Harvard Business School

Transcript

But we also had a very different research methodology. It was, again, the strength of this strategy. Our research was closely related to our teaching. And there was not much disagreement among the faculty about the sort of problems we should look at. They were these unstructured, real problems. And you brought the problem back and used whatever techniques were available, as opposed to the strategy in most arts and science departments of taking the techniques and going to find problems that would yield to the disciplinary protocol. . . . .

The teaching drove the research, because you looked at the problems managers faced, and they were almost always problems that didn’t yield single, correct answers. Hence it was not a logical exercise. The reason other institutions couldn’t, for years I guess—even through the ‘60s, the School had a missionary zeal to try and get other institutions to adopt our methodology and our purposes. And they simply couldn’t. They didn’t have the resources. They couldn’t get the diversity of students. They couldn’t get the diversity of faculty. They didn’t have the money to spend on field research, which is very expensive.

And there was no way that they could do anything except be consumers of our own faculty’s research, which puts them in a dependent position. And was essentially an alternative they didn’t have.