Professor Nien-hê Hsieh wrote the case “Cedar Environmental: Innovation vs. Corruption” with HBS’s Middle East and North Africa Research Center to explore the “gray area” of leadership—that uncomfortable and all-too-common space where leaders face difficult trade-offs across their responsibilities and commitments. During a class discussion among all 720 first-year MBA students, they considered the protagonist’s challenges as he tried to navigate in an industry in Lebanon rife with corruption.
Nien-hê Hsieh is the Kim B. Clark Professor of Business Administration in the General Management Unit at Harvard Business School. His research and teaching aims at helping business leaders and organizations determine and deliver on their responsibilities. He also studies what democratic values require for economic policies and institutions. Professor Hsieh teaches Leadership and Corporate Accountability (LCA) to first-year MBA students and Executive Education participants, and serves as Course Head for LCA. At Harvard University, he serves as Faculty Co-Director for the Justice, Health, and Democracy Impact Initiative at the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics, a Director at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, and on the Faculty Committee for the Scholars at Risk Program.
Professor Hsieh’s research centers on the question of whether and how managers, organzations, and economic institutions ought to be guided not only by considerations of efficiency, but also by values such as freedom and fairness and respect for basic rights and democracy. He has pursued this question in a variety of contexts, including the employment relationship, the operation of multinational enterprises in developing economies, and the ownership of productive property. Professor Hsieh also studies foundational aspects of this question, examining principles for rational decision making when choices involve multiple values that appear incomparable.
Professor Hsieh's work has been published in Business Ethics Quarterly, Economics and Philosophy, The Journal of Political Philosophy, Philosophy and Public Affairs, Social Theory and Practice, Utilitas, and various other journals. He is a past president of the Society for Business Ethics.
Professor Hsieh holds a B.A. in Economics from Swarthmore College, an M.Phil. in Politics from Oxford University, and a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University. He joined the faculty from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he was an associate professor of legal studies and business ethics and served as co-director of the Wharton Ethics Program. Before joining the faculty at Wharton in 2001, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard Business School, and he has held visiting fellowships at Harvard University, Oxford University, and the Research School for Social Sciences at the Australian National University.
Professor Nien-hê Hsieh wrote the case “Cedar Environmental: Innovation vs. Corruption” with HBS’s Middle East and North Africa Research Center to explore the “gray area” of leadership—that uncomfortable and all-too-common space where leaders face difficult trade-offs across their responsibilities and commitments. During a class discussion among all 720 first-year MBA students, they considered the protagonist’s challenges as he tried to navigate in an industry in Lebanon rife with corruption.
Multinational enterprises, especially those operating in developing economies, face wide-ranging demands to help persons whose basic needs are unmet. Pharmaceutical companies, for example, are asked to provide access to life-saving therapies to patients in countries whose health-care systems do not provide for them, and apparel companies are pressured to require their suppliers to pay above-market wages to their workers.
In much of the debate, the answer to the question of whether managers have a responsibility to help meet these needs has turned on views about the nature and purpose of the for-profit corporation. To advance the conversation, Professor Hsieh addresses the question of responsibility in a manner consistent with a range of views about the corporation and without having to settle longstanding debates about such matters as shareholder primacy. The approach he takes is to start with widely accepted standards of minimally required conduct, such as a duty not to harm, and to examine what such standards require for the decisions of managers.
The employment relationship represents another significant area for managerial decision making. While much of what managers and employees owe one another depends upon mutual agreement, not all of the terms can be specified in advance. Given these conditions, what are the responsibilities of managers? Professor Hsieh pursues this question by extending the influential work of Harvard political philosopher John Rawls. Professor Hsieh concludes that on the issue of managerial discretion, Rawls’s theory of justice is far more demanding than previously recognized. In his research, Professor Hsieh explores the implications for managerial responsibility as well as for the organization of work and economic institutions.