Harvard Business School

The School's leaders began worrying about the challenge of disseminating useful knowledge almost from the day the institution was launched in 1908. HBS had only a five-year lease on life—at the end of which, Harvard would decide whether its experiment in graduate business training should be continued—so Dean Edwin Gay and his colleagues felt enormous pressure to produce original work and disseminate that work across relevant constituencies across the business world. If those constituencies spoke up for the infant School, Gay hoped and believed, the experiment might be continued.

The Bureau of Business Research issued its first bulletin in May 1913. While only a modest-looking publication, the document—which detailed the actual costs of running a retail shoe business—had an enormous impact on a hitherto-skeptical business community. For the first time, a group of competitors in the shoe trade pooled their numbers (anonymously), and for the first time, they were able to learn how their own operation differed from those of their competitors.

Over the next half-century, increasingly detailed Bureau research reports were developed in a host of industries, at both the wholesale and retail level. Dean Gay's hope, back in 1908, was realized: The successful dissemination of knowledge not only helped business, but enhanced the School's reputation, and helped ensure its survival.

The early 1920s saw two additional attempts to capture and disseminate knowledge. The first, Harvard Business Reports, was developed in 1923. This publication was conceived by Dean Wallace Donham as a means of capturing and codifying the "findings" of the case studies that were coming to dominate the HBS teaching model. Donham, trained at Harvard Law School, hoped that HBS cases contained precedents that could be studied and applied by business people who encountered similar problems in the future. The experiment failed almost right away: Both the faculty and the business community realized that there was no real business equivalent to legal precedents.

The other venture launched in this same period proved far more durable and useful. Harvard Business Review was first published in October 1922, again as an inexact parallel to the student-run Harvard Law Review. It was originally produced by Chicago publisher and former HBS instructor Arch Shaw, who believed that the magazine could eventually underwrite the School's case research. As part of the arrangement, Shaw agreed to make up any losses incurred by the magazine—a gesture that turned out to be significant, because after making a profit of $468.29 in its first year, HBR lost money for the next twenty years.

Almost from the outset, HBR—under the leadership of Professor Harry Tosdal—sought ideas from a wide variety of sources. As early as 1923, for example, an HBR editor visited Europe in search of contributions from economists, business practitioners, and publishers. A 1931 tally revealed that up to that point 63 HBR articles had been written by HBS faculty members, while 216 had been contributed by outsiders.

In 1945, HBS took over the publication of HBR from McGraw-Hill (which had purchased Shaw's publishing company). Two years later, paid circulation had grown significantly, reaching 15,000. That was the year that managing editor Edward Bursk—who spent nearly 30 years at the magazine—arrived, and thanks to his efforts and a strong economy, HBR finally began to take off. By 1951, the circulation had reached 25,000, and it wasn't uncommon for the School to receive 10,000 requests for reprints of popular articles. Two years later, circulation reached 35,000, and a survey suggested that 89% of subscribers were in "top management." In 1955, 200,000 reprints were sold, and circulation exceeded 50,000. Evidence of the magazine's increasing impact began to mount. In 1957, for example, the magazine received 319 unsolicited manuscripts—up from 204 in 1952. And in the following year, the McKinsey Foundation for Management Research established the annual "McKinsey Awards" for the best articles published each year in HBR—a tradition that continues to this day, and which lends distinction both to the magazine and to the award recipients. Circulation rose from 61,800 in 1961 to 83,000 in 1965. In that year, 22,470 individuals and businesses ordered 678,100 reprints: an increase of 35% in one year.

Individual articles achieved both short- and long-term success. Ted Levitt's 1960 article, "Marketing Myopia," generated requests for 35,000 reprints from 1,000 companies. (Over the next 45 years, 850,000 reprints of the article were sold.) Wickham Skinner's "Production Under Pressure," published in 1966, anticipated the challenges that would be faced by U.S. manufacturers in subsequent years. With a growing inventory of "classic" articles, reprints exceeded 1 million for the first time in 1967.

Ken Andrews became editorial chairman in 1976, marking the return of HBS faculty to leading positions at the head of the magazine; he was named editor in 1979. HBR joined the electronic age in 1982, when the magazine moved to electronic typesetting, and abstracts of all articles became available through computerized databases. Ted Levitt continued his unparalleled run as an HBR author with a series of articles over the years which anticipated coming trends—for example, "The Globalization of Markets" in 1983, which pointed HBR's audience toward the impending phenomenon of a global marketplace. In 1985, Levitt was named HBR's editor, and pushed the magazine toward readability and managerial relevance.

Also in 1985, Dutch and Norwegian editions of HBR were launched, increasing to 10 the number of foreign-language editions of HBR. By 1988—when HBR celebrated its 65th anniversary—it had 200,000 subscribers in 131 countries, and sold more than 2.5 million reprints. By the early years of the 21st century, that number had exceeded 3 million.

