Faculty and Research

THOMAS K. McCRAW is the Isidor Straus Professor of Business History, Emeritus at Harvard Business School.  Most recently, Professor McCraw has written American Business Since 1920:  How It Worked (2009).  Another recent book, Prophet of Innovation:  Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (2007), won three international awards:  the Hagley Prize for the Best Book on Business History, the Joseph J. Spengler Prize for the Best Book on the History of Economics, and the biennial prize for research on innovation given by the International Joseph A. Schumpeter Society.  Prophet of Innovation was also cited as a Best Business Book by both Library Journal and strategy + business, a Best Book on Innovation by Business Week, and a Best Read by The Spectator (London).  It will be translated into six languages. 

Professor McCraw's many other books include Prophets of Regulation:  Charles Francis Adams, Louis D. Brandeis, James M. Landis, Alfred E. Kahn, which won both the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1985 and, in 1986, the triennial Thomas Newcomen Award for the Best Book on Business History.  His book Morgan versus Lilienthal:  The Feud within the TVA won the William P. Lyons Award.  In addition, he co-authored and co-edited The Intellectual Venture Capitalist:  John H. McArthur and the Work of the Harvard Business School 1980-1995 (1999); co-authored and edited Creating Modern Capitalism (1997), Management Past and Present (1996), America Versus Japan:  A Comparative Study of Business-Government Relations (1986), and Regulation in Perspective:  Historical Essays (1981).  He also compiled and edited The Essential Alfred Chandler:  Toward a Historical Theory of Big Business (1988). 

At Harvard Business School Professor McCraw served as a Director of Research (1984-86), as Head of two required first-year courses (1981-84 and 1996-2002), as chair and co-chair of the Business, Government, and the International Economy Unit (1986-97), and as editor and co-editor of the Business History Review (1994-2004).  He was associate editor of The Encyclopedia of the United States in the Twentieth Century (1996) and editor of seven books in the monograph series Harvard Studies in Business History.  He was a member of the Council of the Massachusetts Historical Society, the advisory board of the Nomura School of Advanced Management (Tokyo), the Board of Syndics of Harvard University Press, and the editorial advisory boards of Reviews in American History and Harvard Business Review.  He also served as President and Trustee of the Business History Conference, which at its 2009 meeting in Milan presented him its Lifetime Achievement Award for scholarship.  He became Straus Professor of Business History, Emeritus in July 2006.