Francis J. Aguilar papers

Francis Joseph Aguilar was a leading expert in the field of general management, strategy, and ethics. He received a BA in electrical engineering from Renssalaer Polytechnic Institute in 1954. Aguilar served as a pilot and squadron legal officer in the United States Navy during the final years of the Korean War. He retired from active duty in 1957. He earned an MBA (1959) and DBA (1965) from Harvard Business School and joined the faculty while still a doctoral student in 1964. He served as an instructor at HBS from 1963-1965, associate professor from 1967-1971, and Professor of Business Administration from 1971-1995. Aguilar taught courses in general management, accounting and control, business policy, and ethics in the MBA program and Executive Education program. From 1990-1994, Aguilar served as deputy director for the Central and Eastern Europe Teachers Program. The program was a joint venture between Harvard and leading business schools to prepare academic leaders from former Eastern Bloc countries for influential roles as teachers of business in emerging free-market economies. Aguilar retired in 1995, but served as an emeritus professor until 2012.

His special areas of interest include business policy, the business environment, corporate long range planning, ethics, and the education of teachers of business administration in foreign countries. He wrote over one hundred case studies and wrote or co-wrote numerous books and articles on corporate planning and ethics. He served as Chair of the International Teachers Program at HBS (ITP) for many years. After his retirement from HBS, he taught at the Harvard University Extension School beginning in 2001. His involvement in business education went beyond HBS. To increase the number of minorities embarking on careers in management, in 1992 he helped create the Management Education Alliance, an organization dedicated to improving business education in universities serving African-Americans and Hispanic Americans. Aguilar died in 2013.