Santiago Iniguez - Dean IE Business School

Dress codes

I read in today’s edition of The Independent  that according to a survey conducted by law firm Peninsula in the UK, four out of five companies found that a relaxed attitude as regards dress codes in the office increases productivity. The survey has been released at times when the UK is experiencing one of the hottest summers in recent decades and when, consequently, workers wonder whether to dress in a cooler way and leave suits and formal shoes at home.

This piece of news reminds me of a comment made by Patrick Harker, Dean of the Wharton School, at the latest EFMD/AACSB annual conference in Paris in May this year, where he announced the adoption of some measures at his school to strengthen etiquette and discipline, which included respecting a basic dress code and avoiding the use of cellular phones as well as eating in the classroom.

This current July, temperatures in Madrid have been abnormally high –it seems as elsewhere- though the actual perception of heat here is lighter and more bearable than, for example, in London, given that humidity in Madrid is low. In summer time, students tend to soften the rigor of dress codes and some come to class in shorts and sandals. In those circumstances, I am approached by some professors who demand a tougher etiquette in class since, they explain, external appearance is an important part of the personality and a proper education at schools should include how a manager should look externally.

I remember reading in Herbert H.L.A. Hart’s The Concept of Law", a masterpiece on law, morals and philosophy, that rules of etiquette were the small sisters of moral norms. What I was not sure is if this means that not observing the former entails a loose attitude towards the latter.

At many companies there is still a strict dress code, written or unwritten. Conventionally, formal dressing shows respects for the others. Should the findings of the abovementioned survey make us rethink and relax rules of etiquette for the sake of productivity?

The Nature of Inventions in Management Science

Teppo Felin refers in orgtheory, one of my favourite blogs, to a list of the 100 world-changing discoveries and ideas that resulted from research projects developed at UK universities in the past 50 years. The list is published in a report produced by Universities UK and subsequently summarised in an article published in The Guardian last week. One of the objectives of the report is showing how basic research is linked to the improvement of society and well being and it comes at a time when the UK government plans to change the current system of funding university research, the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) and replace it with a metrics system which is currently under consultation.

Sadly, the report’s list does not include any discoveries found at business schools. Nevertheless it lists contributions originated at schools of social and political sciences: for example LSE, the London School of Economics of the University in London is credited with a significant number of new ideas that transformed society. The absence of b-schools in the list of research innovators is not a consequence of their relative youth as compared to other academic institutions, since many b-schools were founded more than 50 years ago, the lifespan surveyed in the study. Is there any other reason justifying the lack of creativity at business schools?

Some months ago, a prestigious colleague from Europe told me that he believed there were very few ideas –if any- generated at business schools that have contributed to the transformation of real management practices. He sustained that the process of innovation in business knowledge works the other way round, that it starts with the analysis of real world practices and not in an academic vacuum. Management knowledge is made of human experiences, an amalgamation of “human devices”. Since the only management facts to be discovered exist in the real world –and not in some other ideal, platonic, sphere- the development of management knowledge is distinctively clinical. A similar solid line of reasoning can be found in a popular article by Bennis and O’Toole published in Harvard Business Review.

I agree with Teppo that “Knowledge-building and research is about a systematic effort to explain, understand, and predict - driven by careful theory-building and data collection” but I am a little puzzled when he adds “that inherently choices need to be made as to which type of knowledge should be privileged, particularly in a b-school and university environment. Do we value scholarship (and teaching) that is theory-driven, or teaching (scholarship?) by executives that is experience-driven?”

For a long time academia has strongly emphasized the excellence of “basic research”, and the lesser value of the so called “applied research”. It is probably time to reconcile the two and it seems that the “attached view of business schools” defended in a previous post works in this direction.

