Amid Racial Reckoning, A Push To Diversify College Investment Strategies
While Steven Rogers was serving as a trustee of Williams College in the 2000s, the business school professor urged his alma mater to invest at least some of its endowment dollars with Black-owned asset managers.
Slow Progress On Race Hampers Business School Diversity Push
MBA programmes are improving access for minority groups, but considerable barriers remain.
Retired Harvard B-School Professor To Black People: Own Your Anger And Grief To Combat Brutal, Systemic Racism
Retired Harvard professor Steven Rogers departed from his usual format to focus on “the business” of helping Black people respond to the alarming number of casualties from police shootings.
Working Inside the System: Black Directors Stand up for the Future of Corporate America
The death of George Floyd, caught on camera, became a tipping point for some of the world’s largest companies, as they released a variety of statements about police brutality, racism and diversity. But if these statements are to be more than mere public relations moves, corporate America will have to address its own diversity and inclusion in the C-suite.
Black MBAs: Improving African American Representation In Business Schools
It all begins with an idea.
African Americans are starkly underrepresented in business schools, and the largest underrepresented population group among US business school candidates. In addition to dismantling barriers to higher business education, dominant stereotypes of African Americans must be challenged to ensure fairer representation.
Professor Steven Rogers, senior lecturer in business administration and expert in entrepreneurial finance at Harvard Business School (HBS), says he was struck by the dearth of black figures in case studies. According to Steven, less than 1% of the case studies published by HBS feature black business leaders. This lack of recognition inspired him to design the Black Business Leaders and Entrepreneurship initiative at HBS—a course that utilizes cases focusing exclusively on black protagonists.
Retired Harvard Business School Professor: Black Businesses, Please Take the PPP Money!
Featured in Black Enterprise Magazine, retired Harvard Business Professor Steve Rogers encourages Black business owners to apply for funds through the SBA’s Paycheck Protection Program, designed by the federal government to make forgivable loans available to small companies impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic to keep workers on payrolls.
At Harvard Business School, Diversity Remains Elusive
For seven years, Steven Rogers has been unrelenting in his push to include more diverse voices in Harvard Business School’s celebrated case studies, its primary tool for helping students understand how real-life business executives tackle crucial decisions.
But this past year, Rogers, one of a handful of black professors at the business school, faced an executive dilemma of his own: What do you do if you are frustrated by your employer’s lack of African-Americans in its faculty, leadership, student body, and featured in its curriculum?
Black Entrepreneurs in the Spotlight
Many years before Uber and Lyft, there were jitney cabs: ride-share services created by and for black Americans discriminated against by taxi companies. It was a business idea that originated in the black community, as well as an innovation in the marketplace. It’s also just one example of a successful black industry excluded from the narrative of the business world. Even at Harvard Business School, the successes of black entrepreneurs were largely invisible in business case studies. Fewer than eighty out of ten thousand business cases taught to students featured black business leaders—until Professor Steven Rogers took action.
With Obama Center Coming, Hope Seen for Black-owned Businesses
It all begins with an idea.
More African-Americans are realizing that not only is entrepreneurship the pathway toward wealth, it is the only way crime-plagued, poor communities will ever improve. It’s small businesses that are willing to give job opportunities to people who get dismissed by corporate America, said Steven Rogers, a professor at the Harvard Business School who teaches a course called Black Business Leaders and Entrepreneurs.
Our Favorite MBA Professors of 2017
It all begins with an idea.
How is this for a jaw-dropping statistic? Of the 10,000 case studies that Harvard Business School has authored, just 100 feature an African American protagonist. This 1% marker takes on even great significance when you factor in that Harvard cases represent up to 80% of the cases studied in business schools worldwide.
Steven Rogers is on a mission to change all that.
A senior lecturer of business administration who joined HBS in 2012, Rogers has created a case-based course that features African American business protagonists. In the process, he has also developed new cases like Ebony magazine, which examines whether a new leader, Linda Johnson Rice, should sell, save, or shutter a mature product. In addition, he has been lobbying other HBS faculty to include or author cases that feature African Americans.
