Business-School Research: Failure to Launch

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From The Economist

It can be surprisingly hard to tell when an organisation has failed. Businesses have products that never quite got off the ground, investments with ugly returns and once-promising managers languishing ineffectively for years. But when outside observers, including well-intentioned researchers, come calling, companies are not in a hurry to talk about it.

Peter Madsen, of Brigham Young University in Utah, and Vinit Desai, of the University of Colorado at Denver, ran into this problem while trying to investigate how organisations learn from both successful and failed ventures, and how that knowledge is retained over time. Their solution was to examine firms, private and public, that launch rockets designed to place satellites into orbit around the Earth. As the authors explain in a recently-published paper in the Academy of Management Journal, when a satellite fails it is easily identifiable (either the rocket makes into space, or it doesn’t); costly; and “often very loud”.

Moreover, the pair were able to take a large sample: all orbital launch attempts between October 1957 (the deployment of the first Sputnik) and March 2004. They wanted to see how, for any given company, its successes or failures, and those of its rivals, influenced its ability to get subsequent rockets into space. The authors also wanted to measure whether success depended on how long had passed since the previous launch. This, they hoped, would measure of whether the company was retaining the lessons that needed to be learned.

To Read More…

Latest Management Journal Papers

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The latest issue of  The International Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Change Management includes:

A Post-Crisis Case Study: The New Dean of Harvard Business School Promises “Radical Innovation”

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From The Economist

Henry Kissinger, who started his career in the killing fields of Harvard before moving to Washington, DC, is said to have quipped that academic politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small. Schumpeter has no idea whether the contest to succeed Jay Light as dean of the Harvard Business School (HBS) was vicious. But he is sure that the stakes were not small.

HBS is hugely influential. The school is a training ground for America’s business elite: a striking number of the top office holders of Fortune 500 companies, including the heads of General Electric and Boeing, sharpened their skills and elbows there. The school is also the apex of the vast global industry devoted to teaching business. It sits on an endowment of $2.1 billion and employs some terrific thinkers, including Michael Porter and Clayton Christensen. It developed the “case method”—using case studies to teach students about real-world business problems. It claims to be the source of four-fifths of the case-study materials used in the world’s leading business schools.

To Read More…

Us Now

From Us Now

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The United Arab Emirates and BlackBerry? Cherchez la server

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From The Economist

The United Arab Emirates announced on August 1st that it had failed to reach an agreement on data traffic with Research in Motion, maker of the BlackBerry, and would suspend messenger, e-mail and web-browsing services on BlackBerrys from October 11th. There are lots of smart-phones in the world that handle e-mail and web browsing; why pick on BlackBerry? From the UAE’s telecoms regulator:

BlackBerry data is immediately exported off-shore, where it is managed by a foreign, commercial organization. BlackBerry data services are currently the only data services operating in the UAE where this is the case.

Whenever you read about a dispute between a web-based service and a country, you need to ask yourself only one question: where is the server located? The conflict between Google and China came down to the conditions under which Google could locate servers in China. Closer servers offer a faster load-time, but servers on the Chinese mainland fall under Chinese law. WikiLeaks, as well, takes advantage of server law by routing all links through servers in countries with strong protections for whistleblowers and journalists.

To Read More…

In Search of Serendipity

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From The Economist

Every year, hordes of free spirits gather in the Nevada desert to “breathe art”, feel at one with the cosmos and sample the delights of Bianca’s Smut Shack. The Burning Man festival is radically anti-capitalist, with a strict ban on commerce and an emphasis on “self-reliance”. In short, it is not the sort of place you would associate with corporate schmoozing.

But you would be wrong, argue John Hagel, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison. Their new book, “The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things In Motion”, celebrates unconventional networkers such as Yossi Vardi, the 68-year-old “grandfather” of Israeli venture capital. Mr Vardi attends or hosts some 40 pow-wows a year, including Burning Man. (It’s about art, sex and drugs, he muses, but “I was only involved in art.”) According to “The Power of Pull”, Mr Vardi is a “super-node”, one of the best-connected people in the high-tech industry. More than that, he is a role model: he excels in “managing serendipity”. His avid conference-going, for example, is not just for fun. By mingling with so many strangers, he finds that he often bumps into people who give him valuable information.

