Dear Alumni,

Photos by Neal Hamberg

In 2008, we’ll celebrate a historic milestone: the 100th anniversary of Harvard Business School’s founding. Fundamentally, we see the Centennial as a unique opportunity to highlight the many things that make HBS distinctive — including our global reach, ideas with power in practice, a remarkable campus, and an alumni community more than 70,000 strong. Equally important, it’s a chance to help set the agenda for management education and research for the next century, and for tomorrow’s business leaders and scholars.

Harvard Business School was established by a vote of the Harvard Corporation on April 8, 1908, and President Eliot’s choice for its first dean — a young Harvard economist named Edwin F. Gay — was confirmed that day. The following fall, 24 candidates arrived ready to pursue a degree new to Harvard and to the world: the Master in Business Administration. The faculty — all fifteen of them — had their work cut out: Using classrooms borrowed from Harvard College, they had to determine what to teach and how to teach it.

During the early years, we sought to discover the underlying principles of business, codify them, and then disseminate them. We were looking for the science of business. Gradually, though, it became clear that management was as much an art as a science. Becoming an effective manager meant not only mastering the facts, but also acting when not all the facts were available. It meant not only analyzing the case, but also bringing people around to your point of view. It meant thinking in the broadest possible terms about personal and corporate responsibilities.

We’ve come a long way since then. We built a remarkable campus, thanks to George F. Baker’s generosity in the 1920s and gifts from scores of philanthropic alumni thereafter. The faculty has increased from 15 to more than 200. Our entering MBA class now numbers roughly 900. Our annual operating budget has grown from $29,000 to $375 million, reflecting the School’s expanded research, teaching, and publishing mission as a global institution.

Despite these many changes, though, our essential mission remains the same. We educate leaders who make a difference in the world. We’re still looking hard for underlying principles. We’re still working at the difficult intersection of values and profits.

Planning for the Centennial began two years ago under the leadership of Senior Associate Dean John Quelch. Very early on in the planning stage, John and his team decided we should concentrate our energies on the challenges facing business and society in the century ahead, and research opportunities for our faculty. In that spirit, starting this year and continuing through 2008, we will be hosting a series of colloquia focusing on some of the most pressing issues of business practice and business education.

For its part, Baker Library is engaged in an ambitious institutional memory project that will include video interviews, dozens of video reminiscences recorded during reunions and other School events, and a variety of historical materials. Most of this rich archive will be available on a Web site that we hope will be a resource for scholars, as well as a trove of fascinating and inspirational reflections for the HBS community.

We also have been working with our HBS clubs to develop and deliver an unprecedented Global Outreach Program that will send faculty to some fifty clubs around the world. Alumni clubs play a vital role in sustaining the HBS community while also enriching their own; many sponsor important service activities, continuing a tradition of local engagement that is one of the common threads of HBS clubs, regardless of size or location. The Global Outreach Program recognizes the clubs’ good works, and at the same time brings the Centennial celebration to the broadest possible number of alumni.

Back home on the HBS campus, we have planned several special activities. Our Centennial celebration formally began on October 1 when we dedicated the new Centennial Bell hung in Baker Library’s cupola and a half-sized replica installed on Baker’s Lawn (see above). In April of next year, staff, faculty, and students will commemorate our founding with a daylong community celebration centered on a case study about HBS’s history.

And finally, the capstone event of our Centennial year is the Global Business Summit, which will be held on campus October 12–14. This promises to be an extraordinary gathering, with alumni and leading thinkers from across the globe coming here to engage in a dialogue on three important topics: leadership in the 21st century, globalization, and the evolution of market capitalism. In addition, faculty will lead discussions on a wide range of topics, ranging from health care and science-based business to private equity and the future of business education.

This is truly a remarkable time in the School’s history, and an exciting time to be part of the HBS community. The Centennial offers us all an opportunity to engage with each other, and with the ideas that continue to emerge from this distinctive institution. I hope you will join us in both looking back, and looking forward.

Best Regards,
Jay O. Light