From the Editor’s Desk: The Silent Majority of the M.B.A.

In the early 20th century, when massive corporations like Standard Oil and the Pennsylvania Railroad Company needed managers to administer business entities on a scale that had never before been seen in human history, they turned to schools like Harvard to supply their demand. These companies did not need outspoken visionaries, political brawlers, or mavericks. They needed confident readers and optimizers of numbers: managers with the guts to occasionally make a big, hard decision. This kit is timeless. The modern business school has done nothing but double down on developing its tools in every realm its graduates enter. By and large CEOs of most of today’s largest companies (none founded in an M.B.A. program) are run by the business school graduate, who finds great success in this methodic application of their skill. Tim Cook, a Duke Fuqua graduate, has added four trillion dollars to Apple’s market capitalization, one among many similar examples. The other field - politics - M.B.A.s sometimes enter, usually once we’ve erased all personal financial risk and bought all optionality by accruing a fortune of money and experience, tells the same story. There is a certain archetype that dominates.

This type is the silent majority of the business school. The majority does not speak loudly in any circumstance, does not take unnecessary risk, does not abandon optionality - the personality of the accomplished technocrat. Time and again we and our contributors have published pieces opining, asking, begging HBS students to air their opinions, to debate, to speak, to commit to the public record. But last year, when we received an answer from the provocative “When Business School Avoids the Business of Leadership,” written by the new leaders of the Democrats, Liberals, and Progressives Club, it was published, conveniently, the month they graduated. The silent majority includes most of the seemingly outspoken exceptions.

Therefore, appeals to become more like a law school have in the past fallen on deaf ears at the school that ultimately produces the able administrator and the exceptional manager. Let this reality serve as motivation for us: the Harbus will toll far louder this year. With a much larger team and transformational investment, this paper will launch several major initiatives. We aim to catalyze something deeper within the silent majority, for this local newspaper refuses to yield to the zeitgeist, no matter how powerful it may be.

Alex Qi (MBA '27) is from Irvine, California. He studied philosophy, politics, and physics at New York University. Prior to HBS, he worked in corporate strategy and M&A at Northrop Grumman in Virginia.