Harvard Business Review looking to apply its own advice

Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson of the Financial Times writes about the Harvard Business Review, which is looking to apply some of the business suggestions in its articles.

Edgecliffe-Johnson writes, “Mr Macht and Adi Ignatius, a former senior journalist at Time magazine and the Wall Street Journal who became editor-in-chief in January 2009, pulled their teams together last month for a two-day ‘offsite’ meeting, to start a debate that they hope will produce a new business model by January. The whiteboard presentations, discussing everything from how many issues of the $16.95-a-copy magazine HBR should print a year to how to price subscriptions for tablets, would look familiar in any business school, but are rare in publishing.

“‘I worked at Time and the Wall Street Journal, which were fairly hostile to management-y approaches to things,’ Mr Ignatius says.

“Rarer still is the notion popularised in HBR’s pages by the late Peter Drucker of ‘creative abandonment.’ The question of what to stop doing is ‘one of the toughest things’ for any business, Mr Macht adds.

“After HBR’s own creative abandonment sessions, Mr Ignatius says, ‘we killed a couple of things instantly,’ including the Answer Exchange a community-driven online feature it had launched with some fanfare but which consumed more manpower than expected. ‘We’re no longer even pretending to accept unsolicited manuscripts for books,’ he adds.”

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