Faculty & Research

Leigh Hafrey is a Senior Lecturer in Communication and Ethics at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Since 1992, Hafrey has worked in professional ethics, with a focus on ethics and management, teaching courses at Harvard Business School and MIT Sloan and consulting with professional practitioners in the United States and abroad. At MIT Sloan, he teaches regularly in the MBA, MIT-China, and Leaders for Global Operations. He also has taught in MIT’s Industrial Liaison, Management of Technology, Nanyang Fellows, Sloan Fellows in Innovation and Global Leadership, and System Design and Management programs. Together with his wife, Sandra Naddaff, Hafrey is a co-Master of Mather House, one of the 12 residential complexes in Harvard College. The Mather community brings together 400 undergraduates; 100 faculty, administrative, and alumni fellows; and dozens of advisory and other staff.

Hafrey has worked as a journalist, teacher, and consultant in international development, communication, and professional ethics. Over the past 20 years, he has taught courses in communication at Harvard Business School, Arthur D. Little’s Management Education Institute, and the MIT Sloan School of Management. In the late 1990s, Hafrey served as a core committee member of the Brandeis Seminars in Humanities and the Professions, part of the Brandeis University International Center for Ethics, Justice, and Public Life. In 1997, he was a Forum Fellow of the World Economic Forum (WEF), participating in panels on leadership and cultural diversity and moderating a seminar in ethics at the WEF Davos Annual Meeting. For more than a decade now, Hafrey has moderated the Aspen Institute’s Seminar in Leadership, Values, and the Good Society, as well as other seminars sponsored by the Institute.

A former staff editor at The New York Times Book Review, Hafrey has published book translations from French and German. His reporting, essays, reviews, and interviews have appeared in The New York Times and other American and European periodicals. He writes an ethics column for IPA’s Business Today, a quarterly magazine for small to midsize businesses, and serves on the editorial advisory board of Philosophy of Management (U.K.) and the Journal of Business Ethics Education (U.S.). His book on how people use stories to articulate ethical norms—The Story of Success: Five Steps to Mastering Ethics in Business—was published in September 2005 by Other Press. 

Hafrey holds an AB in English from Harvard College and a PhD in comparative literature from Yale University.

Leigh Hafrey is a Senior Lecturer in Communication and Ethics at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Since 1992, Hafrey has worked in professional ethics, with a focus on ethics and management, teaching courses at Harvard Business School and MIT Sloan and consulting with professional practitioners in the United States and abroad. At MIT Sloan, he teaches regularly in the MBA, MIT-China, and Leaders for Global Operations …