Commercialization’s Corruption of Communication

Or: What the Shuttering of the Sloan Management Review May Really Mean

This was a hypnopompic thought this morning that turned into a full-on, fully conscious rant (to myself) on my morning walk with my dogs. I dictated all of this into my phone, so forgive the occasional wander or imprecision. My thanks to Andrew Winston and his post this morning which was apparently the last tumbler of the lock I needed for all this to click in.

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MIT Sloan recently announced it is shutting down the Sloan Management Review (SMR). A number of people, as you’d imagine, are rightly upset, myself included.

My personal stake, for full transparency: I was hoping SMR would be one of the four sites for my dissertation’s empirical study. The larger point here is why I chose it in the first place: SMR had a 67-year reputation for not only recognizing truly novel and important ideas ahead of time but also making sure those ideas got out into the world, whether they came from MIT faculty or alumni or not.

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How “content” became synonymous with “marketing”

Top of mind for me, related to this, is an article on Substack, still living very much rent-free in my head (I feel like I should be paying her at this point), by Moni Oloyede, on the history of how and why marketing got tied to revenue. Or to put it another way: how content became synonymous with marketing, not just in Marketing. Seemingly everywhere.

What struck me was this:

The slide into tactician as the primary role of marketer meant that marketing abdicated entirely its seat at the strategic table.

I’m willing to date myself here. I entered marketing in the early 90s and majored in marketing and market research as an undergrad. I came to marketing before the shift Oloyede describes. Marketing was the “creative side” of business, yes, but it was also supposed to be a strategic function. That’s where I first learned it should fit. That’s where I continue to believe it could and should fit. And based on my conversations with marketers over the years, most of them are frustrated by exactly this gap, between where they think marketing should be (strategy) and where it has ended up (tactics).

I worked in higher-ed marketing and fundraising communications for close to a decade, starting in the early 2000’s and continuing into the early social media era. In practice, publications like SMR often sit, directly or loosely, under the purview of marketing, communications, or public affairs (or newer departments that, tellingly, combine marketing and sales/fundraising functions under the same umbrella). When that’s the structure, you’ve got:

• marketing tied to revenue, and

• publications sitting underneath Marketing, a revenue-measured department.

Which often means that those publications, no matter their espoused values or mission, become revenue-generating tactics in practice. From what I’ve seen, there’s pretty much no way to avoid that, since the whole structure is measured and incentivized on revenue and ROI.

To be clear, I’m not casting aspersions on the marketing comms folks at Sloan. I’ve done work with this team. There are good people there.

[An update, as of 7 May 2026: I’ve since learned that SMR was its own unit, but I believe what follows applies, perhaps even more so. —TW]

But if the worldview from which they operate is that everything must tie back to revenue, if that’s the message from the Dean—that in a resource-constrained environment every function must prove its worth in measurable and direct terms, then I can see why closing down SMR (which is no doubt incredibly expensive to produce, manage, and distribute), would make sense from that point of view.

I don’t agree with it, but I do understand it.

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When people become things

I came across a comment on yet another Substack post, by someone I don’t remember (so I’m sorry I can’t attribute it properly), quoting a passage from Carpe Jugulum, a novel by Terry Pratchett. The passage contained a sneakily powerful phrase (emphasis mine):

“And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.”

“It’s a lot more complicated than that—”

“No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.”

“Oh, I’m sure there are worse crimes—”

“But they starts with thinking about people as things…”

I keep returning to this in the context of Oloyede’s argument. Because tying marketing to revenue, from a certain point of view, is exactly the moment we stop thinking about clients, customers, and audiences as people and start thinking of them as things.

Things to be measured. Things to be tracked. Things to be converted, persuaded, influenced, and driven to buy.

In that light, a whole set of related concepts develops naturally, but (in my view) insidiously. While undoubtedly an oversimplification, commercialization reduces what, from a communication point of view, is a nuanced interaction between two nuanced humans into the wildly oversimplified (and dehumanizing) roles—things—of buyer and seller, in which one needs the other to do something. 

• How do we get people to act?

• How can we nudge them?

• How can we exploit their cognitive loophole…erm…apply behavioral marketing tactics?

The questions start innocently enough, but it doesn’t take much for us to stop seeing people as humans with points of view, needs, and desires separate from those of the market. As things to be converted. Numbers and tracking columns.

One of the dominant motivations for my work (and now my research) over the last five to 10 years has been trying to find—or create—a workable alternative. This exploration has taken me to places I’d never expected, all the way back to the ancient Greeks and the concept of parrhesia, brought into the present(ish) day by Foucault in ethics, and also to the concepts of public reason by John Rawls and the work on communicative rationality by Jürgen Habermas. And what I’ve been delighted to find is that the idea of actually engaging with people at the level of ideas and understanding, so that we could expand each other’s points of view and see new options and routes forward as a result, is the opposite of new.

