Habits Needed for Success in Business School

Successful students don't come by success without working at it. There are a lot of smart people in college, so just being smart is not much of a distinguishing trait. Successful students have habits that that contribute much to their success. Many of these habits are behaviors that any student can adopt. Here are a few of them.

Successful students go to class. Most college classes do not have an attendance requirement, so many students simply choose to skip class when they don't feel like going.

Successful students read the assigned material before class. Many students have told me they don't read the assigned material until after it has been covered in class. They reason that they will understand it better if they read it after the professor has explained. That may be true, but they would understand the material even better if they read it before class so they could (1) pay particular attention to the parts they didn't understand when they read it and (2) ask the professor questions about the parts they didn't understand. When students read the assigned material before class, they are seeing it for a second time in class.

Successful students do homework even when it is not assigned. Many professors will not assign homework. So, many students will not do homework. When the textbook has problems or questions at the end of chapter, successful students work the problems and answer the questions. Afterward, they seek out the solutions (from a professor or a teaching assistant) for any solution / answer that they are not 100% confident about.

Successful students join student groups. If your major has a student group, join it and become an active member. It's the best way to build a community of students to study with and it is also key to navigating the recruiting process when you are searching for a job in your senior year.

Successful students lead balanced lives. Successful students make time to eat, sleep, study, and play. They eat at least one healthy meal a day. They get an appropriate amount of sleep. They play intramural sports or work out (even if it is a casual routine) at the recreation center. And, they do the other academic things listed above.

Even if you are working to help pay for your college expenses, you can incorporate these success factors into your life. You must do it to maximize your likelihood of success.


If you have a question or a suggestion for a post topic, please email it to bizedthoughts@gmail.com.

Choosing a Major

A common issue that arises is the process of choosing a major. Many business students come to a business school with a major already in mind. In many cases their choice has been determined by some familiarity with a relative who has already succeeded in that field. For example, a student chooses to major in accounting because her father majored in accounting. Or, the choice of major may be influenced by some perception that comes from the popular media. For example, a student chooses to major in finance because he believes finance graduates automatically make a lot of money.

I encourage all business students to shop around.

There are many majors in a business school that a student has never heard of prior to arriving. Depending on the business school, these include majors like business analytics, entrepreneurship, information systems, insurance, logistics, operations management, production management, real estate, risk management, and supply chain management. A student should investigate all of these.

Most majors have a student group that meets regularly. I encourage students to attend a range of student group meetings during the first year on campus so that they can learn something about their options.

There are faculty who will explain job opportunities in fields to students. If a student will go to the department office and ask, she will be directed to a faculty member who will be happy to discuss the industry.

I also encourage students to go to any lecture given by a successful alumnus of the school. These people often provide a perspective of a career path that is not expected.

More than anything, though, the most important thing is for a student to find a major that s/he finds interesting. I believe that people are most productive when they are in a job they enjoy. Productivity leads to success, both personally and professionally.

If you have a question or a suggestion for a post topic, please email it to bizedthoughts@gmail.com.

A New Focus for BizEdThoughts

Hello!

I'm back and looking forward to reviving this blog. This time the focus of the blog will be a little different, however.

This blog was originally constructed as a way for me to post some of my thoughts about business school education. I felt like I had enough experience in various roles at a couple of large business schools that I might have something worthwhile to share. At that time, my goal was to become a dean in a business school. So, the blog posts were as much a way for me to explore my own thoughts about business education as it was to get some feedback on them.

In a nutshell, I've abandoned the goal of becoming a dean. I've moved to a great institution, the Raymond J. Harbert College of Business at Auburn University, and I'm busy serving as the Harbert Eminent Scholar in Business Analytics and Chair of a department that currently has programs in Aviation Management, Business Analytics, Information Systems Management, Professional Flight Management, and Supply Chain Management.

Now, I'd like to draw on my experiences to help others navigate the business school environment. If you have any connection to a business school, or you are thinking about making a connection to a business school, send me a note at bizedthoughts@gmail.com with a comment or a question that you would like to see addressed.

If you are a student or the parent of a student with a question about admissions, academics, or anything else related to the business school experience, send me a note. I've dealt with admissions, dismissals, grade appeals, and a lot more. I've dealt with families whose student had significant medical, criminal, and family issues.

