Spring Break
The "Harvard MBA Indicator" for the Next 100 Years
Brian Dutt (OE), Viewpoints Editor
Issue date: 10/20/08 Section: News
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I recently did a Google on HBS and came across something called the Harvard MBA Indicator - a stock market indicator that tells investors whether to buy or sell on the stock market based on the percentage of HBS graduates that accept "market sensitive jobs" (e.g., banking, private equity). The idea is that if over 30% of Harvard MBAs take jobs in finance, then the market is oversaturated and soon to collapse. According to Career Services, 44% and 45% of the classes of 2007 and 2008, respectively, went into Financial Services. Last I checked the markets are now doing bad things.
But I digress. In fact, not one of the guests at our Business Summit this weekend mentioned the HBS Indicator and it surely is not an academically sanctioned metric, yet it raises questions. If the decisions we make as HBS graduates are so intricately tied to the world markets, what else might we be tied to? More importantly, as we celebrate our 100 year anniversary, to what do we need to begin to tie ourselves over the next 100 years?
In 1908, when HBS was formed, a business school was not a novel idea and many thought probably not a good idea either. The country was in the midst of a recession, and there was real uncertainty at Harvard about the future. The University had suspended work on the stadium, and another professional school had just been closed. As Dean Light explained in his address, HBS was birthed as a "delicate experiment" - a compromise forged between University magnates who saw leadership training as the future and those who thought it was "foolhardy" to think that business school could be good for anything more than teaching "your slower son to learn accounting or a little inventory control."
But HBS was something different than the business schools of the time - HBS was to be a leader factory. It was surely innovative, but as Dean Light explained, leadership amongst other things entails: entrepreneurial vision, sense of opportunity, communication skills, integrity, and the courage to act. He asked, "how do you teach that?" In the 1920s, the HBS answer was the case method, which created an environment that was about "learning and not teaching." We got a new campus on a swamp across the Charles from the pantheon of traditional academia, and the HBS that we know today was born. We have surely come along way from an institution of privileged white men in dark suits.
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