The Empire Builders: Power, Money, and Ethics Inside the Harvard Business School. - book reviews

Business Horizons, July-August, 1989 by Guy Alchon

The Empire Builders: Power, Money, and Ethics Inside the Harvard Business School

In his book The Empire Builders: Power, Money, and Ethics Inside the Harvard Business School, J. Paul Mark asserts, "Those who care about the course of business scholarship in this country agree . . . that keeping Harvard Business School strong is in all our best interests" (p. 265). This is a dubious proposition, but it is the central one underlying The Empire Builders. Given this assumption, Mark (a former staffer at the Harvard Business School) has important things to say about academics as businessmen and the business of education as it is practiced at Harvard. He communicates his message through sketches of key personalities and lively anecdotes, and he also offers prescriptions for marginal change. Mark's criticism is only marginal, however, because of the assumptions of the self-importance of its subject. Mark's criticism is well-meaning and often well-aimed, but it fails to cut deeply because it is governed by a kind of reverence. Thus, what could have been a more substantial and critical study falls instead into the American rut of expose advertisement.

The book's central method is the biographic sketch, and its major concern is the wielding of money and influence. Mark is troubled by the excessively pecuniary impulse running through all aspects of HBS operations. He chastises the school for turning its vaunted case method into a money-making proposition for professors. He criticizes professors for subordinating research and teaching to the pursuit of business contacts. He questions the administration's compulsive fund raising practices. And he skewers both faculty and administration for the discrimination that keeps the institution an essentially white male preserve.

Mark's treatment of these and other problems is often revealing and amusing. To remedy them, he proposes greater efforts toward the recruitment and retention of women faculty; better oversight of the case system; limits and fuller disclosure of faculty links to outside businesses; and encouragement of a higher regard for teaching in general, and for teaching entrepreneurship in particular.

The Harvard Business School, for Mark, suffers the typical disabilities of wealth and power, especially the tendency toward ethical sloppiness. Many of his criticisms and suggestions are no doubt appropriate. But even within its own logic, his argument is occasionally confused. For example, it borrows the double-talk of George Gilder to criticize the faculty (which probably contains the most successful collection of academic hustlers anywhere) for an insufficient regard for the "essence of entrepreneurship" (p. 266).

Much more important, however, is that Mark fails to place his criticisms of individual and institutional behavior in a context sufficient to explain how and why these things have come about. His book is a historical, and it is the inattention to history that hurts it most. Even the briefest glance at the origins and history of modern business education (such as that offered by Herbert Heaton, A Scholar in Action: Edwin F. Gay, or Jeffrey L. Cruikshank, A delicate Experiment: The Harvard Business School, 1908-1945) offers ample evidence to suggest that what troubles the Harvard Business School is not about to be remedied at the level of ethics, oversight, and moral exhortation.

Collegiate business education arose early in the century in the face of much skepticism. What could universities offer that would be of any use in the business world? How could business benefit from closer ties to universities? By the 1920s, university-based schools of business had become numerous and had developeod confident answers to these and other questions. Business schools, of course, could introduce aspiring managers to the utility of the natural and social sciences, the technique of scientific management, and the broadening influences of the liberal arts. But of equal or greater importance to its proponents, business educators promised to put business management on a modern and a scientific footing, to raise it out of the mud of luck, knack, and intuition and make it into a profession. Thus credentialed, business management could make the most of a managerial revolution destined to elevate salaried managers to new prominence. The profession of management promised to sustain a new capitalism, superior to the old because of its scientized and professional stewardship. Dedicated to profit through abundance, the modern manager (so the argument ran) was in a position to do more for social welfare than almost anyone else could. And behind all of this would be the business schools, whose chief purpose and claim to legitimacy was that they trained the men who in turn helped further the functioning of a business system dedicated to growth and prosperity. Self-serving cant to some, these notions were widely held, in different ways, by such serious and sincere people as Edwin F. Gay, Henry S. Dennison, Arch Shaw, and even Thorstein Veblen, to name only a few.