Taught by MPP Alumni, Dan Duckworth.
This course presents students with a set of unconventional assumptions about leadership, change, power, and institutions/organizations and invites them to internalize these assumptions through active experimentation and reflection. In other words, the objective is not to learn about leadership. It is to learn to lead. The course will draw on principles and frameworks emanating from the Ross School's Center for Positive Organizations and Harvard's Center for Public Leadership. Students will explore purpose, climate, authenticity, appreciative inquiry, positive deviance, and emergence as transformational levers of leadership in public policy, communities and organizations. More importantly, the course will invite students to experiment with these levers as individuals and as a group and to mine the ensuing data for meaningful insights. Students will emerge from the semester having clarified and emboldened their own theories of leadership.