I am happy to find Herbert H.L.A Hart´s contribution to Jurisprudence among the “ideas for ideals” selected among the 100 world-changing discoveries mentioned above. Hart was an exponent of how academia and practice could be combined almost perfectly and I was lucky to be tutored by him at Oxford in his later years as member of the University College. Interestingly, my understanding is that most of the ideas elaborated in his “The Concept of Law”, a work that transformed the way Law is taught at most western schools, were generated in his practice as a barrister, before he joined the academia. Indeed, Jurisprudence and the theoretical analysis of Law has been a typical area of clinical research. Business schools and law schools could exchange best practices on research and producing inventions that transform the world.

Plato’s Gastritis

Some years ago, Umberto Eco, the prominent academic and writer, published an article in “L’Expresso”, the Italian weekly magazine, under the title: “The first duty of intellectuals: to remain silent when they can not be of any use”. The title is self-explanatory, but I extract a passage from the article that has been quoted often subsequently:

“Intellectuals are useful to society, but only in the long run. In the short term they can only be professional speakers or researchers, school administrators, communication managers at a political party or a company, or maybe blow the fife in a revolution, but they cannot perform a specific and distinctive task. To say that they are useful in the long run means that they work before and after the actual events, but never during those events. An economist or a geographer could have warned about the transformation of terrestrial transports when the steam machine came into scene and could analyse the future pros and cons of that transformation or develop a study one hundred years later to show how that invention revolutionised our lives. However, when stagecoach companies were becoming bankrupt and the first steam machines were taking the lead, (intellectuals) had noting to contribute or, in any case, much less than an engine driver. To ask intellectuals for something else is like reproaching Plato for not finding a remedy for the gastritis (…) The only meaningful thing an intellectual can do when his house is burning is to call the fire brigade” (L’Expresso, April 24th, 1997) *

Indeed, it is an exemplary piece of irony. Let me anticipate that I do not agree with Eco’s statement. I believe that intellectuals and academics can exercise their social task effectively and produce a direct impact on their societies, for the better. Countless examples could be used as evidence. However, Eco’s scathing statement and the analogous ideas formulated by others are often used by critics of the “ivory tower” accusing academics of living in an unreal Arcadia, very detached from the real world. Suppose that Plato had been a professor at a business school in our days. Wouldn’t we have asked him for concrete remedies to business problems?

Business schools need both academics and practitioners in their faculties and deans look for those who represent the best symbiosis of the two. I understand that Teppo Felin agrees with me on the need to have academics as well as practitioners and rightly adds that the challenge is to find the adequate blend of the two. Richard Edelstein identifies a pivotal question when he says that the real challenge for business schools’ deans is how to manage diversity when the profile of faculty members is so complementary. Traditionally, the reciprocal reaction between academics and practitioners has been to reject the other. It is time to overcome this mutual exclusion and explore the formidable synergies that could result from diversity. Again, this is one of the reasons I favour an attached view of business schools, i.e., that business schools should act as bridges between academic and the business world.

* Note: I take Eco´s quote from Antonio Tabucchi “La Gastritiis de Platón”, a very inspiring book.

Tags(clickable): Eco, Umberto Eco, Plato

The Multifarious Sources of Management Knowledge

I appreciate Teppo Felin’s previous contribution in this blog (and I would also like to reply to a post on his own blog) since constructive debate is a truly academic exercise and one of the best avenues to improve our practices. I agree with his statement that business schools should develop cutting-edge research -who wouldn’t agree? The question here, though, is how “cutting-edge research” is defined. At the same time, I do also favor the idea about business schools investing in basic research but, again, the risk is to fall in a semantic trap when defining “basic research”. For some time, some academics have taken for granted the meaning of the mentioned concepts and the debate has been metatheoretical or semantic. My intention is to try to throw some light and rationality on the debate. Ludwig Wittgenstein once wrote that “Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language” but, I would add, we should not let language bewitch our intelligence.