To Read More…

Profiting From Non-Profits

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From The Economist

The members of the Village People, a pop group founded in the 1970s, are dismayed that the organisation that inspired their greatest hit is to change its name after 166 years. The American branch of the Young Men’s Christian Association, known to arm-waving disco mavens as the YMCA, announced on July 12th that it would become plain “The Y”. This is part of what the outfit describes as a “major brand revitalisation” intended to make it seem warmer and more welcoming. It may turn out to be a misguided rebranding exercise on a par with Coca-Cola’s launch of New Coke and British Airways dropping the Union Jack from the tails of its aircraft.

Non-profit organisations such as the one formerly known as the YMCA are commonly advised to become more like for-profit businesses. Management experts and consultants view them as horribly inefficient due to the absence of the concentrating power of the profit motive. The negative reaction to the Y’s rebranding suggests that non-profit outfits are not all that good at emulating business even when they try. There has been barely any reciprocal pressure on for-profit firms to learn from the non-profits. Yet this is what Nancy Lublin, one of America’s most successful non-profit leaders, proposes in a new book, “Zilch: The Power of Zero in Business.”

To Read More…

Management Journal, Volume 10, Number 1 available

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The first issue of Volume 10 of The International Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Change Management has now been published.

Volume 10, Number 1 contains:

Continue reading ‘Management Journal, Volume 10, Number 1 available’

Google Wave Decision Shows Strong Innovation Management

google_wave_logoFrom Karim R. Lakhani  in Harvard Business Review:

Some tech pundits were surprised that Google decided to shut down Wave yesterday just a year after its launch andchastised the company for its decision. But I’m not surprised and I applaud the company’s decision to pull the plug after it was clear the market wasn’t interested in Wave. From my vantage point as someone who studies innovation, Google’s decision was exactly the right move and provides some very important lessons for managing innovation in both small and large organizations.

The first lesson, of course, is that uncertainty haunts all innovation attempts. Charles Kettering, inventor and VP of R&D and Board Member of GM (1920-1947) famously noted that when it comes to innovation: “You don’t know when you are going to get the thing, whether its going to work or not and whether its going to have any value whatsoever.” In essence Kettering implied that any innovation attempt faces a combination of temporal, technical and market uncertainty. Even a company like Google, recognized for its wealth of intellectual talent in its employees, was not able to figure out before hand if there would be a market for Wave. Some types of uncertainties are simply not resolvable before the fact, and the only true way to find out is to make the investment and launch an innovative product in the market place. Google should be applauded and rewarded for pioneering a risky project and publicly launching it so that it can learn from the market.

For more…

Soul Searching, not Soul Stirring

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From Matthew Reiez, Times Higher Education

Mission statements form a major part of how many institutions present themselves to the world - and, at least in theory, how they see themselves.

Although the precise terms differ, it is now common for universities to make the effort to define their basic purpose (mission), major longer-term aspirations (vision) and underlying values. There is fun to be had in comparing the self-descriptions that appear in their corporate advertising (see quiz, page 40). Yet mission statements present a far more considered picture, often based on extensive consultation and debate. What is the point of them, and can they justify their cost, especially at times of financial constraint?

Universities are willing to invest considerable amounts of money in getting their mission statements right, as the example of the University of Nottingham indicates (see box, below). Certainly, words that genuinely inspire people are worth paying for. The Conservative Party must have handed Saatchi & Saatchi a small fortune for the phrase “Labour isn’t working”, but it is generally agreed to have played a major role in helping the Tories win the 1979 election. Given the sums universities must spend on developing declarations of their missions, one would hope that the results read like the products of top-class copywriters. So are they genuinely inspirational, banal or positively leaden?

To Read More…

Things Fall Apart

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From Omar Malik, Times Higher Education

Philosophers have long pondered the big question: why is life such a bugger? Lesser orders have similarly wondered why life is just one damn thing after another. Why do things always go wrong? The answer is short and simple: the laws of nature.

Some like to believe that we are the highest form of life, blessed with free will. Maybe. But as far as nature is concerned, we are just another of her countless products and, like the rest of them, serve sentence under her laws.

Francis Bacon said that we cannot command nature except by obeying her; sadly, he omitted to say that to obey her, we must first understand her. In macro terms that is surprisingly easy: all we have to do is identify her laws. The micro task of combating them is much more difficult, well beyond the scope of libraries of regulations, however vast.

