I had never noticed before, but when I took the latest issue of Harvest Business Review, three leaflets feel out, all of then heavily promoting the magazine and subscriptions to it. I’ll post some details later on, as I left all of the three leaflets home before taking a flight and I don’t remember anything of what’s printed on them. What did strike me though, the tone of the leaflets in nothing resembled the letters I got from the Economist, after having canceled my subscription (or rather, forgotten to renew it). They were way too commercial for me and almost caused me the throw the magazine away. Again, I can’t give you the details right now–I’ll get you those later.

Two things that made up for the way too commercial leaflets. First, the humor in one of the articles, combined with a little arrogance was great–especially because I started laughing in such a way that it caused a good conversation to start between the guy in the aisle seat and me. The second (which I had never noticed until now) was the fact that you don’t have to pay in advance for a subscription. I always buy the magazine in the store (as opposed to the Economist, which used to be in my mailbox every Friday–until I forgot to send in my renewal which I still haven’t done ;-). I’m still doubting whether or not I should subscribe…

“Nobody knows if we’ll ever receive a message from extraterrestrial life, but if we do, one-third of the world’s population would probably worship the remote intelligences, one-third would probably want to conquer them, and the final third (the readers of this magazine), would want to do some extraterrestrial market research and sell them something.”

^{Paul Saffo, Six Rules for Effective Forecasting, HBR July/August 2007}

p.s. by the way, there was a great article on IT strategy and SOA in the July/August issue. Often nothing too technical, but nonetheless a pretty interesting read.