George C. Lodge

Professor Lodge had been a member of the Harvard Business School faculty since 1963. Before his retirement in 1997, he taught a number of courses in the MBA Master's Program and in various HBS executive programs. in the MBA program these included: Business, Government and the International Economy; Comparative Government Business Relations; Human Resources Management; Leadership, Values and Decisio Making; and Business History in HBS executive programs, and has also taught Human Resource Management; Leadership, Values, and Decision Making; and Business History.  In Executive  Program he taught BGIE, and Ideology and Business. 

After service in the U.S. Navy (1945-'46), he graduated from Harvard College cum laude in 1950, and became a political reporter and columnist on the Boston Herald. In 1954 he joined the United States Department of Labor as Director of Information, and four years later was appointed Assistant Secretary of Labor for International Affairs by President Eisenhower; he was reappointed by President Kennedy in 1961. He was the United States Delegate to the International Labor Organization and was elected chairman of the organization's Governing Body in 1960. At the end of his government service in 1961 Lodge was named one of the ten outstanding young men in the United States by the U.S. Junior Chamber of Commerce. He also received the Arthur S. Fleming Award as one of the ten most outstanding young men in the federal government and the Distinguished Service Award of the Department of Labor. He wrote of his government experiences in Spearheads of Democracy: The Role of Labor in Developing Countries (Harper and Row, 1962).

In 1961 he was appointed lecturer at Harvard Business School. He left the following year to become the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate from Massachusetts. He returned to the School in 1963.

During the 1960s Lodge played a major role in the establishment of the Central American Institute of Business Administration (Instituto Centroamericano de Administracion de Empresas-INCAE). His research during those years took him to Veraguas Province, Panama, where he studied the introduction of political and economic change. This work resulted in several articles in Foreign Affairs and a book, Engines of Change: United States Interests and Revolution in Latin America. These in turn led in 1970 to the establishment by Congress of a new government agency, The Inter-American Foundation, of which Lodge was vice chairman for seven years.

He was named associate professor of business administration at Harvard in 1968 and received tenure in 1972. He played a leading role in the design and development of several courses relating to the global political and economic environment of business, comparative business-government relations, and comparative ideology. He has published more than 40 articles-12 in the Harvard Business Review, two of which received the McKinsey award for the best article of the year-and a number of books besides the two mentioned above: The New American Ideology (1975) and The American Disease (1984), published by Alfred Knopf; U.S. Competitiveness in the World Economy (1984) ed. with Bruce R. Scott and Ideology and National Competitiveness : An Analysis of Nine Countries (1987) ed. with Ezra F. Vogel, published by Harvard Business School Press; Comparative Business-Government Relations (1990) published by Prentice Hall; Perestroika for America: Restructuring Business-Government Relations for World Competitiveness (1990), published by Harvard Business School Press; Managing Globalization in the Age of Interdependence (1995) published by Pfeiffer & Co.; and published in 2006, A Corporate Solution to Global Poverty, with Craig Wilson, by Princeton University Press.

In 1991 Lodge was named Lee Kuan Yew Fellow by the Government of Singapore, and in 1994 received an honorary doctorate from INCAE. In 1995 The New American Ideology received the annual book award of the Academy of Management. From 1997 to 2007 he was a director of Nordic American Tanker Shipping. He has been a member of the Council on Foreign Relations since 1960. He has taught executives in a number of companies including IBM, AT&T, and the World Bank. 

Lodge was married to the former Nancy Kunhardt from 1949 until she died in 1997.  They had six children.  In 1997, he married Susan Alexander Powers whose husband had died a few years earlier.  She has three children.