"Our approach has always been to whisper, not to shout," says Kim Clark, dean of the Harvard Business School.

Harvard hardly needs to shout. The lavish gardens, redbrick buildings and stiff, white tablecloths in the faculty restaurant all conspire to hush clamorous visitors' voices.

While other business schools scramble to find partners - Columbia has teamed up with London, MIT with Cambridge - Harvard Business School stands aloof.

It does run joint executive education programmes with other institutions, including Insead in France, IMD in Switzerland and Witwatersrand in South Africa. But Harvard has no plans for an all-embracing alliance, such as the Columbia/London Business School joint executive MBA. Schools establish partnerships with their peers. Prof Clark is too understated to labour the point, but Harvard does not believe it has many peers. "Stanford certainly qualifies as a peer," Prof Clark allows. He names no others. And while Harvard will continue to offer individual joint programmes where it makes sense, "we certainly don't have any long-term relationships", he says.

The business school was founded in 1908 in what Harvard University called a "delicate experiment" in the new field of management training. Since the mid-1920s Harvard has occupied a site apart from the university, which is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The 35-acre business school campus is in Soldiers Field, on the Boston side of the Charles River.

Prof Clark, who was appointed dean in 1995, says the school's influence extends far beyond Boston. "For 80 years we've been committed to reaching out beyond the confines of Soldiers Field to touch leaders all over the world," he says. There are the school's MBA and executive education programmes, which attract students from many countries. There is the Harvard Business Review, founded in 1922, with 235,000 paid subscribers and a readership, once the journal has been passed around, of four to five times that.

There are also the case studies, accounts of real management situations. The case studies are Harvard's principal teaching method. They are also a substantial business. Harvard sells 6.5 million copies of its case studies a year.

But new business models are being invented daily. Some of the highest-flying Internet companies are being launched by university drop-outs. Is the case method still the most appropriate to teach aspiring managers? Are case studies not, by definition, backward-looking?

"It is the most effective way to teach general management," Prof Clark insists. "Out of a specific situation grows the realisation that there are general issues that require general principles."

Many schools use the case method. Few do so effectively, he says.

"It's very difficult to do. Most people who use cases tend to do so as examples. The real method is that out of the specifics come general principles. "We are trying to help people by educating them deeply. We're teaching judgment, we're teaching courage. We're teaching persuasion - how to take a position and argue it, and how to back off when you're wrong . . . when to be quiet and when to listen. We teach confidence without arrogance," he says.

The case method exemplifies the Harvard ideal, he says, of combining top-level research with practical management.

"We've always sought to combine the work of the academy and its traditions with practice.

"We have a specific mission, which we take very seriously, which is to educate leaders who bring the kind of values and character that not only produce outstanding results but do it in a particular way, that has the most impact on the people they work with and the customers they serve and the communities they are part of."

Harvard is not unaware of the competition it faces from other institutions and new technologies. Its faculty has studied too many fabled companies that have failed for it to be complacent about its own status. Clayton Christensen, one of the business school's academics and an expert on technologies that disrupt established businesses, has set up a consortium of organisations that could be damaged by upstart rivals. The consortium includes companies such as Intel and Kodak. It also includes Harvard Business School.

Prof Clark says: "We are now faced with significant new technologies and new ways of distributing education. At the same time, there's disruption in the markets for education. The combination of the two is a very powerful force."

Changes in business, largely provoked by the Internet, mean companies are increasingly looking for education for their staff. Consulting firms and university programmes tailored to individual companies' needs have sprung up to meet the demand. The Internet also means that not all education has to take place in the classroom. Students coming to do their MBAs at Harvard in September will do an accounting course online before they start.

"We also have a programme of global leadership," Prof Clark says. "It starts in Singapore. They spend three weeks there. They then go back to work for three months and later come to Boston for four weeks. During the three-month period we give them a problem they have to work on.

"We've created collaborative software so that they can engage in chat online, moderated by the faculty. The technology allows you to create a new type of community that allows people to interact at very low cost. The technology will create new ways of learning at work."

There are some forms of education, however, that will always require leaving the office. The Harvard MBA, Prof Clark says, is one example. Harvard prefers its MBA students to live on campus. At present the business school is in the midst of a building programme, so that only half the class is living on the premises. Usually, 75 per cent do so.

They do not regret it, he says. There is nothing like a Harvard MBA in business education.

Prof Clark speaks so evenly and is so committed to the school's creed of confidence without arrogance that it is a surprise, when rereading the notes of a conversation with him, to discover soundbites, however quietly delivered, that would do Madison Avenue proud.

"What we do on the MBA is a transforming experience. We change people's lives. If you want to become a leader, there's no better place in the world than this school," he says.