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Among academic business historians, Alfred D. Chandler Jr. is regarded as the man who made the field a legitimate course of study at Harvard Business School (and elsewhere). "When he arrived in 1971," says his Harvard colleague and fellow business historian Richard Tedlow, "there were 13 people taking business history. Now there are 1,300." The famous Harvard Business School case studies existed b... More

Among academic business historians, Alfred D. Chandler Jr. is regarded as the man who made the field a legitimate course of study at Harvard Business School (and elsewhere). "When he arrived in 1971," says his Harvard colleague and fellow business historian Richard Tedlow, "there were 13 people taking business history. Now there are 1,300." The famous Harvard Business School case studies existed before Professor Chandler arrived, but by all accounts, he helped influence such prominent Harvard strategists as Kenneth Andrews to train MBAs to look beyond immediate market and competitor data to consider the long-term trends. But the core of Professor Chandler's work (and the reason he is most relevant to business managers) is his theories about industrial change and the interplay of large corporations that he has spent 60 years articulating. Professor Chandler is not just a mentor to business historians and the developer of one of the most far-reaching theories of business success; he is also our most prominent fan of big business. He follows the Fortune 500 the way some of his Bostonian neighbors follow the Patriots, Celtics, and Red Sox. His writing can be dense and dry, like that of Fernand Braudel, the great French historian of economic daily life, with whom he is often compared. Professor Chandler generally eschews stories of heroic personalities and instead writes meticulously about comparative economic performance - the impact of organizational decisions on production costs, throughput, and the larger economy. He is fascinated with the fate of corporate titans, from the Erie Railroad to Cisco Systems Inc., as they clash and compete, allying with and betraying each other, continually seeking to control their fields, and shifting the economic landscape around them through their battles and alliances. Alfred D. Chandler Jr.'s 1977 book, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business, was the first business title to win the Pulitzer Prize; it is only one component of a body of work (more than 25 volumes published over 45 years) that established the nature and influence of large corporations in the modern economy.

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