Inventing HBR

In its first issue of the new millennium, the Economist in January 2000 paid a high compliment to Harvard Business Review, calling it “a publication which almost single-handedly defines the agenda for management debate.” That description would surely have surprised the Harvard Business School dean who launched the Review precisely 90 years ago. Wallace B. Donham never envisioned that his journal, with its initial print run of 6,000 copies, would go very far beyond equipping managers-in-training with better tools of the trade. But the Economist’s words rightly describe a magazine that, all these decades later, has earned the authority not only to teach business leaders how to do things right but also to define the right things to do.

In 1922, when Donham and his colleagues at HBS started the magazine, economies were bouncing back after the Great War, and the Roaring Twenties were under way. With businesses growing fast, demand for the school’s expanding body of knowledge went well beyond the few hundred students who could enroll there. Harvard Business Review provided what we might today call a poor man’s MBA.

That’s not to say it was a poor man’s subscription. Jeffrey Cruikshank writes in A Delicate Experiment, his history of the first four decades of HBS, that one of the early points of contention about the dean’s project was the question of what to charge. The Review’s outside publisher, Arch Shaw, had been an instructor at the school and had in mind a price point that would make HBR broadly accessible. Donham, however, insisted on an annual subscription rate of $5. “This was very high by the standards of the time,” Cruikshank writes, “but no higher than the model Donham had in mind: the economics department’s Quarterly Journal of Economics.” Shaw finally conceded, “but only after declaring that it would ‘break [his] heart.’ ”

Perhaps Shaw was right. The Review, intended as a source of revenue to fund the school’s fledgling case method research, failed to grow its audience and barely broke even for the next 25 years. What was steadily growing, however, was the faculty’s competence at translating rigorous research into relevant reading for practicing managers. By the time World War II had ended, HBR was poised to capitalize on the ensuing boom. The school itself took over the task of publishing the Review. Circulation shot from 14,000 subscribers in 1945 to 83,000 by 1965—and 20 years after that, to 243,000.

HBS marketing professor Ted Levitt saw the magazine as an underleveraged brand that he could manage like a consumer product.

Currents of Managerial Concern

To scan HBR’s tables of contents over the decades (a relatively easy task, because they constituted almost every cover from 1940 through 2009) is to gain an impression of the changing concerns of the managerial class. From early surveys of evolving industry structures, debates over financial regulation, and the ongoing pursuit of what Frederick Winslow Taylor termed “scientific management” in production, the focus began to shift toward “human relations” and the motivation of workers, then to the centrality of the customer and the power of the consumer, and later to a focus on leadership as distinct from management.

Over the years, new currents have entered the flow quietly, in some cases steadily gathering force. A first mention of women in the workforce, in 1935, noted that companies employing them “in large numbers” might be models of responsible wage policies. By 1953 they merited a full feature (Frances M. Fuller and Mary B. Batchelder’s “Opportunities for Women at the Administrative Level”). Fast-forward to the 1980s, and the voices discussing the issue had become persistent and powerful. Likewise, consider the now-popular topic of managing social enterprises, which HBR first addressed in a 1983 article, “Should Not-for-Profits Go into Business?”

The threads being woven into HBR’s fabric as the years passed were not just timely topics for consideration but also distinct approaches to studying them. From the beginning, management has been a synthetic discipline that draws on all the social sciences. Dean Donham knew this well: In 1932 he noted that a “new type of business executive” would understand the “complex organism [of] civilization.” But in his 1922 prospectus for the magazine, he kept the focus on just one discipline: economics. “The Review should serve as a medium,” he explained, “for pointing out the relation between fundamental economic theory as it is worked out by the economist and the everyday experience and problems of the executive in business.” Sociologists and psychologists quickly became part of the editorial mix, however, and the chorus of voices would grow to include historians, anthropologists, neuroscientists, behavioral economists, and—yes, Dean Donham—complexity theorists.