To Read More…

Voices of Experience

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From Times Higher Education,

In a chilly economic climate, business schools’ ability to deliver research with real-world relevance is essential. Tracey Hudson asks whether they can find the right academics to deliver those goals

“Because of this shortage, many business schools are adopting a model of education that de-emphasises the role of research professors and substitutes others who are not primarily researcher-teachers. Until PhD programmes increase in number and output, this worldwide trend will continue,” he says.

One of the biggest challenges faced by higher education institutions around the globe is the continuing shortage not of academics, but of the right kind of academics. And nowhere is the challenge greater than in one of the fastest-growing areas of the academic world - the international business school community.

According to Paul Danos, dean of the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, “there is a continuing shortage of PhD-trained professors, which is causing cost escalation for the very best”.

To Read More…

Series: The Organization

We are accepting book proposals for the imprint The Organization.

Common Ground is setting new standards of rigorous academic knowledge creation and scholarly publication.

Unlike other publishers, we’re not interested in the size of potential markets or competition from other books. We’re only interested in the intellectual quality of the work.

If your book is a brilliant contribution to a specialist area of knowledge that only serves a small intellectual community, we still want to publish it. If it is expansive and has a broad appeal, we want to publish it too, but only if it is of the highest intellectual quality.

The Eleventh International Conference on Knowledge, Culture and Change in Organizations

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Please continue to check the Management Newsletter for news and information about the 2011 Management Conference. We will announce the dates and location soon.

Management Conference–Share Your Photos

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To those of you that joined us at the 2010 Management Conference in Montreal, or if you’ve participated in a previous conference, please share your photos of the conference with your friends and colleagues that you met while at the conference. Pictures of the conference sessions, dinner, tours and ‘down time’ are all welcome!

Join our Management Conference Flickr group here, and upload your pictures to easily share. Once you’ve joined, simply click on ‘Add something?’, and upload your photos or videos of the conference.

For information on sharing photos with Flickr, please read more here.

Management Journal - Become an Associate Editor

As part of the process of publishing The International Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Change Management, all submissions are sent for peer refereeing, prior to publication. Assessment, comments and guidance by the referees are an essential part of the publication process and invaluable to the authors of the submitted papers.

In recognition of the important role of referees, the international advisory board acknowledges all referees who have refereed papers as an ‘Associate Editor’ in the volume of the journal they have contributed to.

If you would like to referee papers submitted to The International Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Change Management, please email journals@theorganisation.com, with your professional details, areas of expertise and contact details. If we feel you are qualified and we require refereeing for papers within your expertise, we will contact you.

Drucker in the Dug-Out: A Japanese Book about Peter Drucker and Baseball is an Unlikely Hit

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From The Economist

Zoff, a maker of cheap, chic glasses in Tokyo’s trendy Harajuku district, is hardly a place you would expect to find dedicated followers of management theory. But one day its boss, 38-year-old Takeshi Ueno, came into a staff meeting waving a book about baseball with the picture of a gamine schoolgirl on the cover. It had the clunky title: “What if the Female Manager of a High-School Baseball Team read Drucker’s ‘Management’”. Mr Ueno told his staff to read it. Satoko Osanai, his sales manager, did.

Like many young businesswomen across Japan this year, Ms Osanai became an instant fan—not of baseball, but of the late management guru, Peter Drucker. After reading the book, she says, she started treating colleagues and customers differently. As news of the novel travelled from office to café to home, its sales topped 1m. According to the publisher, the cutesy manga cover was aimed more at attracting salarymen than women. Yet almost half of the buyers have been female. What’s more, sales for Drucker’s original works, such as “Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices”, published in 1973, have soared. Some 300,000 copies of the book have sold in the past six months, compared with 100,000 copies in the previous 26 years.

To Read More…

We’re all Global Now

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From The Economist

The internationalisation of business education in recent years has given prospective students a wider choice of where to take an MBA than ever before. As a consequence it seems that business schools now spend almost as much time promoting their cultural, social and sporting advantages as they do the quality of their teaching or position in the rankings. So are students really free to select a location based on such self-indulgences as good weather, good food and handy ski slopes? Or can place have a deeper significance for the potential entrepreneur or corporate leader?

