Harvard Business Review

Last updated

Harvard Business Review
Harvard Business Review cover Jan Feb 2012.jpg
Editor-in-Chief Adi Ignatius [1]
Former editorsThomas A. Stewart
CategoriesBusiness
Frequency6 times per year
Circulation 263,645 [2]
PublisherSarah McConville
Founded1922;101 years ago (1922)
Company Harvard Business Publishing
CountryUnited States
Based in Brighton, Massachusetts
LanguageEnglish
Website hbr.org OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg
ISSN 0017-8012
Some issues of Harvard Business Review HarvardBusinessReview.jpg
Some issues of Harvard Business Review

Harvard Business Review (HBR) [3] [4] is a general management magazine [5] [6] published by Harvard Business Publishing, a not-for-profit, independent corporation that is an affiliate of Harvard Business School. HBR is published six times a year [3] and is headquartered in Brighton, Massachusetts.

Contents

HBR covers a wide range of topics that are relevant to various industries, management functions, and geographic locations. These include leadership, negotiation, strategy, operations, marketing, and finance. [7]

Harvard Business Review has published articles by Clayton Christensen, Peter F. Drucker, Justin Fox, Michael E. Porter, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, John Hagel III, Thomas H. Davenport, Gary Hamel, C. K. Prahalad, Vijay Govindarajan, Robert S. Kaplan, Rita Gunther McGrath and others. [8] [9] Several management concepts and business terms were first given prominence in HBR.

Harvard Business Review's worldwide English-language circulation is 250,000. HBR licenses its content for publication in nine international editions. [10]

Cover of HBR Italia Cover hbr italia july 2023.jpg
Cover of HBR Italia

Background

Early days

Harvard Business Review began in 1922 [6] as a magazine for Harvard Business School. Founded under the auspices of Dean Wallace Donham, HBR was meant to be more than just a typical school publication. "The paper [HBR] is intended to be the highest type of business journal that we can make it, and for use by the student and the business man. It is not a school paper," Donham wrote. Initially, HBR's focus was on macroeconomic trends, as well as on important developments within specific industries.

Following World War II, HBR emphasized the cutting-edge management techniques that were developed in large corporations, like General Motors, during that time period. Over the next three decades, the magazine continued to refine its focus on general management issues that affect business leaders, billing itself as the "magazine for decision makers". Prominent articles published during this period include "Marketing Myopia" by Theodore Levitt and "Barriers and Gateways to Communication" by Carl R. Rogers and Fritz J. Roethlisberger.

1980s through 2009

In the 1980s, Theodore Levitt became the editor of Harvard Business Review and changed the magazine to make it more accessible to general audiences. Articles were shortened and the scope of the magazine was expanded to include a wider range of topics. In 1994, Harvard Business School formed Harvard Business Publishing (HBP) as an independent entity.

In 2002, a management and editorial staff shakeup occurred at the publication after the revelation of an affair between editor-in-chief Suzy Wetlaufer and former General Electric CEO Jack Welch. The two met while Wetlaufer was interviewing Welch while researching an article for the research-based magazine. [11] Two senior Harvard Business Review editors left complaining the affair initiated during Wetlaufer's work with Welch for an article had broken ethical standards and cited an unfair office climate. Shortly after the resignations, Wetlaufer resigned on March 8, 2002 amid further rebuke by remaining staff. [12] Three months later, the publisher, Penelope Muse Abernathy, was also forced out. [13]

Between 2006 and 2008, HBP went through several reorganizations but finally settled into the three market-facing groups that exist today: Higher Education, which distributes cases, articles, and book chapters for business education materials; Corporate Learning, which provides standardized on-line and tailored off-line leadership development courses; and Harvard Business Review Group, which publishes Harvard Business Review magazine and its web counterpart (HBR.org), and publishes books (Harvard Business Review Press).

Redesign

In 2009, HBR brought on Adi Ignatius, the former deputy managing editor of Time magazine, to be its editor-in-chief. [14] Ignatius oversees all editorial operations for Harvard Business Review Group. At the time that Ignatius was hired, the United States was going through an economic recession, but HBR was not covering the topic. "The world was desperate for new approaches. Business-as-usual was not a credible response," Ignatius has recalled. During this period the frequency of HBR switched from ten times per year to six times per year. [15]

As a result, Ignatius realigned HBR's focus and goals to make sure that it "delivers information in the zeitgeist that our readers are living in." HBR continues to emphasize research-based, academic pieces that would help readers improve their companies and further their careers, but it broadened its audience and improved reach and impact by including more contemporary topics.

As part of the redesigned magazine, Ignatius also led the charge to integrate the print and digital divisions more closely, and gave each edition of HBR a distinct theme and personality, as opposed to being a collection of academically superlative, yet mostly unrelated articles.

