key organizational challenges around hiring, compensation, performance evaluation, retention, workforce diversity, and organizational culture. Students will also learn how to design and evaluate organizational interventions that can be used to help address such challenges. Throughout the course, students will engage with real-world examples and learn methodological strategies (e.g., longitudinal studies, randomized field experiments) for solving people-related problems in diverse organizational contexts, including investment banking, high-tech, biotech, and law firms. Course materials will include academic articles from management, sociology, social psychology, and economics to develop the analytical rigor required for making data-driven decisions in organizations. The papers we read will leverage data to develop theory and offer empirical evidence to address questions such as:
By the end of this course, students will have mastered analytical techniques to (a) identify key workforce challenges that affect workers using organizational data (e.g., hiring evaluations, employee performance metrics, salary data); (b) infer plausible causes contributing to observed workplace challenges; and (c) design and test data-informed solutions to improve strategic people-related practices and outcomes. Students will engage in active learning by co-leading class discussions of the papers each week and completing both a mid-term and final project that apply course concepts to real-world datasets.
SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP (SESHP)
Professor Mark R. DesJardine
Despite a growing desire to pursue prosocial goals and affect positive change in the world, many entrepreneurs have little understanding of how to develop new ventures that can simultaneously generate positive financial and social returns. Without the ability to measure, manage, and scale social impact, ventures that start out with prosocial aims will often diverge from their roots, with founders drifting away from social impact aims or pursuing goals that fail to deliver on their intended impacts.
This course takes a hands-on approach to addressing these issues. Students will work in teams to identify an opportunity and develop a plan for a new venture that can generate positive financial and social returns. Emphasis is placed on understanding the unique challenges of creating social impact business models and defining the value proposition of these models for investors and other stakeholders.
Students will leave the class with a deeper appreciation of the potential for business to be a force for good in the world. The class will be of value to students who are interested in creating socially impactful businesses, as well as to those who want to work in the business ecosystem that supports such ventures, including impact investing and consulting.
SUSTAINABLE MARKETING (SUSM)
Professor Liana L. Frey
To use Philip Kotler’s definition, “sustainable marketing holds that an organization should meet the needs of its present consumers without compromising the ability of future generations to fulfill their own needs.” To do this well, marketers need to expand their traditional scope and leverage new tools and frameworks. There has been a shift in consumer expectations around transparency and responsibility of a company’s environmental impact. Consumers are seeking out and buying more sustainable products. Consumer expectations are changing, and they now expect companies to not only be responsible for their environmental impact while making a product, but also in the sourcing, use, and disposal. Many companies have struggled to communicate on these topics because they are complex, which has led to marketing that is often inadvertently misleading. Marketers want to leverage this interest in sustainability, but they struggle with what, where, when to communicate during the customer journey.
To meet these challenges, we will explore several new tools and frameworks. Over the course of this class, we utilize system thinking to map out an industry and create a new product or service that makes a positive environmental impact. We identify stakeholders who are aligned to the same end goals so that a business can partner in non-traditional ways to accelerate and magnify sustainability progress. We will walk through how to create an emotional connection with a potential customer and how to conduct customer research so a company’s marketing resonates. We will update the 3C’s and 4P’s for sustainability. We’ll review circularity strategies and the evolution of circular systems. We’ll bring all these tools and concepts to life as we use several current cases- Impossible Foods, Nike, and Liquid Death- to discuss strategy in action and debrief on how these companies executed their marketing strategy around sustainability.
WOMEN, GENDER AND LEADERSHIP IN THE NEW WORKPLACE (WGLNW)
Professor Stacy Blake-Beard
Over the past decades, women have steadily moved into higher levels of management and leadership where they now occupy key positions in the public and private sectors and have established themselves as a force in most workplaces. However, there are still challenges that they are facing. The work place experiences of women are informed by societal expectations that are deeply ingrained in how we show up – gender norms. In this course, we will focus on how gender norms have impacted women’s careers, as well as the ways that gender norms affect work, leadership, and professional success in general. We will delve into issues that are commonly included in discussions on women, gender, and leadership (i.e. work-life balance, networking, and bias). We will expand to more recent dimensions of the new workplace (i.e. the influence of technology, the different career experiences of women across the globe). Through the course, we will have a forum to identify, at interpersonal and organizational levels, the challenges that women have faced—and the strategies they have utilized—on their career path. We will also diagnose gender and power dynamics in the workplace and evaluate alterative reactions/responses to enhance individual and group effectiveness. With each of the topics, you will be encouraged to think of your role as leaders and how you can use those competencies to create and/or contribute to workplaces that are sensitive to the importance of gender equity.