Harvard Business School

Transcript

What the Dean and the leaders from generation to generation I think have to do is to somehow, you know, move the place from one chapter to the next, as the world around us changes, and the opportunities change.

So how I measured success was, I mean, I wrote out the letter before I started, in fact, before I'd even been asked to do the job, and outlined a whole range of things that I thought if they weren't dealt with, they were terminal. Not that we wouldn't survive as, you know, and struggle along. But, I mean, our place in life isn't to struggle along in the middle of a pack somewhere. You know, it's to try and more or less define for the rest of them what business education should be, and how to do it, with what kinds of faculty, what kinds of students, what kind of curriculum, and so on. All of which are, you know, rapidly changing.

And so I think that, you know, if you look at the couple of dozen people that were, you know, plus or minus 5 or 10 years of my age, that cohort that came through, I look at what all those people did, and I think they did a great job. I mean, we had, you know, all those things that I outlined in that critique to the President. And, you know, some of them turned out to be less important than others, and other things that I'd never even thought about popped up, like your machine in the attic. But I think that half-generation did a fantastic job. They worked well together, given how God designed people. And I think they salvaged the School, in a way. . . . .

I think that by far the most important thing that, you know, in that role that you can do, it's who you leave behind. Not just in the faculty, because this place, it's—I mean, to put on a thing like they're doing today, with several thousand people around here, or two weeks from now, this program that's been put together for the 100th anniversary—I mean, not many places could do that, even businesses. And it doesn't happen because there's 15 faculty around here, or something. There's several hundred people who really know what they're doing, and care. And it includes many who don't work here. It's, you know, there's a whole array of outside vendors that we work with in many different aspects of the work going on here who work closely with people on the inside.

And so I think that's, you know, by far, you know, to have a faculty when you leave that's relevant, and, you know, processes for attracting, and bringing along, and getting through, you know, the tenure process. And then able to, you know, shift their dinghy in different directions over the 30 or 40 years they're here after tenure, and not just grind on doing the same goddamn thing for year after year after year.

And similarly with the support organization. I think there are a lot of things that are important, but I think if that isn't okay then, you know, you've sown the seeds for what we went through in the first two decades that I was around here. Which wasn't terrible, but it wasn't really okay, either. There were a lot of these little motors running away that hadn't been unplugged, or heard. And that just happened to be a bunch of guys and women who, you know, took it on.