HBR’s editors, always capitalizing on its unique positioning as a hybrid of scholarly journal and trade magazine, have seen their job as picking up on the most pressing, practical questions confronting managers and finding the best research-based answers to them. Sometimes the magazine’s expert voices are found on the Harvard Business School faculty, but certainly not always. Despite the impression (still held by some) that HBR is a “house organ” for its institution, HBS professors have consistently been a minority in its pages. Cruikshank reports that a 1931 tally “showed that 63 Review articles to that date had been written by HBS professors, while 216 had been contributed by outside sources.” Later, in 1955, HBR editor Edward Bursk reported recent articles as coming approximately 20% from HBS, 20% from other schools, 40% from business executives, and 20% from lawyers, government officials, and labor leaders. A similar mix endures today, although the magazine’s current editors also draw on management consultants—a category that scarcely existed 60 years ago.

Where Thought Leaders Convene

Over time, Harvard Business Review came to own a niche. For thoughtful managers seeking stimulating perspectives and ideas, it was a must-read. For management researchers hoping to affect practice (or, to use the later coinage of Joel Kurtzman, a former managing editor at HBR, “thought leaders”), it was the place where one’s ideas must appear. HBR was where Peter Drucker, Peter Bernstein, Warren Bennis, Charles Handy, and many more chose to publish their work. It became the epicenter of what Stuart Crainer and Des Dearlove, longtime students of management thinking, call the “guru industry.”

The publication had gained the authority not only to teach captains of industry but occasionally to lecture them. Consider the 1980 piece by Robert Hayes and Bill Abernathy, “Managing Our Way to Economic Decline.” It took American business leaders to task for the country’s declining competitiveness. As Crainer and Dearlove have observed, “An article buried in the Harvard Business Review does not usually excite or ignite debate. This one did.” A few years later HBR’s managing editor, David Ewing, told a reporter that the question Harvard Business Review answers is “What’s the leading edge?”—but he couldn’t resist adding, “I think [the magazine’s] most important role, more and more, is to be a kind of a conscience for business.”

Meanwhile, HBR was growing as a business itself. When the renowned HBS marketing professor Ted Levitt assumed the editorship, in 1985, he saw the magazine as an underleveraged brand that he could manage like a consumer product. He gave it a design makeover, even introducing cartoons, and encouraged a new slate of editors to push more articles to the point that they would ignite debate. He also jacked up the price, nearly doubling the subscription rate, and increased the cost of a full-page ad by more than 50%.

A Shove Toward the Magazine Side

Soon after taking over, Levitt met with HBS colleagues to explain how he saw the challenge. The Review’s content had always been supplied by experts like them, he noted, whose prose was the desiccated, reference-riddled stuff of scholars. Its customer base, meanwhile, was made up of action-oriented managers who were perpetually pressed for time. HBR, he is said to have concluded, was “a magazine written by people who can’t write for people who won’t read.”

The changes he introduced were exciting. It’s probably fair to say that he altered the course of HBR forever, by taking a publication that had sat on the fence between journal and magazine for six decades and giving it a decisive shove toward the magazine side. He essentially declared the customer king. But for a publication owned by a dignified institution of higher learning—HBR’s sole shareholder was and still is the dean of the business school—excitement can spell consternation. A couple of small crises forced the question of whether HBR’s growth as a popular magazine could be reconciled with its Harvard Business School ties.

The first challenge was Levitt’s decision in 1989 to publish “Management Women and the New Facts of Life,” in which Felice Schwartz cautioned companies not to see the growing presence of women in their managerial ranks as presenting just one set of issues. Schwartz noted that expectations and appropriate responses were quite different according to whether or not a woman was also a mother. The article was quickly damned by feminists for advocating a separate “mommy track” that would preclude women from “having it all.”

It is unlikely that Levitt (who died in 2006) failed to anticipate the firestorm he would set off. No doubt he welcomed it. He had shown a penchant for courting controversy. (Michael Jensen complains to this day that Levitt pushed the thesis of his most famous article, “Eclipse of the Public Corporation,” past the point he himself believed.) But this time Levitt had touched a third rail. Although no one claimed at the time that it was the last straw for his tumultuous editorship, he was gone by the end of the year.

The second crisis involved a story that was pulled before publication. T. George Harris, HBR’s first nonfaculty editor in chief (though he was never so recognized on the masthead), was a magazine maker who had built Psychology Today into a hot title. Immediately after joining HBR, in August 1992, he approved an article by a technology-sector analyst in which IBM was chided for having lost its way, perhaps beyond rescue. When the article was killed just before the issue went to press, rumors flew that it was because of IBM’s status as a major donor and friend to the school. Harris took public responsibility for the decision, but found himself out of a job only four months after accepting it.

