Transcript

Well, of course, as you know, for the first 11 years of Harvard Business Review, it was a losing operation. So, in fact, the School had a long history of making commitments to things that they cared about the impact of the thing, as opposed to the exact financial return.

I mean, clearly, they didn't want to lose a lot of money. Business History Review would be a good example. I think there's actually a one-one correspondence between the mission, and actually making money. And by "making money," I mean earning enough revenues to cover your cost, and to the extent you add more value, to make money that you can plow back in to the creation of more fundamental material. Which is if we have a book—Bob Kaplan on accounting, or The Balanced Scorecard, whatever it might be, or Clay Christensen on disruptive technologies—frankly, I'm eager to have more people read that in various forms, and to change how they think, and how they manage. And so if we have higher sales, we are accomplishing our mission.

So John never, ever said, "The key thing is going to be to make $25 million from this, and then we can do other things that we really want to do. But your job is to make the money, and our job is to spend it on important things." Absolutely not. John viewed it as an independently important organization, doing important work consonant with the mission of the School.

Having said that, as it grew, it became important as part of our overall business model, a critical part of which is our ability to support and sustain our own research, so we don't go outside for funding. We don't have to go to the National Science Foundation; we don't have to go to corporations and beg. We get to decide: what are the important issues? How should we approach them?

And that, I think, is fundamental to doing the kind of research that is different and impactful. And which, parenthetically, needs a voice out there that isn't typically filled by, or met by existing organizations. So I think it has turned out to be financially important, but that's jimmies on the ice cream, if you will. And a measure of how competent we are at doing what we do, and adding value to what we do, but, frankly, not the preeminent goal.