How to be an Effective Leader

He looked content. He was not bothered that while everyone around him was feasting on entrees, his plate was filled with appetizers. Not many around the lunch table noticed either — except two individuals.

The person in this scene is a colleague, and the two individuals are the leaders of an Aspen Institute Fellowship program that I am undertaking right now. It did not take the leaders of this program more than a few minutes to realize that my colleague was a vegetarian, and the items on the buffet table were mostly non-vegetarian....

The Case for Kindness as a Skill.

"Can you make sure they are nice," she said, with a nervous laughter.

I was surprised to hear this – working in a highly competitive and technical field, one does not get to hear much about how important virtues such as kindness can be. But I was intrigued. Recently, I moved to a new position that entailed working with senior leadership to recruit new talent for our ever-growing research team – and I had developed a voracious appetite to learn all I could about how to assemble an efficient and productive team.

On further probing, she mentioned how while working at...

Strangers at the bedside: Importance of self-care in medicine.

While the weather outside Brigham and Women’s Hospital is always changing; the climate inside the hospital remains the same. Every morning when I enter the main lobby of the hospital through the 75 Francis St. entrance, I am greeted by a trove of amazing individuals, who, in their capacity – as a nurse, a receptionist, a phlebotomist or a physician – are working tirelessly to improve the health status of a stranger. Every beloved patient at one point is a stranger to the clinical team – it is through the rituals of patient...

Junaid Nabi, MD, MPH

Senior Researcher, Health Care Strategy, Harvard Business School

Thought Leadership