Santiago Iniguez

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.

No simple solutions to questions about faculty

In his latest post, Dean Dinwoodie raised a key issue for business school’s deans and managers that I hope he will allow me to summarize in a single question: What should be the right blend of faculty at business schools? The natural answer, implicit in his post, is: “it depends on the nature of each business school, whether it is oriented towards undergraduate education or executive offerings or postgraduate education”. However, if we consider an institution that covers different segments and type of programmes, the mentioned answer actually begs its question.

I was invited to speak at a recent conference on the future of the MBA organised by Dean Roger Martin at his school, the Rotman School of Management, in Toronto. The conference was attended by illustrious academics that included Chris Argyris, Michael Jensen, Bill McKelvey, Henry Mintzberg, James O’Toole and Jeffrey Pfeffer. One of the most recurrent topics discussed at the conference was the ideal composition of the faculty of business schools. In his presentation, O’Toole described the two polar profiles of faculty members, the academics versus the practitioners, using examples from his university. At the end of his presentation he formulated the question: which of the two polar types of faculty does a business school need most? The quick answer from the audience was: “both!”. Initially I was not entirely convinced by this answer: I found it too almost too evident and I was looking for some magical solution, something more complex and elaborated. However I concluded that business school deans have, first to assimilate that there is no such thing as a “pure and ideal” model of faculty, even with Solomonic qualities. As dean Dinwoodie point out, isn’t management a question of balancing?

Two Pressing Challenges for B-schools Deans (2)

How can b-school deans foster valuable research and open new avenues that help young scholars to diffuse their academic contributions? Dean Lapert raised in his latest post the issue that the number of scholars and the volume of potential contributions have grown considerably in the last years whereas the number of academic journals has remained almost steady. This creates, in his opinion, a bottleneck “and many articles never see the light of day, even though they may be of great scholarly, and even public, interest”. He suggests “that we work with organizations that represent faculty in the various management disciplines to make available the means that will enable young researchers (and even those who are not so young) to have their works published”. I volunteer to support his initiative.

However, I believe that the pressing challenge mentioned should be also faced from an broader perspective. The key question is how business schools could foster more effectively the creation and the diffusion of relevant management research. This, in turn, is related to two issues: (i) what is relevant management research or knowledge, and (ii) what should be considered as valuable channels of diffusion of this research. The problem in distinguishing between those two questions is that, conventionally, the quality of a given piece of research (issue # 1) is validated by its publication in some canonical vehicle of communication (issue #2). For example, the quality of an article is supported by its publication in a refereed journal. Is there some way to escape this conceptual trap or, to put it differently, this Catch 22 situation?

Tags(clickable): EQUIS, EFMD, Web2.0,

PhD Programmes: Need of Reforms

PhD programmes are essential to the whole education system. They are the pool of future university researchers and teachers. Last week, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, a US based non-profit organisation dedicated to promote excellence in education, released the report "The Responsive PhD: Innovations in US Doctoral Education", an extremely interesting document on doctoral education in the US that calls for important reforms: "there have been too many words and too little action", it states. The report also comprises a series of successful initiatives developed in PhD programmes at different US universities.

I want to focus on two recommendations of this report. First, that pedagogy should be an important part of doctoral preparation. For some time, PhD programmes have focused almost exclusively on training academic researchers. This has been essential, but not sufficient. In fact, the omission of some other important facets, such as preparing candidates to teach effectively and to link with the corporate world, has reduced the potential development and the opportunities of PhD graduates.

Another recommendation is the need of connecting doctoral programmes with other major social stakeholders outside universities, mainly the organisations that may recruit or work with PhD graduates: "the doctorate in totality and in every discipline will benefit enormously by a continuing interchange with the worlds beyond academia", says the report.

This report should be very welcome and it comes at a time when there is a growing market for DBA (Doctor in Business Administration) programmes in Europe. Significantly, the Association of MBAs (AMBA) recently launched a new accreditation scheme aimed at DBA programmes, to cope with the increasing demmand from the market. I do not dare to dissect here the differences between PhDs in Management and DBAs. Maybe in some future post. But it seems that the latter category of programmes is where the growth will take place in the future.

