“Down and out” in D.C.: How Georgetown M.B.A. students learn about leadership through service to others

This article describes a community service project in which M.B.A. students learn about and experience directly the dynamics of leadership and power. The purposes of this project are to help students better understand the social reality of powerlessness, and how they, through their political activism and influence management skills, can improve the situations and lives of powerless people in the local community. In so doing, students begin to see the connection between political action and moral ends, the fundamental learning objective of this project.Wisdom is knowing what to do next. Virtue is doing it.(David Starr Jordan) Robert J. Bies is Associate Professor Management in the School of Business at Georgetown University. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University. His research interests include leadership and power, the delivery of bad news, the litigation mentality, and organizational justice. He edited (with S. Sitkin) the book, The Legalistic Organization (Sage Publications, 1993).