Busy School Alumni Hold Meeting

A record number of alumni crowded the Business School Saturday for the nineteenth annual conference of the Harvard Business School Alumni Association.

Among the guests was John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who made a conditional gift of $5,000,000 to the Business School last Thursday. The condition is that the school must match the sum by July 1, 1950. It was Rockefeller's first visit to the School.

Top speaker at the sessions at which five prominent American industrialists discussed "Developing Executives for Business Leadership" was Sumner H. Slichter, Lamont University Professor, who spoke at Saturday night's Harvard Club banquet.

Business Has Responsibility

"Business cannot entirely escape responsibility for its environment," he said. "Business managers have the responsibility of keeping the community friendly toward business. This means that enterprises need to have top executives who understand the community, who are interested in its problems and sympathetic to its efforts to find solutions for these problems.

Slichier stated that "the community, in the main, will remain laboristic," but he added, "business will recover part of the intellectual initiative which it has lost in the last generation. As a result, the community, which is in danger of being transformed from one in which business was dominant to one in which labor in dominant, will become a genuinely co-operative one in which management and labor contribute a fair share of the important ideas which win acceptance from the community and which therefore determine the course of history."

At the morning session, presided over by Marvin Bower '30, chairman of the committee. the alumni heard L. R. Boulware, vice-president of the General Electric Co., suggest city-wide courses in economics for adults. Bowlware also attacked proposed changes in the Taft-Hartley law and declared that the pressure on Congressmen to change the act was not truly representative of the will of the people.

William B. Given, president of the American Brake Shoe Company, told the alumni there is no shortage of young men who can be developed into executives in most large companies. Speaking on "Experience in the Development of Management People," he offered a yardstick by which management executives could be judged.