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.
Inventing HBR
Reprint: R1211E
Harvard Business Review was launched in 1922 by a Harvard Business School dean who wanted to equip managers-in-training with better tools of the trade. Its initial print run was only 6,000 copies, and its initial subscription price—$5—was a point of contention between the dean and his outside publisher. For the next 25 years the magazine barely broke even. But between its founding and World War II, the HBS faculty became competent at translating rigorous research into relevant reading for practicing managers, and by the end of the war HBR was poised to capitalize on the ensuing business boom. Circulation shot up from 14,000 in 1945 to 243,000 in 1985.
Kirby, an editor at large for HBR, traces its history from the Roaring Twenties to the present day. “The threads being woven into HBR’s fabric as the years passed,” she writes, “were not just timely topics for consideration but distinct approaches to studying them.” Those topics included “scientific management,” women in the workforce, and the power of the consumer, to name just a few. And those distinct approaches brought names such as Peter Drucker, Michael Porter, and Robert S. Kaplan into our pages.
Kirby writes as well about some of the colorful personalities behind the scenes at HBR, and about the magazine’s falling and rising fortunes. As it enters its 90s, she says, “it does so with a special provenance, some special strengths, and a deeply informed notion of what the management agenda should be.”