HBR won the 2020 Webby Award for Business Blog/Website in the category Web. [16]

McKinsey Awards

Since 1959, the magazine's annual McKinsey Award [17] has recognized the two most significant Harvard Business Review articles published each year, as determined by a group of highly independent judges. Past winners have included Peter F. Drucker, [8] who was honored seven times; Clayton M. Christensen; Theodore Levitt; Michael Porter; Rosabeth Moss Kanter; John Hagel III; and C. K. Prahalad.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jack Welch</span> American business executive, chemical engineer, educator and writer (1935–2020)

John Francis Welch Jr. was an American business executive. He was Chairman and CEO of General Electric (GE) between 1981 and 2001.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peter Drucker</span> American business consultant

Peter Ferdinand Drucker was an Austrian American management consultant, educator, and author, whose writings contributed to the philosophical and practical foundations of modern management theory. He was also a leader in the development of management education, and invented the concepts known as management by objectives and self-control, and he has been described as "the founder of modern management".

<i>MIT Sloan Management Review</i>

MIT Sloan Management Review is a magazine and multiplatform publisher. It features research-based articles on strategic leadership, digital innovation, and sustainable business. It aims to give readers practical, of-the-moment guidance for leading in an ever-shifting world. MIT SMR publishes in print quarterly and online daily. It creates content across various media, including web, app, podcast, live and recorded video, and via distributors and libraries worldwide.

Executive education refers to academic programs at graduate-level business schools for executives, business leaders and managers, globally. These programs are generally non-credit and non-degree-granting, but sometimes lead to certificates, and some offer continuing education units accepted by professional bodies and institutes. Estimates by Business Week magazine suggest that executive education in the United States is an $800 million annual business, with approximately 80% provided by university-based business schools. Many traditionally upper tier schools, as well as business schools and other academic institutions, offer these programs.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rosabeth Moss Kanter</span> American economist

Rosabeth Moss Kanter is the Ernest L. Arbuckle professor of business at Harvard Business School. She is also director and chair of the Harvard University Advanced Leadership Initiative.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">C. K. Prahalad</span> Indian-American Strategist, educator and author

Coimbatore Krishnarao Prahalad was an Indian-American entrepreneur and author. He was the Paul and Ruth McCracken Distinguished University Professor of Corporate Strategy at the University of Michigan Stephen M. Ross School of Business.

Suzy Welch is an American author, television commentator, business advisor, and public speaker. She is also the co-author of the business books Winning, published in 2005, and The Real Life MBA, published in 2015.

Theodore Levitt was a German-born American economist and a professor at the Harvard Business School. He was editor of the Harvard Business Review, noted for increasing the Review's circulation and popularizing the term globalization. In 1983, he proposed a definition for corporate purpose: "Rather than merely making money, it is to create and keep a customer".

Thomas A. Stewart is the Executive Director of the National Center for the Middle Market (NCMM) at the Fisher College of Business at The Ohio State University. He joined the NCMM after a stint as Chief Marketing and Knowledge Officer of management consulting firm Booz & Company. Prior to joining Booz & Company, he was the editor and managing director of Harvard Business Review (HBR) from 2002-2008. Prior to joining HBR, he was editorial director of Business 2.0 and a member of the Board of Editors of Fortune magazine.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Vijay Govindarajan</span> Indian-American academic

Vijay Govindarajan, popularly known as VG, is the Coxe Distinguished Professor at Dartmouth College's Tuck School of Business and Marvin Bower Fellow, 2015–16 at Harvard Business School. He is a Faculty Partner in the Silicon Valley Incubator Mach49. He worked as General Electric's innovation consultant and professor in residence from 2008 to 2010. He is a New York Times and Wall Street Journal best-selling author and a two-time winner of the McKinsey Award for the best article published in Harvard Business Review. VG was inducted into the Thinkers 50 Hall of Fame in 2019 for his life-long work dedicated to the field of management, strategy, and innovation. VG received Thinkers 50 Distinguished Achievement Awards in two different categories: Breakthrough Idea Award in 2011 and Innovation Award in 2019. 

Pamela Thomas-Graham is an American businesswoman, corporate leader, and author. In August 2016, Thomas-Graham was elected by the Clorox Company board of directors as the lead independent director. Previously, she was a senior executive at Credit Suisse, and served on the bank's 10-member executive board, until October 2015; was a partner at McKinsey and Company; president and CEO of CNBC; and Group President of Liz Claiborne.

Stewart D. Friedman is a professor at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania and the founding director of the Wharton Leadership Program and Wharton's Work/Life Integration Project. He has been on the Wharton faculty since 1984 and became the Management Department's first Practice Professor in recognition of his work within the fields of Leadership Development, Human Resources and Work–Life Integration on the application theory and research on the real challenges facing organizations. In 2001, Friedman completed a two-year assignment as the director of the Leadership Development Center at Ford Motor Company, where he ran a 50-person, $25 million operation.

