Strategy+Business - History

History

Joel Kurtzman, formerly editor-in-chief of the Harvard Business Review and a business editor and columnist at the New York Times—together with a group of partners at Booz & Company, then part of Booz Allen Hamilton—founded strategy+business in 1995. A collection of Kurtzman’s Thought Leader columns was published in book form, Thought Leaders: Insights on the Future of Business (Jossey-Bass, 1997). Kurtzman served as editor-in-chief between 1995 and 1999.

Randall Rothenberg succeeded Kurtzman, serving as editor-in-chief between 2000 and 2005. Previously, Rothenberg had been an editor of the New York Times Magazine and had also served as the newspaper’s advertising columnist. He redesigned strategy+business, introduced the “Best Business Books” feature, and expanded coverage of the burgeoning electronic media infrastructure. Rothenberg’s first major issue, which was published in February 2000, was titled “E-Business: Lessons from Planet Earth,” and it contained articles that prophesied the dot-com crash that occurred several months later. During Rothenberg’s tenure, the strategy+business staff was formally brought into the Booz Allen Hamilton operation; prior to that, the magazine was a standalone, contracted enterprise.

By 2002, the firm’s e-commerce businesses had hit serious headwinds, and the future of strategy+business was not certain. But Booz Allen’s partners decided to keep publishing it. Rothenberg began developing what he and Cesare Mainardi (then an influential partner in North America’s commercial practice and now Booz & Company’s chief executive officer) called the “functional agenda.” They started to build a body of research and practice around six major functions: strategy and leadership; innovation; organizations and people; marketing and sales; mergers and restructuring; and operations. Many of the regular, annual features in strategy+business—including the “Global Innovation 1000” survey of top R&D spenders and the “CEO Succession” report on CEO tenure—date back to this effort.

The current editor-in-chief, Art Kleiner, succeeded Rothenberg in 2005. A writer, lecturer, and commentator, Kleiner is the author of The Age of Heretics: A History of the Radical Thinkers Who Reinvented Corporate Management (Currency/Doubleday, 1996; rev’d. ed., 2008, Jossey-Bass) and Who Really Matters: The Core Group Theory of Power, Privilege, and Success (Currency/Doubleday, 2003).

During Kleiner’s tenure, the magazine has published influential articles on such topics as neuroscience and leadership (a 2006 article by David Rock and Jeffrey Schwartz led to the establishment of the field of neuroleadership), women in emerging markets (“The Third Billion”), capabilities-driven strategy, investment in infrastructure, organizational culture, and long-wave theories of economic change.

After a private equity takeover by the Carlyle Group in 2008, Booz Allen Hamilton was split into two entities. At that time, strategy+business became the flagship publication of the global commercial firm, Booz & Company. With 58 offices around the world, Booz & Company works with businesses, governments, and organizations.

The firm’s marketing, intellectual capital, and knowledge management efforts, which include strategy+business, are led by Thomas A. Stewart, its chief marketing and knowledge officer. Stewart, formerly editor and managing director of the Harvard Business Review and a member of the Board of Editors at Fortune magazine, is the author of two books: The Wealth of Knowledge: Intellectual Capital and the 21st Century Organization (Currency/Doubleday, 2001) and Intellectual Capital: The New Wealth of Organizations (Currency/Doubleday, 1997).