Harvard Business School Professor George F. F. Lombard Dead at 93
Organizational behavior pioneer and senior associate dean, he turned down banking for 41-year career at the School
BOSTON – George Francis Fabyan Lombard, a former senior associate dean and a professor of human relations at Harvard Business School (HBS) for 41 years, died peacefully at his home in Weston on Thursday, June 17. He was 93.
A pioneer of the field of study that eventually became known as organizational behavior, and a skilled dean known for his care and concern for individuals, Lombard initially was interested in pursuing a career in banking. A 1933 graduate of Harvard College and 1935 graduate of HBS, he postponed his job search for a year after receiving his MBA in order to travel around the world.
But while waiting to receive a job offer from an investment firm in 1936, Lombard was invited to spend a few minutes discussing his plans for the future with Dean Wallace B. Donham. The School had an opening for an assistant dean, said Donham, and Lombard could have it if he wanted it. “That proposal was completely unexpected,” recalled Lombard in a 1985 interview. After only one night of deliberation, he decided to forgo banking and accept Donham’s offer. He retired from the School in 1977 as a revered administrator and professor. Noted the late Lawrence E. Fouraker, dean of the School from 1970 to 1979, in a mid-1980s tribute to Lombard: “He is one of the kindest and most selfless men with whom I have ever been associated.”
For his first two years, Lombard helped advise students on their career plans. “It was interesting work, because I had to know the members of the graduating class as well as I could and be familiar with the different positions that companies were offering.”
In 1938, however, Lombard joined the ranks of those who were pioneering the study of human relations. A handful of HBS faculty members, including Philip Cabot, Lawrence Henderson, Elton Mayo, Fritz Roethlisberger, and Thomas North Whitehead, had begun to look closely at the social structures and patterns of interpersonal behavior in organizations. Many leading executives wanted to know more about this new field of knowledge, and in the latter part of the 1930s, a number of them participated in a series of weekend meetings conducted at the School by Cabot, Mayo, and Roethlisberger. Out of these contacts came a request from General Motors for a team of field researchers to examine the corporation’s executive bonus plan. Roethlisberger chose Lombard as one of four assistants for the GM project.
A year or so later, Roethlisberger and Lombard collaborated again on research at Macy’s department store in New York City. For six months, Lombard studied the social structure of the young girls dress department, observing the behavior patterns of the twenty salespeople who worked there as they interacted with customers, supervisors, and each other. Two years later, he earned his doctorate from the School, using the data he had collected at Macy’s as the basis for his dissertation, which was later published as Behavior in a Selling Group by the School’s Division of Research.
Degree in hand, Lombard was appointed an assistant professor of industrial research in 1942. He soon turned his attention toward casewriting and teaching in the special programs that were being held in the School during World War II. As an instructor in the Army Air Force’s Statistical Control School, for example, he put together a field case called the Umpteenth Fighter Squadron, which examined the organizational problems of a unit stationed at an airstrip near Boston.
“I discovered that there were two conflicting chains of command,” recalled Lombard. “One included the squadron leader, the pilots, and the maintenance crews, all of whom were responsible for keeping planes in the air continuously to protect President Roosevelt’s residence in Hyde Park, New York. The other was headed by the adjutant, who had to fill out a myriad of reports, but who found it impossible to keep track of the men and equipment in the unit. One day, in fact, I came across a private who didn’t even have an assignment. I kept a daily record of the problems and tensions I observed and then presented the material to the officers in the program, asking them how they’d handle those situations.”
Lombard also spent time during those years working with Roethlisberger on new courses he was teaching at the School, and with Mayo, who was studying the causes of absenteeism in factories in Connecticut and California. “The social sciences were no longer confined to primitive cultures or the fringes of industrial institutions,” said Lombard. “This period was the beginning of our efforts to bring our findings into the classroom and to write cases geared toward the general administrator rather than the personnel officer.”
