Harvard Business School

The Harvard Business School (HBS) is a graduate school of business located inside Harvard Institution in Boston, Massachusetts. Harvard University is a private research university. It has a big full-time MBA programme, management-related PhD degrees, and various executive education programmes, and it is routinely listed among the best business schools in the world. It is the owner of Harvard Business Publishing, a company that produces a variety of business-related works, including books, essays on management and leadership, case studies, and the monthly Harvard Business Review. Additionally, it is the location of the Baker Library and the Bloomberg Center.

1908 was the year that saw the birth of the institution. It was first founded under the faculty of the humanities, but in 1910 it was granted autonomous status, and in 1913 it was designated as a distinct administrative entity. Edwin Francis Gay, a historian who lived from 1867 to 1946, was the first dean. Yogev (2001) provides an explanation of the fundamental idea:

This school of business and public administration was first envisioned as a school for diplomacy and government service, modelled after the French Ecole des Sciences Politiques. However, the institution has since shifted its focus to business and public administration. The objective was to find a school of higher education that would allow students to get a Master of Arts degree in the subject of the humanities while concentrating on business. During talks concerning the course content, one participant made the recommendation that the course could have a greater emphasis on certain areas of business, such as banking, railways, and so on. Professor Lowell predicted that the school would produce skilled public administrators whom the government would be compelled to hire, so contributing to the development of a more effective public administration. In the same way that its medical school educated physicians and its law department trained attorneys, Harvard was now preparing young people for careers in business, and it was forging a new path in the process.

The Harvard Business School is credited as being a pioneer in the creation of the case method of teaching, which was modelled after the Harvard Law School's use of this instructional strategy. Cases are often narrative accounts of actual occurrences that occurred inside organisations. Students are put in the role of managers and given challenges that they are expected to examine and make solutions for.

Since its inception, the educational institution has maintained strong ties to the business community. Within a few years of the company's inception, several successful businesspeople had graduated from the school and were employing other graduates for entry-level roles in their companies.

When it first opened its doors, the institution solely welcomed male pupils. The Training Course in Personnel Administration was the first programme of its kind to be offered to female students at Harvard University. It was established in 1937 at Radcliffe College. In 1954, HBS took over management of the programme from its predecessor institution, Radcliffe. Alumni of the one-year programme, which was known at the time as the Harvard-Radcliffe Program in Business Administration, were given the opportunity to apply to the Harvard Business School MBA programme as second-year students in 1959. In December of 1962, the faculty held a vote to decide whether or not to admit female students immediately into the MBA programme. In September of 1963, female students were the first to enrol in an MBA programme after applying for admission directly.

In the academic year 2012–2013, the management of HBS developed new initiatives and procedures with the goal of enhancing the educational experience of female students and increasing the number of female faculty members.