Harvard Business Review Puts 75 Years of Trends on 6-Foot Fold-Out Timeline

Call it academia’s answer to the prize in the Cracker Jack package.

The September-October issue of the venerable Harvard Business Review, which is celebrating its 75th anniversary this year, comes shrink-wrapped with a 6-foot-long timeline crammed with three-quarters of a century of U.S. management ideas and practice. A monumental undertaking, it required more than 500 hours of HBR staff time to create.

Any student of management will find it a treat to navigate this document, which spotlights global conflicts, new technologies, key corporate and social developments and prominent thinkers, many of them, not incidentally, from Harvard. It is also a fascinating review of U.S. history, dovetailing with labor and management trends.

Among the developments noted:

* The first supermarkets appear in the early 1930s, as rampant layoffs and shorter work hours give rise to unions.

* Transistors arrive in the late 1940s, as nations concur on the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and workers and management achieve an uneasy labor truce.

* McDonald’s franchising blossoms in 1960, as companies’ overseas operations grow and the idea of the “organization man” takes hold.

* In the late 1970s, personal computers begin appearing in homes and offices, as “quality circles” invade the workplace and airlines win deregulation.

* Wal-Mart surges onto the national scene in the mid-1980s, when entrepreneurial management, just-in-time manufacturing, leveraged buyouts and junk bonds are the order of the day.

Test your knowledge by naming the decade: Management consultants are big, workers face displacement by technology, merger mania is underway, and investors are speculating heavily in the stock market. Nope, it’s not the 1990s. How about the 1920s, right before the market crashed? The more things change. . . .

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The timeline is arranged in three sections. Across the bottom stretches a graph indicating the peaks and valleys in real gross domestic product, with the longest dip occurring during the Great Depression, signified by a black cloud and lightning bolts.

The center band illustrates general management practices by area, including administration, personnel, production and accounting. By 1997, those categories have taken on a hipper aura, transformed into, respectively, leadership, managing people, adding value and measuring results--a playful reminder of the proliferation of business buzzwords. Stripped across the top are seminal ideas (marked by lightbulbs), the names of key books (including “The Practice of Management” by Peter F. Drucker) and the titles of significant HBR articles.

The ambitious process of assembling the timeline started in January, when John Landry, associate editor of HBR and a business historian, began skimming the tables of contents of every Review published since 1922.

“I started to think about the developments the articles reflected,” Landry said. Over many decades, they dramatized the change and evolution in how American workers have been managed.

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Working with David Sibbet, an organizational consultant and “information designer” in San Francisco, Landry set about winnowing out what would make the timeline and what wouldn’t. The term “re-engineering”--a bugaboo that has come to be synonymous with downsizing but was really about making organizations more effective--didn’t make the cut. “Information superhighway” is nowhere to be found. Neither is the advent of birth control pills or the invention of Post-it notes, although both were considered.

In fact, Landry said, Post-it notes were a crucial element of the timeline’s preparation. When a draft was posted for Harvard professors and others to comment on, it got covered by a blizzard of the stick-on notes, a staple of today’s workplace (and, by the way, introduced by 3M in 1976).

The timeline ends on a mixed note for workers, with references to flexible organizations, job insecurity and “vision” as an element of leadership.

Landry noted that the American Management Assn. was founded the same year HBR was started. “People were beginning to look at the role of management,” he said. HBR, he added, has served as “sort of a petri dish for ideas and practices.”

During its prestigious tenure, the bimonthly Review has been dedicated to the power of ideas. As editor Nan Stone once noted, “effective management ends in action but begins in thought.”

Can managers learn something from the timeline? Can it help them avoid mistakes of the past?

Probably not, Stone said. But it’s possible to detect cycles and to follow the shifts in management styles, from command-and-control to more openness about employee initiative and learning. At the very least, it’s a reminder that management does not happen in a vacuum. “As editors, it makes us want to be very watchful for all sorts of other things,” she said.

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Does your company have a worthy management approach that hasn’t made the pages of Harvard Business Review? Tell us about it. Write to Martha Groves, Corporate Currents, Los Angeles Times, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles, CA 90053, or e-mail martha.groves @latimes.com