Walker Webcast: Harvard Business School’s Fritz Foley on the Changing Landscape of Business Education
At Harvard Business School (HBS), associate dean Fritz Foley was tasked a few years ago with mapping out possible risks. He couldn’t have anticipated that a worldwide pandemic upending the traditionally in-person model of business education would be among them.
Fifteen months after COVID-19 shifted learning at HBS—and in virtually all of academia—to an online format, a return to onsite classes is in the offing. However, Foley said on this week’s Walker Webcast that his thinking has evolved regarding in-person, real-time sessions as the be-all and end-all.
“We can begin to think of HBS as a platform business,” Foley told Walker & Dunlop CEO Willy Walker. In so doing, he added, the school can address the question “how can we best serve learners?”
For example, the pandemic has demonstrated to Foley that, although his preference is for the interaction of a live classroom, “There’s a lot of learning that can happen in an asynchronous way.”
That isn’t to say that the pandemic has left enrollments unscathed, though. Foley noted that while recent demand for the MBA program has been “strong,” executive education hasn’t rebounded yet, due largely to travel restrictions discouraging would-be participants from overseas.
Foley’s appearance on the Walker Webcast coincides with the imminent publication of Global Goliaths: Multinational Corporations in the 21st Century Economy, which he co-authored with James R. Hines, Jr. and David Wessel. The book’s appearance in turn coincides with debate among the G7 nations on the prospect of a global minimum tax rate for corporations.
To a casual observer, it may seem as though the corporate practice of using “tax havens” is widespread. In fact, research for Global Goliaths revealed that only about 50% of multinationals use tax havens to lower their bills, partly because of the accounting intricacies needed to take advantage of these havens.
“If it were that easy, 100% would be doing it,” said Foley, who along with serving as associate dean at HBS is also the André R. Jakursi Professor of Business Administration there.
During the webcast, Walker noted that the new book highlights how the landscape of the world’s largest corporations by revenue has evolved. In 1988, there wasn’t a single Chinese company in the top 50 globally; in 2019 there were 12, including three in the top 10.
Along similar lines, Global Goliaths makes the point that many of today’s largest corporations didn’t exist 30 years ago, while many of the corporate giants of 1988 have either folded or been absorbed via M&A activity. “The half-life of successful firms is just not that long,” said Foley, adding that such evolution is healthy.
On-demand replays of the June 2 webcast are available by clicking here and through Walker & Dunlop’s Driven by Insight podcast series.
- ◦Economy