But what appears to have happened is that we’ve lost the tools for how to do it. And not just at the marketing level. At the individual level. We seem to be at a point professionally, politically, socially, where every single interaction gets reduced to a transaction, to win or lose. “I must influence, I must persuade, I must get you to act according to my way of thinking, rather than stopping to ask, ‘Wait, why do you think differently?’” or of asking, “Why do you think that is the right thing for me?”

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A brief personal history

I was 18 when I first started a job in marketing, volunteering in the marketing department at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. I’m now 52.

I chose marketing in the early 90s because it was the “creative side” of business, and because in a recession, “employable creative” felt safer than “starving artist.” Over the next 30 years, I worked in and around marketing departments—in higher ed, nonprofits, agencies, and companies—but I liked marketing less and less. The people were different. The purpose was different. I felt like a stranger in a strange land.

So I stopped doing what most people these days would call marketing and started doing what marketing always was to me: connecting people and organizations at the point of mutual interest or passion, and looking for where that connection kept breaking. First it was “marketing,” then “sales,” then “content,” then “messaging,” then “ideas” themselves.

That trail of broken connections is what led me to my doctoral program, where I study what it is about novel ideas that makes those aha moments possible in the first place.

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This piece is the proof

For anyone who has followed my writing and work for a number of years, you may have already observed this pattern. When I first started blogging and writing, lo these many years ago in the late 2000s, I wrote a lot of thought pieces like this one and this one (two of my favorites).

Over time, and particularly once I became an entrepreneur and had to support myself through my writing, the writing changed. It started to turn into content that focused on “here’s what to do and why, so now you’ll hire me to do that with you, too.”

The market said, and I believed for a while, that’s what I needed to do, too:
Turn people into things so that I could make money.

This piece, as you’re reading it, is exactly the kind of thing I would never have published under that old, commercialization-of-content mindset, because it doesn’t fit a “slot.” It’s not my scheduled day to post. And, <clutches pearls>, there’s no conversion goal.

Thankfully, I’m now in the extraordinary and privileged position of being able to go back to those earlier times and mindsets (though updated for today) in my approach to my work, for both practical and emotional reasons.

Practically: I need to focus on my dissertation.
Emotionally: that work and the research it requires bring me true and unadulterated joy. (And I mean that seriously. I’m a freak.) But I also feel such urgency around this and related topics.

AND: as soon as I turned off the switch in my head that says “I have to market, I have to convert, I have to increase subscribers,” again, my writing changed.

I was willing to put things out that I never would before: the hypnopompic thoughts that wake me up in the morning, the observations from a morning walk (like this!), the connections to work and research and readings I couldn’t quite justify under the “how does this contribute to ROI!?” point of view.

So I made the decision to remove anything that doesn’t fit with the mindset I believe so strongly in: a mindset of curiosity-driven exploration, sensemaking, and sensegiving whatever I’m making sense of. I don’t have to explain why I’m spending time reading, writing, or sharing particular pieces of information—I just want to. Because I think these concepts, people, and topics are interesting. I think maybe you will, too.

And yes, I’m getting more engagement, but I’m also happier. Like, a lot happier.

But here’s the most important thing I’ve learned:

If the intent of a communication is to convert, it is almost impossible to remove that contaminant from the content.

The commercialization of communication has pushed us to equate purchasing with validation—with truth, rightness, or pragmatic usefulness—when, in reality, the ideas that win are often the ones that have been marketed better, not the ones that are fundamentally better for complex adaptive systems like the societies we live in. I can’t see how that’s a good thing.

Your mileage, as they say, may vary. But I see your unedited-by-human-hands-AI-written posts and comments. Others do, too.

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The upstream problem

I am seriously worried about what happens to ideas, especially when there is the kind of bellwether that the shuttering of SMR may signal.

Just recently, Reid Hoffman posted that (technology) “companies have repeatedly been the institutions most capable of building and deploying general-purpose technologies that improve society at scale.”

My response to him was: “Have they, though?” Because most of those technologies, or their core ideas, started somewhere else—often in government-funded or publicly funded research, in private academia, or in the military, staffed by people often trained in universities in the first place.

I believe the only way to change what comes downstream is to change conditions where the ideas actually originate. Like it or not, more often than not, that’s academia. So what happens when academia itself becomes the target—intentionally or not?

What happens when academia can’t or won’t make the case for its critical role in the origination of ideas that make it to market?

What happens when schools like Sloan can’t or won’t make the case for the value of their own idea infrastructure—and the role it plays in the broader infrastructure of ideas?

When I was researching my application essay to Columbia, I discovered that business has been the most popular undergraduate major in the U.S. since 1980. I was one of those business majors, but I added an American Studies degree because (a) I was bored by the narrowness of the business curriculum and (b) because I didn’t understand how I could market well without a fuller understanding of the culture and the people to whom I was marketing.

That experience left me with a deep appreciation for both professional/technical degrees and the humanities and the social sciences. I’ve worked personally with an Ivy League dean of humanities on how to make the case for why the humanities matter in a market-driven, capitalist society.

