The Business School Dean reflects on his first year

By Ken Gewertz

Gazette Staff

When Kim Bryce Clark was named Dean of Harvard Business School in September 1995, the appointment was regarded as an outstanding one. Steeped in Harvard tradition as a student and longtime faculty member, Clark also possessed the vision that made him the right choice to lead the School into the 21st century.

After receiving his bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees in economics from Harvard, Clark went on to specialize in the study of technology, productivity, product development, and operations strategy. The author of many books and articles, he is also known as a scholar who is deeply conversant with information technology and its implications for both business and academia. In his initial year, Clark has put into operation a plan to put the School on the leading edge of networked information systems technology with an internal network, an interactive course platform, extensive use of video, and other innovations. He has also focused on areas such as globalization, entrepreneurship, lifelong learning, and leadership.

In the following interview, Clark discusses some of his ideas for the School with Gazette reporter Ken Gewertz:

You studied economics at Harvard both as an undergraduate and as a graduate student. Why did you decide to make a transition to the Business School rather than go on to become an economics professor?

When I was an undergraduate I became very interested in technological change and the interaction between markets, institutions, and technology. In graduate school I became interested in human relations and in labor markets, and I wrote a thesis on the effect of unions on productivity in the cement industry. It was while doing field research for that thesis that I really became interested in management.

There were two cement plants that I studied in Texas that were about five miles apart. They were built in the same year, they had the same technology, they were the same size, they hired people out of the same labor pool, and they sold their goods into the same product market. Virtually all the determinants of productivity that I had learned about in economics were the same for these two plants. But one of the plants was about 70 percent more productive than the other. That was such a big difference that it was startling. I spent time talking to the managements of the two organizations and getting a feel for how they ran, and it was very clear that the management of these plants was very different and had had a huge impact on their performance.

Another factor was that one of my thesis advisers was John Dunlop, a Harvard faculty member who had served as Secretary of Labor, and I'd been working for him in Washington. When he came back to Harvard, he was appointed a University Professor and he located here at the Business School. Since John had been on my thesis committee, that sort of got me into the loop. And since I was very interested in management and technology, the Business School was very intriguing to me. Once I got in here, I found out it was terrific.

Your academic specialty is product development and operations research. Are there areas where you've found yourself applying insights from your research directly to the management of the Business School?

Yes, particularly in the information technology initiative, where some of the ideas have proved particularly useful, primarily something called rapid prototyping. The idea is that since you're trying to develop a new product, rather than study the thing to death, you try to figure out how to do a prototype of the product fairly early, even if the form is relatively rudimentary. Then you run it through a rapid cycle of tests so that you gain as much information as you can about how that product is likely to function, and then you feed that information back into the design and try to iterate as quickly as you can to get the product developed.

If you look at all the things we've developed in the past 12 months -- the Intranet, the course platform, the new Web-based video system, all the features on the network-- it's amazing. None of this stuff existed a year ago. We could never have done all that if we had said, let's study this for six months and then test it and see how it works, and if everything's OK, we'll put it in. We're basically in a world where we say, let's study it for the next three days and we'll get something that looks sort of reasonable and get it into people's hands and let them use it, and then we'll learn from that and keep going.

I've heard people at the Business School say they knew things had really changed the first time they got an e-mail message from the dean's office. That had never happened before, and people felt that it demonstrated your commitment to updating the School's information technology. Tell me, how is that initiative going and why is it important?

The technology initiative we launched a year ago is going very well. It's an increasingly integral part of our educational process -- an essential way to enrich our students' learning experience and to prepare them for the technological advances they will encounter in the workplace. The faculty has been absolutely fantastic, very willing to invest in learning a lot of new things and in changing how they do their daily work to an extent that I think is quite remarkable. Materials for all our courses are on our internal network -- with interactive capabilities. That changes the nature of the whole learning experience. With the Intranet, for example, faculty can poll students about a management issue before they come to class, and students can form virtual groups to talk about a case or a research project they're working on. And with an increasing number of video case materials, we can actually bring a chunk of reality into the classroom -- something that provides a much more textured experience for students than a case that appears only on paper. That extra dimension makes analysis all the more subtle and effective. We've had bumps along the way, as with any kind of major project, but I think we've worked through a lot of them. We also have a lot of new things coming down the road that are going to be more and more powerful as we continue our efforts to bring technology into the center of what goes on at this school.

