Transcript

There is a continuum of concern about how best to communicate ideas to improve the practice of management. And we had lots of different vehicles: Cases would be a good example, Harvard Business Review, reprints of HBR articles, simulations. There were lots of things that you would like to get out into the hands of other educators, or into practitioners' hands, so that they could have the impact they should.

John—actually, beginning in probably the late ‘80s—decided to hire McKinsey to come in and assess what we should do in publishing. How large was the market? How should you organize to have an effective editorial voice, a high level of quality? That related to Harvard Business Review. It related to Harvard Business School Press. It related to all of the things that we did that involved external communication.

And he got a small committee together, of which I was a member, and we would meet on Saturday mornings. And I was relatively newly tenured, as in weeks old. And I came to these meetings thinking, "This is terrific," you know? "I get to go to meetings with the Dean," and, you know, "I've sort of arrived." And it took me three or four meetings to understand that he had in mind a different role for me than just attending these Saturday meetings. [Laughs] So that was another revelation of the indirect method of cooking that we now describe as John McArthur.

But basically the idea was you had, separated by historical accident, Cases and HBS Press, which was beginning to gain traction, and to have an independent voice. Had an editorial board, had professionals running it, had a meritocracy base for getting ideas, so other people could compete for the right for publishing through HBS Press. And that provided a quality control that was important. That was all separate. That was down at 230 Western Avenue. Harvard Business Review was back in South Hall, or Teele Hall, or whatever it was called at the time.

There was no coordination between the two. So, for example, it had gotten to the point that people over in the Press, and the like, who wanted the mailing list for HBR ended up having to buy it from a third party vendor. That struck all of us as, perhaps, odd, that you couldn't get even that level of cooperation.

And so we decided that we would do a number of things. First of all, organizational change begins, first and foremost, with people, and the quality of the people that you have in the effort. And our goal was to have people who were as good at publishing, communicating, affecting practice in HBS Publishing as the professors were in whatever it is that we do—whether it's research, or teaching in the classroom. And the only way you could do that was to create an organizational identity, to recruit different people, to be willing to pay market prices, to be willing to provide incentives. To be willing to fire people, and have a real meritocracy, and some organizational metrics, and performance metrics. All part of the educational mission of the School. So it, you know, if in teaching in Executive Education, or teaching in the MBA program, our goal is to develop leaders to change how they think for the rest of their lives, then publishing is a very logical extension, and another arm for accomplishing that mission.

So the basic theory was to create an integrated, high-performance organization in which you would have coordination, control, quality, meritocracy across ideas, across people, and try to fulfill the needs of practicing managers out there and educators who were desperate for insights into how to be more effective.

You have to remember that really, the book publishing operation—if you think about management books, it wasn't until In Search of Excellence in the early 1980s that that market turned out to be a large market, and people were more willing to buy book-length treatments of things. So it became a popular press kind of issue, where you could sell a million copies, or two million copies, and really, in some ways, move the needle. So that was part of the overall context for what we were doing.