Twenty-five years ago, our yearbook opened with a quote from John Kenneth Galbraith - esteemed professor from across the river - who said patronizingly of HBS, in that wonderfully dry way of his, "It's a good school. We should be grateful to it for training people who will shoulder the dull, tedious administrative jobs in organizations."

But I found the teaching at HBS a lot more animated and accessible than the teaching at Harvard College. The College was relentlessly academic, and few academics have the outgoing personalities of, say, a Galbraith (and few Galbraiths spent a lot of time teaching undergraduates). At the B-School, by contrast, the professors were, for the most part, a lot more fun. All but a few were great at relating to us, most of them with a wit and energy and clarity one did not find as often at Harvard College.

It was most appropriate that the setting for HBS was not Cambridge, the heart of academia, but business-like Boston, seat of august money managers and the then-hottest management consulting firm around, The Boston Consulting Group, with whom all but three of our classmates (it seemed) interviewed. To me, many of the "dull, tedious administrative jobs" were academic. What excited most of us, I think, was the prospect of doing something real. Twenty-five years later, better than half the respondents to our class survey answered "Yes" when asked, "Do you consider yourself an entrepreneur?" Tedious administrative jobs, indeed!

What strikes me in contemplating our 25th Reunion isn't so much our two years in those United NationsÐlike Aldrich classrooms, or the upcoming reunion itself, but how much has changed in the interim. We have gone from the days (begun with that awful vending-machine coffee) of pocket calculators and inflation so severe (4 percent) that President Nixon (that laissez-faire Republican) imposed wage and price controls, to a world where each of our kids has more computing power on his or her desk, and each of us on his or her lap, than all of Harvard had in its entirety (or certainly all of Harvard Business School)... a world that seems to have found a better way than price controls to tame inflation (free trade, competition, innovation, dour central bankers)... and a world with a Starbucks on almost every corner. (Now that's coffee.)

In these 25 years HBS has gone from being an acronym only a little more palatable across the river and around the world than CIA, to symbolizing much that the younger generation and people everywhere aspire to. Not to say my classmates and I have had a whole lot to do with ending the Cold War, or the near universal acceptance of market economics. Or that dear old Professor Lodge succeeded in making us all ethical, compassionate capitalists. Certainly there are some spectacular successes among us, outstanding leaders and innovators who've gained wide notice. It's also true that we've had a couple of classmates who've made the wrong kind of headlines.

But most of us, from what I can tell, fall comfortably in between: modest to significant successes; honest; doing our bit for the economy and our communities; and paying our taxes (grumbling if we're Republicans and amazed if we're Democrats that the top federal bracket is only 39.6 percent - it was 70 percent in 1972).

We have gained some weight, lost some hair, seen the world take giant leaps forward and a few steps back. Many of us would never be remotely near where we are today had we not lucked into the HBS imprimatur and network of connections (not to say we would have been circus performers or postal clerks, but still). Most of us are really, really glad we chose business school rather than law school (except those of us, like one classmate-friend of mine, who chose both and now hobnobs regularly with the world elite). And almost all of us, I imagine, regard the next 25 years with a sense of wonder, but also with a sense of profound gratitude that we have gotten to a place where we can possibly even make a (very) small difference.

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