In and Out of the Laboratory

Over the past few decades, business schools have embraced game theorists, economists, and others who deal in abstraction, all but stopping the solving of real-world, real-time problems. This text argues for a return to the medical model in business: listen, observe, and test. These three steps are the roots of human relations and organizational behavior; managers must fully assess a business and diagnose its problems before solving them. This model helped managers, consultants, and management scholars diagnose and solve problems faced by small and large organizations for decades, and it can continue to help companies today with myriad issues-including competition, leadership, diversity, and organizational structures-by offering a framework for addressing these problems rather than abstract theories. Chapter 1 discusses the beginnings of the medical model in business and the connections across various disciplines (e.g., medicine, psychology, and sociology) its founders developed. Wallace Donham, the second dean of Harvard Business School, paved the way for thinkers of different backgrounds to come together and create the medical model, also known as the human relations model, in the early twentieth century. Many influential academics and thinkers helped to shape the medical model, which is dependent on dynamic equilibrium. Businesses are living entities, needing to respond to changes in technology, investment conditions, market demand, and the workforce. If managers and consultants are to treat organizations as the living beings they are, they need to study the business holistically and work backward from the current problem to the underlying causes.

• Business history
• Organizational transformation
• Organizational development
• Executive education
• Business education
• Organizational behavior