How the Harvard Business School Changed the Way We View Organizations

The story of the field of organizational behavior (which overlaps considerably with the origin story of Harvard Business School) and how it created the “medical model” of systems thinking—anchored in the practices of listening, observing, testing, and only then diagnosing—yields three insights valuable to MBA students, managers, and scholars working across the broad field of management. First, the social systems of organizations, their problems and solutions, are best approached by fieldwork using the techniques of listening, observing, and testing. That aspects of this approach trace to the Harvard Medical School is significant and a reason I term it the “medical model.” Second, this approach originated at HBS and still informs how best to approach a majority of the case studies taught to HBS, and indeed all, MBA students. Third, revisiting and reinvigorating this approach today is a double corrective: first, to bad scholarly habits arising from too much of the field of organizational behavior having embraced the more academic models of social sciences, behavioral economics, and economics generally; second, reminding practicing managers of the powerful tool kit the medical model still represents. A book for students, managers, and scholars, Listen, Observe, Test critically reviews the history of organizational behavior for the purpose of presenting insights and applications.