John Van Slyke
I am a graduate (Baker Scholar) of Harvard Business School Class of 1970. As it happened, Gene Carter and his wife, Rita Rodriguez, were teaching finance in the MBA program during my years as a student. Gene and Rita were highly rated by students and well respected by other faculty. From Harvard, Gene moved down the Charles River to teach at the Sloan School of Management at MIT.
In 1982, I received an invitation from Howard Stevenson to return to Harvard Business School as a Senior Lecturer to help Howard establish the modern Entrepreneurial Management Department in the MBA Program. I served on the faculty for five years before returning to my own businesses.
The opportunity Howard presented was irresistible. After graduating in 1970, my goal became putting something of value back into an institution and university that had been fundamentally important in my life. In addition, entrepreneurship and new business formation is fundamentally important to the health of the U.S. economy.
The specific opportunity was to become one of four founders of the modern Entrepreneurial Management (EM) Department. The original group included Howard Stevenson, Bill Sahlman, Irv Grousbeck (now at Stanford GSB) and myself. Our case writer was one of my students in my first term teaching. I taught several EM courses during the five years that I was on the faculty. One of these was a course that I created from whole cloth, the Seminar on Starting New Ventures and Field Studies in EM (SNV/FSEM).
For those who are not aware, classroom teaching at Harvard Business School uses discussion method teaching. A classroom instructor’s job is to facilitate discussion by students of a fact set, called a case. Instructors use very little air-time. The idea is to help students learn from one another. Not an easy thing to do.
HBS classroom, arranged so that all 102 students had unimpeded views of each other. Swiveling chairs enabled them to turn and work in small groups. Seeing every student, instructors were able to encourage more participation, which counted for 80% of students’ grades.
Part of the syllabus of SNV/FSEM was the first course element in graduate teaching on the use of Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet models for planning and evaluating business concepts, including new and existing companies. A variation of SNV and FSEM continue to be offered in 2021.
The EM Department that we founded with four faculty in 1982 became the Arthur Rock Center for Entrepreneurship at Harvard. https://entrepreneurship.hbs.edu/Pages/default.aspx This department now has about 38 full-time faculty plus staff. Very importantly, the core concept of the framework originally developed by Stevenson became a core course, The Entrepreneurial Manager, in the first year of the MBA Program at Harvard. The framework we developed and perfected during 1982 to 1986 also revolutionized teaching and research in entrepreneurship.
In 2021, I am working to develop a new website that will bring elite level expertise from the top of the business, financial and legal communities in the United States to men and women who are accountable for achieving results at street level in roughly 11 million small companies and divisions of large firms at the heart of the U.S. economy. Large companies are actually groups of smaller companies flying in formation.
I think of my participation in launching entrepreneurship education at Harvard Business School (HBS) as giving something back. That was my objective. My luck was having the opportunity to make a contribution to HBS and Harvard University as well as change the way EM was thought about in the world at large. None of us knew in the beginning that the latter would happen.
The reason our EM framework became part of the MBA program is that unless a person thinks in terms of opportunity, his or her business will ultimately fail. Same goes for personal economic strategy over time; e.g., allowing skills to wane or heading off into a barren area of opportunity. Personal economic strategy is a central part of my current work.
Editor’s Note: The two documents below provide more information about the entrepreneurial education program that John helped to develop.
