Show Business

Just a week or so ago one of the large slick magazines ran an overpowering spread in publications all over the country. The writer of this ad headlined his production "The Tycoon is Dead," and went on to say that the modern big-businessman was not like his predecessors, the hard-headed founders of the giant corporations and holding combinations. The present day Board Chairman is a man whose ways of thinking and acting, the ad explained, were in keeping with the world and the responsibilities of 1951.

Like many such glib pieces of advertising, this one told a half perhaps three-quarter truth. But the returning Business student is lucky: he can look around him and see an example of the whole truth's best fraction. New buildings, product of cooperation between industry and scholar, are being constructed for example. The School's Advanced Management program has drawn its largest class-nearly 200 executives are having their way paid to Cambridge to study the 1951 means to 1951's goals.

If this were the entire story we could afford to enjoy the self-satisfied feeling which the advertisement seemed intended to induce. This is obviously not the case. The big problems suggest course titles: business and government, business and labor; and there are enough little tryants around to keep the tycoon's reputation from going completely uncommemorated.

It is not that the Business School can answer all the questions or even turn out men who can; but through its efforts and those of the industries whose future executives it trains, we get closer to the solutions. The laision now normal to Cambridge may make the ad-man's words a happy prophecy for some future day's readers.