The Big Time: Harvard Business School's Most Successful Class--And How It Shaped America

1949 was a pivotal moment of economic dominance; the MBA was still exotic, arcane, and swaggeringly potent. The men of Harvard Business School ’49 would be “the class the dollars fell on.” By 1974, nearly one ‘49er in five was a millionaire. Forty-five percent were chairmen, presidents, or chief operating officers. The men of HBS ’49, however, hadn’t just achieved success; they’d defined success.

Their story is much more than a catalogue of vivid business tales; it is a map of American ambitions and assumptions, of national triumphs and epic-scale misjudgments that have only recently been finding their comeuppance.