Inspiring and Shaping Future Social Impact Leaders
Q&A with Brian Trelstad, New Faculty Chair of Harvard’s Advanced Leadership Initiative
Brian Trelstad is the Faculty Chair, Advanced Leadership Initiative and William Henry Bloomberg Senior Lecturer of Business Administration and Joseph L. Rice, III Faculty Fellow at Harvard Business School in the General Management Unit. He teaches an elective course on Social Entrepreneurship and Innovation, and a Short Immersive Program on Effective Strategic Philanthropy. His teaching and research focuses on innovators (and the funders who support them) who are looking to develop systemic solutions to our most pressing social and environmental problems.
He is also a partner and board member at Bridges Fund Management, a specialist sustainable and impact investor with $1 billion+ under management that invests in mission-driven businesses, real-estate projects, and outcome-based contracts in the United States and Europe. Prior to joining Bridges, Brian was the chief investment officer at Acumen, a pioneering impact investment fund that primarily focused on emerging markets.
Brian is an alumnus of Harvard College, where he received a degree in Social Studies (AB 1991). He also received an MBA from the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University and an MA in City and Regional Planning from the University of California at Berkeley. He is a Henry Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute.
In April 2023, Brian Trelstad was appointed the third Faculty Chair of Harvard University’s Advanced Leadership Initiative (ALI). Founded in 2008, ALI is the first interdisciplinary academic fellowship program created for experienced third stage leaders to help them address society’s pressing challenges through social impact strategies and projects. The ALI Fellows and their Partners in the program take classes across Harvard, and participate in a Core Curriculum, Deep Dives, leadership development and peer collaboration. There are over 635 former Fellows and Partners who make up the ALI Coalition. This September ALI welcomed its 15th cohort of Fellows back to the Harvard campus.
Soon after his appointment, Mr. Trelstad sat down with Ruth Streeter, a 2021 Advanced Leadership Initiative Fellow and former 60 Minutes Producer, to discuss his vision for ALI fifteen years after its founding, and the strategies he’s planning to address anticipated challenges and meet his goals.
Ruth Streeter: Congratulations.
Brian Trelstad: Thank you.
Streeter: Tell me about your vision for ALI. What is it?
Trelstad: The goal is to take the one-year experience and develop a program that is world class. I think we have room for improvement and ways to learn from other programs that do things somewhat differently. I’m going to steep myself in some of the founding ideas and theory of change, but from my perspective to build a program that is faithful to the original intent but meets the expectations of the Fellows and is just exceptional – that's goal number one.
Goal number two is to make a material difference in the post Fellowship trajectory of the Fellows. There are a number of folks who have gone on to do amazing things and I’d love to be able to say: “But for their year at ALI, it wouldn’t have happened, or it wouldn’t have been as high impact, or it wouldn’t have been as influential.” And so, I want us to continue to focus on how we make sure that we are bringing much greater rigor to the projects that we’re allowing for people.
I don’t feel like you have to come in with a project, but if you don’t then you should be expecting a very different pathway. If you come in undecided – with an undeclared major as it were – it will be much more of an exploratory path than trying to pursue a well-defined “project”.
But if you really want to come in with a specific idea, say community mental health, then we'll try to connect you with the Centers at Harvard that are doing that, we’ll support you with external resources, we'll connect you with Fellows and Coalition members and we'll really pressure test your thinking to make sure you leave with exit velocity that will make a difference. So, I think bringing much greater clarity to the kind of the project or pathway and then much greater support for the distinctive pathways that Fellows are on is goal number two.
And goal number three is to activate the ALI Coalition. I don't know quite what that looks like. There should be an active effort to make sure there’s support for the Coalition’s ongoing work not just to connect and socialize, but to continue to learn from, reflect on what’s working, confess to failures, reboot.
Streeter: Why did you want the job?
Trelstad: I wanted the job and I’m excited to work at ALI because my career in social innovation and impact investing and my teaching have converged and I see a huge opportunity to help accelerate and amplify the impact that Fellows can have. I think the program is obviously a pioneering program that remains transformational for those who have been through it. And I think there are yet ways for the program to bring more of Harvard to the Fellows and a more rigorous and intentional learning experience.
So, a real focus from my perspective is to take what I've learned from teaching at Harvard Business School and bring it alongside others into the Core Curriculum. There's a way to help bring some of the pathway work using the frame – Person, Problem, Pathway – into the program a bit earlier to help people figure out the right pathway.
We want to make sure that we help Fellows make more of a difference and are more effective in whatever they do after the Fellowship. I think the program really should be the first year of a lifelong learning journey, as opposed to the only year.
Streeter: You're a Senior Lecturer at the Harvard Business School, you’re a Partner and Board Member at Bridges Fund Management. How are you going to do it all?
Trelstad: To me it was important to remain committed to teaching at Harvard Business School, so I will keep a class or two here. I think it gives me credibility, the ability to still write cases and be anchored at the School matters. The role is technically half time. I think it will be more than that for the first 18 months. As of July 1st, I imagine I'm going to be investing heavily in better understanding the program, meeting Fellows, meeting Coalition members, rethinking the Curriculum a bit.
I don't think there's any dramatic overhaul that's required, but rather a bit more coherence and figuring out where I can bring my teaching into the curriculum and create a syllabus for an experience for the Fellows in the Fall and the Spring that really helps achieve the goals of the program.
