Walter A. Friedman is Director of the Business History Initiative. He also edits Business History Review and is a Research Fellow. He specializes in business, labor, and economic history. His book, Birth of a Salesman: The Transformation of Selling in America (Harvard, 2004), traced the history of selling from the days of peddlers and traveling drummers to the development of modern, professional sales forces. He is currently writing a history of economic forecasting agencies in the United States. He was formerly a Newcomen Post-Doctoral Fellow in Business History and a Trustee of the Business History Conference.
Featured Work
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Birth of a Salesman: The Transformation of Selling in America
written by Walter Friedman, Harvard University Press
 Walter Friedman chronicles the remarkable metamorphosis of the American salesman from itinerant amateur to trained expert.
From the mid-nineteenth century to the eve of World War II, the development of sales management transformed an economy populated by peddlers and canvassers to one driven by professional salesmen and executives.
Publications
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Chapter
| Handbook of Leadership Theory and Practice
| 2010
Leadership and History
Walter A. Friedman
Historians have written a lot about business leaders, especially successful ones. In fact, rags-to-riches stories have come to embody the philosophy of America itself, yet the term "business leadership" was rarely used until the early twentieth century. This chapter looks at historians who have studied the functional role of leadership and have aligned it with the early twentieth-century economist Joseph Schumpeter's definition of entrepreneurship: a creative-destructive process carried out both by individual agents and by those working in firms. (It was Schumpeter who famously described the entrepreneur as a "rogue elephant" who has the courage and chutzpah to overturn the existing order.) The author focuses on the work done at Harvard's Research Center in Entrepreneurial History--in existence only from 1948-1958, yet home to some of the most prominent scholars in sociology, economics, and history. He reviews the research of two historians, Fritz Redlich and Alfred Chandler, who use history to illuminate the phenomenon of leadership, particularly the concept of leadership as a "disruptive art."
Keywords: Entrepreneurship;
History;
Leadership;
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Working Paper
| HBS Working Paper Series
| 2007
The Seer of Wellesley Hills: Roger Babson and the Babson Statistical Organization
Walter A. Friedman
Roger Babson was a pioneer of the business-forecasting industry in the United States in the early twentieth century. He built the largest private economic forecasting agency in the period and published a great range of economic statistics in his weekly newsletters. As a forecaster, he was best known for advising investors in the month prior to October 1929 that a “crash” was coming that “may be terrific.” Most academics, and many businessmen, ridiculed Babson’s forecasting methods, which were informed by his belief, based on his reading of Isaac Newton, that economic “actions and reactions” (or depressions and expansions) would always be equal. But Babson was able to gain a following among investors who thought he was either wise or lucky. His blend of new statistical methods and old common-sense reasoning helped him profit as the forecasting industry first developed.
Keywords: Forecasting and Prediction;
Economics;
Business History;
Newsletters;
Personal Development and Career;
United States;
Citation: Friedman, Walter A. "The Seer of Wellesley Hills: Roger Babson and the Babson Statistical Organization." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 08–036, November 2007.
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Working Paper
| HBS Working Paper Series
| 2007
Irving Fisher, Economic Forecasting, and the Myth of the Business Cycle
Walter A. Friedman
A premier economist of the twentieth century and a founder of neoclassical thought, Irving Fisher was also an active participant in the field of economic forecasting. Fisher made theoretical contributions to the understanding of economic fluctuations, popularized the use of index numbers, and wrote frequently on the importance of future expectations to businesspeople. He also published forecasts through syndicated newspaper columns and made public pronouncements on the future of the economy—including a notorious statement on the eve of the October 1929 stock-market crash that optimistically predicted that a new high “plateau” for stock prices had been reached. Despite Fisher’s poor prediction on that occasion, he played a neglected, but significant role in the growth of the forecasting industry and in the rise of a class of early business analysts.
Keywords: Forecasting and Prediction;
Economics;
Business Cycles;
Business History;
Newspapers;
Personal Development and Career;
Citation: Friedman, Walter A. "Irving Fisher, Economic Forecasting, and the Myth of the Business Cycle." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 08–037, November 2007.
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Working Paper
| HBS Working Paper Series
| 2007
The Rise of Business Forecasting Agencies in the United States
Walter A. Friedman
Citation: Friedman, Walter A. "The Rise of Business Forecasting Agencies in the United States." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 07–045, January 2007.
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Working Paper
| HBS Working Paper Series
| 2007
Warren Persons, the Harvard Economic Service, and the Problems of Forecasting
Walter A. Friedman
Citation: Friedman, Walter A. "Warren Persons, the Harvard Economic Service, and the Problems of Forecasting." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 07–044, January 2007.
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Working Paper
| HBS Working Paper Series
| 1998
The Tactics of Traveling Salesmen: Using Geniality to Master the Marketplace
Walter Friedman
Citation: Friedman, Walter. "The Tactics of Traveling Salesmen: Using Geniality to Master the Marketplace." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 99–016, August 1998.
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Working Paper
| HBS Working Paper Series
| 1998
The Efficient Pyramid: John H. Patterson and the Sales and Competition Strategy of the National Cash Register Company, 1884-1922
Walter Friedman
Citation: Friedman, Walter. "The Efficient Pyramid: John H. Patterson and the Sales and Competition Strategy of the National Cash Register Company, 1884-1922." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 99–015, August 1998.
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Working Paper
| HBS Working Paper Series
| 1998
The Visible Man: An Historiographical Investigation of Quantitative Studies of American Business Leadership
Walter Friedman and Richard S. Tedlow
Citation: Friedman, Walter, and Richard S. Tedlow. "The Visible Man: An Historiographical Investigation of Quantitative Studies of American Business Leadership." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 98–101, May 1998.
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Case
| HBS Case Collection
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2009
(Revised from original 2008 version)
Forecasting the Great Depression
Walter A. Friedman
What is proper role of professional economic forecasting in financial decision making? The case presents excerpts from three leading economic forecasters on the eve of, and just after, the stock market crash of October 1929. The first set of excerpts is from Roger Babson, an entrepreneur from Wellesley, Massachusetts, who gained considerable fame for correctly predicting the market downturn on the basis of his own forecasting device, the "Babsonchart." The second set is from the staff of the Harvard Economic Society, an international group of illustrious economists and statisticians. To create its forecasts, the Harvard Economic Society developed a model that traced economic activity in three areas: speculation, business, and money. The Harvard group had great success when they introduced their model in the early 1920s, but failed to predict the stock market crash in 1929. The third set of excerpts is from Irving Fisher, the premier monetary economist of his day and one of the most respected American economists of all time. Although the crash caught Fisher completely by surprise, he remained a major figure in the forecasting field in the 1930s. The case also includes passages from University of Chicago Professor Garfield Cox's effort, in 1930, to assess the accuracy of forecasts made throughout the 1920s.
Keywords: History;
Mathematical Methods;
Personal Development and Career;
Forecasting and Prediction;
Financial Crisis;
Research Summary
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Research Summary
Business History
by
Walter A. Friedman
Walter Friedman serves as co-editor of Business History Review. He has a special interest in the history of marketing and personal selling, and is author of Birth of a Salesman: The Transformation of Selling in America (Harvard, 2004). He is also interested in the history of economic thought and his most recent project is to trace the development of economic forecasting theories from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. He has recently published in the journal Business History (UK) and in Harvard Magazine.
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