Harvard Business Review (HBR) is a general management magazine published by Harvard Business Publishing, a not-for-profit, independent corporation that is an affiliate of Harvard Business School. HBR is published six times a year HBR has published articles by Clayton Christensen, Peter F. Drucker, Justin Fox, Michael E. Porter, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, John Hagel III, Thomas H. Davenport, Gary Hamel, C. K. Prahalad, Vijay Govindarajan, Robert S. Kaplan, Rita Gunther McGrath and others. Several management concepts and business terms were first given prominence in HBR.
HBRs worldwide English-language circulation is 250,000. HBR licenses its content for publication in nine international editions.
Background
Early days
thumb|Some issues of Harvard Business Review
Harvard Business Review began in 1922 Two senior Harvard Business Review editors left, citing an unfair office climate and complaining that the affair had broken ethical standards. Shortly after the resignations, Wetlaufer resigned on March 8, 2002, amid further rebuke by remaining staff. Three months later, the publisher, Penelope Muse Abernathy, was also forced out.
Between 2006 and 2008, HBP went through several reorganizations but finally settled into the three market-facing groups that exist today: Higher Education, which distributes cases, articles, and book chapters for business education materials; Corporate Learning, which provides standardized on-line and tailored off-line leadership development courses; and Harvard Business Review Group, which publishes Harvard Business Review magazine and its web counterpart (HBR.org), and publishes books (Harvard Business Review Press).
Redesign
In 2009, HBR brought on Adi Ignatius, the former deputy managing editor of Time magazine, to be its editor-in-chief. Ignatius oversees all editorial operations for Harvard Business Review Group. At the time that Ignatius was hired, the United States was going through an economic recession, but HBR was not covering the topic. "The world was desperate for new approaches. Business-as-usual was not a credible response," Ignatius has recalled. During this period the frequency of HBR switched from ten times per year to six times per year.
As a result, Ignatius realigned HBRs focus and goals to make sure that it "delivers information in the zeitgeist that our readers are living in." HBR continues to emphasize research-based, academic pieces that would help readers improve their companies and further their careers, but it broadened its audience and improved reach and impact by including more contemporary topics.
As part of the redesigned magazine, Ignatius also led the charge to integrate the print and digital divisions more closely, and gave each edition of HBR a distinct theme and personality, as opposed to being a collection of academically superlative, yet mostly unrelated articles.
HBR won the 2020 Webby Award for Business Blog/Website in the category Web.
In 2025, HBR launched HBR Executive, a $700-a-year subscription for senior leaders.
McKinsey Awards
Since 1959, the magazine's annual McKinsey Award has recognized the two most significant Harvard Business Review articles published each year, as determined by a group of highly independent judges. Past winners have included Peter F. Drucker,