Over the past 94 years, the Harvard Business Review has become a must-read for anyone keen on keeping up with the latest management thinking. Covering a wider range of topics form leadership and organizational change to marketing and managing people, the magazine has brought the thinking of Peter Drucker, Michael Porter, Rosabeth Moss Kanter and other management gurus to newsstands and coffee tables around the world. Published in 11 languages besides English, the magazine can claim to have brought management concepts and business terms such as Balanced Scorecard, Reengineering and Glass Ceiling to a global audience.
In the coming days, HBR's LinkedIn group will reach one million members. From discussions on the digital economy to tips on public speaking, the wholly owned subsidiary of Harvard University can claim to be moving with the times, building a bridge between academic research and best practice to help professionals improve the performance of their organizations and themselves.
"Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things," Peter Drucker (AP... [+]
However, business schools are often criticized for research that fails to connect with the real world. In 2009 at the height of the financial crisis, even HBR itself was accused of not covering the topic in the depth it demanded. Perhaps as a result, the arrival of Adi Ignatius from Time magazine provided the impetus to make the publication less an author-focused academic journal, and build a relationship with readers that for Ignatius would “deliver information in the zeitgeist that our readers are living in.” Along with short-form blogs and webinars, Harvard Business Review has ramped up its digital presence with a range of online tools to help the modern manager. They even offer customizable Powerpoint templates for your SWOT analysis, and a decision tree to determine if you really need to attend a meeting.
Digital Disruption?
Digital may prove to be the downfall for some business schools, swept away by online access to courses and certificates. But for the most ambitious and innovative, digital is about distribution, and the ability to reach out to a much wider audience with their research and expertise. Beyond the academic journals that are indispensable reading for management scholars, and whose importance in the business school rankings of the FT influence the hiring and incentive policies for faculty, a new generation of business professors are trying their hand with video, blogs, and social media to take ideas, data and management thinking to a global audience.
Perhaps the best known example of this is Knowledge@Wharton, the online business analysis journal launched by The Wharton School in 1999. The site, which is free, has a searchable database of more than 6,300 articles, podcasts and videos with analysis of current business trends, articles based on recent business research, and interviews with faculty and industry leaders. Knowledge@Wharton currently has more than three million users worldwide, and has expanded to include editions in Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese and Arabic.
The site also includes a High School Edition, KWHS, designed to provide high school students and educators with a deeper understanding of business and personal finance. The lesson plans, business glossary and other student-focused resources are designed to build entrepreneurship, leadership and related workplace skills, with multimedia that tell stories through the experiences of students around the globe.
However, while the U.S. is often the pioneer when it comes to digital innovation, some of the most interesting work in the management education field is now being done in Europe. Take, for example the case of Rotterdam School of Management (RSM) Erasmus University, one of Europe's leading business schools with 30 research centers and over 250 senior researchers and 100 PhD students. The school has created an online platform, RSM Discovery, for videos and analysis in areas of strategy, operations, marketing, organisation and finance and accounting. From the lessons that banks can learn from hairdressers about relationship management, to ideas on turning electric vehicles into profitable power plants, RSM is intent on making academic research applicable to real world challenges.
Getting Buy-In From The Faculty
But how easy is it to persuade professors to complement their in-depth research with shorter, quirkier delivery of their ideas? For Dirk van Dierendonck, professor of Human Resource Management at RSM, it is a step worth taking.
"I was initially hesitant to distill the findings from months of research into a 2 or 3-minute video. But my work is intended to be a source of practical and accessible thinking for executives, and not remain in an academic ivory tower."
Van Dierendonck believes the video format works particularly well. "It encourages you to focus on the key findings of the research and deliver those ideas in plain language for the business community." His work concentrates on inclusive HR management practices for older workers, whose experience and knowledge can be a tremendous source of value in any institution. "It has been rewarding to see the response to the video, both from employers and employees. Any program targeted at age management involves the joint responsibility of the employer and the employee, so the video format proved to be a great way to reach both audiences."
An Accelerating Future
Of course it’s not just business schools themselves that have grasped the need to reach a wider, ‘real world’ audience in a form of language it understands. The McKinsey Quarterly, which recently celebrated its 50th birthday, was initially an internal document only shared with consultants and clients. But it has gone on to become one of the most effective communicators of difficult and challenging ideas to the educated man and woman in the street while elegantly avoiding any charges of ‘dumbing down’. And the Thinkers50 platform founded by former UK journalists Des Dearlove and Stuart Crainer has made an excellent job of collating and disseminating research by some of the best and brightest in the management field, such as the work of CK Prahalad around the Bottom of the Pyramid and Clay Christensen on innovation and disruption. As a result its bi-annual ranking of management thinkers has come to be described as the 'Oscars’ of management thinking,
Managers face countless challenges every day, and with more business schools and their faculty sharing their research and expertise online, smart thinking and solutions may be just a click away.
