Harvard Business School

Today, faculty members at HBS talk about having a transforming impact on their students. They talk about teaching, and learning, on multiple levels—an ambitious pedagogical goal.

So where did this notion of a transformational education come from? By the late 1920s, the School already had several of its fundamental building blocks in place. It had a new campus that had been designed to help create a professionally normative experience. It had a strong first-year curriculum taught to cohesive groups of ninety-plus students. Perhaps most importantly, it had a novel teaching methodology—the student-centered "case method"—that challenged, scared, inspired, and motivated students, and a faculty that for the most part was committed to that teaching style.

The case method was demanding of its students. A 1927 ad for a Harvard Square tobacconist made the point explicitly: "Cool under fire," the ad's headline read. "Business School Men have learned to be cool under fire," the copy continued. "They've had to—in the School [and] on the job." The ad also implied something the powerful impact that this new pedagogy had on "Business School Men": They had been changed by their educational experience.

But what exactly was this change? A preface to the 1941 student yearbook, contributed by Marketing professor Malcolm McNair, put words around the elusive concept of transformation. "For two years," McNair observed, "the Business School has tried to make you tough-minded. We have forced you to acquire knowledge by the hard route of the case method instead of the easy route of the textbook and lecture." Rather than providing students with a specific body of knowledge, wrote McNair, the School offered a means of analyzing a situation, working out a program of action, and carrying out that program.

Dean Donham once recalled an encounter he had in the late 1930s at a reunion of MBA classes from the 1920s. One alumnus startled the dean with a blunt statement: "You didn't teach us anything in the Business School."

"I will accept that," Donham replied, "but in what sense do you mean it?"

"Well," came the answer, "I studied a great number of cases with care, sought my own interpretation of them, discussed them with other members of the class, went into the classroom, where we argued them with the instructor, modified my conclusions not only on the cases but on the subject matter we were discussing. And in ten years of experience I have never met a problem on all fours with any case I studied, or reached any conclusion that was controlled by the class discussion."

"I'll accept that," Donham said again, "but what did the School do for you?"

"That is simple," replied the alumnus. "It gave me a sense of assurance that I could tackle any problem, either because I had the experience to justify handling it myself, or because I knew in what directions to turn in situations where my experience was inadequate."

In 1944, a faculty committee exploring the design of the postwar curriculum argued that the School should aim to be "an important center where men are helped to acquire or develop the technical confidence, the personal qualities, the vision, the instinctive acceptance of responsibility, and the insight into the nature of the administrative process, which characterize great administrators."

In a memo to this subcommittee, Professor Sumner Slichter tried to capture an elusive transformational quality that many thought had characterized the School's programs before the war. "Something should happen to men who come to the Business School," Slichter wrote, "which could not happen to them anywhere else in the world, and which will leave its mark on them for the rest of their lives—even though the distinctive qualities that they get from two years at the Business School may not manifest themselves (and probably should not) for ten or twenty years after their graduation."

Writing his 1953 report to Harvard's new president, Nathan Pusey, Dean Donald K. David described what he called the "challenge for the second 50 years of this School's existence": to "produce in the fullest sense professionally educated men" who are equipped to deal "as sensibly with the unknown as with the known," and are blessed with a "durable idealism." In other words, the School's transformational effect had to do with imparting judgment—even wisdom. Dean Stanley Teele elaborated on this idea in his 1956 report: "I believe that the successful administrator needs to acquire both knowledge and wisdom. Knowledge, denoting acquaintance with or clear perception of facts, is to be distinguished from wisdom, the capacity to judge soundly and deal broadly with facts. Of the two attributes I hope that this School increases more a man's wisdom."

One MBA student from the 1960s—Howard Stevenson, who subsequently went through the DBA program and joined the faculty—talked about the School's transformational intent and impact in terms of molding attitudes. But these kinds of explicit statements are relatively hard to find. For the most part, the transformational intent of the School and its faculty is submerged in the language of committees, in words like "objectives for the first year."  Equally, most professors and deans over the School's history have preferred to let the School's impact speak for itself in the accomplishments of its graduates. Reading between the lines, however, most generations of leaders at the School have been convinced of its impact on its students. Some of the best evidence lies in the achievements, and testimony, of HBS alumni. And although "transformational" is most commonly used to describe the MBA program—which, after all, is a two-year experience—some also ascribe a transformational effect to the School's executive education programs. For the most part, these programs are based on both the case method and a highly choreographed, intensive residential experience, much like the MBA experience must have been when almost all MBA students lived and ate together in the School's dormitories.

"A degree from HBS is more than just a credential," Dean Kim Clark wrote in a September 2000 message to alumni. "Education at HBS is a transforming experience that provides students with a unique set of skills and values, an enduring relationship with a vital extended community and a foundation for a lifetime of leadership."