And yet. The commercialization of creation and the monetization of knowledge have driven more and more academics out of academia. The crushing pressure to “publish or perish”—yet another metric!—combined with the increasing economic pressures on higher ed, where the cost of salaries and of benefits for all those thinkers and scholars, especially in the midst of our lets-call-it-problematic health care system, seems to be driving this very special (and I say that lovingly) breed of human out into a world where they must survive on how well they can spread their ideas through skills (i.e., marketing, sales) they haven’t yet had to develop.

I so fear they will discover exactly what I did:
You cannot both create and commercialize at the same time.

That is, you cannot be in pure creation and active commercialization at the same time without one contaminating the other, not, at least, at the level most truly new ideas require.

Part of that is practical: the kinds of attention, time horizons, and risk tolerance that creation requires are different from those that commercialization optimizes for.

Part of it is cognitive: the focus required to generate and explore a novel idea pulls in a different direction than the focus required to package, price, and promote it. The more you tune your communication to convert, the more you narrow it to what already fits a known slot.

Not to mention that most of the advice on the marketing of “thought leadership” and ideas right now is absolutely antithetical to the academic approach to establishing and validating new ideas. That’s something that, despite all of its issues, academia actually gets right, even if imperfectly. As my dissertation coach (and I’m going to claim him as a friend, whether he knows it or not), Lennart Nacke, says: “There’s a big difference between having ideas and having to defend them in public.”

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The counterargument I keep coming back to

I hear the objection: “But the market does validate!” “Ideas that can’t survive contact with real people and real problems shouldn’t survive!” “Companies have produced genuine innovations!”

Commercialization, the argument goes, is what allows ideas to scale, to reach the people who need them.

There is truth in this. I spent 30 years in that world. I have seen the market get it right.

But here is the problem with purchasing as a proxy for truth: the ideas that win “socially” win because they’ve been marketed better, not necessarily because they are fundamentally better (or better for humanity) ideas.

To me, the saddest part of all is seeing how this commercialization of ideas has squeezed higher education steadily in the same direction.

Unfortunately, this is usually only visible when you take the long view, when you step back from the individual “innovations” and look at what they did, collectively, to the complex adaptive system in which we all live.

I’m worried that we’ve slowly written the recipe for our own intellectual demise, one optimized piece of content at a time.

What happens when the Academy itself starts to fail (as it may)?

Then we’re all in trouble. Not just academics, not just practitioners. All of us.

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Why I have hope

I re-entered academia, 25 years after my master’s degrees, from the absolute desire to turn the tide back. To change, to introduce (or reintroduce), to establish (or reestablish) what it is that ideas are actually about. What communication and dialogue are actually about. What is actually required before someone is truly persuaded to do or think or act in a new way, long term.

I re-entered academia because I recognized, as a practitioner in the marketplace of ideas, that the most powerful place to change a paradigm is where it began.

For centuries, there has been another group of people alongside the marketers and the merchants: the teachers, the educators, the researchers, the philosophers, the artists, the creators, the clergy. The market didn’t know quite what to do with them. It certainly didn’t ask for their ROI. It just knew they were important. So, they were protected by patrons, by the Academy, by systems that sometimes brought them into contact with money but didn’t require it for every hour they worked.

Now we seem to be in a society that leaves us with two choices: monetize or be monetized. That middle group is being eradicated.

I worry for those leaving academia to join the “thought leader” world. I worry about what happens when their time to research, to ideate, to innovate is no longer protected. When every choice about how to spend their time is a calculation between “putting food on their family” (to quote my husband, quoting George Bush) and furthering the exploration of an idea that still needs a protected space to grow strong enough to succeed in the market.

I’m worried. But I also have hope.

Because that middle group has not disappeared. It has been squeezed, yes. It has been pushed out of its institutions and told to prove its ROI and sent into a market it was never designed for. But there are still too many of us who have been doing this work for too long (or just starting!), to simply vanish because the metrics don’t account for us.

What I think we’re missing—what the demise of SMR may really mean—is that we haven’t named the problem clearly enough to fight it. So here it is:

If ideas are forced into commercialization, communication and creation get contaminated. Commercialization reduces people to things—“that’s where it starts”—and once it does, it strips away the delightful quirkiness of humanity and of the communication itself. Meaning and metrics, creation and scale, insight and analysis are all necessary, but they cannot occupy the same moment or be governed by the same incentives in a complex adaptive system like the societies we live in.

Hear me on this: That’s not a philosophical preference or my point of view. It’s what the research, the science, and yes, even the practice show.

That’s why publications like SMR matter:

Sloan Management Review’s 67-year run was a sustained institutional argument that some ideas need a different kind of home.

Unfortunately, it seems to be an argument that MIT Sloan no longer wishes to make.

But you can. WE can.

Champion that model. Find the publications, the thinkers, the researchers who are not trying to convert you, and protect them the way patrons always have: with your attention, your subscription, your citation, your defense of their work in rooms where they are not present.

There are enough of us who know that ideas are not content.
There always has been.