Growing Independence

Perhaps it was already becoming evident that such crises would continue, and indeed were endemic to a magazine that was encouraged to grow but forbidden to take risks that might upset any of its parent’s applecarts. The solution that emerged was as surprising as it is (in hindsight) obvious. HBR was given more freedom, not less. Not only has the editorship never reverted to faculty hands, but the entire faculty editorial advisory board was disbanded. And in 1994 HBR was established as a wholly owned subsidiary of Harvard University. Its profits would still go to fund HBS research, as they always had. But the magazine now had enough institutional distance to take its own stands and fight its own fights.

In a business world overturned by web-based enterprises, HBR seemed strictly “old economy”—reading for the sitting-duck incumbent.

In 1990 David Ewing published Inside the Harvard Business School. The brief section he devotes to the magazine he had served as managing editor is a strange one, called “The Short, Happy Life of HBR.” Its first paragraph is a study in backhandedness: “The HBR story dramatizes not ineptitude, as many believe….” Rather, Ewing claims, the housecleaning that led to his departure, in 1986, was “a careful decision of the administration to put down an organization that was threatening to eclipse the school.” HBS showed the world what its priorities were, he said, “by cutting HBR off at the knees.”

For some bemused readers, Ewing’s words might evoke the Columbia University professor Wallace Sayre’s famous observation about academia: “The politics of the university are so intense because the stakes are so low.” But the truth is that the stakes were quite high by that point. HBR was very profitable, and its editor held a position of growing authority. Ewing missed the mark; his rumors of HBR’s death were greatly exaggerated. After his tenure, the magazine made further gains in influence and profitability. These were the years when Michael Porter published much of his work on competitive strategy; when Bob Kaplan and Dave Norton introduced their balanced scorecard; when Michael Hammer launched the juggernaut that was reengineering; when Tom Davenport and Larry Prusak developed the field of knowledge management. And when HBR’s vitality did come under threat, it wasn’t a domineering parent that was to blame. It was an evolving market.

From the HBR Archive

Simple Truth? Where anything so complex as the American economy is involved, there are few simple truths, beloved as that phrase is in our day. Simple truth is normally a

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Even as the Economist was giving HBR its due as a management agenda setter, HBR was due for change. A makeover in 2001 freshened up the design again and increased the magazine’s frequency from bimonthly to a more newsstand-friendly monthly. But on a deeper level HBR had encountered the kind of challenge that many iconic brands do. Associated with the successes—and perhaps the excesses—of the previous generation, it didn’t seem to speak to the new one. In the midst of a business world being overturned by web-based enterprises, it seemed strictly “old economy”—the preferred reading of the sitting-duck incumbent. In a global marketplace being rushed by emerging economies, it sounded like the voice of America. Meanwhile, a spate of new magazines, conferences, and websites were jockeying to serve an unprecedented appetite for management ideas.

An HBR for the 21st Century

Caught up in a business model that pulled more revenue from subscriptions than from advertising, and perhaps distracted by turmoil in its top editor ranks (this time having nothing to do with mere content decisions), HBR for a while lagged many magazines in bringing content to the web. As late as 2004 one of its top editors declared that “HBR will not blog,” believing such casual, ephemeral content to be inconsistent with the brand. But in the past few years HBR has undergone another dramatic transformation. In 2010 the magazine was again redesigned, and the editorial team was reorganized to recognize the growing power of the web. Where once the emphasis had been squarely on “timeless,” HBR began to embrace “timely” as well, publishing newsy analysis online and magazine articles such as Walter Isaacson’s “The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs.” HBR’s readers have responded positively. Newsstand sales are at record levels, and ad revenue continues to grow.

Today a whole new generation of managers, many of them in the emerging economies, hunger for the insights that will enable them to succeed. Global companies face the same talent shortages that U.S. enterprises faced in the 1920s. Thoughtful managers feel the same eagerness to be the best professionals they can be. And HBR is there with them, still evolving, still growing.

Now entering its 90s, it is also fully entering the red ocean of business magazines. But it’s doing so with a special provenance, some special strengths, and a deeply informed notion of what the management agenda should be.