When INSEAD had just the one campus, in Fontainebleau, its answer to that question would have been a clear no. Back in those days its location in France was deemed to be an irrelevance to what was marketed as a truly international school. But its decision in 2000 to open a second campus in Singapore, specifically designed to target Asia and the Pacific Rim proves that even INSEAD called into question such lofty ideas.

To Read More…

The ‘Learning Knights’ of Bell Telephone

16opedimg-articleinlineFrom Wes Davis in The New York Times:

FIFTY-SIX years ago today, a Bell System manager sent postcards to 16 of the most capable and promising young executives at the company. What was written on the postcards was surprising, especially coming from a corporate ladder-climber at a time when the nation was just beginning to lurch out of a recession: “Happy Bloom’s Day.”

It was a message to mark the annual celebration of James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” the epic novel built around events unfolding on a single day — June 16, 1904 — in the life of the fictional Dubliner Leopold Bloom. But the postcard also served as a kind of diploma for the men who received it.

Two years earlier a number of Bell’s top executives, led by W. D. Gillen, then president of Bell Telephone of Pennsylvania, had begun to worry about the education of the managers rising through the company’s hierarchy. Many of these junior executives had technical backgrounds, gained at engineering schools or on the job, and quite a few had no college education at all. They were good at their jobs, but they would eventually rise to positions in which Gillen felt they would need broader views than their backgrounds had so far given them.

To read more…

Growth on the Cheap: The OECD Tells Governments how to Unleash Business’s Creative Potential

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From The Economist

Windy talk about innovation is mind-numbingly abundant. Unusually, however, the grandees taking part in a conference in Paris this week organized by the OECD received some pointed advice. The rich-country think-tank has unveiled a thoughtful new report on how governments can do better at spurring and measuring innovation.

The grandees were also unusually attentive. Many governments are facing not only slow economic growth but also big deficits and heavy debts. At the same time, problems such as global warming and rising prices for natural resources demand their attention. Innovation, the OECD argues, offers a way out. It is already the chief engine of productivity in the rich world, and thus holds out the tantalising prospect of sustaining economic growth on the cheap. It could also provide affordable fixes to the thorniest global problems, argues John Kao, the founder of the Institute for Large Scale Innovation, which advocates the use of prizes and contests to encourage breakthroughs on social ills.

Nazhat Jafri to speak at Management Conference in Montreal

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Nuzhat Jafri became the first executive director of the Office of the Fairness Commissioner in September 2007.

She has wide leadership experience in both public and private sectors. She directed diversity initiatives at Scotiabank and previously at the Bank of Montreal, where she delivered awardwinning leading-edge programs. In the Ontario government, Ms. Jafri developed a cultural policy framework at the Ministry of Culture. She oversaw the passage of amendments to the Ontario Heritage Act and the development and implementation of key regulations. Earlier, she was a director at the former Employment Equity Commission. Most recently, Ms. Jafri was the manager of Global Experience Ontario, the information and referral centre for internationally trained persons at the Ontario Ministry of Citizenship and Immigration.

The Office of the Fairness Commissioner is an independent agency of the government of Ontario. Its goal is to make sure that people are treated fairly when they apply to become licensed professionals in one of Ontario’s regulated professions, no matter where they were trained. This goal is widely supported in Ontario, and reflects the principles and core values of its people. www.fairnesscommissioner.ca

Outside Directors and Children First: Do Outside Directors Leave Just as Companies Need Them Most?

From The Economist201018wbp503

Ruth Simmons  joined Goldman Sachs’s board as an outside director in January 2000; a year later she became president of Brown University in Rhode Island. For the rest of the decade she apparently juggled both roles (as well as several other directorships) without attracting much criticism. But by the end of 2009 Ms Simmons was under fire from students and alumni for having sat on Goldman’s compensation committee; how could she have let those enormous bonus payouts pass unremarked? By February Ms Simmons had left the board. The position was just taking up too much time, she said.

Ms Simmons’s decision to leave makes perfect sense, according to research conducted by Rüdiger Fahlenbrach at the École Polytechnique Féderale in Lausanne, Angie Low of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, and René Stulz of The Ohio State University. The three are co-authors of a new working paper suggesting that when trouble looms for a firm, outside directors have more incentives to quit than to stay.

