Catching up to how people are reading? Or, giving up on deeper thought-and-idea sharing? MIT Sloan Management Review has long been a leader in bridging the gap between academic research and management practices.
Does their upcoming move away from strategic long-form articles and towards short-form videos, podcasts and social-first content mean they are following today’s trends, catching up to the rest of the world? Or are they giving up their original much-appreciated mission of making research-based work available to business practitioners?
I read it often and just learned that they are shutting down their online publication and quarterly news letter.
In past years, they published two of my articles: Neutralize Internal Politics in Digital Initiatives in 2017 and How Digital Leaders Inspire Engagement from 2018. That year they invited me to be a guest on a webinar based on my work on internal politics: Don’t Let Politics Block Your Digital Initiatives. My work, based on my research over years, was a minuscule part of their strategy of bridging research to reach practitioners.
MIT SM Dean Richard M. Locke explains in a letter to colleagues: (https://t.e2ma.net/message/u9dmjbb/igz1a3je)
“In order to ensure greater coordination and consistency of messaging, we are bringing communications and external engagement closer together.”
“We are at a pivotal moment… one in which what we communicate, and how we communicate, has a direct impact on our visibility, impact, and engagement with the world.”
“The school will continue to deliver thoughtful, engaging content that draws even more heavily on the important work of our MIT Sloan faculty, showcasing a variety of platforms including digital newsletters, short-form video, social-first content, and podcasts.”
Will my webinar with them from July 2018 now be considered a podcast? Just joking!
Thank you Rita McGrath for your message in Thought Sparks asking about the impact of this decision, the risks and what we should do next.
You said
“The translation layer between “what research knows” and “what practitioners do” has always been thin and underfunded. SMR was one of the few institutions explicitly committed to that translation. Now it’s gone.”
“Action points coming from short-form outlets without essential context are mostly useless, and conceivably even dangerous.”
“Sixty-seven years is a long run. MIT Sloan Management Review shaped how generations of managers thought about strategy, innovation, leadership, and change. The right response to its closure isn’t nostalgia. It’s to ask, with some urgency, where the future high-impact management ideas will come from and how they will be disseminated.”
And thank you Andrew Winston for your clear, hard-hitting comments in Substack about how the goals seemed to be reduced to communication and no longer strategy and thought leadership.
You said
“A university is different than a company, so “comms” may be broader, but it’s still weird to put the Sloan Management Review in the same general bucket as press releases. Yes, it’s part of how the MIT brand goes out into the world, but isn’t it much more than that? Doesn’t it get to the fundamental purpose of a university: improving our understanding of the world and educating?”
“MIT SMR put thought leadership into the world …. It helped business leaders build better companies that profit, grow, and serve their employees and the world. That’s a righteous mission—and it did more than improve the MIT brand.”
“All of us with ideas to share are going to have to think hard about how we actually reach people. I don’t think many under 30 will notice the loss of MIT SMR, but I think it will affect the quality of business thinking more than they realize.”
More info from Kevin Haynes who summarized MITSloan Management’s long history here on INC.
We can encourage people in our organizations to meet F2F regularly to discuss and share experiences and plans. Encourage them also to make their project spaces open beyond the actual team members. This working out loud is valuable, and not yet common enough.
For further geographical reach, we can work in online groups, exchanging ideas and developing new approaches. This takes a dynamic facilitator and maintaining regularity. It’s not easy, but is worth it.
Please share your ideas in the comments.
Thanks for reading Gig Mindsetters – Imaginize a New World! This post is public so feel free to share it.
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