Transcript

In, you know, the same period of time, three- or four-month period of time, whenever it was, Gordon Donaldson came in to talk to me, and Paul Lawrence, and Jay Lorsch came in to talk to me about the same subject: that they were near completion on work they'd been doing, and nobody was interested to publish their book, which was one of the products of what they were doing. Not the only one, but one of them. And, you know, when whoever was second in that sequence—I don't remember now. I mean, this is unbelievable. Here's three of the best people we've ever had here, in every way. And whose research is in the sweet spot of what we need to do. You know, it was field-based, very well done, and connected very well with, you know, the theory that they were trying to evolve or create, you know, from these clinical observations that they'd done.

And so, you know, I don't know why I thought it, but anyway, I just said, "This is wrong. I mean, here's the best that we have at this part of what we do. It's at the core of our survival, because we can't exist in this kind of a luxurious environment if we're just repackaging other people's ideas from textbooks, and stuff like that. So here's the guts of what we are, and that has to work if we're going to make it over the, you know, over the decades."

So, you know, I start talking around. And I think Ray Corey was running the research program at that time. And, you know, and it's the 100th now, and this was around the time of the 25th. And I tried to really use that to focus on the intellectual agenda here at the School. . . .

And so I talked to people. I found out why it was we had gotten out of the book publishing business. And, you know, at least a part of it was, as I remember, that what was explained to me, that Larry had just, in the end, felt that we'd become the publisher of last resort. And that, you know, he had personally—and I would have felt the same way, for sure—found it pretty disagreeable to be dealing with some of his most senior colleagues who had spent eleven years on something that probably wasn't all that great. But the care, and feeding, and managing, you know, and the management of the senior faculty, which is also extremely important—and here we had, you know, Gordon Donaldson, one of the most careful, thoughtful, and Jay, and Paul, you know, struggling to get their stuff published, and getting people in other publishing places that would have, you know, well known professors in these fields say, "This is crap. I mean, this is the kind of stuff they do at Harvard. It's not serious." That was wrong. You know, both things were wrong.

So Larry, I think, just decided, you know, "We're the publisher of last resort for the part of the faculty that can't get their stuff published. And I'm spending too much time at it, and it's annoying everybody." So he shut it down. Then I come along, you know, ten years later, or something, probably, and I saw this other dimension of it. That is, you know, for some of our best people, they shouldn't have to run the gauntlet, and listen to a chorus of people who don't understand really what we do at our core criticizing it, and to the point of saying it isn't even relevant, or it's not "academic" work.

So that's how, you know, so then I set—as always, you know, it was like the British Parliament. I set up a Royal Commission and asked Ray Corey, and—I can't remember it but—John McGee was an outsider—I think there were three people on it. And, you know, and they came back in six months, or twelve months, or something, and said, "Look, we think you should have a publishing company. But like the Harvard Business Review, it ought to be a refereed. It oughtn't to be a negotiation in the Dean's Office. It ought to be, you know, some appropriate reference group, and we should have a professional staff that's doing it." . . .

So, I mean, he and these guys came back and said this was, you know, "We should do this as a real venture, and probably off the books. That is, not constrained by university compensation, and promotion, and all the rest of it. So, anyway, that's what we did. . . .

And, you know, and eventually then the idea came, you know, to—I don't know out of what, out of the ether that we should put all this together and, you know, and create the publishing route. And that we should try to set it up as a legally freestanding entity, so we could bring in some of the kinds of people that we have brought in ever since that, you know, from outside. That we could compete against the best employers of editors, and all the kinds of people you need to make that go, marketing it, and thinking of the, you know, what the product line ought to be, and so on.