Harvard Business School

Transcript

When I was running the Business Game,  at the height I had three full-time people working with me on programming as we just kind of pushed,  you know,  this new thing forward.  And we made some horrendous mistakes.  In 1969,  why,  the Business Game that we had the whole first year divided up into these 21 teams.  And the listing of the program,  which in previous generations had always been a very—students would take one look at it and say,  "This is too complicated,"  and they would go back.  And that so I,  as a matter of pride,   left it there,  and it didn't do anything.

In 1969 Susan Rogers,  who was working for me then,  called me and said,  "Warren,"  she said,  "I think you should lock up the listing.  There's a young man down here doing bad things."   I said,  "No,  no.  Not at all."   She called me and said,  "Warren,  you really—you should do something."   In my arrogance I said no.

So this chap,  Al Teller,  in the first year of timesharing terminals,  is sitting down and building a regression model,  working off the listing,  to fill in the missing coefficients that might define the marketing model.  Now on move 7,  section A,  team 8,  which was his—(thirty)  people—they suddenly soared up out of the pack,  and that they earned more money than all the other teams in the School combined.

At that moment,  Section A had a real problem,  because each section were divided into three teams.  The question was,  was the section together as a team?  Should their newfound knowledge be shared against—with the other two teams in the section?   And after some intense meetings,  we decided they were a section.  And in move 9,  teams 1,  8,  and 15 made all the money that was to be made in the business game.  The other six sections were in deep red ink.

Section A culminated this by buying a full page ad in the Harbus entitled,  "Welcome to the Real World."   In the meantime,  I had an opportunity to meet some forty faculty advisors of various other teams.  Streams of unhappy people coming through my office,  explaining that in a graded course,  they had been hit as an unfair competitive advantage.

Now all of this was in the spring while I was to come up for promotion as an Associate Professor the following fall.  And I thought my career had absolutely died.  And somewhere in that Appointments Committee,  someone was able to broaden the discussion that out on the bleeding edge we ought not to,   in fact,  immediately discourage creativity,  and there had been a lot of excitement.  So I kind of slipped through.