In Depth
What makes a profession?
» A core body of knowledge
An editor makes his mark
Sometime in the spring of 1908, at his Chicago office, Arch W. Shaw received an announcement of the founding of HBS. Shaw was the president and owner of the A. W. Shaw Company, which published System magazine. (System was purchased in 1927 by McGraw-Hill, and renamed BusinessWeek.)
Shaw immediately recognized that he and the new Business School had a shared challenge: the need to uncover the principles that underlay the evolving practice of business. “I think you will understand from our conversation,” he wrote to Gay in August 1909, “how thoroughly I believe in teaching the principles of business. I also feel that there is an almost equally important field in the gathering of this concrete information and furnishing it to men actually in business for themselves, or hoping some day to be.”
Three months later, in another letter, he elaborated: “At this particular stage in the development of business it seems to me that it is the function of System, at least, to distribute as widely as possible the concrete, or as we call it, the ‘how’ information of business from which generalizations may be made later and definite principles determined.”
Shaw established a fund of $2,200 to investigate problems of marketing (which he preferred to call “distribution’). He also made a lasting mark on the School by designing and teaching the first run of the Business Policy: a required, second -year, integrative course that immediately gained popularity with the students, and — in one form or another — endured for decades.