If you are a doctoral student in business facing an issue you want some guidance on, send me a note. I've been on over 50 dissertation committees.

If you are a faculty member facing a problem and you want another professor's perspective on it, send me a note. I've been in the business for over 30 years. .

If you are an administrator, send me a note. I've been responsible for over two dozen academic programs. I've dealt with accreditation issues. I've been in a unionized environment and a non-unionized environment. I've handled difficult promotion and tenure cases, instances of faculty behaving badly, and students disrupting classrooms.

If you work at a corporation interested in a relationship with a business program, send me a note. I was center director for 4 years. Corporate relationships are critical for business schools.

I look forward to hearing from you!

How Much Better is Best Compared to Average?

I recently watched a “lost interview” of Steve Jobs. The interview was done in 1995, when Mr. Jobs was busy with his company NeXT. This is one year before Apple purchased NeXT and Mr. Jobs returned to Apple to run the company. It is before the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad.

Mr. Jobs was asked about Apple and his vision of the future. In the interview I could see some of the natural charisma of Mr. Jobs. I could begin to understand his focus on “content,” as he put it. I think he would say his company and his products had to have a soul; they had to bring the best of what humans have to offer to the table.

One comment he made that really got my attention was about the difference between “average” and “best.” In most cases, he observed, the difference between “average” and “best” makes at most a 2-to-1 impact. As examples, he noted that the difference between an average taxi cab experience and the best taxi cab experience might only get you to your destination 20% faster. The same was true for airplane flights. Moving away from travel, we can imagine that the “best” medical examination or treatment might increase our life span by a few percent (excluding the times we catch something serious early). In fact, it can be difficult to think of a true 2-to-1 multiplier experience. Maybe when we think of retail transactions, the “best” retail transaction experience might make us twice as likely to return to a particular store.

However, one thing that drew Mr. Jobs to software development was the fact that software absolutely shatters this 2-to-1 constraint. The best software, he noted, is 50 or maybe even 100 times better than average software. Anyone who has wrestled with a bad user interface and also experienced a good one will probably agree with this assessment. I know I do.

But this made me think, what about higher education? Is higher education constrained by the 2-to-1 limit?

I don’t think so. I have had an average teacher in a subject and a "best" teacher (i.e., a teaching award winner) in the same subject; and the experience with the "best" teacher was far, far more than two times better than the experience with the "average" teacher. It was better in terms of my learning and retention of the subject matter, it was better in terms of my subsequent engagement with that topic, and it was better in terms of my ability to apply what I had learned later (in some cases, much later) in life. The same holds at the institutional level. I’ve been to average schools and “best” schools. The experience at the “average” schools was largely forgettable. The experience at the “best” schools shaped my life.

So, we have this opportunity every day to be “average” or strive to be “best” at what we do. Which will you choose? Which would you rather be known for?

How to Survive as Senior Associate Dean

In my last post, I listed a number of experiences that would benefit anyone moving into this job I currently occupy. Those experiences are too many and too varied to realistically expect anyone to have them before taking on the job. Of course, I wrote that to give readers a sense of the breadth of issues that come through my office.

So, if adequate experience is not realistic, what is a more realistic expectation? I’m not sure, but here are some things I try to keep in mind.

I try very hard to be fair. Sometimes students think I am biased toward faculty and sometimes faculty think I am biased toward students. When I was as soccer referee, I learned that half of the people at each match generally disagreed with every decision I made. That doesn’t make the decision wrong.

When I make a decision that is particularly upsetting to someone, I try to communicate why I have decided the way I have. If possible, I will let the person know about it before it becomes public.

When necessary, I use the network of friends and colleagues I have built across the campus. Universities are full of very intelligent people. These people are a huge asset.

I try to listen to people. Even when I feel like I know what the person is going to say, I try to listen. Sometimes, just listening resolves an issue. All that the person wanted was to be heard. If you are forming an answer in your head before the person stops talking, you probably aren’t listening as closely as you should be.

I try to distinguish between urgent and important. Not all important things are urgent and not all urgent things are important.

I try to visit the offices I manage at least once a week just to see how people are doing. When I am not delegating a task to someone, it gives that person an opportunity to dictate where the conversation goes. Over time, people learn to take advantage of that opportunity and sometimes that allows me to address issues before they become problems.

