Faculty and Research

Joseph L. Badaracco, Jr., is the John Shad Professor of Business Ethics at Harvard Business School. He is also Senior Associate Dean and Chair of the MBA Program. Badaracco has taught courses on business ethics, strategy, and management 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. Badaracco serves on the Faculty Committee of the Harvard Center for Ethics and the Professions, and he is also the faculty chair of the Nomura School of Advanced Management in Tokyo.

In recent years, Professor Badaracco served as Housemaster at 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.

Badaracco's research focuses on business ethics, particularly on leadership and individual decision making, and he has written four books on these topics. These are Business Ethics: Roles and Responsibilities, Defining Moments: When Managers Must Choose between Right and Right, and Leading Quietly: An Unorthodox Guide to Doing the Right Thing. His most recent book, Questions of Character, was published in April, 2006. It presents the lessons for leaders suggested by works of serious literature. These books have been translated into ten languages.

Badaracco has three children and lives with his wife, Patricia O’Brien, in Brookline, Massachusetts.