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HOT READS FOR THE PRACTIONER

Title: Harvard Business Review Executive Summaries

Competencies: self-development, communication

Who benefits: new supervisors, managers, trainers, consultants and those seeking promotion to management or a career change

Consultant Usage: all business consultants and many trainers need to be familiar with this publication because many of their clients are reading these pages

What’s it about? If you are new to the Harvard Business Review (known in the field as HBR), then let me suggest why you should embrace this publication. Most everyone experienced in management knows about HBR.  Executive and senior managers subscribe to it, many read it, and those who don’t usually have it lying around it public view.

As a newbie there are three important reasons to subscribe or at least read it on line.  First, if you subscribe, you too can leave it lying around your office space and appear to be really, really smart.  Second, whether you subscribe or read it on line, you will learn the language of business and the business issues of now and the future.  We often talk about communication in the abstract.  HBR is business communication in the concrete.  Read it and discuss topics of interest with those who can make career decisions about you.

The third reason to read HBR monthly is your personal education.  My guess is that if you read each issue cover-to-cover for one year, you will pick up the equivalent of a mini-MBA.   Over the course of a year HBR will have several specialty issues like Leadership, Strategy, or Marketing.  Then they have the general issues like this one (May) that covers a variety of topics. 

One feature I really like is the ability to read the whole magazine each month at Harvard Business Online.  I bookmark the location and each month I open it and go to Executive Summaries.   The summaries let me decide which articles to read.  And if I am in the current month’s issue, I can read any article for free. 

For instance, in this May issue there is an article call Leadership’s Online Labs.  It intrigues me enough that I want to review it here next week. 

However, if Sales is your thing you might want to read: How to Sell Services More Profitably. 

Or if you have an interest in R & D you might want to try: Rebuilding the R&D Engine in Big Phama.

Want to learn more about Strategy?  Then how about Strategy as a Wicked Problem?  
 
And for those of you interested in Quality, there is: From the Editor: Continuous Improvement (HBR’s own attempt at C.I.). 

And that’s just some of the full-length articles.  There are at least a dozen more short articles, reviews or a case study to experience.  So click on one of the links and test it out.  Remember the Mikey commercial?  “Try it, you’ll like it!”

[tags]Harvard Business Review, HBR, business communication, self-development, bill bradley, william bradley, bradley[/tags]

Bill Bradley

Bill Bradley (mostly) retired after 35 years in organizational consulting, training and management development. During those years he worked internally with seven organizations and trained and consulted externally with more than 90 large and small businesses, government agencies, hospitals and schools.