Former HBS Professor ‘By’ Barnes Dies at 81

Louis Byington “By” Barnes, a longtime organizational behavior professor at Harvard Business School, died Aug. 22 at a hospital in Bangor, Maine, from complications from kidney failure. He was 81.

Family members and former colleagues and students remembered Barnes as a good listener who charmed many of the people he met.

“He definitely gave me the emotional support I never expected to get at business school,” said Rebecca S. Leung, a former student of Barnes who named him the god-grandfather for her two children.

One of Harvard Business School’s first experts in using the case method, Barnes taught the human side of business—organizational behavior—at Harvard as a tenured professor from 1968 until he retired in 1998. Before receiving tenure, he had served as a research associate at HBS since 1956 and spent much of that time as a teaching fellow.

Barnes was born on August 6, 1928, in St. Paul, Minn., and grew up there as the middle child of three boys. After graduating from Phillips Academy, Andover, he went on to Amherst to study English and rose to become president of his class and captain of the varsity football team.

Barnes then received his MBA and doctorate in business administration in 1952 and 1958 from HBS before becoming a full professor in 1968.

Though Barnes spent over half of his life at Harvard, he never took himself too seriously, according to his widow and former student, Julie C. Wang, 62, who used to head her own medical public relations firm.

“Most women who knew him felt as though they were being heard and listened to for the first time in their lives,” Wang said of Barnes, who married three times.

Barnes served as the second president of the Iran Center for Management Studies (ICMS)—a Harvard-affiliated business school in Tehran, where HBS professors and Iranian Harvard graduates taught both Iranian and foreign businessmen in an 11-month program—from 1975 to 1977. He also taught there, charming both the students and professors—listening so intently that he made it seem “as though you were the only person in the world that mattered at the time,” said Kasra Ferdows, a Georgetown Business School professor who taught at ICMS.

Barnes’ experience in Iran left a lasting impression on him. When Ferdows visited Barnes in Cambridge a little over a decade after Barnes’ tenure in Iran, he recalled seeing about 40 photos of ICMS professors, staff, and students in Barnes’ office.

Habib Ladjevardi, who founded ICMS in 1972, said that he still recalls one lesson from Barnes’ lectures, which he came to follow himself: visiting an employee in his or her own work environment, rather than calling an employee to one’s office.

“First they’re flattered...secondly, you get an idea of his work situation,” said Ladjevardi, who served as ICMS’ vice president from 1972 until it closed in 1978, on the eve of the Islamic Revolution. “Sometimes a guy turns out to be a different person than he was in my office.”

Barnes was also an avid Democrat. He celebrated Obama’s election in 2008 with champagne in a nursing home with Wang.

Though he already began dialysis two and a half years ago, he made phone calls on behalf of Democrats for the last five years of his life—including for Obama’s general election campaign.

Barnes, who grew up near Minnesota’s Gull Lake, spent the final years of his life in his Brooklin, Maine home overlooking Bar Harbor.

He listened almost entirely to classical music—especially Brahms’ symphonies. Barnes also loved to read mystery novels and hike through the Swiss Alps, according to Wang.

A professional cellist will perform selections from Bach’s cello suites at his memorial service in Maine on Saturday, where attendees will later toast him with chocolate shakes—“his favorite drink,” Wang said.

—Staff writer Bonnie J. Kavoussi can be reached at kavoussi@fas.harvard.edu.