How an African History Scholar Became a Modern Righter of Wrongs
Recently, a first-year MBA student at Harvard Business School was overheard gushing to a friend about a professor’s deep knowledge of Africa’s past.
He was talking about Caroline M. Elkins, a visiting professor at HBS who teaches in the School’s FIELD (Field Immersion Experiences for Leadership Development) global immersion course, which sends groups of students all over the world to get first-hand experience doing business in an unfamiliar location. This past May, Elkins and her students traveled to Cape Town, South Africa, where they engaged with 10 global partners on a dozen different design projects.
A renowned scholar of colonial-era African history, she isn’t the most obvious candidate for teaching modern business lessons to future executives. But Elkins, who has spent years conducting intensive field research in rural Kenya and other parts of the former British Empire, argues that there are clear parallels between academic knowledge and business intelligence.
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