Does being involved in this interactive exchange make it harder to be a faculty member, more time-consuming?

For a member of the faculty who's teaching, there is definitely a period of time when you have to learn how to manage the interactions. It can be overwhelming if you let it, there's no question about that. But I think we are learning how to manage it, and I think our students are as well. The students are actually very respectful of all faculty time, including mine. I get messages from them, but they're generally the kind of messages that I should get, concerning major issues, and it's fairly easy to direct them to the right places.

In Business Week's recent rating of business schools, Harvard was ranked number four. I know there's been some concern that Harvard has slipped from number one in recent years. Do these ratings bother you?

First of all, and I've said this in public a lot, anything that affects the reputation of the School is something I care about. And so when you have a process in which lots of people are paying lots of attention to how the School is evaluated and how it is rated, it's something I care about. On the other hand, we don't manage the School that way. The thing that drives everything we do is our sense of the mission of the School. We believe in it. We make all of our decisions within that framework. And that mission is to educate leaders and to develop general managers. The mission of our research, course development, and teaching programs is to build new ideas that address critical problems in practice and to communicate those ideas effectively. It's education in the broadest sense. It's a worldwide mission. It's not restricted to time or place. Where we have data that tell us there are issues we need to resolve, that's welcome information, and we take it and use it and address those issues. Our approach is basically to look closely at what needs to be done to drive the mission forward.

Now let me address specifically the Business Week ratings, which are the most recent. They come out every two years, and they focus on two things -- student satisfaction and recruiters' perceptions of the schools and their success in hiring graduates. The fact of the matter is that back in the early 1990s, there were some problems here with student life and the responsiveness of the administration to the students. We knew about those issues long before they were reflected in the Business Week ratings, because we talk to our students and every year we do a student survey. So we started dealing with these matters several years ago. However, since the Business Week survey includes data not only from the class of '96 but from the classes of '92 and '94, the improvements we've made in our approach to student life are not yet totally reflected in the statistics. It will take a while before that happens.

Our educational programs, our faculty, and the overall experience that students have here is unparalleled. The market tells us we're doing very well and that there's great demand on both the input and the output sides. We receive more applications than any other business school, and 88 percent of the applicants we accept enroll -- the highest yield in the country. When they are ready to enter the workforce, our students receive multiple job offers at salaries that are as high as those offered to their peers at other top-tier schools.

One thing you hear about Harvard Business School is that the competition among students is extremely intense and that the School encourages that. Is this true, and if so, is it something you support, or are you more in favor of a cooperative approach?

To answer that question, I think the first thing you need to understand is that this school is about leadership, about helping people learn how to take responsibility and take positions and make decisions. It's also a school that helps prepare people for a world that is very competitive. And so one of our principal goals is to prepare our students as well as possible for that world.

On the other hand, we recognize that no one is going to be a great leader in business who cannot work well with others, who cannot motivate people, who cannot be dependable and reliable. And so our students also need to learn how to do that. The approach we've developed for decades requires students to work in groups of approximately 80, called sections. They take all their first-year courses with the same group of people. That puts people in a position where they have to learn how to work together. Our students also spend a lot of time working in small groups, working in teams, to get things accomplished. They have to develop relationships, they have to learn how to help one another. But at the same time, because of the way in which we evaluate performance, they're also competing with one another.

There are some schools over the past few years that have decided to emphasize teamwork and cooperation as the primary focus of their programs. In addition, many of those same schools have changed their grading systems to de-emphasize individual performance and individual grades, many of them going to pass/fail grading systems. Many of the schools that have gone in this other direction have experienced a decline in the academic performance of their students.

We will not go down that road. We plan to maintain very high standards and to help our students develop the full range of skills that they're going to need in their careers. If you talk to our M.B.A. students, they'll tell you that based on much of what they had read or heard, they did not expect to find the high level of camaraderie they experience here both inside and outside the classroom. And when section mates come back to reunions 10, 20, 30 years later, they are still close. The alumni network is very strong. So the idea that this is a population of 880 lone wolves who are out to get each other is simply not true. But at the same time we expect outstanding individual academic performance, and since we educate for leadership, we encourage people to make decisions and stand up for what they believe.