Some years ago I was commissioned by EQUIS, the European accreditation system, to develop a set of standards that could be applied when evaluating business schools as regards their research activity. One of the first things I realised at the beginning of this task was that research is a contested concept, i.e., a concept with different conceptions or meaning with some even conflicting. In order to avoid the semantic trap the working team decided to give up the controversial concept research and stipulate a new one: RDI, which stands for research, development and innovation, a more ample concept that would leave room for many different forms of production and diffusion of knowledge.

True, “research” is a contested concept in a similar way to other abstract concepts such as justice, liberty and merit. They can be interpreted in different ways and we may even hold contested or opposite conceptions when applying them to some particular case. The concept “research” shares the same contested nature. We may define a core meaning of research but the controversy comes when different adjectives are added: academic (vs. applied?), theoretical (vs. empirical?), original or basic (vs. developmental?), client oriented (vs. “ars artis”?), pure (vs. impure?). A rule commonly employed to classify the different sorts of research is the pedigree of the channel used in its diffusion. According to this taxonomy, basic or original research is published in refereed academic journals whereas developmental or applied knowledge is distributed through professional publications. However, is this always the case? In fact, evidence shows that a good number of valuable and original management ideas and models have been generated outside academic publications.

Academia is not the only reservoir of management knowledge, a fact that reinforces the detached view of business schools, discussed in my previous post, a view defending that business schools should act as bridges between academia and the real business world. Consulting companies, investment banks and publishing houses are sometimes the source of valuable, original knowledge and business schools could promote an active dialogue with this and other institutions to further develop these ideas to higher grounds. Adjunct and clinical professors can play a vital role in this process and this is why I favour their intense participation at business schools

Abysses and Bridges between Business and Academia

Some business school’s managers –most, I hope- think that an important part of their institution’s mission is to bridge the business world and academia. Some others –few, I believe- emphasize that business schools are academic institutions and they should search their own identity, separated from the business world. In this and subsequent posts I will refer to the first conception as the “attached approach” and to the second as the “detached approach”. They both describe two alternative, though very generically described, views about the nature and mission of business schools that require further explanation and I will use some examples to illustrate them.

Let me refer to a case of the detached conception by recalling an inspiring and quite recent anecdote when I interviewed a candidate for my school’s faculty. I asked this person for the content and purpose of his research, and at some stage he explained that he was looking forward to teaching at executive programmes because it would provide the opportunity to check if the findings of his research fitted the real business world. I tried not to overreact to his words –my friends say I am too diplomatic- but I can tell that I was very surprised. Could you imagine a scientist whose research was on elephant family habits saying that he would like to watch real elephants in order to test the accuracy of his theories? Are some PhD programmes in management stressing the detached approach too much?

The academic world has always experienced a tension between Theory and Practice, in management as well as in other disciplines. This tension has sometimes resulted in the creation of an abyss between both spheres, characterised as the “ivory tower syndrome”, a phenomenon that, paradoxically, some academics take great delight in. A curious antecedent of this syndrome was when the abbots of Middle Age monasteries, which were the embryo of later universities, prescribed the principle “ora et labora” (pray and work) after their monks were spending too much time in church and abandoning their responsibilities in the orchard or the library.

Immanuel Kant, one of my favourite philosophers, dealt with this question in his opuscule “Theory and Practice”, a must reading for academics, where one of his aims is to overcome the gap between speculative thinking and practical decisions. One of the conclusions of his work is that when theories can not be applied to practice they are just bad theories. For those who seek a further analysis I recommend an essay by Jeffrie G. Murphy.

Another example of the detached approach is the comment posted by Teppo Felin (of orgtheory.net fame) in this same blog, if interpreted in an extreme way, i.e., that academics from a different discipline to management are better candidates for teaching than experienced executives. I agree with Teppof that we should fish beyond management faculties -in areas such as sociology, psychology and social sciences in general- in order to enrich our programmes, as I defended in a previous comment, but I also believe that those practitioners that undergo the necessary preparation for teaching are at least as good potential docents as academics.