Yair Aharoni Memorial

Yair Aharoni belonged to the first generation of students of multinational business at Harvard Business School (HBS); their work eventually led to the large Multinational Enterprise Project directed by Raymond Vernon. The group comprised many faculty and doctoral student researchers that explored a wide range of international business (IB) topics and utilized various methodologies. Yair finished his doctoral degree (DBA) in 1961, two years after Ray arrived at HBS and just before I came to the school for the MBA program; therefore, I just missed knowing him when we were students. In fact, MBA students and DBA candidates rarely mixed anyway. But I discovered, on moving on to the doctoral program, that his thesis and book, The Foreign Investment Decision Process, had already appeared on the reading list for the International Business DBA oral exam. I do not remember whether the thesis version was assigned before the book appeared, although I believe it was. I got to know Yair later, at the annual Academy of International Business (AIB) meetings, when he visited HBS, and when he was at Duke. It was always fun to engage in the friendly debates he was bound to initiate. To start them, he would put forth some idea very forcefully, to say the least. But he would listen to counter-arguments, fight back, and eventually adjust his ideas if the target’s arguments were good. Anyone who knew Ray, especially in his early days in academia, can understand why Yair and Ray got along so well…