Len's Last Lecture: Babson College President Leonard Schlesinger's remarks at student sendoff

OMG he worked in a paper mill too! AT Green Bay, WS. P&G in 1973! Puffs facial issues! He is GREAT! 1. People simply don't care how much you know, until they know how much you care about them. 2. Leonard Schlesinger is Babson's President, was Associate Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School where his teaching and research is in Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management. He currently serves as faculty chairman of the school's Executive Education program in Human Resource Management. He received his bachelor's degree from Brown University, an MBA in Corporate and Labor Relations from Columbia University, and a doctorate in Organizational Behavior from the Harvard Business School. Prior to joining the Harvard faculty in 1978 he served in a number of manufacturing, industrial relations and organization development positions with Procter and Gamble and held the posifion of Associate Coordinator of Youth Services in the State of Rhode Island. The bulk of Professor Schlesinger's recent research has focused on (2) organizational innovations designed to foster employee productivity and quality of work life, (2) the strategic readaptation of organizations in response to changes in technology, markets, regulation andlor work force demographics, and (3) the management of human resources in large diversified companies. He is author of five books and several articles in scholarly and management oriented journals. Leonard A. Schlesinger ’73 discusses 35 years of applying what he learned at Columbia Business School to a successful career in business and academia.
Extraordinary Training I was trained extraordinarily well. I received my MBA in 1973 with a concentration in corporate and labor relations. My MBA became a platform for me to engage with real-world phenomena. The Columbia Business School experience inspired me to test, experiment with and apply the theories that I learned as a student, by instilling the fundamental notion that theory and practice go hand in hand. One cannot be fully developed and successful without the other. From the start, I was eager for the opportunity to put this training into practice. Many of my classmates went off to banking jobs. That was the traditional route that most MBA graduates took at the time—many still do. I decided to do something radically different—and that was a big risk. My first job was as a first-line supervisor on the night shift of a Procter & Gamble factory that produced paper products. I was on the floor, not in an office like the majority of my classmates. It wasn’t glamorous, but it was exciting. This move was largely an outcome of recognizing that through my MBA experience I had developed lots of conceptual notions, and a curiosity about the kinds of outcome these notions stimulated when put into practice. While I worked at Procter & Gamble, a group of academic researchers and consultants came to the factory to experiment with semiautonomous and autonomous work-teams. This drove me to go back and get my doctorate in an attempt to more deeply understand the business practices I was encountering in the real world. After getting my doctorate from Harvard Business School, and spending years in industry, I returned to academia as a faculty member to try to develop a broader conceptual framework to execute against the work I had done in the service, profit sector. I was continually developing ideas about how the machinery of business operates, testing those concepts in the industry and then going back to study them more closely—all habits that started at Columbia. At each step of the way, a curiosity that I developed at the School led me to my next career move.