<i>Strategy+Business</i> Business magazine

Strategy+Business is a business magazine focusing on management issues and corporate strategy. Headquartered in New York, it is published by certain member firms of the PricewaterhouseCoopers network. Before the separation of Booz & Company from Booz Allen Hamilton in 2008, strategy+business was published by Booz Allen Hamilton, which launched the magazine, then titled Strategy & Business, in 1995. Full issues of strategy+business appear in print and digital edition form every quarter, and other original material is published daily on its website.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bernard Avishai</span>

Bernard Avishai is an Adjunct Professor of Business at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He lives in Jerusalem and the United States. He has taught at Duke University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Dartmouth College, and was director of the Zell Entrepreneurship Program at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya in Israel. From 1998 to 2001 he was International Director of Intellectual Capital at KPMG LLP. Before this he headed product development at Monitor Group, with which he is still associated. From 1986 to 1991 he was technology editor of Harvard Business Review. A Guggenheim Fellow, Avishai holds a doctorate in political economy from the University of Toronto. Before turning to management, he covered the Middle East as a journalist. He has written many articles and commentaries for The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Harvard Business Review, Harper's Magazine and other publications. He is the author of three books on Israel, including the widely read The Tragedy of Zionism, and the 2008 The Hebrew Republic.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Hagel III</span>

John Hagel is a management consultant and author.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Adi Ignatius</span> American journalist

Adi Ignatius is editor-in-chief of Harvard Business Review. He joined the magazine in January 2009.

Tony Schwartz is an American journalist and business book author who is best known for ghostwriting Trump: The Art of the Deal.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sangeet Paul Choudary</span> Business scholar, entrepreneur, advisor and author

Sangeet Paul Choudary is a business executive, advisor, and best-selling author. He is best known for his work on platform economics and network effects. He is the co-author of the international best-selling book Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy and How to Make Them Work for You.

Ellen Ernst Kossek is an American academic and social scientist who is known for research on work, family, and personal life. She is the Basil S. Turner Distinguished Professor at Purdue University’s Mitchell E. Daniels, Jr. School of Business. She previously served as the Research Director of the Susan Bulkeley Butler Center for Leadership Excellence for Purdue University’s Provost’s Office and as a University Distinguished Professor at Michigan State University’s School of Human Resources and Labor Relations. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Mount Holyoke College, her Master of Business Administration from the Stephen M. Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan and her Ph.D from Yale University. She has work experience in international and strategic human resource management working in Asia, Europe and the U.S. for Hitachi, IBM & GTE. Dr. Kossek works globally to advance knowledge on gender and diversity, employment practices to support work and family, and the development of leader and positive workplace cultures to support well-being and productivity. Her research has been featured in national and international media such as the Financial Times, National Public Radio, the Wall Street Journal, Forbes magazine, Time magazine, Marketplace, and the Washington Post.

Rob Markey is an American author, speaker, and business strategist. Often referred to as the Vince Lombardi of Customer Loyalty, he is perhaps best known for his research and writing on customer experience and loyalty marketing. Markey is also the co-creator of the Net Promoter System of management (NPS), along with fellow Bain & Company consultant Fred Reichheld.

References

  1. Harvard Business Review Names Adi Ignatius as Editor-in-Chief, a Harvard Business School press release
  2. "eCirc for Consumer Magazines". Alliance for Audited Media. December 31, 2012. Archived from the original on January 23, 2017. Retrieved April 7, 2015.
  3. 1 2 "Harvard Business Review Revamps". The New York Times . December 10, 2009.
  4. "Reviewing Harvard's Business Review". The New York Times . March 15, 2002.
  5. "Harvard Business Review Announces New Podcast Network, HBR Presents" (Press release). April 3, 2019.
  6. 1 2 "Harvard Business Review (HBR) | PreventionWeb.net". preventionweb.net. Retrieved July 8, 2021.
  7. "Harvard Business Review Guidelines". Hbr.org. December 31, 2012. Retrieved September 10, 2013.
  8. 1 2 "Private Sector; Seeing the Corporation's Demise". The New York Times . November 14, 1999.
  9. "Justin Fox". CUNY TV.
  10. "HBR Global Editions". Hbr.org. Retrieved July 20, 2023.
  11. Jennings, Marianne M. (April 18, 2002). "Affair Takes Shine Off 2 Adulterers". Deseret News. Retrieved January 4, 2021.
  12. DePaulo, Lisa (May 6, 2002). "If You Knew Suzy…". New York Magazine.
  13. Armstrong, David (July 9, 2002). "Harvard Business Review Publisher Is Forced to Resign Amid Overhaul". Wall Street Journal. Retrieved January 4, 2021.
  14. Delbridge, Emily (November 21, 2019). "The 8 Best Business Magazines of 2020". The Balance Small Business. New York City: Dotdash. Best for Professionals:Harvard Business Review. Retrieved February 8, 2020.
  15. Faisal Kalim (August 13, 2019). ""Magazines are alive and well": Publishers refresh their strategies for the print format". WNIP. Retrieved June 1, 2020.
  16. Kastrenakes, Jacob (May 20, 2020). "Here are all the winners of the 2020 Webby Awards". The Verge. Retrieved May 22, 2020.
  17. Frederick Andrews (October 29, 1976). "Management: How a Boss Works in Calculated Chaos". The New York Times .