Profiles in executive education: Ken Andrews

Business Horizons, Sept-Oct, 1995 by Harper W. Moulton

This is the second in a series on executive education "gurus" of the 20th century. The first installment, featured in the January-February 1995 issue, profiled the contributions of Harry Levinson.

  "My career as a teacher, researcher, and
  consultant has been focused on the
  education of practicing executives... to
  direct their attention to the need for
  defining the purposes of their own lives
  and those of their organizations, and to
  the fact that such purposes should be
  worth pursuing in terms of profit
  outcomes and social responsibility."

-- Kenneth R. Andrews

Donald K. David Professor

Emeritus of Business Administration,

Harvard Business School

How did Ken Andrews get into the field of executive education when his early interest and subsequent doctorate was in the field of American and English literature? Born in New London, Connecticut, in 1916, he spent his early years in East Lyme, then a small village seven miles from New London. His mother taught him to read long before he entered first grade, and he would avidly peruse her magazines-McCall's, Ladies' Home Journal, Women's Home Companion--as well as his own Boy Life.

His interest in reading carried him into a New London high school. The school, he says, did little to excite his intellectual curiosity, but because he was two years younger than his classmates, it did cause some early concerns with social problems. Later, at Wesleyan University, he obtained both bachelor's and master's degrees in English, which led to some degree of frustration in that "a liberal arts education did not lead to any useful or practical skills for dealing with the real world." Believing that the only thing he could do with his education in literature was to teach it, he decided to go to the University of Illinois for a teaching assistantship, which later led to his Ph.D degree.

Andrews spent a happy four years at Illinois, until he was drafted in 1941--first into the field artillery and then into the U.S. Army Air force. He found himself welcome in the military establishment and found no deficiency in his preparation to do the "cannoneer's hop" as a gunner, or to serve as chief classification and assignment officer for the Air Force Officer Candidate School. Later, as commanding officer of the 35th Statistical Control Unit of the Air Force's Pacific headquarters, he learned a great deal about organization and management. Discharged in January 1946, he returned to Illinois--now married--and was "demoted from major to instructor."

Mark Twain and Harvard

What has Samuel Clemens--Mark Twain--to do with the Harvard Business School? Andrews' doctoral dissertation was on Twain, whose personal papers essential to that project resided in the Harvard University library. Published in 1950 by the Harvard University Press, Andrews' thesis examined the intellectual, religious, social, economic, and political climate in Twain's most productive 20 years. It chronicled the newly married Clemens' move to Hartford, Connecticut, where he fit into a highly cultivated New' England circle. Included in this circle were Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, and her sister, Isabella Beecher Hooker, eccentric feminist. Andrews wrote that Stowe, Twain's nearest neighbor, "dotty in her old age, often escaped from her two daughters (whom Twain called Hellfire and Damnation), and wielded a pair of scissors randomly in his greenhouse, which was never locked." As for the redoubtable Isabella Beecher Hooker, he wrote, she assembled the neighborhood, including the Clemenses, one New Year's Eve to await the divine intervention that would establish her as vice president of the United States, with Victoria Woodhull, a free love advocate, as president.

Work on his thesis, says Andrews, was fun scholarship for its own sake. But concentrating on the relationships among interesting people, such as Clemens, Stowe, and Hooker, as well as on the influence of their local lives and times on what they wrote, was as rewarding as it was interesting. Through his work, he discovered that society in the Clemens era was afflicted with trauma and difficulties in adjusting to a changed world--not unlike the predicament of industrial organizations after World War II. Andrews' book was influenced by his exposure to the human relations group at the Harvard Business School, to which he had a one-year appointment in 1946. One member of the group, George Lombard-- who was apparently the major influence in bringing Andrews over to HBS as a faculty member-- encouraged the idea that nostalgia, edged by traumatic and imperfect adjustment to a changed world, such as in the Clemens era, may have affected the artistic quality and emotional content of the work of the human relations group.

The business school gave Andrews time to finish his thesis, making no comment about the disparity, if any, of his work from that of the Elton Mayo-Fritz Roethlisberger scholars, who were also studying group association and establishing the importance of group membership in understanding group behavior. It was understood that he was about to put aside the prospect of an academic career in literature and join the HBS faculty.