MBR Plan

We are happy to announce the upcoming launch of a new magazine, Management and Business Review (MBR).  The goal of MBR is to bridge management practice, education and research, and thereby enhance all three.  With a targeted readership of managers, students, and professors, we expect that this effort will increase the impact of academic research on organizations.  We will issue a call for papers later this year.

Cosponsors: MBR is cosponsored by ten prominent business schools whose names will be listed on the front cover of all issues.

  1. Anderson School of Management at UCLA
  2. China Europe International Business School
  3. City University of Hong Kong
  4. Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia
  5. Indian School of Business
  6. INSEAD
  7. Johnson College of Business at Cornell University
  8. Owen Graduate School of Business at Vanderbilt University
  9. Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan
  10. Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University

Editorial team: MBR’s editors-in-chief are

  • Wallace J. Hopp, Herrick Professor of Business and Associate Dean of Learning Design, Ross School of Business, University of Michigan (former Editor-in-Chief, Management Science)
  • Kalyan Singhal, McCurdy Professor of Innovation, Operations, and Supply-Chain Management, Merrick School of Business, University of Baltimore (Editor-in-Chief, Production and Operations Management)

For the magazine’s first few issues, we will invite selected people to write top-flight articles.  We plan to have a multilevel editorial team:

  1. Advisors: Scholars and executives who will advise the editors on the strategic direction of MBR and the composition of its editorial team. At this point, MBR has 91 advisors, including ten professors from Wharton; eight from Harvard; five from Carnegie Mellon; four each from MIT and Stanford; three each from Chicago, Columbia, Duke, London Business School, Northwestern, and UCLA; and two each from Cornell, Dartmouth, Indian School of Business, NYU, and UC-Berkeley.  Advisors also include nine executives from Accenture, Alidale, Ashridge Strategic Management Centre, Bain & Company, Deloitte, Good Growth Capital, and Monitor Deloitte who have published best-selling books for executives and many articles in the magazines like the Harvard Business Review.  The names of the advisors are listed at the end of this plan.
  2. Deputy editors and liaisons who will work with business school deans and AACSB (Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business); schools in Australia, China, Europe, India, the rest of Asia, and North and South America; business community members; consulting firms; and editors of top research journals.
  3. Autonomous departmental editors to whom authors will submit papers. The department editors will have full authority to accept papers that may later go through extensive copy editing.  One department may have several departmental editors.  We plan to have departments in traditional disciplinary domains (such as accounting, business analytics, finance, marketing, operations, organizational behavior, and supply chains) and in multidisciplinary domains (such as disaster management, digital transformation, energy and sustainability, entrepreneurship, innovation, public policy, and strategy).  So far, the following colleagues have agreed to serve as departmental editors:
    • Charles Corbett, UCLA
    • Arnd Huchzermeier, WHU: Otto Beisheim School of Management
    • Chris Ittner, Wharton School
    • Nirmalya Kumar, Singapore Management University
    • Eva Labro, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
    • Sunil Mithas, University of Maryland
    • Stefan Reichelstein, Stanford Business School
    • Segei Savin, Wharton School
    • Anil Shivdasani, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
    • David Simchi-Levi, MIT
    • Jan-Benedict Steenkamp, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
    • Jay Swaminathan, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
    • Asoo Vakharia, University of Florida
    • Jeffrey R Williams, Carnegie-Mellon University
    • Alan Scheller Wolf, Carnegie-Mellon University
  4. Associate editors and members of the editorial review board who will review papers.

In addition, we will call upon ad-hoc reviewers to assist departmental editors.  A professional editorial staff will work with the authors of accepted papers to produce truly compelling articles.

Business-School Deans’ Nominations for the Editorial Team

We request business-school deans to nominate their colleagues for one or more editorial positions.  Departmental editors and associate editors should have some of the following qualifications: published in the Harvard Business Review (HBR), Sloan Management Review (SMR), or California Management Review (CMR); published books for practitioners; and done consulting at senior levels of companies.  Members of the editorial review board should have excellent publication records and one of two qualifications: authorship of a textbook or thorough familiarity with HBR, SMR, and CMR.

Please send your nominations for MBR’s editorial team to Kalyan Singhal at MBR@ubalt.edu with the e-mail heading: Nominations for MBR.  In half a page or less for each nominee, please include the name, email address, and the areas of interest and list the names of the journals or magazines in which the nominee has published and other qualifications.  Individuals can also send self-nominations.

Partner Business Schools and Customized Editions of MBR

MBR is a grass-root initiative with an opportunity for all schools to participate.  Schools that subscribe to MBR for all students will be listed as Partner Schools in MBR.  The students and other constituents of the schools, including their faculty, alumni, and affiliated business community, will receive a 50 percent discount on the magazine’s price.  They will also receive a similar discount on their advertisements in the magazine.

A partner school may also request its own edition of the magazine for its constituents (affiliated business community, alumni, students, and faculty).  For example, for the XYZ School of Management, MBR will have a banner headline on the front cover: “The XYZ School of Management Edition.”  If the school wishes, it can add supplementary material for its constituents in the back part of the magazine.

