Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration - Definition

Harvard Business School (HBS) is one of the graduate schools of Harvard University, and is one of the world's leading management schools.

Official name: Harvard University Graduate School of Business Administration: George F. Baker Foundation

The School was founded in 1908 with an initial class of 59 students. Its first location was in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In the 1920s, the class size reached 500 students. In 1927, the School moved across the Charles River to its present location in Boston - hence the custom of faculty and students of referring to the rest of Harvard University as "across the river."

The school offers a full-time MBA program, a Doctoral program and several executive education programs. Current MBA classes have a size of approximately 880 students, divided into ten sections (A-J). Each section takes classes together the first year, with the intention of forming deep social bonds. Graduation rates are approximately 99.5%. Teaching is almost exclusively done through case teaching (also referred to as the Socratic method), where the students prepare teaching cases and discuss them in class. The School owns the Harvard Business School Press, which publishes business books, teaching cases and the monthly Harvard Business Review.

Famous people

See also: Harvard University people

Current and past faculty members include:

• Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., business history
• Clayton M. Christensen, technology and general management (originator of the concept "disruptive technology")
• Rosabeth Moss Kanter, management
• Robert S. Kaplan, accounting (originator of the "balanced scorecard" concept)
• Elton Mayo
• Robert C. Merton, The Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel (1997)
• Michael E. Porter, competitive strategy
• Howard Raiffa, decision analysis
• Ed Zschau, general management

Alumni include (MBA and executive programs):

• William Anders, former NASA astronaut
• Julie Bishop, Australian politician
• Michael Bloomberg, businessman and Mayor of New York City
• Dan Bricklin, co-creator of the VisiCalc spreadsheet program
• Jon Burgstone, co-founder of SupplierMarket.com
• George W. Bush, 43rd President of the United States
• Donald J. Carty, former chairman and CEO of AMR, the parent company of American Airlines
• Chai Ling, one of the leaders of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989
• Elaine Chao, 24th U.S. Secretary of Labor
• Chris Cox
• Gurcharan Das, venture capitalist
• Albert Hamilton Gordon
• Fred Haise, former NASA astronaut
• H. John Heinz III, US Senator
• Jeffrey R Immelt, chairman and CEO of General Electric
• James Kelly, Assistant U.S. Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs
• Antony Leung, former Financial Secretary of Hong Kong SAR
• Robert S. McNamara, US Secretary of Defense, 1961 - 1968, 4th President of the World Bank 1968 - 1981
• William Proxmire
• Donald W. Riegle, Jr.
• William Roth
• Jose Antonio La Rosa, founder of Supera (http://www.supera.org)
• Jeffrey Skilling, former CEO of Enron
• Jan Stenbeck, Swedish capitalist and majority shareholder of Kinnevik AB
• Gérald Tremblay
• Meg Whitman, President and CEO of eBay
• Robert S. Winter, Venture Capitalist
• James D. Wolfensohn, 8th President of the World Bank
• Donna Dubinsky, MBA1981, Direct Report of Bill Campbell at Apple_Computer, CEO of Palm,_Inc., and Cofounder of Handspring

External links

• Official Web Site (http://www.hbs.edu)
• Getting into a Top 5 MBA Program (http://geocities.com/topmbaprograms/Top5MBA.htm) - includes Harvard Business School