Transcript

The first point about leadership is you did want to get someone from the publishing industry, who understood how to make things happen. How to get broad distribution for good ideas, how to recruit, how to manage, get feedback—do all the things that professional managers do. Historically, we had used people from inside the School. So if you happened to run a support function in executive education, the model around here was, "Well, that meant you could run some other part of Harvard Business School." And I think that works fine, as long as you're not running a large and complicated organization, and the kinds of things they do don't require tremendous, deep knowledge of an industry, and how it works.

So our model was to go out and recruit that person. We searched far and wide, and we hired Ruth McMullin, who had worked at Wiley before she came here. A graduate of the Yale School of Management. A distinguished career. She came in, in a sense, before we had all of the i's dotted and t's crossed. Meaning that the University had not actually approved our doing the kinds of things that we were going to do. She struggled somewhat with some aspects of the job, which is almost inevitable, considering the culture clash between the outside world, and what takes place even in a business school. It's different. Fundamentally different. And in the end we decided that she was not the person to take it to the next level, though she had done a huge number of things that turned out to be critical for the long-term success of the operation.

And Linda Doyle had been on those committee meetings that met in the beginning. So she had worked with me from day one, and with McArthur, on recruiting, organizing, creating a board of directors, trying to make this a very effective organization. So one of the things I had done from the beginning was I had recruited outside directors, and inside directors.

So an illustration of an inside director would be Walt Salmon. Well, Walt has more board level experience than any five people in Harvard Business School. So he brings wisdom, and deep knowledge of the School, and knowledge of what practitioners need, particularly in marketing.

I brought on board Frank Batten, from Landmark Communications. Again, an extraordinary amount of wisdom and insight into how to manage. Or Bob Halperin, who had been involved in lots of ventures, but was principally involved in creating a major international corporation, RayChem. So those were examples of people we tried to bring into the fold.

Linda played a critical role, because Linda understood Harvard Business School almost better than anyone. Understood the dean, and what he was trying to accomplish. Understood the University, and what was going on over there. And in the end is a very, very talented person. And during the period that she was on the board, she came to know a lot more about publishing, and really acquired some of the skills she would need to be effective in that job. There were also a lot of very talented people in the organization. And so when Ruth stepped down it was almost logical and inevitable that Linda would be the right person, because she had the trust of John McArthur, she had trust from the University.

And, of course, I aspired to work with Linda any time, anywhere, on any kind of situation.