I especially try to be honest with myself. If something doesn’t feel right, I try to take the time to re-examine the issue.

I mentioned humor in the last post. I try to retain a sense of humor and be pleasant. I’m not always successful, but being pleasant costs nothing and occasionally pays big dividends.

Finally, I try to remember that there are many things I have done in the past that I didn’t know how to do before I did them. In other words, we all have things to learn when we move into a new position with new responsibilities. It is important to learn and not repeat your mistakes. I feel if you do this and try each day to make your environment a little better than you found it, things have a way of working out.

Wanted: Senior Associate Dean – Experience Preferred

I have been thinking recently about the many aspects of my job. Here is a list of the experiences / education that I think are relevant. It helps to have:

A reasonable research record so that you understand what is involved in publishing research in a widely recognized, high-quality academic journal. This is critical in evaluating faculty needs.

A teaching award so that you understand what is involved in innovative teaching. This is also critical in evaluating faculty needs.

Some background in organizational behavior, so that you can manage the personalities in an academic environment. You deal with a wide range of faculty types (from the adjunct to the eminent scholar) and a wide range of staff (from the student worker to the accomplished veteran who has been with the college for decades).

You also need some understanding of leadership – at least some notion of various leadership styles.

Some knowledge of accounting, so that you can understand budgets.

Some knowledge of communications or advertising, so that you have some facility with persuasion. A popular misconception is that a dean has the power that a CEO has. This is not true.

You need to be able to create decision models and conduct analyses of many types.

It is good to understand public administration, so that you can understand legislative processes and how a legislative agenda is likely to affect your college.

You need some understanding of the law. FERPA only begins to scratch the surface of what you should understand.

Medical training would be good, so that you can evaluate a student’s request to drop a course for medical reasons.

Some of the students I see have significant troubles. An education in social work will help you deal better with the ones who struggle with dysfunctional families. An education in mental health will help you identify the ones who are depressed or schizophrenic (more common than you might think).  

An education in criminology or forensic accounting will help you identify the ones who are executing a financial aid fraud.

An education in religious studies would help you understand the importance of the many religious holy days that you must evaluate when students request excused absences from exams.

Education in at least one humanity discipline and one science discipline will help you interact with your colleagues on campus.

You should have training in project management.

A study of systems would be good, so that you appreciate how the research, teaching, outreach, and administrative subsystems interact.

One thing is certain: you don’t stop learning when you take this position. Also, you need to have a good sense of humor, because some days you just have to laugh to keep your sanity!

My Parents Didn’t Go to College

I’ve dealt with students this week whose primary excuse for bad behavior or poor performance seems to be that they are the first generation in their family to go to college. Their argument: they don’t know any better.

My brother and I were also the first generation in our family to go to college. While I got a few tips from my older brother, the age difference (seven years) was such that he was out beginning his career by the time I started college, so we really didn’t talk much about it. That really doesn’t matter.

My parents didn’t need a college degree to teach me that I’m expected to do my own work.

They didn’t need a college degree to teach me that my education was my responsibility.

The fact that they didn’t have college degrees never stopped me from going to the library in those pre-Internet days to seek additional sources of information on a topic with which I was struggling.

My parents never had the opportunity to ask a college professor a question when they were growing up, but that didn’t prevent me from determining that office hours are a good time to get clarification on issues that are confusing.

My parents never completed a term paper, but that didn’t keep them from teaching me that putting off work until the last minute is not a good idea.

My parents never had a college course where different components of the course were weighed differently, but I learned how to compute my grade so that I could always know where I stood in a course.

We certainly should recognize that being the first in a family to go to college may mean that a student has a unique experience. We may need to help that student get off to a good start by making our expectations clear and providing accessible resources. In the long run, however, we do not help the student who turns this opportunity into an excuse for bad behavior or poor performance.

The Opening Week of the Semester

As the first week of the semester draws to a close I thought it would be good to review what I’ve dealt with. The first week (and also the last week) is not typical of other weeks in the semester. The first week has its own character. Yet, it has been a typical “first week.”

Although I was involved in meetings related to fundraising, building a new building, updating our graduate online classes, and the expectations we have for our doctoral students when they teach or conduct research, this first week really revolves around getting close to 6000 students into classes.

There have been miscellaneous questions about classroom scheduling, syllabus requirements, course cancellations, and the availability of teaching assistantships.

