MBA in a Box Practical Ideas from the Best Brains in Business

INTRODUCTION When I was the editor of theHarvard Business Review, I had a recurring fantasy (no, not that kind of fantasy). In my fantasy the dean of the Harvard Business Schoolmy bosswould call me into his dimly lit, book-lined, wood-paneled office. He would sit me down, draw the shades, and lock the door. He would pace. In some version of the fantasy he would wring his hands, shrug, hem and haw. In others he would offer me a glass of port and a fine cigar. (I liked the second version better.) In that fantasy, the deanan enormous man with a raspy, conspirator's voicewould say to me that my job at theHarvard Business Reviewwas to make business appear difficult to the readers. "Don't publish any smart-aleck articles about how Andrew Carnegie or Henry Ford never finished grammar school or how Bill Gates dropped out of college. Publish articles that talk about how difficult business is, how complicated it is to read a balance sheet, how many times you have to run a regression analysis to really understand your market, how the problems of strategy are intractable. Make it all seem hard," he would tell me with a scowl. "Hard? Why?" I would ask rather meekly. "Why? Why?" he would repeat, eyes narrowed into tiny slits. "Did you really ask me why, you nincompoop?" "Yes," I would say, clearing my throat. "I did." "Because it is. And besides, what would happen to our business if your readers thought business wasn't all that difficult? That any imbecile could do it? What do we do then?" the dean would bellow. "We sell business education, business books, business magazines, online business content, business videos, business case studies, lectures, degrees, research, class notes. The whole shebang. If people thought business was easy, we'd be wiped out. Finito. End of story." My fantasy did not go on much after that. And in truth, I have great admiration for the dean, the school, the students, and the faculty. The Harvard Business School is a tremendous institution, and it has done an enormous amount of good for thousands of people and institutions on many, many levels. Even so, as I think about business, I have come to understand that my fantasy was in some ways right as well as wrong. It was wrong because business isn't easy. At least it isn't at the moment. The forces governing competition today are very difficult to navigate. They are global, technological, financial, and human. The cycles of growth and declinewhich many pundits in the 1990s said were no longer applicableare back in full force. In fact, the same itemsglobalization and technologythat people said had ended the business cycle are now being viewed as making it worse. Globalization and technology, it is now said, have destroyed the ability of many companies to price their goods and services at a premium, which is hurting profits globally. (In the '90s, the same phenomenon was viewed the other way around. Globalization and technology would check inflation and keep prices low so that cost-conscious consumers would continue buying, fueling what some people at the time called the "long boom.") But that's not all. The forces governing business are largevery large. They range from sudden, short-term shifts in consumer buying habitsa two-season-long denim craze, a two-year Hula Hoop frenzy, a four-year-long cigar fad, for exampleto slower, medium-term changes, such as the decade-long shift from conservative business attire to clothes for casual Fridays and then to clothes for (as my children might say) whatever. [read more]