Harvard Business Review

About Harvard Business Review

Harvard Business Review is a general management magazine published since 1922 by Harvard Business School Publishing, owned by the Harvard Business School. A monthly research-based magazine written for business practitioners, it claims a high ranking business readership and enjoys the reverence of academics, executives, and management consultants. It has been the frequent publishing home for well known scholars and management thinkers, among them Clayton M. Christensen, Peter F. Drucker, Michael E. Porter, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Gary Hamel, C.K. Prahalad, Robert S. Kaplan, Robert H. Schaffer and others. Management and business concepts and terms such as "Balanced scorecard," "Core competence," "Strategic intent," "Reengineering," "Globalization," "Marketing myopia," and "Glass ceiling" were first given prominence in HBR's pages. Its worldwide English-language circulation is 240,000, and there are 11 licensed editions of the magazine, including two Chinese-language editions, a German edition, a Hungarian edition, a Brazilian (Portuguese-language) edition, and an English-language South Asia edition. The magazine is editorially independent of Harvard Business School. It is not peer reviewed. Thomas A. Stewart, who joined as editor of the magazine in 2002, left HBR in June 2008. The magazine’s publisher is Hank Boye and its Deputy Editor and Assistant Managing Director is Karen Dillon.

Harvard Business Review began in 1922 as an editorial project of Harvard Business School’s faculty and students. In the first issue, Harvard Business School Dean Wallace B. Donham described the aims of the magazine in the article “An Essential Groundwork for a Broad Executive Theory.” “ The theory of business must develop to such a point that the executive may learn from the experiences of others in the past how to act under the conditions of the present,” he wrote. “Otherwise, business will continue to be unsystematic, haphazard, and for many men a pathetic gamble.”

Dean Donham and the editors believed that the magazine would serve as a natural complement to the school. In its early years, the magazine focused on macroeconomic trends and developments and published industry-specific articles like “Are Railroad Freight Rate Structures Obsolete?” It also contained a section of student contributions, which was discontinued in 1939.