While Rogers sees a defining issue, he remains focused on a specific end. “The reality is, we don’t have an integrated curriculum that showcases and highlights African Americans in the same way it does others,” he tells P&Q. “My desire is that in the immediate future that will be a non-issue, and that all core courses will have cases that have African-American protagonists. And the real idea will be that the need for my course goes away.”
Understanding Identity
Chances are, if you’ve taught or studied business through case studies published by Harvard Business School, you’ve been talking about white male business leaders. “Harvard has published approximately 10,000 cases, and fewer than 100 have black protagonists,” says Steven Rogers, the MBA Class of 1957 Senior Lecturer of Business Administration at the school in Boston, Massachusetts. He’s on a mission to change that.
Want to do Well? Then do Good
Steven Rogers, M.B.A. ’85, believes that those who are blessed have a responsibility to find solutions to problems, to create something that benefits society. The way to do that, he believes, can be found in entrepreneurship.
How One Harvard Professor is Sharing his Knowledge with Inner City Business Owners
ICIC’s Inner City Capital Connections program has a proven track record of success, with alumni from the program averaging 184% growth in revenue, raising $1.4 billion in debt and equity capital, and creating more than 12,000 jobs since 2005. A key aspect of this program is capacity-building executive education, allowing entrepreneurs an opportunity to receive high-quality training while running their businesses. The success of the program depends on the quality of the professors who have been recruited from leading business schools throughout the country. Of these educators, Steven Rogers is surely one of the most beloved.
New Black Entrepreneurship Course Draws Strong Interest
A new course at Harvard Business School, “Black Business Leaders and Entrepreneurship,” focuses on case studies featuring black protagonists in an effort to address a “blatant absence of inclusion” in the school’s curriculum. Steven S. Rogers, the Business School professor who started the course, said the motivation for starting the course wasn’t to discuss racial discrimination, but rather to tell the stories of successful black business executives.
Black Leadership, Front and Center
When Steven Rogers was a graduate student at Harvard Business School (HBS), he couldn’t help but notice how little he was learning about black leaders in the business world. Now a senior lecturer on entrepreneurial finance at HBS, Rogers is working to change that with the course he’s now teaching, “Black Business Leaders and Entrepreneurship.”
Harvard Business School Moves to Study More Diverse Cases
Business schools take pride in studying real life. The heart of a business education is a case study asking how a business decision worked or failed. Case studies written up at Harvard Business School are used all over the world, but here's a catch - most Harvard case studies track white business executives. From WBUR, Zeninjor Enwemeka reports on an effort to feature people of color.
HBS Prof: Case Studies Need Diversity — Now
Steven Rogers, entrepreneurial finance professor at HBS, estimates that fewer than 1% of HBS’ 10,000 or so studies feature a black executive as protagonist, or central decision-making figure, despite U.S. Census estimates that about 9% of U.S. companies are now black-owned. So he’s aiming to change that. Fed up with the uneven treatment, Rogers, who has taught at Harvard for five years, spent April to December last year co-authoring 14 new black executive-centered case studies, many of which have been taught this semester in his class Black Business Leaders and Entrepreneurship.
Harvard Business School Looks To Diversify Its Case Studies With More Black Executives
Case studies are key to business school education. They're real life examples of major business challenges. Most of these case studies have been written by Harvard Business School professors. The school has some 10,000 case studies used all over the world. And the majority of them feature white business leaders.
HBS professor Steven Rogers wants to change that — with new case studies that feature black business leaders.
Only 2 of the 300 Case Studies Read by First-Year Harvard Business School Students Include Black Executives
Less than 1 percent of the 10,000 case studies published by Harvard Business School feature black business leaders, said Steven Rogers, a former lampshade manufacturing executive who is teaching the course — even though black-owned businesses represent 9 percent of all U.S. firms.