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Training Leaders to Win Wars and Forge Peace: Lessons from History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 February 2021

Peter Tufano
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Abstract

Leaders of business schools and other educational institutions have enjoyed decades of stability. Today, we confront a set of systemic global challenges, including a pandemic, severe economic weakness, heightened inequality, racial injustice, and a climate emergency. Taken together, these challenges redefine the environment in which we operate—and offer us an opportunity to reimagine our organizations. We can learn about how to deal with this level of upheaval by studying how leading U.S. business schools responded to World War II. All shrank as students and faculty were drafted, most innovated in fairly traditional ways while still maintaining existing activities alongside of war-time innovations, and some pushed forward long-standing institutional change. One school choose a different path, shutting all peacetime programs as it fully committed not only to helping win a global war but, just as importantly, to forging a lasting peace—the long-term economic prosperity that followed the war. The lessons we can draw from academic leaders from nearly eighty years ago are apt today.

Type
Perspectives
Information
Business History Review , Volume 94 , Issue 4 , Winter 2020 , pp. 807 - 833
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 2021

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Footnotes

I acknowledge the helpful comments of Colin Mayer (Dean, University of Oxford's Saïd Business School, 2006–2011), Nitin Nohria (Dean, Harvard Business School, 2010–2020), Jordi Canals (Dean, IESE, 2001–2016), Robert Bruner (Dean, University of Virginia's Darden School of Business, 2005–2015), Andrew Pettigrew (Dean, University of Bath's School of Management 2003–2008), Ann Harrison (Dean, Berkeley Haas, 2019–present), Gay Haskins, Adrien Jean-Guy Passant, Sandra Epstein, Geoff Jones, and especially Jeffrey Cruikshank.

References

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5 Other early American business schools include those at Northwestern University (School of Commerce in 1908, now Kellogg); Harvard Business School (1908); MIT (originally Engineering Administration in 1914, now Sloan); Babson College (1919); Indiana University (School of Commerce and Finance in 1920, now Kelley); and Stanford Graduate School of Business (1925). The U.K. business school sector and many of the modern elite European business schools were postwar innovations: for example, Insead (1957), IESE (1958), London Business School (1964), Cambridge Judge Business School (1991), and Saïd Business School–Oxford University (1996).

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