Partner Companies

MBR seeks close collaboration with the business community.  Companies that subscribe for all senior executives will be listed as Partner Companies in MBR.  For these subscriptions, they will receive a 50 percent discount on the magazine’s price.  They will also receive a similar discount on their advertisements in the magazine.

Why we need another magazine

Management and Business Review, like the three foremost business magazines, HBR, SMR, and CMR, will be targeted to all managers.  While each of the three foremost magazines is published by a leading business school, Management and Business Review is a grassroots initiative with a wide participation by many schools.

The primary reason for developing a new magazine is that we have over 20 million potential readers of such magazines worldwide who have a broad range of needs for knowledge about management and business practices.  The existing sources, including the three foremost magazines and the enormous amount of information available on the Internet, meet only a fraction of their needs.

Furthermore, most of the over 200,000 business school professors around the world generally publish in about 1,500 research journals and practitioners’ journals focused on specific business disciplines.  Over 98 percent of them never attempt to publish in the three foremost magazines. They could be motivated to write papers for MBR if we can create a publishing opportunity with broad community involvement, a different organizational structure, and different editorial processes.

With a different organizational structure and different editorial processes, Management and Business Review will evolve over time.  Thus, while keeping in mind a wide range of interesting and rewarding possibilities, we plan to emphasize the following:

  1. A much wider global perspective: MBR will cover a much wider global perspective than any existing magazine.  During the current decade, the high-income industrialized countries have started to account for less than 50 percent of the global gross product, and China has become the largest economy in the world based on purchasing power parity.  This shift, combined with the continuing rise of global networks for production of goods and services, has created new paradigms of managing organizations.
  2. In-depth coverage, rigor, and value density: We plan to publish articles that are rigorous and cover topics in depth.  Furthermore, articles in MBR will be succinct and precise, ensuring that readers get maximum value per minute for the time they spend in reading.
  3. Drawing on an untapped pool of authors: Since we plan to rely on numerous cosponsoring and partner schools, we expect to draw on a larger pool of academics who work on real-world problems than other publications do.  Most people in this pool do not publish in HBR, SMR, and CMR.  Articles from this pool, from the consulting community, and from practitioners will be the primary sources of papers for the Management and Business Review.
  4. Research journals: Some articles in academic research journals are pertinent to practice, but the practitioners rarely read them because they are written for academics. We plan to invite their authors to write “practitioners’ versions” of such articles and we plan to conduct workshops to help them in their rewriting.

Editorial Focus

The value proposition of MBR rests on the quality of its content.  Articles must be interesting, relevant, and readable for a wide audience.  Although many of the ideas presented in Management and Business Review will be rooted in research, they must contain a clear management message.  It is therefore vital that all articles address real-world business systems.  Novel research results must be tied to concrete management practices.  Hence, the overarching characteristic of MBR will be articles that are relevant to the practice of management, efficiently written, and enjoyable to read.  To achieve this, articles will be concise, supplemented with visual graphics and rich in real-world connections.

It is possible, however, that an article is highly relevant only to an audience in a specific discipline.  To permit us to publish both broad interest articles and important specialty articles, MBR will make use of both print and online channels.  Articles in the print journal will be held to a standard of broad interest, which generally means of interest to a senior management audience.  Articles published online will be targeted at audiences in specific disciplines in such online magazines as MBR Accounting Review, MBR Finance Review, MBR Marketing Review, and MBR Operations Review.  Once we reach a critical number of papers in a specialized online magazine, we will also publish it in print form.

Impact on academic research: An accompanying agenda

Vipin Agrawal et al. in a 2017 study reported that, contrary to occasional claims, academic research in management and business has made phenomenal contributions to practice since 1959 when reports from the Carnegie Foundation and the Ford Foundation laid out the goals for modern business education and transformed it from vocational training to a rigorous academic and professional pursuit comparable to education in engineering or medicine.   If you have any evidence of academic research in management and business making contributions to practice, please share it with MBR by sending an email to Kalyan Singhal at MBR@ubalt.edu

The presence of MBR will encourage academics to conduct their academic research in actual organizational settings. While doctors can practice their innovations on patients on their own, lawyers can practice their innovations in courts on their own, and scientists and engineers can create innovative prototypes in labs, management innovators often need companies’ participation to test and improve their ideas.  The proposed magazine has the potential to serve as an influential supplement to what our academic journals publish, leading to a major evolution similar to the one that began in 1959 with the reports from the Carnegie Foundation and the Ford Foundation on business education.

Workshops on conducting research and writing papers for practitioners’ magazines

To help academic authors translate their research into accessible articles, MBR will conduct workshops led by outstanding scholars with strong track records of publishing in practitioners’ journals.  Of course, we hope that this will increase the stream of publishable submissions to MBR.  But if it also leads to scholars writing more for other practitioner-oriented publications, this will also help achieve our goal of deepening the dialogue between business scholars and business leaders.