To Read More…

Redesigned Newsletter: Launched Today

Today the Management Newsletter will be re-launched – marking the start of a new approach to connecting with and reaching out to our Management Community. The newsletter will be sent out on a monthly basis and will contain important community news, conference updates, and publication information.

It is the hope of Common Ground Publishing that this newsletter will provide you with a more positive experience connecting with the Management Community.

If you are not currently a subscriber but would like to receive future newsletter emails, please go to theorganisation.com and click on “Sign Up: Our Newsletter” in the upper right-hand corner.

If you have inquiries, concerns, or general comments, please feel free to contact the newsletter team at support@ theorganisation.com.

Tenth International Conference on Knowledge, Culture and Change in Organizations

The 2010 Management Conference will be held at HEC Montreal in Montreal Canada from 26-28 July.

Plenary Speakers

  • Nuzhat Jafri, Executive Director, Office of the Fairness Commissioner
  • Mildred Schwartz, Professor, University of Chicago, Chicago, USA
  • Emma Stenstrom, Professor, Stockholm School of Economics, Stockholm, Sweden
  • Frank Habermann, Managing Director, Becota, The Berlin Consulting & Management Association, Berlin, Germany
  • Alain Senteni, Dean, School of e-Education,  Hamdan Bin Mohammed e-University, Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Call for Papers
If you intend to present a paper at the conference, your participation begins with submission of a paper proposal. For information on proposals, presentation types, and other options, see: http://theorganisation.com/conference-2010/call-for-papers/#ppt. To submit a proposal, see: http://theorganisation.com/conference-2010/call-for-papers/. If your proposal is accepted, you will then need to register for the conference.

Registration
Those who submit paper proposals should register following the acceptance of the proposal. Conference delegates who do not intend to present may register at any time. For registration options, or to register for the 2010 Management Conference, see: http://theorganisation.com/conference-2010/register/.

Themes
http://theorganisation.com/ideas/themes/

Conference Dinner & Tours

http://theorganisation.com/conference-2010/activities-and-extras/

Accommodation
http://theorganisation.com/conference-2010/accommodation/

The Guru of the Bottom of the Pyramid

From The Economist201017wbd000

Oimbatore Krisnarao Prahalad, universally known as C.K., was the most creative management thinker of his generation. He revolutionised thinking on two big subjects, business strategy and economic development, and made a significant contribution to a third, innovation. His admirers were legion, including bosses of some of the world’s biggest companies, heads of NGOs and founders of scrappy start-ups.

Mr Prahalad burst onto the management scene with two path-breaking articles in the Harvard Business Review, “Strategic Intent” (1989) and “The Core Competence of the Corporation” (1990), and a bestselling book, “Competing for the Future” (1996), all co-written with his former pupil, Gary Hamel. “Core competence” remains one of the most frequently reprinted articles ever published by Harvard Business Review.

To Read More…

The Economist Manifesto

From Amartya Sen, NewStateman20100421_201016smith_w

The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith’s first book, was published in early 1759. Smith, then a young professor at the University of Glasgow, had some understandable anxiety about the public reception of the book, which was based on his quite progressive lectures. On 12 April, Smith heard from his friend David Hume in London about how the book was doing. If Smith was, Hume told him, prepared for “the worst”, then he must now be given “the melancholy news” that unfortunately “the public seem disposed to applaud [your book] extremely”. “It was looked for by the foolish people with some impatience; and the mob of literati are beginning already to be very loud in its praises.” This light-hearted intimation of the early success of Smith’s first book was followed by serious critical acclaim for what is one of the truly outstanding books in the intellectual history of the world.

After its immediate success, Moral Sentiments went into something of an eclipse from the beginning of the 19th century, and Smith was increasingly seen almost exclusively as the author of his second book, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, which, published in 1776, transformed the subject of economics. The neglect of Moral Sentiments, which lasted through the 19th and 20th centuries, has had two rather unfortunate effects.

To Read More…

Management Journal Award Finalists

Congratulations to to all of the International Award for Excellence finalists:

The Imitation Economy: Innovation is Overrated. It’s Time to Appreciate the Power of the Copycat.

