With Great Power Comes No Responsibility

The true weight of leadership is lost on us. It won’t be felt until we leave this place where, because everybody is a leader, nobody is

One of the first lessons of RC is that when HBS optimizes for something, it does so remarkably well. 

RC year is carefully engineered to bond sections and cultivate a deep sense of institutional loyalty. The better a job HBS does at instilling gratitude for this experience and all that flows from it, the more returns it sees in the form of future donations (that 50% of enrolled students receive financial aid from alumni is just one metric for alumni satisfaction). HBS’s championing of its case method, which favors a specific mode of inquiry as the definitive way to learn business, has shaped curriculum globally and contributed significantly to both the school’s relevancy and its bottom line. More recently, HBS undertook a campaign to instill the value of entrepreneurial thinking in its students, elevating “founder” as a venerable post-MBA career alongside its traditional consultant and PE routes, convincing a significant number of people that I know to abandon more traditional career tracks entirely. 

Producing ethical leaders, though,  is not what HBS optimizes for. 

HBS has always been in the business of morality, explains Michel Anteby in Manufacturing Morals. Where once producing economic value was framed as a moral undertaking in itself, most would agree that in the year 2026 HBS attempts to teach a morality that extends beyond shareholders and gestures towards individual and societal impacts. 

HBS teaches with what Anteby terms “vocal silence.” Moral boundaries are expected to naturally emerge under Socratic conditions, proposed by classmates rather than the professor (who can only ask that we discuss a scenario through “an ethical lens” and challenge the positions we take). The vast majority of normative instruction is teaching legal boundaries. Because unlike an undergraduate institution full of malleable, pre-career young adults, Anteby observed that here, where the median age is 27, “the possibility of changing students’ values, deemed possibly too utopian, is replaced by the more attainable and gradual goal of raising their aspirations.”

HBS doesn’t fail to support those who think deeply about the social implications of their careers. The resources to pursue a career in “social impact” are all there, even if a few pages deeper on the career center website. 

Where HBS does fail is in instilling any sense of responsibility about the tools that it gives us. The institution sees its primary role as empowering us to succeed as leaders no matter our objective. In the case method, as long as it is legally permissible, the successful pursuit of an “opportunity” is celebrated; its broader outcome and the societal value it does or does not generate is a secondary consideration, received with respect if a student raises a concern. The result is that “impact” – I’ll use that word again – has become its own career category, rather than a question that every leader should reckon with regardless of domain.

It makes sense. We’re not at Harvard Kennedy School. We don’t need to understand or even think about systems and contexts in order to succeed. Instead, HBS reminds us breathlessly that we are future leaders. It gestures towards positive examples of moral leadership with the same hand that it invites us to experiment with entrepreneurship. Doing good, whether that’s measured by interpersonal or societal impact, is modeled with the same optionality as any other career choice. And unsurprisingly, for all of HBS’ gentle invitations to consider the broader impact of what we do, the “success” of an HBS-led business and the alumni who draw the biggest crowds when they return to campus are ultimately assessed in financial terms.

At a moment when corporations exercise more influence over public life than at perhaps any other point in history, I do not believe this is enough. For all the reminders of the leaders we will become, the true weight of leadership and the lives we will affect is lost on us. It won’t be felt until we leave this place where, because everybody is a leader, nobody is. 

With every decade that passes, the tools HBS gives us affect the world more potently. The institution’s relationship to that power has not kept pace. Unlike the other values that HBS optimizes for – prestige, loyalty, entrepreneurial thinking – the non-material impacts of the lives we lead will never generate a financial return for the institution. For fear of estranging many of its most powerful alumni, HBS refuses to endorse or condemn examples of “good” or “bad” impact in the world. This is not, I’d argue, because it doesn’t want to produce “good” leaders. It’s that HBS doesn’t want to take a stance on what “good” entails. It’s why, despite alumni petition, HBS has retained its motto that “we educate leaders who make a difference in the world” without ever qualifying that difference as positive.

I don't want HBS to tell me what it means to do good. Nor do I think its job is to send all of us into social impact careers. Instead I’m asking that, as it hands these tools to us, HBS does more to ensure that we feel their weight. On that front, I make three recommendations: 

1. Retire “impact” as a separate lens and make responsibility and legacy a default mode of examination. The vast majority of cases treat business problems as morally neutral as far as they are legal. Concerns of societal value and collateral are received with respect, but the burden remains with students to raise them. I propose inverting this assumption. For instance: the first TEM case of RC commends a founder for seizing the opportunity to produce cheap, disposable electric toothbrushes. The legacy of this product – short-term profit, long-term e-waste – went unexamined. There will always be people who believe that their responsibility reaches no further than successful execution; rather than treating this as the default, let them argue for it, the way those who raise concerns of societal value must raise their hands to do so every day.

2. More moments of soberness. Many of my peers have commented that HBS so often feels like a high school classroom. It’s difficult to imagine yourself as a “future leader” when you get checked for using the bathroom too often. Consequently, on the rare occasions HBS asks us to consider the gravity of what lies ahead, the stakes are hard to fathom. FRC has most effectively challenged this: my classmates still cite its “fraud triangle” months later, and despite “A Letter from Prison’s” mugshots being received with nervous laughter, it was one of the few times I remember being asked to sit with the reality of certain alumni outcomes. LCA’s “Rajat Gupta” landed similarly: a lifetime of genuine good undone by a single borderline decision. Based on the conversations I’ve had though, few have taken these as an invitation to expect more of themselves, instead resigning prematurely to the complications of morality. This is important: none of us should be assured of our own virtue. But if HBS is going to empower us to “make a difference,” it’s also responsible for holding us to a higher standard.

3. Cross the river. HBS is physically and culturally disconnected from Boston and the greater Harvard community. Engagement outside of our bubble, as far as it exists, is driven entirely by individuals. Service – one of the tenets of leadership – is not expected of our time here. This is a missed opportunity that compounds a larger problem, which is that we’re rarely required to consider the contexts and impact of our work. At a minimum, HBS should require a school-wide day of service that reminds us our education extends beyond the walls of Aldrich, and that looking beyond ourselves is a practice. 

Instead we are given a handshake. 

“We hope you’ll do the right thing, but most of all we hope we’ll see you here again in 25 years.”

Meg Shriber (MBA ‘27) graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 2022 with a degree in literature, and the University of Cambridge in 2024, where she wrote her MPhil dissertation on AI and creativity. Her first article, “Death of an Author, Birth of a Medium: Collaboration, Control, and Creativity in Machine-Generated Text” is forthcoming in Poetics Today. Meg is also a painter.