Five Ideas That Will Reshape Capitalism’s Next Century
The Harvard Business Review’s celebration of its first 100 years mixes the invaluable with the evanescent. The darker forces likely to transform business in the future will demand a sharper focus.
The next business century needs rethinking.
Photographer: Alex Tai/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
The Harvard Business Review is celebrating its 100th birthday with a fat book of its most influential and innovative articles and an electronic fanfare of videos, charts and online articles.
HBR was founded 14 years after its mothership, the Harvard Business School, to provide the fledgling discipline of business with a bit of academic heft. The new discipline faced a lot of sneering from the Brahmin establishment who ran Harvard in those days for lacking academic rigor as well as social cachet. Wallace Brett Donham, HBS’s dean from 1919 to 1942, hoped that the review would address one of these complaints by pioneering a “theory of business” based on rigorous research and capable of teaching fledgling businessmen sound judgment. Without such a theory, he wrote in the inaugural issue, business would be “unsystematic, haphazard, and for many men a pathetic gamble.”