I also think that if we're going to try and focus a little more on the pathways, we could have slightly fewer external presenters and spend a little bit more time in teams constructively self-managing. There also can be Fellow-led sessions.
Streeter: In my experience, the Faculty Chair is the person Fellows go to for talking, mentoring, connecting: “Hey, Brian, I'm having this issue. Can you talk me through this thing?“
Trelstad: Being at 14 Story Street for office hours, and Tuesday morning “coffees with the Director” are an important first and last line of communication and connection to the program. But I'm not sure I can coach 50 fellows through each of their projects. So, I think we need to find a way to manage people's expectations and provide support from a variety of places. There are other coaches that we can pull in who can play that role, and we should enable Fellows to tap into the Coalition a bit more easily. If there are problems or significant opportunities, I will make myself accessible, as I have since I started in April. But we need to figure out how to create more capacity of other folks who can help, who can constructively guide Fellows. And that’s one of the reasons I think the Coalition brings such a resource – that if there’s somebody who's navigating through, say, the climate space, well, then let's create a peer learning with Coalition members who are maybe two or three years ahead on their pathways to provide some virtual or in person support.
Streeter: How do you empower the Fellows, give them the resources they need, to get their projects off the ground?
Trelstad: The Core Curriculum should be the center point of helping to pressure test their thinking. And you know, an absolutely fine conclusion of the year is: “My project was a bad idea. I shouldn't pursue it. I'm passionate about education, but this wasn't going to work. And I want to find a platform where I can continue to think about these things because not all ideas are good ideas.” And so, I think we should be forthright with Fellows at different kinds of points about what it will take for their idea to work.
Failure is often the best entrepreneurial teacher. So, I think we want to pressure test Fellows’ ideas through the Core Curriculum so that they understand the viability of their ideas and point them towards opportunities to test that and get feedback on it and then figure out whether it's worth pursuing or not. And that I think is something we need to do better as part of the Core.
Streeter: How do you see connecting the Fellows into the Harvard community so that they're grounded within it?
Trelstad: I think we can use a bit of pattern recognition to point people towards the centers of activity and classes that Fellows typically audit. The team worked over the summer to build an AirTable of frequently audited classes that was a huge help as this cohort of Fellows returned to campus and sought to navigate the fall semester.
Streeter: Can I jump in for a second? I’ve been through many classes where you can’t get in to audit. They won’t take you.
Trelstad: That’s right. So, I think we should tell you: “Don’t go to that class cause they’re not going to let you in” – as opposed to raising your expectations.
Streeter: But the classes are often the pathway to connection with the faculty member.
Trelstad: That’s right. But guess what? If your project requires that you raise money from, say, the Rockefeller Foundation, from my experience it's harder to get a program officer at the Rockefeller Foundation to return your e-mail than to track down a Harvard faculty member who has office hours at the Kennedy School, and where you can just show up and knock on the door. And if you can't find your way past those gatekeepers, you're not going to be an effective change agent. I'm sympathetic – we can do more to help people avoid the doors that are locked and aren't going to open, and we can manage people's expectations more clearly. But equally, it's about personal efficacy and life is not easy. If you take a bunch of high talent folks who can't navigate Harvard, that doesn't bode well for the navigation of more complex social problems.
Streeter: Let’s talk about recruitment and admission to ALI. Who's the person who should apply and who shouldn't?
Trelstad: People who shouldn't apply are people who want to come here and get Harvard on their resume and hang out. People who should apply are serious about investing the balance of their lives and making a serious difference in multiple different pathways. If anything, I want to ramp up the rigor and make it something that is the best and hardest year of folks’ lives. It's not hard in the bad way, but hard and intellectually challenging, your head hurts after you've thought about these things. At the end of it, you've got these insights about what you want to do next and help you commit to the next thing. So, I want people who have an inkling of what they want to do and what they want to learn and are willing to be challenged to get there.
I think the cohorts that I have been exposed to since 2019 have been great. I think the size this year feels about right – about 40 to 50 Fellows. My sense is we could probably, and I think we'll have to, continue to compete for Fellows who like: “Why would I spend a winter in Cambridge when I could be in Palo Alto”.
Streeter: You do have competition now. Why should you choose Harvard and the ALI program over Stanford, or Chicago? Or Notre Dame?
Trelstad: That’s what I need to do over the next three years. I can't answer the question right now and I welcome the fact that more people are doing this. Instinctively my bias has been more about collaboration, which is, if somebody can find a better fit at Stanford, that's fantastic. I think there's more demand for these programs than there's currently capacity and I think our job is to earn the right to be the best one. I have enjoyed meeting with and speaking with the directors of the programs at Stanford, Notre Dame and the University of Chicago, and I think we have a lot to both learn from and contribute to those programs and the other 25 members of the Nexel community.
Streeter: What do you think is the most important thing for you to accomplish in the first 90 days? What's your priority?
Trelstad: Fully understand the curriculum; get to know the current Fellows; meet, speak with and learn from as many Coalition members as possible; and provide as much support to the terrific staff as I can.
Streeter: Thank you.
About the Author:
Ruth Streeter is a documentary film producer, director and writer. She was a producer at CBS News 60 Minutes, where for over 30 years she covered stories on politics, law, social justice, science, the arts and culture. Her earlier work at CBS News included producing stories for its documentary unit CBS Reports. Her work has been recognized with the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Gold Baton, the George Foster Peabody Award, twelve Emmy nominations and three Emmys, amongst countless other awards and commendations.
This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.