Of course, we had a number of students who absolutely had to get a particular class at a particular time. In most of these cases, the student’s procrastination is to blame. In other cases, resource constraints (e.g., room availability or reduced faculty and staff) have created situations where we cannot offer enough classes to meet demand.

I saw several students who were dismissed last semester and whose request for readmission was denied. Even in a college as large as ours, we actually look at each and every one of these cases. In most of these cases, the student’s grade point average is too far below the required minimum to reasonably expect that the student will be able to raise it enough to stay in good standing. In some cases, it is mathematically impossible. I hear promises and guarantees that the student will make all A’s and all will be well. It comes as quite a shock to some of them that I base my decision on past performance. I hope this is the wake-up call they need to begin managing their education, and their lives, better.

We dealt with some tragic situations, too. I had three students who had to cope with either a parent’s unexpected death or catastrophic illness this week. Suddenly, these students have emotional and financial pressure that we would not wish on any young adult. In most of these cases, the students show uncommon grace and I am proud of the way members of our faculty step up to accommodate the needs of these students.

As the semester begins, I look forward to working with the President’s Council – our student group of student organization presidents. I hope all of our classes go well. I hope our students show up prepared for class. I hope the students push the professors to be better teachers and the professors push the students to be better learners. I hope our professors draw on the research they do to add more value to our classes. And when life gets in the way, I hope the students and the faculty make good decisions.

If these things happen, it should be a good spring.

Oh, the stories I hear!

Happy New Year!

Last year was very hectic for me and my blogging suffered as a consequence. One of my new year’s resolutions is to get back into the swing of things here. Generally speaking, I’ve tried to create posts that would provoke some thoughts. That will continue, but I’ve also decided to broaden the topics I cover. In other words, I’m going to also give you a glimpse into the issues that find their way to my office. To get things started, I thought it would be insightful to post a few of my very memorable student / parent interactions from the past two-and-a-half years.

There was the young lady whose mother called to inform her professors that the student would miss classes for a week while recovering from a minor, yet significant, surgical procedure. After some checking, I determined that the young lady was not a student at Florida State. That wasn’t what mom and dad had been led to believe for the past year or two.

There were twins who stopped by to ask if it was possible to get an “F+” instead of just an “F.” They thought mom would be less upset about an “F+.”

There was the young man who emailed that he probably would have done better in his classes if he had been as focused on them as he was on gambling this semester. Could he have another chance?

There was the young lady who told me (in December) that she wanted to turn in all of her work at the end of the prior summer semester, but her professor had refused to take it. Now, she wanted to drop the class (six months later) to remove the “F” on her transcript. I told her to email the work to me and I would consider the request. Based on her reaction, I am not surprised that I have not yet received the work.

There was the young lady who told her parents that we changed the rules on her in the middle of the year. Now she had to take another course in the spring and would not be able to graduate in the fall. Her parents complained, to the president’s office no less, and the matter was referred to me. After some checking, we found out that the real reason the young lady would take classes in the spring was because of the failing grades she had earned in the fall.

One student stopped by to determine whether he could get an “incomplete” grade in his courses. I asked about his circumstances. Well, he had missed some child support payments and “that usually leads to spending two or three weeks in jail.”

Of course, they aren’t all knuckleheads. There’s the young man who was in an accident that left him 100% deaf. He has worked extra hard to recover and keep up in his classes. Now fitted with Cochlear implants, we expect him to graduate and be successful.

There’s another young man whose grades were suffering because he was overly-involved in mentoring and volunteer activities. We talked about how he would be better able to do these things if he took care of his own needs first. He’s learned to manage his time and is doing great.

There’s the young lady who had no idea what major to choose and ended up in one that was just a bad fit for her. She presented herself in a professional manner, made a case for why we should consider her for admission to the business school, and followed up with more information when we had questions. We gave her a chance and she has shined. She will do well.

And finally, there is the President’s Council. This council is composed of the Presidents of the various student organizations. These students are focused, mature, and destined to do well in whatever career paths they choose.

The Curriculum Conversation

A few weeks ago, I had the good fortune to spend some time visiting with Dr. Charles Isbell, Jr., the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. Dr. Isbell described the innovative way the College of Computing had restructured their curriculum in the face of the declining enrollments in computer science that followed the dot com bubble bust just after the turn of the new century.

