The Internet is becoming as familiar a presence in households and offices as the telephone, but, like many big ideas, it was once no more than a twinkle in someone's magazine story. Writing in the days before computers had even become commonplace in American life, Daniel Bell, Harvard University professor of social sciences, now emeritus, wrote "Communications Technology - For Better or for Worse," in which he laid out concepts that paved the way for the Information Superhighway. The year was 1979. And the magazine was the Harvard Business Review.

"If you think of virtually any important business idea today, chances are it was first written about in HBR," says Nan Stone, a 14-year veteran of HBR who has served as the magazine's editor in chief since 1994. Indeed, for most of this century, the magazine has not only been on the cutting edge of business, it has often been decades ahead of the times. HBR has been a voice for the concepts and practices that have created the practice of management - a profession that was in its infancy when the magazine was inaugurated in 1922.

This month marks HBR's 75th anniversary, a landmark that the magazine has commemorated in a special September/ October issue that looks at some of today's most pressing management issues. A special six-foot pullout also highlights some of the seminal ideas first espoused by academics from HBS, scholars from other institutions, and business practitioners who have contributed to HBR. These concepts are now informing the practices of managers in enterprises around the globe. "Their articles and commentary have made HBR the single most influential management publication in the world," says Stone.

"HBR is where you first heard about how information technology would become a critical strategic tool, for example," she continues. "It's where HBS professor Ted Levitt first outlined the principles that defined the field of marketing and where Mike Porter first identified the five competitive forces that shape strategy. It's also where key concepts such as activity-based costing, the 'balanced-scorecard' approach to performance measurement, and the importance of workforce diversity were first introduced."

While HBR has served as a platform for innovation, the inner workings of the magazine itself these past 75 years have been marked "more by evolution than revolution," says Stone. Conceived by students in the early 1920s, the idea for the magazine was quickly taken up by HBS faculty, who charged Arch Shaw, the Chicago publisher of System magazine (which later became Business Week), with producing the publication under the School's editorial control. Modeled after the Harvard Law Review, it was intended both to improve the oper-ation of business by linking economic theory with practice and to serve as a showpiece for HBS research.

The magazine's first decades were marked by financial losses. But in the late 1940s the School took over its production, began to experiment with promotion, and started soliciting reader input. As management education began to grow in popularity over the next three decades, so did HBR. The magazine began to feature new depart-ments on business topics of current interest and more articles written by non-HBS scholars, consultants, executives, and other business practitioners.

After a few turbulent years in the late 1980s marked by organizational and personnel changes, in 1993 HBR officially became a part of the new HBS Publishing Corporation, an entity that combines the School's many commercial publishing operations under one roof. Through it all, the magazine has maintained an unwavering commitment to high editorial standards and has retained its cachet. Today, HBR's key business indicators - subscriptions, renewals, and advertising pages - "are higher than ever," says Stone. "It's a clear demonstration that a great many people want more than just business 'news' - they hunger for the kind of thought-provoking material only HBR provides. I feel a tremendous sense of excitement about the future of the magazine."

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