Babson CollegeThrough the 1980s and early 1990s, Babson College was a business
school that reflected the effects of many cultural ills. Numerous
attempts had been made at curriculum and other kinds of reform,
but they all stalled in infighting, territorial disputes, and a decision-
making system that punished initiators and rewarded upholders of
the status quo. An attempt to do strategic planning had died in
midstream for lack of consensus or willingness to make hard
choices. As a result, people with ideas for improvement had
retreated into individual pursuits. They took their pleasure from
their students (when possible), their own research and consulting,
and complaining about “the others” with their few sympathetic
colleagues but didn’t any longer think it was worth the effort to try
to shape the organization to make it more innovative or more pro-
ductive. Belief in the potential of collective action was very low.
In 1989, Bill Glavin, former vice chairman of Xerox, became
Babson’s president. Within a year, he had launched an elaborate
strategic planning process that involved a large number of con-
stituents, unleashing a great deal of early cynicism and eventually a
few bold proposals for change. One of the most radical sets of ideas
came from the graduate program task force, which broached the
idea of a complete curriculum overhaul and building a new gradu-
ate school building—or closing down the full-time M.B.A. program.
A year later, with the crucial job of VP for academic affairs unfilled
and the developing ideas needing strong support from the top, I
agreed to fill in for a year (and stayed seven). Many of the ideas
floating around were similar to concepts I had been mouthing off
about for a couple of decades or more, and I realized that I would not
be able to rest easy if I didn’t try to help them gain acceptance.
During the strategic planning process, several of the teams
declared that they had good ideas for change but that with the cur-
rent decision-making system, under which all faculty (about 110 at
the time) made all curriculum decisions together, there was no
point in advancing proposals. A new task force was therefore
created to revise the governance system. It proposed a system that
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