My presentation on research at AMBA in Chile

Readers may trace the discussion on management research generated in the past weeks in this blog. We debated the meaning of research for business schools, the necessary link between research and teaching and what defines cutting-edge research. The discussion probably resembles a recurrent debate present in Academia since the beginnings: the tension between theory and practice, between speculative work and its adaptation to real life. You may recall one of the famous quotes attributed to Immanuel Kant: “Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play”. The same author also explained that creating a separation between theory and practice is fallacious. Theories that are not applicable in practice are just bad theories.

In late August I was invited by the Association of MBAs (AMBA) to talk on the balance between teaching and research at business schools, on the occasion of their conference for Latin American deans in Chile. There, I had the opportunity to revive the same debate about the right balance between theory and practice in research activities. The main conclusions of my presentation were the following. First, since management education has become “glocal” and has varied sources and different distribution channels, business schools need to find their own sources of differentiation. Second, that there is a need to stipulate a wide and comprehensive conception of research. A plausible solution is to use the concept RDI (research, development and innovation. You will find the contents of my contribution ("Session 4"), along with others at the same conference, here at the AMBA website.

Impact and Opportunities

Kai Peters raises the issue of research on education and how could we measure the impact of the learning process on students. Business schools are probably the segment of higher education where impact is more closely monitored. This is reflected, for example, in the sophisticated systems to evaluate teaching performance at our schools or the processes in place to implement feedback from recruiters that hire our graduates. As regards executive education, some schools, along with specialized consultants and human resource departments, have developed mechanisms to measure the impact of tailored programs in the actual performance of attendees and the company itself. There are systems, with some limitations however, that can evaluate the return on sales or the increase in productivity attributable to educational programs.

At the same time, some of the prevalent methodologies implemented at MBA programs have become paradigmatic. The case method, for example, has the virtue of linking theory and practice by the application of concepts and tools to particular business situations, while at the same time allowing for the development of valuable skills of participants. Teamwork has also been fostered at our schools, preparing students for the working environments they will encounter in real life.

Another example of the constant search for suitable learning methods at business schools is the ongoing debate about how to instill a social responsible attitude in our students. If you just search in Google the item “can ethics be taught” you will find over 3 million entries, many of them referring to management education. I hope that this particular debate is already producing fruitful results. We see, for instance, an increasing number of MBA graduates who engage in social entrepreneurship.

Talking about research on educational methodologies, a major challenge we now face is how to take advantage of the opportunities that technology is offering us to optimize the learning process. All ideas are welcome here.

Need to find 'kangaroos' for our Faculties

Similarly to what happened in other sectors, management education has become global and this has affected the nature of management knowledge in terms of its content, origin, diffusion and relevance. An example is that the current sources of management research are multifarious, and authors in academic journals include not only business schools’ professors but also consultants, financial analysts and journalists, just to name a few. In this new global and brave world, some outsiders to education, such as consulting firms and investment banks, have sometimes more opportunities for originating new knowledge because of their larger resources and proximity to markets. In fact, the potential synergies between business schools and consultancies or other companies have prompted many joint alliances aimed at developing research.

Likewise, the channels of management knowledge diffusion, as Kai Peters points out, have become very varied and fuzzy. Here, Internet is making a big impact in the way business theories are currently being discussed and disseminated. Think, for example about collaborative online tools and Creative Commons. If we, as educators, aim at delivering the ultimate management inventions, we probably have to look also outside the canonical channels of diffusion.

These multifaceted origins and channels of management knowledge have driven some accreditation systems to amplify the meaning of research when it comes to assessing the quality of business schools. Some years ago, AACSB International opted to introduce a new concept, “intellectual contributions”, in order to cover a wide range of research outputs, from articles in refereed journals to teaching materials. On the other side of the Atlantic, EQUIS created a different category:  RDI (Research, Development & Innovation), which goes beyond a narrow conception of academic research and allows candidate schools to define the nature and forms of its knowledge processes and products according to their mission.

Globalisation is affecting decisively the meaning of management knowledge. Like Della Bradshaw and Dean Danos, I believe that cutting-edge research should be an essential activity at business schools and is the necessary basis for excellence in teaching. Some analysts characterise teaching as opposed to research when it comes to defining the ideal profile of a faculty member. But this opposition is fallacious. My experience, in line with what Dean Danos states, is that the most successful and sought-after professors, by corporate clients for example, are also those who excel both in research and performance in class. The challenge for business school deans is how to attract and retain the “kangaroos”, i.e., those professors that combine a remarkable research and teaching profile and have ample practical experience. This is becoming increasingly difficult in our global industry.