After our visit, I gave some thought to how the conversation around curriculum can dictate what we consider. In a nutshell, Georgia Tech has been able to change the conversation about curriculum from “what do you want to be” to “what do you want to do?” In doing this, they have created a flexibility within their curriculum that will allow them to respond to the dynamic environment of computing.

Surprisingly, Dr. Isbell related to me that when they began to consider how they would implement this new curriculum approach, they did not need to create many new classes. (I believe he said they only created two new classes.) They found they only needed to “repackage” their existing curriculum in a new way.

Their new approach makes so much more sense than the old way of thinking! They find that they can now identify specific humanities electives that students should take, because they can relate the elective to what the student wants to do after graduation. Students can now explain to recruiters why they are taking the classes they take, because they understand how the classes prepare the student to do what they want to do. (The old answer to why a course was taken: “Because it’s required.”)

Now, colleges of computing are probably much more accustomed to change than colleges of business are, so translating the idea into a college of business would take some work. But I think in the long run, changing the conversation from, for example, being a finance major to managing the financial assets of an organization, or from being an MIS major to applying technology to solve business problems, could produce a better graduate. Many of my colleagues will argue that they do this already, but it really isn’t how the conversation usually progresses. We tend to talk about majors. We tend to talk in the context of our silos.

Even these changes pale, however, when we really start to think “outside the box.” Imagine envisioning the business curriculum in terms of the interfaces between commerce, government, business, and consumer, rather than majors. This perspective could get us out of the major silos completely. I hope to write more on this idea in subsequent posts.

It Hasn't Been a Vacation

It has been over a month since my last blog post. The reason for the delay has been that I have accepted new responsibilities and now oversee all of the academic programs in the college. I've been busy learning new things that I need to know for this new responsibility.

However, I plan to be back! I hope to have a new post (or two) in December and resume my posting on a more regular basis in the spring.

Thank you for your interest in my thoughts and have a wonderful holiday season.

10,000 Hours

Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers: The Story of Success, makes the case for a person needing to spend 10,000 hours to become expert at the highest level in his or her field. He presents evidence related to athletics, music performance, and professional expertise (e.g., programming a computer), among other fields. (He emphasizes other significant factors that contribute to success, but I’m just focusing on the hours spent working on one’s expertise here.)

This raised the question in my mind of how the 10,000 hours compares to a college education.

Our undergraduate degrees are based on 120 credit hours of course work. A three hour class typically has about 45 hours of “contact time,” that is, the amount of time the student sits in class excluding examinations.

One hundred twenty hours of course work translates to 40 courses (40 courses X 3 credit hours = 120 credit hours for the degree). Realistically, though, only 20 of those courses will be business courses. The other 20 are courses to satisfy general education, humanities, liberal studies, science, and so forth requirements. So, to focus on the hours contributing to business expertise, we have

20 courses X 45 contact hours per course = 900 hours.

Educators like to assume that students spend at least as much time preparing for class as they spend in it, so we might optimistically double our estimate to 1800 hours. (Notably, a lot of class time is not necessarily “active learning,” so perhaps our estimate should be labeled very optimistic.)

Thus, the undergraduate business education results in 18% of the needed experience to achieve expertise at the highest level.

What happens if we add an MBA?

An MBA adds 12 to 20 more courses, depending on the program. At best, we can double our estimate again to get to a grand total of 3600 hours.

This may explain why internships and work experience are such a benefit for business students. Without these, a student has put in only a little more than one-third of the time needed to achieve true expertise in a business field.

Interestingly, if we add a Ph.D. we can get to the magic 10,000 hour number relatively easily. A Ph.D. program is typically like a full-time job for at least 4 years.

40 hours per week X 50 weeks per year X 4 years = 8000 hours. This amount added to the undergraduate and MBA experience easily exceeds 10,000 – and a strong Ph.D. student is truly an expert in his/her dissertation topic area.

In summary, it seems we should encourage our undergraduates to take internships, our MBA students to have work experience, and our doctoral students to approach their work as a full time job. Their prospects will be better – and our programs will benefit from the reputation of our graduates.

