HBS Ideas and Insights: Blavatnik Fellows, Portrait Project, AI Ethical Considerations, and More

At Harvard Business School, we educate leaders who make a difference in the world. Our Ideas and Insights newsletter includes a weekly roundup of the top research, ideas, and happenings throughout the HBS community.

In this issue:

• Meet this year's Blavatnik Fellows cohort!

• Are board members failing their most important duty? Research from Executive Fellow Bill George offers insight.

• As AI surges, corporate directors face a set of urgent ethical considerations. Learn about insights gained fro the inaugural Directors' AI Ethics Forum, recently held on the HBS campus.

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Ideas from the Week

New research from Professors Jorge Tamayo and Raffaella Sadun reveals insights from a survey of 1,200 U.S. chief HR officers and 200 business leaders. The key takeaway? Reskilling is becoming mainstream, but there's still significant work to be done. They explore the main challenges and critical questions companies should consider when designing effective reskilling programs.

Ask board members their most important duty, and they will likely say it is appointing and overseeing the CEO. Yet many boards fail to make appropriate choices, often because they don’t prepare candidates for the challenges they will inevitably face after stepping into the role. General Electric, Wells Fargo, and Boeing all chose the wrong CEOs for the job, says research from Executive Fellow Bill George, creating big problems for the companies. George outlines five common mistakes boards of directors make when selecting leaders and provides advice for picking the appropriate person for this all-important role.

Around Campus

Meet this year's Blavatnik Fellows! Launched in 2013, the Blavatnik Fellowship in Life Science Entrepreneurship is part of a gift from the Blavatnik Family Foundation to Harvard University. The Blavatnik Fellowship offers HBS alumni and Harvard-affiliated postdoctoral researchers the opportunity to advance new ventures around promising life science technologies and develop their leadership talents during a 12-month fellowship year. Fellows work closely with leading biotech industry and biomedical authorities, receive programmatic guidance and mentorship, and join a community of entrepreneurs who have created 45 companies and raised over $520M in funding to impact the business of science.

“My commitment today and every day is to be the leader who sees the unseen, uplifts the underestimated, and acknowledges the overlooked.”For 20 years, MBA students have participated in the Portrait Project, founded and photographed by Tony Deifell, by answering a question from the poem "The Summer Day" by Mary Oliver. Read Jada Haynes’s (MBA 2024) entry and others on our website.

As artificial intelligence surges, corporate directors face a set of urgent ethical considerations. What role can they play in fostering responsible practices for using AI in the workplace? At the inaugural Directors’ AI Ethics Forum held at HBS, leaders from the business, government, and nonprofit sectors pondered these questions and more. The forum’s presenters covered everything from business case studies to the outlook for government regulation worldwide.

Podcast Roundup

This episode of Climate Rising focuses on some innovative alternative low-carbon natural materials being used in fashion. Bolt Threads CEO Dan Widmaier describes Mylo, a substitute for leather that’s derived from mushrooms, via the TED Climate podcast that we’re bringing here a bonus episode of Climate Rising. It’s a perfect extension of our two most recent Climate Rising episodes that focus on other low-carbon advanced materials: GALY’s lab-grown cotton and C16 Bioscience’s lab-generated treeless palm oil.

As an acquisition entrepreneur, Jackie Kopcho is now CEO of Tortorella Swimming Pools, where she leads a team that engineers, builds, and services pools on Long Island, in southeastern New York State. When searching for a company to acquire, Jackie wasn’t looking for this particular industry or location. Rather, she was on the lookout for those qualities that lead to an enduringly profitable business, such as recurring revenue and low customer concentration. This company stood out from the rest as an ideal acquisition target. In this episode of Think Big, Buy Small, Jackie discusses her overall process of discovery, the experience of coming into the role of CEO, managing challenges associated with a seasonal business, her deep focus on customer service, and more.

Browse the entire library of HBS podcasts and episodes here.