From Drake Bennett, Boston.com

Two weeks after it went on sale, the iPad is still the toast of the tech world, with its image gracing magazine covers, market analysts speculating about whether it will transform the worlds of publishing and entertainment, and consumers buying the gadget at a healthy clip. This at a cost of at least $500 each, at a time when Americans are still cautious about large nonessential purchases, and for a device that remains difficult to succinctly describe, much less figure out the purpose of.

It’s early yet, but it looks like another success for a company that, more than any other consumer brand, is synonymous with the new. Apple has forged a unique and lucrative reputation for creating irresistible, intuitive objects of techno-desire, shaping along the way how we work, communicate, and procrastinate, and the look and feel of the electronic gadgetry that increasingly fills our lives.

To Read More…

Risk: The Story of America’s Greatest Idea

From John Dickerson, Slate

Risk has taken a beating recently, thanks to the financial crisis. Risk is supposed to be about choice and consequence. You take a chance and you win or you lose. But then banks and insurance companies found ways to pervert this. They devised ever more esoteric ways to pass risk on to others, so there was, in fact, no risk to them at all. In this distortion, insurance techniques, created to limit risk, exposed millions to it. The laws of probability, originally devised to solve a moral dilemma—how to equitably distribute winnings in a game of chance—wound up inequitably distributing losses to people who didn’t even know they were at the table. The architects of these gambles left their jobs with enormous bonuses, and companies that helped cripple the financial system were repaid by the government bailout. They took a chance, and lost—but they still won.

To Read More…

Bursting a Balloon:Using the Myth of Talent as a Smokescreen for Corporate Plunder

From David Bolchover, The Economist

In these times, the overpaid fat-cat in the corner office makes a barn door of a target. Particularly in the financial services sector, where even at those companies bailed out by the taxpayer, senior executives have been quick to return to obscene bonuses, often coupled with poor performance. To add insult, such behaviour is justified by the alleged need to “let the markets decide” or to ensure that talent is “justly rewarded”.201016wbp505_290

Typically, sanctimoniousness at the top comes with a veiled threat to pack up and head abroad if the government even thinks about reining them in. Understandable, then, that many feel fury at such a sense of entitlement and enrichment, and that sensible discussion tends to evaporate in a flare of mass indignation.

Understandable but ultimately unsustainable. Such populist anger risks taking down innocent entrepreneurs and financial firms as the blunt instrument of regulation is wielded. More reasoned debate about the issue of excessive executive pay is needed. This is David Bolchover’s ambition in his highly readable and punchy polemic.

To Read More…

Indecision-Making

From Virginia Postrel, The New York Times

Sheena Iyengar is the psychologist responsible for the famous jam experiment. You may have heard about it: At a luxury food store in Menlo Park, researchers set up a table offering samples of jam. Sometimes, there were six different flavors to choose from. At other times, there were 24. (In both cases, popular flavors like strawberry were left out.) Shoppers were more likely to stop by the table with more flavors. But after the taste test, those who chose from the smaller number were 10 times more likely to actually buy jam: 30 percent versus 3 percent. Having too many options, it seems, made it harder to settle on a single selection.postrel-t_ca0-articlelarge

Wherever she goes, people tell Iyengar about her own experiment. The head of Fidelity Research explained it to her, as did a McKinsey & Company executive and a random woman sitting next to her on a plane. A colleague told her he had heard Rush Limbaugh denounce it on the radio. That rant was probably a reaction to Barry Schwartz, the author of “The Paradox of Choice” (2004), who often cites the jam study in antimarket polemics lamenting the abundance of consumer choice. In Schwartz’s ideal world, stores wouldn’t offer such ridiculous, brain-­taxing plenitude. Who needs two dozen types of jam?

To Read More…

Management Journal Award Winner

management_frontCongratulations to Tracy Freeze the winner of the International Award for Excellence in the area of knowledge, culture and change in organisations with their paper Transforming the Cynic: Recommendations for Leaders Implementing Organizational Change.