Solving the Right Problem

You have probably heard the statement “A question well put is half answered” or something similar to it. John Dewey wrote this in his book “How We Think” about one hundred years ago. In fact, Dewey’s entire sentence is: “A question well put is half answered; i.e., a difficulty clearly apprehended is likely to suggest its own solution, -- while a vague and miscellaneous perception of a problem leads to groping and fumbling.” (page 94)

I would like to focus on the latter part of the quote; a part that rarely, if ever, is considered. In this part, Dewey writes that a vague and miscellaneous perception of a problem leads to groping and fumbling.

We spend a lot of time in business schools teaching students how to solve problems. We don’t spend nearly as much time in undergraduate business programs focused on the nuances of problem formulation. Students in an MBA program are likely to spend time identifying a problem, especially in a case study course, but even there I would venture to say that we spend more time discussing the pros and cons of various potential solutions to a problem than we do examining how to define the problem we confront and what we can learn directly from the process of formulating the problem at hand.

I’m not talking about a course where a student learns to formulate a linear programming problem or a system of equations. I’m talking about having students study problem formulation. Complex problems have many stakeholders. These stakeholders often have competing and / or conflicting objectives. Resources are often limited. The business environment is dynamic and ambiguous. Often, the problems confronted by decision makers in business are not problems that can be solved in terms of a “correct” answer. More likely, the problem may be resolved with solutions that can be characterized as good, better, or best. In some cases, executing an extensive problem formulation process can dissolve a problem through the better understanding we gain as a result of carefully considering what the problem is.

I suspect we could build an entire class on the topic of problem formulation, and make it really interesting by integrating aspects of research techniques, creativity, and critical analysis, among other topics.

After all, solving the wrong problem rarely leads to any good outcomes.

Now More Then Ever

If the title of this post caught your eye as “incorrect” – congratulations!

One of our new challenges in the business school is to convince students that writing still matters. In a world where text messages and “tweeting” make the ability to communicate with new combinations of symbols an asset, we can understand how the ability to write properly could degenerate. I’m no English professor, but I do strive to write properly. By “properly” I mean I try to punctuate sentences correctly, to use the correct word, and to write clearly and concisely.

Lately, students often object when I do not give them full credit on assignments due to writing errors. Over the last few years, the most common error I see is the misuse of “then.” I don’t know why “then” is used so frequently where “than” is the correct word to use.

All professors have their favorite examples of mistakes and I would not be surprised to find a web site devoted to such errors. Such errors can provide great comic relief, but is that what you want your writing known for in a business setting?

A Newspaper Ad

I remind students that they may be known by their written work well before they are known “personally” in a large organization. The memoranda they write could be read by anyone. That usually does not get their attention until I remind them how easy it is to forward an email.

I ask them, “If someone only knew you by your written work, would they want you in front of an important client? Would they feel you will pay attention to detail and manage an important project well?”

I know some of my colleagues do not want to be in the position of grading grammar, but to the extent we can elevate our students’ written work, we will graduate a better business student. Writing skills are important – perhaps now more than ever!

Three Powerful Questions

A lot of business school education focuses on solutions. We teach our students many techniques for solving many types of problems. Outside of a case study course, we don’t get into the area of identifying what type of problem we are confronting very often. It is more often the case that the problem is “given” and we teach students how to solve the problem should they ever run into it (or one similar to it) in business.

I’d like to suggest that we consider integrating three questions more deeply into the business school curriculum.

The first question is, “What problem are you trying to solve?” I have found this to be a very powerful question to ask and to answer. Asking it usually causes a decision maker to stop cold and reflect on exactly what she confronts. Once considered, answering this question usually eliminates a lot of distractions and superfluous options. When we know what problem we are really trying to solve, we gain a focus that we did not have.

The second question is, “What will success look like?” In business education, I feel we should impress upon our students the idea of establishing a metric of some kind (and it need not be quantitative) so that we will know what success looks like. Another way of phrasing this question is, “How will you know you have solved the problem?” but I personally like the idea of framing the question in terms of success. The answer to this question provides criteria for assessing later how good the solution really is.

The third question is, “Who will hate your solution (and why)?” We naturally tend to think of the “good” aspects of a problem solution and all of the people who will be happy with our solution. We don’t spend too much time thinking about who is going to hate our solution and why they will hate it. I believe it is worthwhile to consider this perspective, because it leads us to being more critical of our work. Often, when we take a critical perspective of our work we can identify ways to improve it. We rarely seek to improve a solution that we think is good.

