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Harvard Business Manager

Notes for Writers

Harvard Business Manager is a journalistically independent magazine for practice-related management topics.

As the extended German edition of the US-based "Harvard Business Review" (HBR), the world's most distinguished management journal, it supplements the best articles from HBR with important research results supplied by professors at European universities and business schools as well as texts from German-speaking experts in consultancies and corporate management.

Our writers include the very best and most renowned experts in their fields and have acquired their expertise through extensive studies and vocational experience.

Our journal not only provides managers, consultants and academics with invaluable ideas for their everyday work, but it is also targeted at readers who have not acquired a business degree. For this reason, we ensure that all our articles are generally understandable and that specialist terminology is always explained.

The spectrum of topics covered by Harvard Business Manager comprises all aspects of management, including strategy, leadership, organisation, marketing, finance, innovation, production, business set-up, careers and human relations.

TRENDS:
The first section of our magazine provides a platform for new management practice ideas and concepts presented in relatively short articles. This is where we provide findings from surveys and future-oriented ideas.

STRATEGIES:
The main section includes detailed, well-researched articles, which illuminate tried and tested management concepts and provide comprehensive recommended courses of action.

OPINIONS:
Here, we offer writers the opportunity to elaborate on current management practice topics in the form of commentaries and essays.

Outlines

If you would like to submit an article, please do not send finalized texts when mak ing initial contact with us. Help us to assess your idea by sending us a written outline responding to the following questions as thoroughly as possible. Submissions without an outline will not be assessed by our editorial team. If you already have a completed manuscript, you can include this with your outline. We will discuss your proposal in detail and talk to you about the further procedure.

Please send the outline with your answers to these ten questions and, if applicable, your manuscript to the following e-mail address:
info@harvardbusinessmanager.de

1. What is the central tenet of the article you are offering us?
2. What is new and surprising about this?
3. Have you systematically examined - preferably in the form of a representative survey - whether your approach increases corporate success? (If "No", continue with question 6.)
4. If "Yes":
   a) How many people did you survey?
   b) How many respond ed?
   c) Who was surveyed?
   d) When did the survey take place?
   e) How did you ask the questions - per questionnaire, meeting, online etc.?
   f) Is your survey representative?
5. Please summarise the most important results of your survey.
6. What courses of action do you recommend for management?
7. With what business examples/bestpractice examples do you wish to illustrate your article? (Please name companies.)
8. Please outline the individual case examples. For instance: "Lufthansa is considered a role model in terms of planning the succession to the CEO. Typically, candidates are developed within the company; the Chairman of the Board of Directors discreetly picks two managers who have proven their potential" (see Harvard Business Manager, March 2009, "Den Chefwechsel richtig planen", Planning a change at the top correctly, by Michael Leitl).
9. Please summarise your article in such a way that both the thesis and the argumentation structure are clearly recognisable. You can also insert graphics and tables here.
10. Please describe your scientific or practical background briefly as well as your current vocational position and explain to what extent your experience correlates to your article.

Exclusion Criteria

We are pleased to be offered articles on any management topic. However, not all articles are suitable for Harvard Business Manager. To ensure the high quality of our journal and to save you the disappointment of a rejection, we would like to outline which points are highly likely to result in a rejection (exceptions apply to commentaries and essays).

1. The article lacks exclusivity:
The article must be original. If your article or topic idea has been published elsewhere, for example in a book, on the Internet or in a news - paper/journal, then we will have to reject it.

2. The article lacks new insight:
We will examine your topic idea with extensive literature research. If other writers have dealt with the topic in detail or if your article lacks any significantly new insight, then we will not be able to publish it. This applies, for example, to fundamentals and textbook contents, abstract ideas or survey findings that merely confirm common sense.

3. The article lacks examples:
Harvard Business Manager is not a scientific journal, but reports on new practice-oriented management developments. It is essential that these developments are underlined with corporate and bestpractice examples. By examples, we mean short reports on everyday company life, which illustrate the thesis, or individual aspects of the article. Here, it is important that the listed example companies are named. We only accept such paraphrases as "a medium-sized engineering company" in exceptional cases.

4. The article lacks evidence of success (for texts in the "Strategy" section):
If the success of a method designed to improve corporate success is not credibly illustrated (preferably with facts and figures), we are unfortunately unable to include the article in our journal. Simply claiming that the method will have an impact in the future is not sufficient.

Editing

Each month, the editorial team receives numerous proposals and manuscripts. As we always endeavour to make our selection with great care, you may occasionally only receive feedback from us after several weeks. Nevertheless, the editorial team wishes at this point to thank you for your interest in the Harvard Business Manager and for your time and effort.

And, in conclusion, one more thing: In your articles, please avoid any impression of self-marketing for your company or your institution. Our readers will be unable to take such texts seriously and we would have no choice but to reject the article.

Furthermore, we reserve the right to reject a manuscript in any phase of the editorial process without providing reasons for this decision. And should we request (following discussion of dates) that you send us a manuscript, please understand that this does not yet constitute an agreement to publish your text.

Please also understand that we will generally have change proposals and that your text will definitely be subject to multi-stage editorial processing.

Copyright

In the event that a manuscript is published in Harvard Business Manager, the copyright of the edited text is transferred to the publishing house.