HBS Aids Tsunami Victims

While many in the business world are accustomed to the grind of a lengthy work week in the office, few have devoted 18-hour days to disaster relief and recovery efforts in the field.

But, in January, Daniel F. Curran, who is the director of the Humanitarian Leadership Program at Harvard Business School (HBS), left Cambridge to work on the front lines of tsunami relief efforts in Indonesia.

Curran worked alongside several nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to devise recovery strategies for more than 20 villages in Banda Aceh—the closest inhabited land to the epicenter of the 9.0-magnitude earthquake that triggered the devastating wave.

According to Curran, he set out for Indonesia with two objectives in mind.

“One was to be involved in ground-level management,” which he had not done in several years, he said. “The second was to work on coordinating mechanisms for NGOs on the ground.”

During his stay in Banda Aceh, he advocated what he terms a “strategy of emergence”—a policy that allows central planning of major projects but leaves most recovery efforts to be managed at the local level.

“The ‘blueprint’ plan...is somewhat impeding recovery,” he said, critiquing the prevailing plan for a centralized rebuilding response.

“At the village level, people are steps ahead of us,” he added. “We need to align ourselves with the strengths and motivations for the people rather than align ourselves with this big plan.”

Curran, who returned to the U.S. at the end of last month, said that he had implemented this emergent strategy in a few villages and intends to undertake an evaluation of its success. He is optimistic about the results.

“We found the people there very resourceful,” he said.

Herman B. Leonard, co-chair of the HBS Social Enterprise Intiative, said that he, Curran, and others saw the disaster as a learning opportunity for the organizations that deliver aid to regions in need of relief.

“We’re now in the process of trying to find what kind of lessons we can learn so we can be better prepared the next time around,” said Leonard, who is also a professor of business administration at HBS and the Baker Professor of Public Sector Management at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

“This is a challenge that we have as a group of organizations—to ask what the next stage is and how you deal with that,” he added.

Curran worked on behalf of the Humanitarian Leadership Program, which is a three-year executive education program developed in 2002 by the Social Enterprise Initiative at HBS, and Mercy Corps International, an international organization that provides humanitarian aid to developing regions.

Director-at-Large of Mercy Corps Paul Dudley Hart offered praise for Curran’s efforts and expertise.

“He hit the ground with some extraordinary technical and administrative skills and with a good idea of what we wanted to accomplish, while leveraging the efforts of local responses,” Hart said.

—Staff writer Daniel J. T. Schuker can be reached at dschuker@fas.harvard.edu.