What problem are you trying to solve?

What will success look like?

Who will hate your solution (and why)?

Sweet Spot Decision Making

Perhaps all of us have experienced a situation where we felt that the service we were getting was too slow. Maybe we had some other place we needed to get to, but often it’s a case where we feel that the people who are supposed to be attentive to our needs are not doing their jobs.

On the other hand, sometimes people are too attentive. I arrived at my local coffee bar one recent morning to purchase a coffee for the trip to campus. There was a line, but it was not too long and it was moving at a satisfactory pace. At least, I thought it was. Along came a barista who felt the situation would be improved by soliciting drink orders and having them ready at the cashier for each customer. In short order, several coffee drinks were placed near the cash register and confusion reigned as the cashier tried to determine which drink belonged to which customer. 

What does this have to do with business education? In thinking about these events, it occurred to me that many decision makers in business have problems when they are unable to maintain the right “pace” in their thinking. If they are slow to react, they may miss an opportunity or allow a bad situation to get worse. On the other hand, when decision makers move too quickly, they often hear that they are guilty of short-cutting the normal “process,” or worse, that they have responded with an ill-considered “knee-jerk” reaction.

A key decision making characteristic is operating in the area between “rush to judgment” and “analysis paralysis.”  I call this area the “sweet spot” of decision making. In the sweet spot, decisions are informed and timely. Whether one naturally tends to slow or quick decisions may be attributable to the person’s cognitive style, the person’s risk aversion or comfort, the influence of peers, institutional norms, or possibly many other things. To the extent we can refine the idea of “timely” decision making in our curricula so that we educate students to seek the decision making sweet spot  – decision making that is not too slow and not too fast – I think we will graduate better business professionals. 

Forever Yours

1978: $19.95; Today: $180.00+

I entered the discipline of computer science in 1976. I was a sophomore in college and computer science looked like a better degree program for me in the long run than the one I was in at the time (mathematics). I remember giving great thought to which books I would sell back to the bookstore and which ones I would keep. There were some books that I knew I would be able to use in later courses and there were other books that I just thought I would enjoy having.

Today, we deliver many materials to our students in an electronic form. We often use a course management system as the primary delivery mechanism. Unfortunately, when a student finishes a course her access to the course materials via the course management system usually ends. Why is this?

I suspect one reason is that we have not given much thought to doing things differently. There may also have been technological reasons (e.g., limited or costly storage requirements or the overhead of maintaining multiple “old” versions of course materials) that also weighed against maintaining access to course materials forever. But are those issues still relevant today?

As we place more emphasis on our business students understanding the integrated nature of the business disciplines, it seems to me that we must move toward a system of maintaining student access to all prior course materials they have studied. We should encourage students to “go back” to those materials to refresh their knowledge on how the material fits in the current course work. We should also build into our courses content and exercises that require active integration of prior material. I think those objectives are easier to achieve when we know students have access to the material in courses they have already completed.

A Team of Catchers

Last time, I wrote: 

Some of us live for the opportunity to conduct research; some of us live for teaching; some of us live for the interaction with the community. I believe it is good that we are not all driven by the same motivations.

I mentioned in that post that research and teaching seem almost antithetical at times, but I believe there is a benefit in viewing research, teaching, and outreach as a system of scholarship activities.

Let me focus on just research and teaching. How, then, can we get our “great researchers” to better appreciate the teaching role and our “great teachers” to better appreciate the research role? (Of course, this is not a universal problem, but where it exists it needs to be addressed.)

When these questions come up, I like to point out that as important as a catcher is to a baseball team, it is very unlikely that the best baseball team would be constructed by putting the nine best catchers on the field as a team. Imagine grouping the eleven best quarterbacks together to form a football team or the five best centers together to form a basketball team!

No, the best teams have a diversity of great players filling many different roles. In fact, I think the players on great teams have high expectations of the each other and they work together to ensure that each player has the best opportunity to excel. Notably, the players on the great teams often assist each other when mistakes do occur. In other words, they are “in it together.”

I encourage our “great researchers” to remember that in the greater public’s mind, universities exist to educate students. Our researchers often focus on working with doctoral students, but that group is typically too small to justify the great researcher’s working life. The great researcher must make an effort to ensure the new knowledge being created is described in a manner that lends itself to communication to persons outside of the research community. The great researcher does not fulfill all of her obligation to scholarship when she fails to effectively communicate her discoveries.

