Harvard Business School

Writing in his 1953 dean’s report, Donald K. David gave business schools—and business—a mixed review:

“Business, though it has changed enormously since 1917, is not yet a profession. Concepts of professional responsibility are not yet wholly worked out—to say nothing of being in universal practice. Yet we have made progress. We have expanded and strengthened the faculty. We are able to choose very well-qualified students from a number of applicants too large to accept. Through our collection of cases we have gathered from thousands of businesses the clinical data upon which new knowledge and improved practice depend. We have unified the teaching of marketing, finance, accounting, and production with the concept of administration and have entered into new experiments in teaching ‘control’ (that is, serving management’s administrative needs for quantitative information), in teaching human relations and the responsibilities of business to society. We have seen that leadership in getting the world’s work done by, with, and through the cooperation of people is a very high calling…

“We have acquired some understanding of these things and we have gathered new strength. It is good that this is so. For what still remains to be done exceeds what has been done.”