Introduction
MIT Sloan MBA student interest in using business acumen and analytic tools to tackle social and environmental challenges has never been higher. As future organizational leaders, they seek to evolve their strategic thinking and exposure to effectively lead corporations addressing sustainability; impact investing; and improving diversity, equity, and inclusion. A new generation of MBA coursework is responding to this demand, examining the differentiated role a corporate leader can play by driving long-term value and creating competitive advantage through purpose-driven decisions. Leading With Impact: Organization Lab emphasizes engaging beyond the corporation – to multiple organizations and the existing systems that connect them. By design, Orgs Lab: Leading with Impact reflects a vision that business schools offer future leaders hands-on learning opportunities for change by engaging in social impact projects in their own backyard.
Previous cohorts from this course include students from MIT Sloan MBA, MIT Engineering as well as Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard School of Public Health, Wellesley College and the Harvard Graduate School of Education, who work together on teams in addressing social challenges from housing, to education, to food access across greater Boston.
Orgs Lab offers students a rare hands-on opportunity to apply their analytical skills to real-world social challenges, which involve stakeholders across multiple sectors, including business, government, social enterprises and nonprofit organizations (NGOs). Student learning centers on problem solving, rather than analysis. Class discussions consider leadership among stakeholders from for-profit, nonprofit, philanthropic and government sectors in solving these challenges. Being on the ground regularly at a nonprofit allows students to develop the deep awareness of context required to be successful in driving substantial and meaningful change within and outside of an organization. To effect positive change at these multi-sector intersections, leaders must become aware of their own biases and privilege and engage in problem solving through culturally relevant capacity building.
This course provides crosswalks between theory and practice, and it does so by having students experience the impact of their problem solving and actions in a mission-driven project. They learn to connect specific interventions made by individual leaders with organizational and community transformation. Although an action-learning project with a specific nonprofit anchors the course, it is not about managing nonprofits. Its primary objective is to learn about making change – by connecting the individual actions taken by leaders involved in a social cause, from funding, operations, and policymaking to the collective outcomes sought, with a goal of implementing real change.