Almost coincident with the birth of HBR in 1922 was the creation of a modest business in sales of HBS cases to other schools and businesses. In keeping with the "missionary" impulse of the Donham administration regarding the case method, HBS cases were sold through the Division of Research on a breakeven basis (or sometimes a less-than-breakeven basis) for many years.

The first real change in this business model came in 1957, when the Ford Foundation gave HBS $120,000 to help support the development of a "clearing house for case materials." The International Case Clearing House (ICCH) sold 204,000 pages of materials in 1958, and 3.2 million in 1959. In 1960, the ICCH added an "international" section to its bibliography of cases; by that point, more than 235 HBS cases had been translated into one or more of nine foreign languages.

By 1963, the ICCH was selling $107,000 worth of mimeographed cases, and was (for the first time) approaching the breakeven point—which it achieved in 1964, when (on $154,000 in sales) it became self-sustaining, at least briefly. But this turned out to be a short-lived state of profitability, in large part because much of the ICCH inventory was carried at a loss. In 1980, for example, the ICCH shipped 100 million pages of material from an inventory of about 18,000 items to more than 6,000 customers in 3,000 organizations around the world, divided almost evenly between schools and businesses. But Harvard cases accounted for close to 90 percent of the sales—and could be sold at a profit—while the rest of the cases (something like two-thirds of the inventory) lost money. As a result, the operation was running at a loss, totaling almost a million dollars over the previous few years.

In 1983, therefore, HBS exited the ICCH business. The case collection was reduced from 20,000 to 6,000 items (with those remaining being exclusively HBS products), and the case-distribution function moved back into the black. A decade later, HBS was selling more than 4 million cases per year.

As these changes were unfolding, HBS was also exploring the book-publication business. In 1980, HBS engaged the Arthur D. Little (ADL) consulting firm to explore whether the School should resume an active publishing program. In the decades following World War II, the School had regularly published books by HBS faculty members who had written texts of interest only to narrow audiences. (In the 1969-70 school year, for example, the Division of Research published eight books, and five more were somewhere in the production process.) Almost inevitably, though, this "Harvard Business School Press" came to be viewed as a vanity press, and was shut down in the 1970s. But with a positive recommendation from ADL in hand, and with strong support from Dean McArthur and Professor Ray Corey, the HBS Press was established in 1984. Within two years, the Press had published 15 books and had 11 others under contract.

Over the following decade, the HBS publishing model went through several waves of reorganization and consolidation. In 1986, for example, the "HBS Publishing Division" was created, aimed at disseminating HBS research and teaching products more broadly—and, hopefully, capturing some of the associated revenues. But for HBS to compete successfully in the traditonal and digital publishing realms, it had to be able to offer wages and benefits that were competitive in those industries. In 1992, in response to both internal reviews and recommendations from McKinsey & Co., the "Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation" (HBSP) was created as a wholly owned, not-for-profit subsidiary of Harvard University, comparable to the Harvard Management Company that managed the University's investments. Experienced publisher Ruth McMullin headed HBSP for two years, and—at the urging of Professor Bill Sahlman—was succeeded in 1994 by Linda Doyle.

HBSP brought together under one umbrella HBR, the HBS Press, HBS Video, and Cases and Reprints. It also opened the door for new kinds of educational products. In 1992, for example, HBSP released Achieving Breakthrough Service, its first multimedia-based management program aimed at complementing on-campus executive education programs. And in 1996, HBS Publishing launched Management Update, a monthly newsletter, to complement HBR. This was succeeded two years later by a new HBS alumni web portal, Working Knowledge; by 2006, Working Knowledge had more than 110,000 on-line readers.

Continued growth and consolidation of the publishing enterprise also required a series of moves into larger space. HBS Publishing first came together under one roof in an HBS-owned office building at 230 Western Avenue, and then—in 1999—relocated to rented space at the former Watertown Arsenal.

The business book publishing business boomed in the 1990s, but substantially imploded in the wake of the dotcom collapse. In part as a result, the HBS Press looked for opportunities to co-venture with other entities. In 2002, for example, it announced a partnership with the Kennedy School's Center for Public Leadership aimed at publishing a series of books focusing on leadership for the common good. And in the following year, the Press formed an exclusive partnership with the Commercial Press, the oldest publishing house in China, to publish HBS Press books in the Chinese language.

By 2007, revenues from HBSP's sales of periodicals, books, cases, and e-learning products had reached $128 million, which meant that the publishing operation was generating just over 30 percent of the School's overall revenues. But as Dean Jay Light told the HBS Visiting Committee in that year, the publishing enterprise (along with the School's executive education program) was "profitable" in large part because much of the cost of developing cases and other teaching materials was allocated to other budgets at the School. To be sure, Light assured Committee members, HBSP helped underwrite the School's ambitious research program. But just as important, it extended the reach of the School's intellectual capital, and protected and strengthened the School's intellectual property.