Aborted Article Causes Stir

Controversy has surrounded a last-minute decision at the Harvard Business Review to withhold its lead story for the January/February issue.

An article critical of IBM was cancelled by the Review because of its controversial content, according to the story's author.

But T. George Harris, editor of the Harvard Business Review, disputed the allegation that the story had been canceled.

He said the article's publication was postponed for editorial reasons.

"The article itself had never been canceled," Harris said yesterday. "I couldn't publish it immediately because I had more edits on it."

Mark Stahlman, the author of the article, said that the decision to pull the story with no definite plans for publication amounted to a cancellation.

"To the best of my knowledge there are no plans to ever run the article or a derivative of the article in the [Review]," said Stahlman, who is president of New Media Associates, a media and financial services company in New York City.

"If there is any difference between an open-ended, indefinite postponement and cancellation, it is lost on me," Stahlman said.

Stahlman said that the article's forceful criticism of management in the computer industry may have influenced the decision to withhold it from the Review.

"The article is highly critical of the management of IBM. It is unusual for an article to appear in the [Review] that adopts that critical tone," Stahlman said.

Harris said his last-minute decision to hold the article was not in response to pressure on this issue.

"I'm not editing this magazine for or against IBM. I'm editing it for things that give us new information on management," Harris said.

Harris said that the core issue in the article was not the criticism of IBM but a discussion of four different parts of the computer industry.

Stahlman agreed that the computer giant was not responsible for the decision. "I do not believe IBM played any direct role in having the story canceled," said Stahlman.

IBM spokesperson David F. Harrah also said the company had no reason to try to prevent publication of the article.

"It's not our way of operating to pressure people into reporting favorably on us," said Harrah. "These opinions can and have come out."

According to a December 21 article in The New York Times, Stahlman was told that his article has been pulled because of the intervention of William A. Sahlman, senior associate dean and director of publication activities at the Harvard Business School.

"[Sahlman] is an individual who I believe laid a very heavy hand on the decision," Stahlman said. "He did take a very strong negative view towards the article."

Harris said he asked Sahlman to look at the article but denied that Sahlman's input was a deciding factor in its postponement.

"I talked to quite a few people about the article. [Sahlman] was one of the people who commented on it but I made the decision," Harris said.

After a two week period during which he said he received no concrete proposal from the Review, Stahlman decided to seek publication elsewhere.

Stahlman said his article will run in original from in March in a Forbes ASAP, a quarterly supplement to Forbes magazine, and that a condensed version will appear in today's Wall Street Journal.

Harris said an article will run in the March/April issue of the Review that will "focus on the important points of the [Stahlman] article." Harris said he will write the article himself.

Sahlman said the Review has published articles critical of computer companies in the past.