The Harvard Kennedy School degree course STM-480 "Leadership for a Networked World" is taught by Professor Jerry Mechling and is for degree students seeking to create innovation and progress in the public, private, and non-profit sectors. The course is designed to improve analysis and implementation for many of the dramatic information-related changes now underway around the globe. We focus primarily on leadership and management, not on technology; the course requires no technical background and you'll learn what you need as we go. LNW is about how information technologies -- when combined with institutional change and effective leadership -- can impact the productivity, equity, and legitimacy of public services and governance.
None of this happens without risk. LNW is therefore also about what leaders should do to ensure that IT initiatives create value while properly balancing risk and return.
We live in a world where human interactions increasingly take place over digital networks. LNW addresses the issues raised as individuals, groups, organizations, and jurisdictions work together under new divisions of labor, responsibility, and authority. These issues are partly technological, but largely organizational and political. They have become too important and too behavioral to be delegated to technology experts alone.
We need better informed and more effective leaders -- with productive relationships between technology managers and general managers -- for problems where information management has significant leverage. These include arenas such as health care, economic development, defense, education, customer service, supply chain management, transparency and accountability, etc.
Our work in LNW depends on dialog among a diverse mix of students. Those with leadership experience often need to learn mostly about technology. Those with technology experience often need to learn mostly about leadership and organizational change. In a class where both groups are well represented, much can be learned from student-to-student interactions.
Learning in LNW also benefits from cases, readings, written assignments, supplemental technology and review sessions, and interactions with occasional classroom guests (e.g., government Chief Information Officers, leaders of various innovation initiatives, et. al.).
Goals: STM-480 seeks to help students to better understand and utilize:
1. Fundamental technologies that are reshaping social, economic, and political relationships
2. Applications of those technologies to redesign and reallocate jobs throughout the value chain
3. Leadership skills to implement technology-related change in difficult environments
4. Analytic skills to assess the risks and returns of technology on productivity, equity, legitimacy, and other concerns
5. Relationship skills to improve communications and teamwork between and among technology managers and general managers
6. Career skills to understand changing job requirements and approaches to the lifelong learning needed to keep up with these issues