Course focuses on case studies of black business leaders
When Steven Rogers was an undergraduate 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.” The course has already brought some big-name entrepreneurs to speak to Rogers’ students. “It came about to address what I feel was an unintentional exclusion of black protagonists,” Rogers says. “When I was a student, we had 700 case studies our first year, and only one of those had an African-American protagonist.” Since returning to teach, Rogers has combed case studies and found blacks were represented in about 70 cases out of 10,000. “So now it’s 30 years since I was a student, and the situation is basically the same. I don’t feel it was an act of...