Transcript

Somehow, beyond the United States was kind of not of any great importance when I became a student in 1940. We had very few foreign students. They were a true oddity, almost. I might also add we had no women. There was in my class, as a student, we had six hundred in my class. There was one black, and no women. And, obviously, there were no women on the faculty who did any teaching.

But at the initiation of Harry Hanson, who I mentioned earlier—Harry really, to me, was the instigator, the creator of an interest, or the idea that really there was something going on beyond the borders of the United States that was important. And I don't think Harry has ever had the benefit of the respect, and the admiration, and the praise that he deserved for really opening up the fact that this outside world was important.

Now I don't know that Harry had anything to do with the Panama effort. That was, I think, a creation, in part—although my memory is pretty vague about who was in charge, so to speak, of the initiative—But I think George Lodge was probably a major promoter of this. And, of course, there were the seminars we ran down there were for the Pan-American "common market" countries. There were six, as I recall. And we ran these seminars up at a public school in Boquete up in Panama, which is up in the mountain country, up in the coffee country. And George and I were up there alone for some time, teaching together, and I got to know him very well. And I think George was really instrumental. And, of course, all the way along, as the years went along, George was a great leader in the whole Central American effort.

The other overseas effort that I got into briefly—again, in a kind of a total naiveté—is that Harry Hanson, as part of his initiative, had had initially some contacts with the Indians. Not American Indians, but the Indians. And at a very, very early stage—I've forgotten. 1962. Yes, that's it, 1962. Harry Hanson put together five people to go to India and develop a relationship there, as best we could. . . . .

And the five of us went to India, with our wives, and visited with all the leading industrialists there. I can remember being in the offices of Tata, which in 2008 you see in the news is a great leading industrial enterprise in India. But we visited all the offices there of these companies, and talked with people about the idea that the Harvard Business School was interested and willing to participate in the development of the Indian Institute of Management, which was kind of a carbon copy of the Harvard Business School.

There were five groups that were going to undertake this operation, that did undertake it. If I remember the five, it's the Ford Foundation, the Harvard Business School -- well, the Harvard Business School was going to provide the academic input. The Ford Foundation was providing the money for whatever was necessary to develop this. The government of Gujerat, which is one of the states of India. The federal government of India, and the Indian textile industry, which was located in Ahmedabad, and led by a group of very wealthy industrialists there. And these five groups were to get together and try to begin the development of this Institute of Management. We did go there. We spent about two months, I guess, maybe a little less than that, and visited all these people, and tried to develop with them a relationship, and tell them about what we thought they needed to do. I remember by that time they had already gone so far as to acquire a very large piece of land where the institute was to be built. I haven't been back since, but I assume that that is where whatever has been constructed is now located.