I encourage our “great teachers” to remember that in today’s business world, the organizations that recruit our students expect those students to bring new ideas into the organization. It is not enough to teach the same material that covered the topic last year in the same way. The great teacher must also make an effort to ensure the new knowledge being created is getting into the classroom. The great teacher does not fulfill his entire obligation to scholarship when he is not current in the research in his field and thus cannot effectively understand the latest discoveries in the discipline.

We need great researchers and great teachers – and they need to work as a team to produce great graduates.

A team of catchers simply won’t do.

The Research, Teaching, Outreach Circle

The work of business faculty members generally gets categorized into one of five categories: research, teaching, outreach, service, or administration.  Admittedly, the categories are not always mutually exclusive. Administration and service often overlap as do service and outreach. But, allow me in this post to speak as though the categories are distinct and to focus on only the research, teaching, and outreach categories.

Research and teaching are often discussed as though they are somehow antithetical. We may hear our colleagues described as “a great researcher” or “a great teacher,” but we rarely hear one described as great in both areas. (Would this be “a great scholar”?) At the large, land grant institutions, the outreach component is often embedded in a distinct unit: the “extension service.”

Let’s look at each piece:

We conduct research to create new knowledge. We have been trained to do that and it is our job to do it.

We teach in order to communicate knowledge to students. We do it because students expect to be taught and parents expect their children to be taught.

When we reach out to the business community (e.g., when we serve on corporate boards, consult in our areas of expertise, provide expert testimony, conduct corporate training, and perform a number of other professional activities) we communicate knowledge to those stakeholders as well.

Some of us live for the opportunity to conduct research; some of us live for teaching; some of us live for the interaction with the community. I believe it is good that we are not all driven by the same motivations.

I believe it benefits a business school to adopt a philosophy that recognizes the inter-relationships of research, teaching, and outreach activities – or at least the potential synergy that I believe can be gained by recognizing a system of research, teaching, and outreach as fundamental to business scholarship.

Here’s how I conceive it:

We have a circular relationship which I see as progressing from research to teaching to outreach back to research.

We conduct research to create new knowledge. We teach established and new knowledge to produce graduates who add value to the organizations that hire them. That knowledge-based value is the basis for a relationship that leads to outreach activities which provide additional value to the community. Once the relationship is established, doors are opened to faculty to conduct research in organizations. This research leads to more new knowledge.

I start the discussion with research, but since the relationship is circular, start where you feel most comfortable.

Leaders Make the Future

The Institute for the Future (www.iftf.org) published a book a couple of years ago with this title: Leaders Make the Future: Ten New Leadership Skills in an Uncertain World (www.iftf.org/leadersmakethefuture). The author of the book, Bob Johansen, makes the argument that the world is becoming ever more volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. The book examines leadership skills that are believed to be necessary for effective leaders in this environment.

I can’t do justice to the skills described in the book in a blog post, but the following very brief description of each skill by Alain Burrese can help:

1. Maker Instinct focuses on how leaders need to draw out their maker instinct and apply it to their leadership. Johansen states that future leaders will need both a can-do and a can-make spirit.
2. Clarity is a must in confusing times and a leader must be able to create and communicate with clarity without being simplistic.
3. Dilemma Flipping is being able to succeed with challenges that cannot be solved and won't go away.
4. Immersive Learning Ability focuses on immersing yourself in new physical and virtual worlds that may be uncomfortable to increase your learning.
5. Bio-Empathy is being able to learn from nature and use that wisdom to inform your decisions.
6. Constructive Depolarizing focuses on how a leader can constructively depolarize conflict to both calm and improve the situation.
7. Quiet Transparency is a skill by which a leader is open but not self-promoting.
8. Rapid Prototyping deals with working through many scenarios during the process of development.
9. Smart Mob Organizing is a leadership skill of organizing people using a range of media.
10. Commons Creating is creating areas within which both cooperation and competition may occur.

I highly recommend this book for business students.

References

Burrese, Alain.  Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/2242384

Johansen, Bob (2009). “Leaders Make the Future: Ten New Leadership Skills in an Uncertain World.” Berrett-Koehler Publishers.