Harbus

Issue date: 9/2/08 Section: News

Dean Jay Light

Welcome, and welcome back, to Harvard Business School. It's an exciting time to be here; 2008 has marked the one hundredth anniversary of the School's founding, and we have been using the occasion as an opportunity to engage the community in a dialogue around who we are, what we do, and how we should be changing in the future.

In particular, last April 8th, we held a series of events to commemorate the day when HBS officially was approved by Harvard University and our first dean, Edwin Gay, was named. Our celebration brought together students, faculty, and staff for several keynote addresses (including a great and inspiring talk by Jimmy Tran, MBA 2009, available on intranet.hbs.edu/centennial /April_8.html), lunch, panel discussions, an art exhibit, a talent show, and most important - in what I think was an historic first - a classroom session during which everyone on campus discussed the same case.

It is this case discussion and the feedback I received from it that I'd like to share with you here. But first, for the more than 900 of you who are new to HBS, I need to provide a bit of context. The case - which also is available on the centennial intranet - is titled "HBS in 2008." Perhaps not surprisingly, I am its protagonist. It is set in January 2008 and it lays out background on the School, including the various educational programs, our publishing division, faculty and staff, and our financials; our mission and strategy; and the challenges we face. All the participants in the day were asked to think about a handful of decision points, including (but by no means limited to):

-How we should approach the new January term, a roughly one-month period created by the University's move to a common calendar that goes live for the first time in January 2010, andwhether and how we might pursue classroom space abroad for executive education programs and other educational uses.

MBA students discussed the case in their sections with a faculty member of their choosing, doctoral students as a group, and faculty and staff as a group, and each room had a scribe who sent me a summary of advice and recommendations within about 10 minutes of the class's end.

I was then, and remain today, impressed by the breadth of the conversations and the thoughtfulness of the feedback I received. While each class took a quite different approach and thus tended to focus on different aspects of the School, there were a few key themes that emerged, as well as some valuable individual insights.

Continued...

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