Does management thinking still matter? Is there anything new left to say?
As editor of Harvard Business Review, I ask myself these questions all the time. (I also asked them when I was executive editor of strategy+business from 2005 to 2008.) The challenge is that there just aren't that many truly new ideas in the world. Many of the most compelling management insights remain timeless, from Frederick Winslow Taylor’s turn-of-the-20th-century thinking on what we now call “productivity” to Michael Porter’s five competitive forces that shape strategy, first developed in 1979. And yet, the global output of white papers, blogs, books, and newspaper and magazine articles on management and leadership seems to be at an all-time high. (I blame the explosion of “thought leadership” as a tool for personal and corporate branding, which has generated a lot more noise than signal.)
