Harry Levinson - Profiles in Executive Education

Business Horizons, Jan-Feb, 1995 by Harper W. Moulton

After seven years of this, Levinson was invited by the late Douglas McGregor to MIT for a year, where he taught graduate students organizational diagnosis and the Sloan Fellows leadership. This was his first exposure to academic programs in organizational development, to McGregor's T-group orientation, and to the atmosphere of a nationally recognized business school an experience he found to be stimulating and highly gratifying. However, he found that much of what he had developed himself was not yet included at MIT or in anyone else's academic program. Key MIT faculty had not pursued psychoanalytic theory in sufficient depth, and although Harry was ahead of them theoretically, they were ahead in terms of group process activity. At the end of his 1961-62 academic year at MIT, he returned to Topeka to conduct seminars and devote himself to consultation and writing.

In 1968, Harry was invited to the Harvard Graduate School of Business for a four-year period as the Thomas Henry Carroll-Ford Foundation Distinguished Visiting Professor. There he was asked to help reformulate the first-year business school teaching in organizational behavior by introducing psychoanalytic theory. To accomplish this, he tried to teach some of the faculty, helping them rethink and revise cases and introducing some theoretical considerations into what previously had been open-ended case discussions in which every student's opinion was about as good as every other's. Such discussions assumed there was no conceptual knowledge, no body of experience in dealing with human behavior and motivation. Says Harry, "It was like having 80 first-year medical students determine whether a patient had a brain tumor and if so, what to do about it."

However, his efforts to teach the faculty at Harvard Business School were not particularly successful. Disappointed by the absence of critical intellectual discussion and vigorous debate to which he had become accustomed in Topeka, he felt the problem lay with him, and that his own strong position came across as arrogance. Tenured professors saw no need to learn more, and their juniors depended on them for their promotions. Although he was highly popular with the students, his lack of acceptance among the faculty also seemed to be related to his reservations about T-groups and other techniques in organizational behavior that were popular at the time.

Apart from his faculty experience, in his second year at Harvard he introduced a seminar in "Organizational Diagnosis" for second-year MBA students that he was to continue for the next 14 years. He divided the students into groups of five and arranged for each group to spend an academic year in an organization--business, religious, medical, or educational for an immersion experience. The students were introduced to the chief executive and had to introduce themselves all the way down the organizational ladder. Then they had to prepare a plan for the organizational study, conduct the study, and provide feedback on the results. Parallel to that field experience, they were introduced to psychoanalytic theory by Harry and some of his clinical colleagues, who acted as coaches. This intensive experience was described by many of the students as the best course they had taken at Harvard.