Harvard Business Review’s Guidelines for Contributors

At Harvard Business Review, we equip ambitious senior leaders with evidence-backed insights that help them become smarter, more strategic, and more courageous in their work. To do that, we publish ideas from the foremost experts in management theory and practice.

Among the topics we cover: strategy, leadership, organizational culture, operations, technological change, innovation, communication, decision-making, talent retention, and career transitions. We publish articles of varying lengths, online and in print, as well as graphics, podcasts, videos, newsletters, and just about any other medium that might help us share an idea effectively.

We look for five qualities when evaluating what to publish:

1. Expertise: You don’t have to be well-known to be a contributor, but you must have demonstrated expertise in the subject you’re writing about.
2. Evidence: It’s not enough to know your subject deeply—you have to demonstrate the validity of your insights and recommendations to the reader. Referring to supporting research—ideally empirical research you’ve done yourself—is one good way to do this; describing relevant examples is another. Most HBR authors are business school faculty or consultants, because these professions allow them to do deep research across a range of companies and industries.
3. Originality: If you’re writing about a well-worn topic, we’ll be looking for a unique argument or counterintuitive insight. We’ll also be examining how well it builds on what we’ve already published. We reject many well-constructed proposals because we’ve already published something similar, we’ve published articles on the same general topic recently, or because the findings or prescriptions aren’t new or surprising.
4. Usefulness: HBR readers come to us not only to stay on top of new developments in management thinking but also to improve the way they and their organizations actually do things. Although many of our ideas are based on theory, we aim to publish ideas that are being put into practice. If you can explain your thinking so that a senior leader understands how to apply it in a real situation, that will make it more powerful.
5. Good writing: The best HBR articles are persuasive and a pleasure to read. Our readers are smart, skeptical, and busy, so if you aren’t clear about the problem you’re solving or don’t capture their interest right away, they will move on to something else. We publish content for senior leaders who are driving change in their organizations, so writing for that audience is essential.

Notes on the Proposal Process

Authors who’ve previously published with HBR typically submit their pitches directly to their editor by email. If you don’t have a relationship with an HBR editor, you can send your pitch through Submittable.

Individual authors and editors work differently, so there is no standard proposal process. Some authors prefer to start with a short pitch to determine whether an idea is a good fit, while others send a more detailed outline or a full draft. No matter what format you use, your pitch should answer the following questions, though it doesn’t need to be in a Q&A format.

1. What is the central message of the article you propose to write?
2. What is new, important, or counterintuitive about your idea?
3. Why do senior leaders need to know about it? How useful or practical is this insight? Can it be applied today?
4. What is the source of your authority? What academic, professional, or personal experience will you draw on?
5. What research and/or examples will you provide to back up your idea?

We receive many more submissions than we can publish. For this reason, we cannot respond to every unsolicited proposal.

How We Work with Authors

When we see a proposal that has promise, we begin developing it with its author. At that point we ask our authors to sign a copyright form and to disclose any financial relationships they have with companies cited in the proposed article.

Authors say they find our editorial process to be rigorous, and you may be asked to do multiple rounds of revisions. Note that unlike academic journals, there is not a point in our process at which we formally “accept” an article or guarantee it will be published. Multiple editors must review each piece enroute to publication, and sometimes we determine that a piece isn’t right for us during later stages. If that happens, you are free to take your article to another outlet.

We retain final decision rights on headlines and art. If we rewrite your headline, it’s because we believe the revised version will help your idea reach the audience it deserves.

We also retain the right to decide whether the ideas will appear in both digital and print, in digital or print form only, or on another HBR platform.

We trust that the work you present to us is original. We don’t publish pieces that have appeared elsewhere, that don’t properly credit the ideas they present, or that promote products or services.

We understand many of our contributors use AI tools. Because of legal restrictions involving copyright protection, we ask our contributors to share whether and how they’ve used these tools with their editor and on our copyright form. No matter what tools they’ve used, our authors are accountable for the accuracy, integrity, sourcing, and originality of their content. Our editors may use AI tools to support their own editorial workflows, but we don’t allow submissions to be used to train AI models, and our editors make all publication decisions. Humans must always be responsible for the work we create.

We appreciate your interest in HBR.

Amy Bernstein
Editor in Chief, Harvard Business Review

Daniel McGinn
Editor, Harvard Business Review

Last updated: September 2026