2008 Woodie Awards
Faculty Perspective - Professor Bruce Scott
Sridevi Raghaven (OC), Contributing Writer
Issue date: 4/7/08 Section: Features
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Prof. Scott graduated from HBS with an MBA in 1958. Although Prof. Scott had initially planned to join Exxon upon graduation, he became strongly interested in teaching and learning while a student in the Business Policy section of Professor C. Roland Christensen, one of the outstanding teachers at that time. As a student, Professor Scott found that some of the cases were lacking in some important information on the human aspects of organization, and Professor Christensen asked him to stay on as casewriter to try to do better. Prof. Scott spent two years as a case writer, spending most of a year with one company with only 150 employees as the basis for a six case series, and then two more years casewriting with much larger companies as a new faculty member directly after earning his DBA. His first five years on the faculty were mostly spent living in Switzerland and researching the French system of indicative national planning. He did not start teaching at HBS until 1969, the year of the student uprisings across the country, in Harvard Square and on our campus as.
Prof. Scott's interest in national strategies came from the project in France, and though he started as an instructor in the required second year course in Business Policy or General Management he received permission to take the last seven sessions of a 56 session course to teach about comparative country strategies in France, Japan and the United States. That experience formed the basis for subsequently changing the required first year course on the business environment from one focused exclusively on the United States to what is now BGIE (Business, Government and the International Economy), beginning in January 1974, with Professor Scott as its first course head.
Prof. Scott enjoys research, course planning and course development as a way to explore new ideas, and finds that Harvard Business School has enabled him to identify, develop and strengthen his research on countries, in great measure due to the school's unprecedented resources. He has almost finished a book called Capitalism, Democracy and Development.
In spite of his enthusiasm for case teaching at HBS, Prof. Scott worries that two hours of student preparation for 80 minute classes is not an ideal formula for teaching about complex problems requiring historical as well as analytic persepectives. It emphasizes problem solving and breadth of experience at the expense of problem identification and in depth learning, which is where the really big mistakes are made. He believes the School needs more diversity in its teaching methods, including some experiences where students study an organization or society in much more depth over successive classes, and where they have to write and defend their analyses in front of their classmates.
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