Semester:
Offered:
Joseph L. Badaracco (Harvard Business School)
First-Year Seminar 70K 4 credits (fall term) Enrollment: Limited to 12
Everyone with serious responsibilities, at work and throughout their lives, faces gray area decisions. In organizations, these highly uncertain, high-stakes decisions are delegated upward, to men and women in leadership positions. They have to make final decisions on these problems, despite the gray, and these decisions test their competence and their humanity. This seminar offers a variety of important perspectives on gray area problems and on ways to resolve them, responsibly and effectively. The seminar begins by examining gray-area problems in various professions and lines of work. Subsequent sessions focus on three different ways of resolving gray area problems—in terms of accountability, character, and action. A typical session of the seminar will draw upon classic works of fiction, basic ideas in moral philosophy, and contemporary situations. These situations are typically described in short case studies involving men and women early in their careers, and they give students in the seminar the opportunity to grapple with these problems in personal terms—by discussing what they would do in these situations. From time to time, students will write short papers, which will be discussed in the seminar.