Harvard Business School

In his 1922 report to Harvard’s president, Dean Donham argued that the profession of business needed “something like the court reporter who systematically records numerous cases for current publication.”

Law cases, Donham noted were reported in the sequence in which they occurred; it was only in retrospect, through the use of elaborate indices and digests of those cases, that legal theory was deduced and applied. Something similar was needed in the field of business. “We have, therefore, in preparation a volume intended to be the first in a series to be published under the name of ‘Harvard Business Reports.’ This series will be designed to help develop the theory of business.”

This proved not to be the “easy and inevitable” job that Donham had hoped. It was a full three years before the first volume of the Reports actually appeared, by which time the dean’s expectations for the series had diminished. Perhaps, Donham noted modestly in 1925, the Reports might be “useful in the formulation of principles in the developing profession of business.”