As a teacher, Lombard was “very careful, very meticulous—painstaking, tolerant, patient, with a sense of humor,” Professor Emeritus Arthur N. Turner once observed. Those qualities, plus a sterling reputation for judgment, perspective, and balance, were well known to George P. Baker when he became Dean of the School in 1962, and so he named Lombard as Associate Dean for Educational Affairs.
In his new position, Lombard was responsible for staffing the School’s programs, hiring new faculty, organizing the work of the Appointments Committee, and administering faculty salaries. In short, he kept the faculty’s internal affairs running smoothly under both Dean Baker and Dean Fouraker until his retirement in 1977. “He epitomized the idea that life in an organization is a process,” said Abraham Zaleznik, now professor emeritus, in a 1985 interview, “and he had a special ability to connect other people with that process, no matter how divergent their points of view.”
One of Lombard’s most important tasks when he first took office was to help put a new organizational matrix into operation. “Until 1962, faculty members identified themselves only with a particular program—first or second-year MBA, or Advanced Management, for instance,” he recalled. Under Lombard’s direction, another dimension was added to the structure, based upon a professor’s area of interest in teaching and research. Under this arrangement, a chairperson was appointed for each of ten subject areas, as well as for each program. “I spent a lot of my time conferring about various issues and trying to make sure that everyone on the faculty was kept well informed about our discussions.”
Lombard also gave his full support to the Division of Research’s efforts to “stimulate new thinking in one field after another,” and he saw the importance of establishing contacts with business and management programs overseas.
Lombard played a key role in HBS’s contacts with institutions in the Philippines, India, Europe, and Central America, and received an honorary Doctorate of Business Administration from INCAE in Managua, Nicaragua, in 1977.
George Lombard was born in 1911 and grew up in Brookline, Mass. As a youngster, he attended Dr. River’s Open Air School for Boys in Weston, which later became known as the River School. At the time, the school did not have any walls and its students were completely exposed to the elements. “The children sat outdoors in the winter,” said Emily Lombard Hutcheson, one of George’s daughters, in an interview with The Boston Globe. “He learned to write with mittens in the freezing cold. Things like that shaped him into the stoic he was. He never showed pain.”
After graduating from Milton Academy, George went to Harvard College, where he majored in economics and captained the 150-pound crew team his senior year. His father’s death during George’s junior year, leaving him with property to manage, motivated him to obtain an MBA at Harvard Business School.
When he retired from HBS, Lombard held the titles of Senior Associate Dean and Louis E. Kirstein Professor of Human Relations. He continued to remain active in the affairs of the School – developing a program for liberal-arts PhDs who wanted to switch from teaching to business, assisting a committee of the University’s Board of Overseers, completing a book manuscript when its author died in 1973. In 1985, he received the School’s Distinguished Service Award.
A resident of Weston, Mass., for 66 years, Lombard was a director of the Weston Forest and Trail Association in its early years. He loved working in the woods, summering on Cape Cod (in Wings Neck, Pocasset), and sailing a slim sailboat known as a “Herreshoff 12 ½” or a “Buzzards Bay Boys Boat.” Married for 64 years to Mary Esther (Jackson), who died in 2001, he is survived by five children: Joshua Lombard of Natick MA, Esther Danielson of Pocasset, MA, Marshal (Mike) Lombard of Peterborough NH, Emily Hutcheson of Weston MA and Annabel Lombard of Fromberg MT. Daughters Rosamond (Posy) Lombard and Rachel Bucciantini predeceased him. He leaves nineteen grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.
A celebration of George Lombard's life will take place at 2 p.m. on Sunday, July 18, 2004 at the Josiah Smith Tavern, 358 Boston Post Road, Weston. In lieu of flowers, donations in his name may be made to the HBS '35 Fund, Harvard Business School, Soldiers Field Road, Boston MA 02163 or to Parmenter VNA and Wayside Hospice, 266 Cochituate Road, Wayland, MA 01778.