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01 Jun 2009

Martin V. Marshall Remembered

Topics: Competency and Skills-Experience and ExpertiseEducation-Business EducationEducation-TeachingMarketing-Marketing Communications
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MARSHALL: A key force behind OPM.

Photo by Richard Chase

HBS professor emeritus Martin V. (“Marty”) Marshall (MBA 2/’47, DCS ’53), a driving force in the development of the School’s Owner/President Management Program (OPM) for entrepreneurs, died on February 16 in Napa, California. He was 86 years old.

Marshall, who retired from the active faculty in 1993, was a marketing and advertising expert whose practice-oriented approach to teaching and course development left a lasting impact on countless Harvard MBA students and business leaders. “Marty was a terrific teacher,” said HBS professor emeritus Stephen A. Greyser, who was an MBA student of Marshall’s before becoming a longtime friend and colleague. “He would home in on the topic and not let students wriggle off their previous statements. He pursued the point by pressing them, but without ever being mean-spirited.”

Marshall, the first Henry R. Byers Professor of Business Administration, joined the HBS faculty in 1949. He produced some 200 cases and teaching notes as well as several books, including Automatic Merchandising and Advertising Management.

Although he taught in almost every educational program at the School, he was best known for his work with the Owner/President Management Program, in which he began teaching in the late 1970s, when it was known as the Smaller Company Management Program. As faculty chair, he changed the curriculum after noticing that participants no longer represented just small companies but firms that might be multimillion-dollar enterprises. He also helped devise a unique schedule spread over three years and changed the name of the program to reflect the common thread among participants — their role as both owners and managers. In addition, Marshall led several important policymaking committees and at the urging of his first wife, Rosanne Borden (HRPBA ’52), spearheaded the effort in the early 1960s to open the two-year MBA Program to women.

Martin Vivan Marshall was born on July 22, 1922, in Kansas City, Missouri. He would later say that he gained his first exposure to the basic principles of marketing while working as a stock boy at a Safeway grocery store to help pay his way through the University of Missouri. He received the School’s Distinguished Service Award in 1998, and one year later, OPM graduates honored Marshall by endowing an HBS professorship in his name. In addition to his wife, Hilda Doherty (OPM 13, 1988), Marshall is survived by a sister, three sons, two grandchildren, and many nieces and nephews. Gifts in his memory may be made to the Professor Neil H. Borden–Rosanne Borden Marshall Financial Aid Fund at HBS. Please contact Kerry Cietanno at 617-495-6889.

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