Joseph L. Badaracco Jr.

Joseph L. Badaracco Jr.

John Shad Professor of Business Ethics, Harvard Business School
Joseph L. Badaracco Jr.

Professor Badaracco is a member of the Harvard Business School's General Management Area and has taught courses on strategy, general management, business-government relations, and business ethics in the School's MBA and executive programs.

Badaracco is a graduate of St. Louis University, Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes scholar, and Harvard Business School, where he earned an MBA and a DBA. In recent years, Professor Badaracco served as Chair of the MBA Program and as Housemaster of Currier House in Harvard College. He has also been chairman of the Harvard University Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility and has served on the boards of two public companies.

Badaracco has taught in executive programs in the United States, Japan, and many other countries and has spoken to a wide variety of organizations on issues of leadership, values, and ethics. He is also the faculty chair of the Nomura School of Advanced Management in Tokyo.

Badaracco's current research focuses on what counts as sound reflection for busy men and women who have serious responsibilities and face hard, practical problems. He has written several books on leadership, decision-making, and responsibility. These include Defining Moments: When Managers Must Choose between Right and Right, Leading Quietly: An Unorthodox Guide to Doing the Right Thing, Questions of Character, and The Good Struggle: Responsible Leadership in an Unforgiving World. These books have been translated into ten languages.

Professor Badaracco was a Senior Scholar in Ethics in 1989-90, and was the first tenured faculty member in ethics at the Business School. His efforts to integrate ethics teaching into the curriculum contributed in no small way to the establishment, in 2004, of the first required, full-length ethics course in the School's history. "Leadership and Corporate Accountability" focuses on the complex responsibilities facing business leaders today. Badaracco served on the Center's Faculty Committee from 1987 to 2014.

 

Current Role

Senior Scholar