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Thomas Raymond
A longtime member of the faculties at Harvard Business School, Harvard College, and the Harvard University Division of Continuing Education, Thomas Raymond was an early champion of teaching business communication through HBS’s famous case method model. In his more than 50 years of teaching, an estimated 18,000 students benefited from his expertise. Raymond taught at Harvard Business School from 1950 until his retirement in 1987, chairing the Written Analysis of Cases (WAC) course, which required all first-year students in the MBA program to submit biweekly papers that had a strict Saturday night deadline. A plaque on the side of the school’s Baker Library now marks the spot where students hurried to drop their papers into a chute before it was shut tight at the final toll of the campus bell at 9 p.m.
One 25th Reunion class at HBS voted Written Analysis of Cases the most valuable course they had taken at the school.
His approach to business communication proved beneficial to the nonprofit sector as well. Beginning in 1970, he was active in training museum directors, managers of performing arts companies, and trustees of these organizations as educational director of Harvard University’s Institute in Arts Administration. He also conducted training programs for executives of the United Way, the Easter Seal Society, Girl Scouts of America, and various other human service agencies.
Asked by the then U.S. Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach to train police chiefs in the case method, Raymond ran programs on the HBS campus for a number of years for chiefs of the country’s largest metropolitan areas.
Raymond was the author or coauthor of numerous articles on business communication and of three books, Problems in Business Administration: Analysis by the Case Method, Casebook in Arts Administration, and Managerial Communication.
—Courtesy of the Harvard Business School
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