Related publications and social networks

We also plan to develop a Web-Based magazine, Knowledge@MBR, which will be somewhat similar to Knowledge@Wharton, but will cover a much wider range of topics and include authors from all over the world.  While Knowledge@MBR will focus on contemporary concerns, MBR will focus on knowledge about enduring issues.

Every business school or company will have the option of hosting Knowledge@MBR for its constituents and adding its own material for them.  We also plan to create social networks for MBR’s constituents.

Your feedback

MBR welcomes your questions, comments, and suggestions on any aspect of this plan.  Please send them to Kalyan Singhal at MBR@ubalt.edu.

Kalyan Singhal

Co-Editor-in-Chief, Management and Business Review

Editor-in-Chief, Production and Operations Management

 

Advisors

  1. Regina Abrami, Wharton School
  2. Paul A. Argenti, Dartmouth College
  3. Anil Arya, Ohio State University
  4. Baris Ata, University of Chicago
  5. Felix Barber, Ashridge Strategic Management Centre
  6. Richard Barker, Oxford University
  7. John Birge, University of Chicago
  8. Joseph Bower, Harvard Business School
  9. Andrew Campbell, Ashridge Strategic Management Centre
  10. Dennis Campbell, Harvard Business School
  11. Peter Cappelli, Wharton School
  12. Jeff Cares, Alidale
  13. Bhaskar Chakravorty, Tufts University
  14. Sunil Chopra, Northwestern University
  15. Morris Cohen, Wharton School
  16. David Collis, Harvard Business School
  17. Charles Corbett, UCLA
  18. Bruce Chew, Monitor Deloitte
  19. Tom Davenport, Babson College
  20. Jean-Pierre Dubé, University of Chicago
  21. Murray Dalziel, University of Baltimore
  22. George Day, Wharton School
  23. Preyas Desai, Duke University
  24. Robert Eccles, Harvard Business School
  25. Jehoshua Eliashberg, Wharton School
  26. Peter Fader, Wharton School
  27. Alfonso Gambardella, Bocconi University
  28. Stanley Gershwin, MIT
  29. Pankaj Ghemawat, New York University
  30. Mark Gottfredson, Bain & Company
  31. Vijay Govindarajan, Dartmouth College
  32. Linda Green, Columbia Business School
  33. Alok Gupta, University of Minnesota
  34. Andrei Hagiu, MIT
  35. Gary Hamel, London Business School
  36. Warren Hausman, Stanford University
  37. Constance Helfat, Dartmouth College
  38. Teck Ho, University of California at Berkeley
  39. Andrew Hoffman, University of Michigan
  40. Christopher Ittner, Wharton School
  41. Jeffery Inman, University of Pittsburgh
  42. Ravi Jagannathan, Northwestern University
  43. Eric Johnson, Vanderbilt University
  44. Ajit Kambil, Deloitte
  45. Uday Karmarkar, UCLA
  46. Andres Karolyi, Cornell University
  47. Sunder Kekre, Carnegie Mellon University
  48. Wolf Ketter, Erasmus University
  49. Kumar, Georgia State University
  50. Howard Kunreuther, Wharton School
  51. Hau Lee, Stanford University
  52. Josh Lerner, Harvard Business School
  53. Baruch Lev, New York University
  54. Arie Lewin, Duke University
  55. Costis Maglaras, Columbia University
  56. Ann Majchrzak, University of Southern California
  57. Carl Mela, Duke University
  58. John Mullins, London Business School
  59. Paul Nunes, Accenture
  60. Gary Pisano, Harvard Business School
  61. Jagmohan Singh Raju, Wharton School
  62. Ananth Raman, Harvard Business School
  63. M Rammohan Rao, Indian School of Business
  64. Michael Raynor, Monitor Deloitte
  65. Stefan Reichelstein, Stanford Business School
  66. John R Roberts, University of New South Wales and London Business School
  67. Johan Roos, Hult International Business School
  68. Aleda Roth, Clemson University
  69. Herman Saenz, Bain & Company and Cornell University
  70. Amy Salzhauer, Good Growth Capital
  71. Sridhar Seshadri, Indian School of Business
  72. Alan Sheller-Wolf, Carnegie Mellon University
  73. David Simchi-Levi, MIT
  74. Chester Spatt, Carnegie Mellon University
  75. Kannan Srinivasan, Carnegie Mellon University
  76. Martin K. Starr, Columbia University and Rollins College
  77. Jan-Benedict Steenkamp, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
  78. Chris Tang, UCLA
  79. Sridhar Tayur, Carnegie Mellon University
  80. Alex Triantis, University of Maryland
  81. David Ulrich, University of Michigan
  82. Jan Van Mieghem, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University
  83. Rohit Verma, Cornell University
  84. Miguel Villas-Boas, University of California at Berkeley
  85. Eric von Hippel, MIT
  86. Seungjin Whang, Stanford Business School
  87. Yoram (Jerry) Wind, Wharton School
  88. George S Yip, Imperial College
  89. Dennis Yao, Harvard Business School
  90. David Young, INSEAD
  91. Jerry Zimmerman, University of Rochester