Harvard Business School (HBS) is one of the graduate schools of Harvard University.
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. 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.
Current and past faculty members include:
- Alfred D. Chandler, Jr, business history
- Rosabeth Moss Kanter, management
- Robert S. Kaplan, accounting
- 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
- William Anders, former NASA astronaut
- Michael Bloomberg, businessman and Mayor of New York City
- Dan Bricklin, co-creator of the VisiCalc spreadsheet program
- George W. Bush, 43rd President of the United States
- Chai Ling, one of the leaders of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989
- Elaine Chao, 24th U.S Secretary of Labor
- Gurcharan Das, venture capitalist
- Antony Leung, former Financial Secretary of Hong Kong SAR
- Robert S. McNamara, 4th President of the World Bank
- James D. Wolfensohn, 8th President of the World Bank
Harvard is considered a top five business school in the United States.