The schizophrenic life of an academic
Today’s Wall Street Journal had a fascinating article about the heated competition to become America’s Top College Professor. Aside from being personally inspiring (as someone who spent a lot of years trying to figure out the right classroom style), the story also points to the fundamental schizophrenia behind the conventional University (and by extension, business school) career track. Good teaching obviously matters to students—it can make the difference in what a student chooses to pursue in life, and can just as easily shut a particular subject or interest down. But, does good teaching matter to universities?
They all say that it does. But one could make the argument that teaching suffers when schools prioritize something else—their status and reputations—over what goes on in their classrooms. Indeed, as M. Harmon suggested in a wonderful article (Harmon, M. M. 2006. Business research and Chinese patriotic poetry: How competition for status distorts the priority between research and teaching in U. S. business schools. Academy of Management Learning and Education, 5(2): 234-243), schools’ ‘quest for status’ can consume resources and take time that obviously is then not available for teaching. The quest for status is reflected in an academic reward and prestige system that is heavily tilted toward scholarly publication over other forms of impact. Indeed, as the WSJ article points out, it is a system that resulted in more than 100 academic books being published on Shakespeare alone!
I’m a big believer in the power and importance of research—indeed, other than those of us whose jobs are blessedly focused on research, who has time to think these days? However, a reward system designed to produce high volumes of publications is apt to do just that, even if teaching gets a lower priority.
It’s therefore doubly refreshing to hear from those who have somehow managed the academic walk-the-plank: high quality publications and award-winning teaching. These top teachers deserve our considerable admiration.
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- Posted Rita McGrath on November 13, 2009
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Unintended side effects of post-9/11 fear of flying
Garrick Blalock, Vrinda Kadiyali and Daniel H. Simon, writing in the journal Applied Economics (June 2009 - Volume 41, issue 14, pg. 1717) came to a fascinating conclusion. After the highly dramatic 9/11 attacks, many travelers elected to go by automobile, in preference to taking airplanes (as the airlines know all too well - their business really suffered after 9/11). One little-known aspect of these decisions, however, is that by going on the road instead of by air, passengers expose themselves to far greater risk. Indeed, in the US, close to 40,000 fatalities occur each year (according to the Fatality Analysis Reporting System. The number of airplane related fatalities worldwide, in contrast is less than a thousand deaths, according to recent reports. The disparity in how dangerous the two modes of transportation are prompted the researchers to ask whether a side effect of the terrorism attacks (fear of flying) increased the risk exposure of people who chose to drive, rather than fly.
They controlled for time trends, weather, road conditions and other factors and found that 327 additional driving deaths per month in late 2001 could be attributed to a shift in preference away from airplanes and toward road transportation. While the effect weakened over time, the authors speculate that a smany as 2,300 driving deaths may be attributable to the attacks.
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- Posted Rita McGrath on July 07, 2009
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Academic language…you have to wonder
My colleague, Ian MacMillan, brought to my attention the abstract for a paper on sleep deprivation and team performance which appeared in the most recent edition of one of our academic journals. It reads, as follows:
We introduce the construct of sleep deprivation to the team-level management literature by integrating theory and research on sleep deprivation and group behavior. We propose that sleep deprivation has a negative monotonic, but nonlinear, influence on team decision-making accuracy and problem solving. We then propose that task, structural, and social characteristics accentuate or attenuate the influence of sleep deprivation on team decision-making accuracy and problem solving.
Quite a set of statements.
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- Posted Rita McGrath on May 12, 2009
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Discovery Driven Planning: Teaching in Non-Degree Executive Education Programs
I’m just here at the Strategic Management Society’s annual conference in Cologne. It’s a meeting which aspires to bring together academics, consultants and business-people for fruitful dialogue and exchanges, although in fairness the tilt does seem to be more toward academics recently. I did participate in an interesting session on how to teach in executive education programs. I focused on issues of style (not too much lecturing, please!) and actually included some substance on real options reasoning and discovery driven planning. Anyone with an interest can download the attached .pdf. (the blog software wouldn’t allow me to upload it in .ppt.)
For now, the key takeaways from my session:
1. Too much one-way communication is ineffective
2. In design, remember the basic principle of what makes something interesting—challenge to weakly held assumptions
3. Build on executive participants’ own experiences and connect to your teaching points
4. Creative repetition (700 times)
5. Tell stories
6. Combine facts, emotions and symbols—often, one or another are left out
Feel free to write with any questions or further ideas. On to the next session!
ExecEdTeaching.SMS.10-08.08.pdf
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Business School Rankings: Hungry for Lists?
Anyone who enjoys watching the various business schools get sliced and diced by reviewers will get a kick out of the Financial Times report on business school rankings.
Absolutely no shortage of lists in their story “A League of their Own”
Got your own list to add? Or perhaps a list you would like to see developed? I’m sure that’s possible.
Oh, and while we’re on the subject of rankings, the FT’s whole 2008 list for American schools can be found here. I’m delighted to see that our own Columbia Business School is ranked at #2.
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- Posted Rita McGrath on February 04, 2008
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