Business and Management

HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW

As a senior editor at HBR, I helped conceptualize and write articles that would go on to become classics in the field.

Among the leading business thinkers with whom I worked at HBR were John Seely Brown, former head of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC); Japanese organizational theorist Ikujiro Nonaka, a leader in the field of knowledge management; and famed Harvard learning theorist Chris Argyris.

Much of this work is collected in the anthology The Learning Imperative: Managing People for Continuous Innovation, which I edited, published by the Harvard Business School Press in 1993.

The Learning Imperative describes the strategic logic, organizational design, psychological challenges, and key implementation issues of the learning organization.

Copies are available on Amazon.com.

You can explore more of my work in the domain of Business and Management.

LEADERSHIP THE HARD WAY

Occasionally, I team with business leaders to help them articulate the lessons of their own work experience.

For example, I partnered with former Intel executive Dov Frohman, inventor of the EPROM and pioneer of the global corporation, on our book Leadership the Hard Way, published by Jossey-Bass, Warren Bennis Books, in 2008.

The book describes Dov’s fascinating journey from living in hiding as a young Jewish child in the Netherlands during World War II to being in on the ground floor in Silicon Valley in the 1960s to creating Intel’s operations in Israel, today that country’s largest private employer.

Management guru Tom Peters termed the book “that rarest of things: a truly original book about leadership.”

You can learn more about my process as an editorial consultant.

“This book would not have been possible without the engagement, skills, and experienced counsel of Robert Howard. I was always amazed by the way that Bob would completely change what I had originally written and yet in the process succeed in capturing exactly what I wanted to say.”
–Dov Frohman

THE BOSTON CONSULTING GROUP

I also have a decades-long association with The Boston Consulting Group (BCG), a leading management consulting company, where I worked for a time as director of idea development.

Over the years, I have been involved in the conceptualization and writing of many of the firm’s publications in areas ranging from people and organization, to corporate finance and value creation, to health care.