Harvard Business School Review Articles

[Denisha Simcoe]

HarvardBusiness School Professor Emeritus Theodore (Ted) Levitt, a monumental and iconoclastic figure in the field of marketing and former editor of Harvard Business Review, who influenced generations of both scholars and practitioners with his groundbreaking, always provocative, and often controversial books and articles, died June 28 at his home in Belmont, Mass., after a long illness. He was 81 years old.

The 25 articles he wrote for Harvard Business Review (four of which won McKinsey Awards, presented annually to the best and second-best articles of the year) made him and the late Peter Drucker the most published authors in the history of the magazine.

Levitt brought his legendary scholarship, vision, intensity, and dedication to good writing to his appointment by former HBS Dean John McArthur as editor of Harvard Business Review, a position he held from 1985 to 1989. He is credited with transforming the magazine from an academic periodical into a more accessible publication that focused on important ideas and practices that influenced a readership composed of top business leaders.

Drafted into the U.S. Army before he finished high school, Levitt served in Europe during World War II. At the end of the war, he returned to Dayton and a job as a sports writer at the Dayton Journal Herald. He earned his high school diploma through a correspondence course and enrolled at Antioch College, receiving his A.B. in 1949. Two years later, he earned a doctorate in economics from Ohio State University and began teaching at the University of North Dakota.

Levitt is survived by his wife of 58 years, the former Joan Levy; four children, John of Sarasota, Fla., Kathryn Wells of Lexington, Mass., Laura Levitt Beaudry of Belmont, and Peter of Boston; six grandchildren; and two sisters, Ann Brenner of Winston-Salem, N. C., and Dorothy Engelhardt of Dayton. A daughter, Frances Levitt Byington, and a brother, Albert, predeceased him.

Print: Lauinger Library subscribes to the Harvard Business Review and current copies can be requested at the Circulations and Reserve Desk. Older issues can be retrieved from Off-Campus Storage.

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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.

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 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.

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).

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.

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.

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