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Stories
Ray A. Goldberg (MBA '50)
In June, the School conferred its highest honors, the Distinguished Service Award and the Alumni Achievement Award, on four professors emeriti and five alumni, respectively. This is a profile of a Distinguished Service honoree.
Ray Goldberg was a young HBS lecturer in 1957 when he and a colleague at the School, John H. Davis, coined the term "agribusiness." The two men wanted a word to describe the complex value-added chain that begins with a farmer's purchase of livestock or seed and ends with a product ready for the consumer's table. "Agribusiness" has since become part of the vernacular, while for those in the industry, it is virtually synonymous with Goldberg himself. Recognized as the father of research and scholarship in the field, he is the author, coauthor, or editor of 23 books, more than 100 articles, and some 1,000 cases on the subject. He has advised and consulted to companies and countries worldwide and, before retiring in 1997, had taught some seven thousand Harvard MBA students and ten thousand Executive Education participants.
Most recently, Goldberg has focused on the impact that advances in genetics may have on the agribusiness system. "All industries that deal with living things or organic compounds will have a common language and, in turn, a common business," he asserts in "Transforming Life, Transforming Business: The Life-Science Revolution," a McKinsey Award-winning article he coauthored in the March-April 2000 issue of the Harvard Business Review. "As distinctions between food and medicine fade, we will see a proliferation of crop-based drugs, or 'agriceuticals.' " The article notes that animals are also being turned into drug-manufacturing entities, and that bioengineering may some day produce animals whose milk, for example, will contain antibodies effective in fighting cancer.
It all seems far removed from Depression-era Fargo, North Dakota, where Goldberg grew up and where, at age 10, he began working in his father's small hay, feed, and grain business. He later went east as a Harvard College student and then to HBS, to prepare himself for running the family business. With MBA in hand, however, Goldberg put off his return home in order to attend the University of Minnesota, where he completed a Ph.D. in agricultural economics in just two years.
From 1952 to 1955, Goldberg oversaw the family's operations in Fargo before accepting an invitation to join the HBS faculty. He taught the School's first agribusiness course, which from the outset, Goldberg recalls, was intended to take "an integrated approach to studying all aspects of this complex sector of the world economy."
That sector has grown even more complex today. "The genetic research revolution is changing our global economy and society more dramatically than any other single event in the history of humankind," Goldberg observes. "On the other hand, we have a worldwide agricultural economic depression and a mistrust of the science by some consumers." Amid all this turmoil, Goldberg remains as focused and busy as ever. He currently chairs a National Research Council subcommittee planning the direction of the U.S. government's future agricultural research, has been invited to lead food-policy task forces at home and abroad, and heads an agribusiness seminar at HBS and a course at the Kennedy School. "I can't tell you," he says with a smile, "how much I still enjoy going to work every day."
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