Forest Reinhardt

Forest L. Reinhardt is the John D. Black Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. 

Professor Reinhardt is the head of HBS’s Business, Government, and the International Economy unit.  He also serves as the faculty chair of Harvard Business School''s Asia-Pacific Research Center and the chair of the HBS Executive Education in the Asia-Pacific Region.

Professor Reinhardt currently teaches, with HBS colleagues Martha Crawford and Joe Lassiter, an MBA elective course called “Twenty-First Century Energy.”   This course analyzes the global energy system from economic and political perspectives, and explores the strategies both of incumbent firms and startups. 

Professor Reinhardt also teaches regularly in the HBS Agribusiness Seminar, and he teaches an MBA elective course called “Food and Agribusiness,” which uses case studies from all over the world to examine the ways in which people raise plants and animals and the ways in which food is transported, processed, distributed, marketed, and consumed.

Professor Reinhardt’s other recent teaching assignments have included a core course called Global Markets in the HBS Owner/President Management Program.  Drawing on microeconomics, macroeconomics, political science, and history, the course helps business leaders understand the economic and political environment in which business is conducted, and the strategic opportunities and risks to which globalization gives rise.   In addition, Professor Reinhardt has taught the required MBA courses on Strategy and on Business, Government, and the International Economy at HBS. 

Professor Reinhardt is interested in the relationships between market and nonmarket strategy, the relations between government regulation and corporate strategy, the behavior of private and public organizations that manage natural resources, and the economics of externalities and public goods. He is the author of Down to Earth: Applying Business Principles to Environmental Management, published by Harvard Business School Press. Like that book, many of his articles and papers analyze problems of environmental and natural resource management. He has written numerous classroom cases on these and related topics, used at Harvard and elsewhere in MBA curricula and in executive programs.

Professor Reinhardt serves on the Board of Tutors for the Harvard College concentration in Environmental Science and Public Policy, on the Steering Committee of the Harvard University Center for the Environment, and on the Steering Committee of the HBS-Harvard Kennedy School Joint Degree Programs.  He is Co-Chair of the Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative. 

Reinhardt received his Ph.D. in Business Economics from Harvard University in 1990. He also holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, where he was a Baker Scholar, and an A.B., cum laude, from Harvard College.

Born and raised in Montana, he lives in Belmont, Massachusetts.