Robert Anthony Remembered
ANTHONY: Credited with innovations in management accounting and control.
Photo by RICHARD CHASE
Robert Anthony, a member of the HBS faculty for more than forty years, died December 1, 2006, in Hanover, New Hampshire. He was 90. A renowned scholar and author, Anthony (MBA ’40, DCS ’52) is credited with innovations in management accounting and control that transformed the field into a mainstream tool for general business managers.
Anthony, the School’s Ross Graham Walker Professor of Management Controls, Emeritus, was involved in every aspect of life at HBS. In 1959, at the request of Dean Stanley Teele and in response to reports by the Carnegie and Ford Foundations that were critical of all business school curricula at the time, he chaired a committee that was charged with reviewing the School’s required curriculum. The committee work involved many presentations and often contentious faculty meetings, but eventually resulted in the addition of several new courses, including Managerial Economics and a greater emphasis on offerings in organizational behavior. Many credited Anthony’s integrity and equanimity for winning over those who were at first opposed to making changes in the status quo.
Another call to duty came during the Vietnam War, when Anthony took a leave of absence from HBS in 1965 to serve as assistant secretary of defense (comptroller) under Secretary Robert S. McNamara (MBA ’39). In addition to developing an $80 billion budget, Anthony headed a mammoth effort to create and install a new accounting and control system that for the first time made it possible to evaluate the costs of similar initiatives among the different branches of the armed forces.
“He showed that the budget proposals of the secretaries of the services — air, ground, and sea — could be analyzed in terms that the secretary of defense could accept or reject,” McNamara told the Boston Globe. “As a result, the President was in a much better position to determine what was appropriate for defense expenditures, which even at that time were huge.”
“He did what academics should do,” HBS professor Regina Herzlinger told the Globe. “He had ideas that he popularized and made available for people of all skill levels to use.”
