Harvard Business Review overhaul gets it right

Steve Smith of MinOnline reviews the reworked Harvard Business Review — both in print and online — and comes away impressed.

Smith writes, “But the look of the new HBR and the editorial process behind it is very much a cross-platform affair now. We felt that tying everything around the HBR brand and bringing the largest community we can around print and digital was going to be critical.

“The book itself now has a feature well of longer sink-your-teeth-into think and research pieces, but both the front and back matter are now being run by Web staff. The Idea Watch section, from Web editor Scott Berinato, will feature new thinking and has such edgy items as Defend Your Research in which skeptical editors grill a researcher on how he or she came up with those headline-grabbing stats. The back section, Experience from deputy Web editor Katherine Bell, offers more advice and stories related to managing ones own time, career, and business, because this content was increasingly popular on the site.

“But most of all, platform-agnosticism at HBR comes in the way that editorial is conceived, says Macht. We are about the big ideas and the management frameworks executives need. We arrange ourselves to talk about ideas first and think about the medium. Is this idea expressed best as a 10-page article or as a blog or as a book?

“The HBR editorial staff is now organized around teams assigned to cover such themes and ideas as marketing or sustainability and leadership. Each one has a captain and a few members from the Web site, books, and magazine and together they are thinking what are the most critical ideas we have to be on top of, says Macht. The Web is also serving as a good font of ideas and a testing ground for topics before HBR invests more resources in pursuing them in longer print pieces. Often, we refine them online to work as longer research pieces in the magazine.”

Read more here.