{"id":275822,"date":"2010-02-04T10:00:31","date_gmt":"2010-02-04T15:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/?p=36611"},"modified":"2010-02-04T10:00:31","modified_gmt":"2010-02-04T15:00:31","slug":"business-lady","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/275822","title":{"rendered":"Business lady"},"content":{"rendered":"

When The New York Times<\/a> came calling, Nancy Koehn<\/a>, James E. Robison Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School<\/a>, stepped up to the plate.<\/p>\n

It was 2003. Harvard Business Press<\/a> presented Koehn with a book prospectus from the Times. The idea? To compile interesting articles across the history of the paper, an assignment Koehn metamorphosed into \u201cThe Story of American Business<\/a>,\u201d which features more than 100 articles spanning 150 years.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe NYT had worked on a few books that were syntheses on specific topics, but had never attempted anything of this depth and breadth,\u201d said Koehn, who couldn\u2019t bypass a chance \u201cto follow the arc of time, that is, some of history\u2019s most interesting individuals and events, through the eyes of men and women watching them in real time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Koehn, a historian and scholar of entrepreneurial leadership, calls the book \u201can incredibly exciting intellectual opportunity.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was an opportunity that included a lot of work. Koehn first had to decide which \u201cthematic avenues the book would travel,\u201d and spent three years simply reading Times backlogs.<\/p>\n

\u201cThen,\u201d she said, \u201cthe real work began, the task of selecting the articles. About 100, from almost 15 times that many, that would make it in.\u201d<\/p>\n

Koehn\u2019s themes are expansive but methodical. \u201cFrom Wall Street to big business, from the transportation revolution to the information revolution \u2014 all of these subjects and more form the chapters of the book,\u201d she said. \u201cBut these building blocks are laid upon the three-part foundation of business in America: the corporation, the changing nature of work, and defining moments in technology.\u201d<\/p>\n

A book of such historical intensity is ever-pertinent in today\u2019s economic climate. \u201cWe forget, in our age of the \u2018next new thing,\u2019 that we are not the first generation to stand at a crossroads, despairing and uncertain of what\u2019s to come,\u201d Koehn said. \u201cIt was heartening to see how we as a people have navigated through such similar points as the end of the Civil War or the Depression. If today\u2019s leaders are going to make sense of the current financial crisis and its significance, they need the breadth and depth of information that the Times affords \u2014 and they need to learn from their predecessors.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When The New York Times came calling, Nancy Koehn, James E. Robison Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, stepped up to the plate. It was 2003. Harvard Business Press presented Koehn with a book prospectus from the Times. The idea? To compile interesting articles across the history of the paper, an assignment Koehn […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4175,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-275822","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275822","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4175"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275822"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275822\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275822"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275822"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275822"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}