Harvard Business turns 100 amid financial meltdown

BOSTON -- The redbrick Baker Library at Harvard Business School is a shrine of U.S. capitalism, a hushed sanctuary where young managers have, for eight decades, prepared for glittering careers on Wall Street and in Fortune 500 companies.But these days, it contains reminders of how fast and how far the mighty have fallen. The collection includes old finance deal books from Lehman Brothers, the 160-year-old Wall Street investment bank that, in September, collapsed under the weight of its bad assets.Harvard Business School, 100 years old this year, has a lot to answer for in nurturing the U.S. enterprise model behind the economic crisis.This is the institution that pioneered the masters degree in business administration, the hot ticket to a successful capitalist career over the past 60 years. It produced Stan O'Neal (MBA '78), the chief executive officer who presided over the disintegration of Merrill Lynch, and Rick Wagoner (MBA '77), the CEO who has seen General Motors pushed to the brink under his watch."Tectonic plates do shift, and maybe for the better," says Jay Light, the school's dean. "I have seen two bad recessions and in the classes that graduate in these times, you get the real leaders."It has, in fact, been a pretty good crash for Harvard Business School, in the way Vietnam was a pretty good war for John McCain -- painful but heroic. For every Stan O'Neal, there is a Henry Paulson (MBA '70) fighting the good war to save the financial system, or a Jamie Dimon (MBA '82), whose JPMorgan Chase & Co. has gained as rivals have imploded. Or John Thain (MBA '79), who replaced O'Neal at Merrill Lynch, grasped the speed of deterioration, and unloaded the once mighty investment bank to Bank of America.Founded as a pioneer in teaching new-fangled professional management, Harvard Business School never really fit into the august academic setting of Harvard College in Cambridge.Its legendary dean, Wallace Donham, took it to marshland south of the Charles River, where it built a new campus in the late 1920s with the help of George Baker's millions. The school's emergence as a world-shaping institution can be traced to the post-Second World War era, when hordes of demobilized servicemen, seeking training in business and funded by the GI Bill, descended on it. Light explains the school was never entirely comfortable with the flood of students to Wall Street in recent years. HBS sees itself as a general management school, not a finance factory in the mode of some of its archrivals, he says.The Harvard degree is also a stepping stone to entrepreneurial careers. Its graduates may start out as corporate managers, consultants or investment bankers, but within 10 years of graduating, half the typical class members ends up running their own businesses. In the current conditions, they may make that transition more quickly.(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)