HBR Adds C-Suite Product, Latest in Long Line to Target Top Tier Executives

Harvard Business Review recently launched an executive-focused subscription product, chasing peers like Semafor, The Wall Street Journal and Fortune who have built similar offerings aimed at the C-suite.  

What distinguishes their offering, however, is an exclusive two-year sponsorship agreement with Egon Zehnder, an executive search firm. The headhunter will contribute content to HBR Executive and their logo will appear on the landing page, newsletter and webinars. Egon Zehnder will also provide subscriptions to its clients.

But what might be most interesting in the partnership is that HBR will have access to data, insights and private conversations about and directly from the C-suite that might be hard to come by otherwise.

“This is a partnership HBR has never done before, to where we really are working with the sponsor, but not just so they plaster their name on everything, but with where we recognize that they have expertise,” Adi Ignatius, editor-at-large of HBR, told AMO. “Egon Zehnder is talking to thousands of CEOs and senior leaders all the time and they have data and they have insight. So we realized that they could be a true content partner as well as helping us think about, what are the big questions that are plaguing the C-suite now and then, how do we figure out the answers.”

HBR declined to share details about the financials of the partnership.

Subscribers will have access to master class videos, live Q&As, a weekly newsletter by Ignatius, as well as digital access to HBR.org and six print issues of Harvard Business Review annually. 

Vulnerability in Leadership

The idea to partner came about when an Egon Zehnder executive met with Ignatius at Davos in January. Until this year, Ignatius had spent 16 years as editor-in-chief at HBR with a broad purview to provide content for everyone from senior leaders to new entries into the workforce.

“We were trying, essentially, to write for everybody,” Ignatius said. For HBR Executive, they are trying to “superserve this highest level market.”

Egon Zehnder will provide access to leaders and their intimate conversations with the firm, while also maintaining confidentiality, the firm’s Chief Executive Officer Francesco Buquicchio said.

“More leaders are coming to terms with their own vulnerability, so they open up more,” Buquicchio said. “So there is much more richness in those conversations.”

In one of its first pieces for HBR Executive, Egon Zehnder writes about “leading through overwhelm,” and the challenges of managing in an unprecedented environment with geopolitical instability, technological disruption and more. To combat stress, leaders “must reprogram themselves by creating mental space to respond thoughtfully rather than reactively.”

“Leaders are becoming more and more lonely and they’re facing a much more complex world,” Buquicchio said.

HBR isn’t providing the executive search firm with any personally identifiable subscriber data, though the publication may share high-level, anonymized insights with Egon Zehnder. 

Everyone’s Building C-Suite Products

Current HBR subscribers are already upgrading to the executive product, suggesting “there was pent up demand that we had C-level executives who like HBR perfectly well serving their needs, but were really looking for something that was more specialized,” Erika Heilman, HBR deputy publisher, told AMO. 

Ignatius admits there’s plenty of competition and says that HBR’s advantage is that it will give executives a playbook to manage through periods of “hyper uncertainty.” HBR Executive content will provide actionable advice backed by research.

“HBR is nobody’s first read, so you have to get a kind of ‘wow’ value,” Ignatius said. The goal is “that everything we publish is not just okay, that’s sensible, but carries a practical—right now, how can I apply this—an insight moment and an application thing. That’s a high bar.”

HBR Executive will continue to build out the offering with more tools for readers, as well as events. The company will position the c-suite product as a natural extension of their existing tiered system, making sure it is clearly labeled and differentiated from the core HBR product.