A Delicate Experiment: The Harvard Business School 1908–1945 by Jeffrey L. Cruikshank (review)

128 Shorter Book Reviews ( 159) General Electric, in other words, meant different things to different people, both inside and outside the firm. In Nye's view, therefore, the relationship between commercial photography and the business firm is more notable for the conflicting truths it produced than the power it sustained. Robert Cuff Department of History York University, Toronto Jeffrey L. Cruikshank. A Delicate Experiment: The Harvard Business School 1908-1945. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1987. xi + 303 pp. Illus. It would be a shame if students of American business, education and culture failed to discover this lavishly-illustrated history of the Harvard Business School's first thirty-seven years. It is a celebratory work, to be sure, and strengths, not shortcomings, are the point. Older HBS alumni will be warmed by the volume's visual and narrative evocations of earlier days. Recent graduates will be intrigued by the contrasts and continuities with a distant past. But the volume deserves a place on library shelves as well as coffee tables. This is so not only because of the interesting materials that official biographer Jeffery Cruikshank has found in the Harvard Business School Archives, and from which he quotes generously (though without citations) in the text; he has also clearly demonstrated the value of hitherto untapped HBS materials, such asthe papers of itsfirst three Deans, Edwin F. Gay, Wallace B. Donham and Donald K. David. Cruikshank also provides perceptive historical analysis. And the overall success of his enterprise suggests thegains to be had by taking the full intellectual and institutional measure of business education in the United States. America pioneered in fashioning the white-collar hierarchies of managers within capitalism , and Harvard pioneered in thinking about a graduate education for them. And the interaction continues. Hundreds of business schools have since entered the competitive educational lists-RBS conferred only one per cent of all U.S. MBA degrees in 1985, compared to fifteen percent in 1950--but Harvard retains its bellwether role as the richest and most influential. A Delicate Experiment may appear an ironic title for such a success story. But that is only because we know the outc,ome. Gay, Donham and David could not. Gay (1908-1919), who began with an operating budget of $29,000 and a skeptical business community, watched his entire staff and students disperse during World War I; many of them joined him in war work in Washington. In the meantime, he and his fifteen colleagues had to invent a field to teach as well as a method by which to teach it. In the 1920s, as applied economics became less convincing as a conceptual base, Donham (1919-1942) looked to Elton Mayo and the fields of Shorter Book Reviews 129 industrial sociology and psychology as key intellectual replacements. In the meantime, private funding was needed to erect permanent buildings, finally opened "across the river" in 1927, to get free of borrowed space from Harvard College. By 1938, cash reserves stood at $24,000, the endowment at $3 million. The Depression and Second World War forced both administration and faculty to rethink their mission. After Pearl Harbor, a variety of initiatives were needed simply to retain faculty and fill dormitories (fifty percent of operating expenses came from educational programs), and avoid another wartime shut-down. A close relationship with the military services and a burgeoning aircraft industry were the result. Whether these relationships would survive the anticipated downturn of postwar demobilization, however, where Cruikshank ends this volume, was of course impossible to predict. As the above summary suggests, institutional creativity and change are Cruikshank's central theme. He is fascinated by the School's "tradition of invention,'' and he makes a persuasive case for an institution •'willing and able to reinvent itself" (280). He gives both external and internal factors attention in organizational analysis, shows appropriate sensitivity to the market-driven features of Harvard's growth strategy, and generally satisfies his aim to make the volume both an intellectual history and a study in institution building, at least within the limits of a gorgeous display book of Harvard memorabilia. (The competition between narrative and visual display is like following a story through the ad...