BOSTON—The newly appointed dean of Harvard Business School said Tuesday that he hoped the institution could play a leading role in helping restore the confidence in business that has been fractured by the global financial crisis.
Nitin Nohria was named by Harvard president Drew Faust to succeed Jay Light, who is retiring as dean at the end of the current academic year.
"It is hard to deny that, to some extent, society's trust in business over the last several years has taken a hit," Nohria said during a conference call with reporters.
"To me it appears that sometime over this period we lost the sense of purpose -- that if you build a business you need to build one that is sustainable for the long term. Sometimes I feel that making money in the short term superseded this greater purpose that business serves," he said.
Nohria, 48, has taught at Harvard Business School since 1988, for the past decade as the Richard P. Chapman Professor of Business Administration. He has co-written or co-edited 16 books over that period.
Nohria's current academic interests include theory and practice of leadership, the study of human motivation, and strategic challenges of globalization, the university said.
Raised in India, Nohria received his bachelor of technology degree in chemical engineering in 1984 from the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay. He earned his Ph.D. in management from the Sloan School of Management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1988, the same year he joined the Harvard Business School faculty as an assistant professor.
"He's deeply committed to business and the positive role that it must and can play in society," said Faust, who said she selected Nohria following an "intensive" search process that included consultations with a 15-member faculty advisory committee, students, alumni, business leaders and others.
Nohria, the tenth dean of the 102-year-old school, predicted that the global financial crisis would trigger a new burst of innovation and serve to remind people of how important business is to society.
Noting that former students work on "Wall Street and on Main Street" and in both large multinational companies as well as small entrepreneurial firms, Nohria called on alumni to serve as the school's ambassadors.
"Those students and what they do and how they behave and the values that they create in the societies and the companies they are part of, will be what will allow us as Harvard Business School and business in general to change the perception of business," said Nohria, whose appointment is effective July 1.
Light, who called Nohria a "splendid" successor, announced in December that he would step down after a 40-year career at the school. He succeeded Kim Clark as interim dean in August 2005 and was named to the post on a permanent basis the following April.
Harvard Business School cut expenses but was able to weather the recession better than some other departments because it is less dependent on distributions from Harvard's endowment, which lost nearly 30 percent of its value in the last fiscal year.
