Last week Harvard Business School Publishing (HBSP), a not-for-profit subsidiary of Harvard University--which includes Harvard Business School Press, the Harvard Business Review and additional units producing newsletters, conferences and multimedia products for management development--laid off 14 employees. CEO Linda Doyle told PW that the decision was "one outcome of a long-term strategic planning process. This was a difficult action to take, but one that enables us to be even more competitive in the future." Doyle will soon be stepping down as CEO, and Penguin Group president David Wan is set to take the role July 1.
Under the reorganization, all of HBSP's business units will remain intact. At HBS Press, two editorial support positions were eliminated, although all five acquiring editors will stay in place. The overall staff was reduced to 26. In addition, HBS Press will begin to acquire more deeply in its core areas of strategy, leadership, innovation, general management and human resources training. "The press will market more aggressively and leverage all the platforms to promote our authors and promote our books," said corporate communications director Sarah McConville. Daniel Goleman's March release, Primal Leadership: Realizing the Power of Emotional Intelligence, co-written with Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee, which grew out of articles originally written for the Harvard Business Review, is a recent example of HBSP's cross-platform strategy.
In other news, HBS Press announced that, despite what McConville called "a very tough fall," the third quarter, which ended in March, was "very strong." A good bit of the credit goes not just to the Goleman book but to the successes of Ronald A. Heifetz and Marty Linsky's Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive Through the Dangers of Leading and Joseph L. Badaracco Jr.'s Leading Quietly: An Unorthodox Guide to Doing the Right Thing. Last year, HBS Press signed 40 books, up from 33 in 2000, and published 44 titles, a level it hopes to match in 2002.