Paper abstract: This paper reviews the theoretical and empirical literature on attitudes, employee cynicism toward organizational change and transformational leadership. Many researchers agree that successful implementation of organizational change is essential to the health and progress of organizations (e.g., Armenakis & Bedeian, 1999; Stanley, Meyer, & Topolnytsky, 2005). One barrier to the successful implementation of organizational change is cynicism. Cynicism in the work context is considered to be a state-based attitude and consequently, may be amenable and responsive to leadership behaviors such as those outlined by transformational leadership theory (e.g., Bommer, Rich, & Rubin, 2005; Reichers, Wanous, & Austin, 1997). It is hypothesized that current research and knowledge from the areas of attitude theory, employee cynicism and transformational leadership can inform leaders and offer recommendations for the successful implementation of organizational change. More research is needed to determine the effectiveness of transformational leadership behaviors in the context of employee cynicism toward organizational change. If transformational leadership behaviors are found effective in transforming cynicism, future research should focus on furthering a framework for understanding the underlying determinants of that effectiveness as well as examining the possible detrimental effects of suppressing cynical attitudes.

If you have read this paper and would like to make comments please add a review.

Belgians in Beijing Reginald Hubbard, an MBA Student at the Vlerick Leuven Gent Management School, Learns the Theory of Doing Business in China

From The Economist

Last Friday morning my MBA class was sitting in a classroom at the Vlerick Leuven Gent Management School in Belgium taking an exam in operations management. A couple of days later we were in China, visiting a pork-processing plant, a dairy and a jelly producer, seeing whether all of the theory we had learned manifests itself in the real-life business of each food producer. 201016wbp504

Before coming to China, we were divided up to research a specific business situation in China, about which we could advise potential clients. Cases ranged from seeking ways to introduce a cutting-edge technology for soil pollution to creating incentive structures for the local workforce. Each project aimed to bring together different aspects of personnel, strategic and cultural management that business leaders must be aware of when seeking to do business across cultures.

Our instruction began with an introduction to Confucian ideals which, we learned, form the foundation of Chinese culture and are in many ways inseparable from the way the Chinese do business. We were taught about guanxi too: the importance of building and maintaining relationships with family, friends and colleagues. Also on the agenda was the significance of group harmony, collectivism and courtesy. I am an American attending an MBA programme in western Europe. Both of these cultures tend to be more individualistic and direct than in China. When doing business in here, we learned, efforts must be made to foster relationships and to avoid aggression in advancing an agenda. Failure to appreciate the cultural foundation of Chinese business can lead to wasted time and capital.

To Read More…

Management Journal Associate Editors

The Associate Editors listing for Volume 9 of  The International Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Change Management is now available.

The Sounds of Silence: Consumers Cue on Corporations’ Crisis Communications

Kellogg Insight

“We are unable to comment on this tragic accident until all the facts are known,” read a statement Toyota issued in response to the accident that killed off-duty California Highway Patrol officer Mark Saylor. The crash of Saylor’s dealer-loaned Lexus would touch off a series of investigations and product recalls that would undermine the storied Japanese automaker’s reputation for safety and quality.

“No comment” is a typical response for a company in Toyota’s position. But where executives see “no comment” as a safe and middle-of-the-road statement, the public hears a company trying to deny guilt and shirk responsibility. In fact, there may be little discernable difference in public reaction between “no comment” and a defensive approach to a crisis, according to new research by Adam Galinsky, professor of management and organizations, and Daniel Diermeier, professor of managerial economics and decision sciences, both at the Kellogg School of Management. Galinsky and Diermeier found that companies are perceived positively when they respond to crises in engaged and empathetic ways. Companies that offer “no comment” or react defensively not only may be harming their brand, they could be driving consumers away from their products in ways they never imagined.

“There can be a spillover from one side to another—a different part of the business. That means, for example, that a crisis that may be a sexual harassment case may have consequences for how a corporate logo is evaluated,” Diermeier says. In their experiments, Galinsky, Diermeier, and their colleagues also noticed that people rate their experiences with a product—bottled water in one case—lower and consume less of it when a company involved in a crisis does not respond in an engaging and empathetic way.

To Read More…

Keeping a Closer Eye on Employees’ Social Networking

teneros_logo_mar10From Joshua Brustein in the New York Times blog Bits:

A service released earlier this week by Teneros, an online communication services company, makes it much easier for companies to keep tabs on their employees’ social networking activities.

The software, called Social Sentry, will automatically monitor Facebook and Twitteraccounts for between $2 and $8 an employee, depending on the size of the company and the level of activity being monitored.

Social Sentry draws only on publicly posted information on Facebook and Twitter; the company plans to add YouTube, MySpace and LinkedIn by this summer. The company is marketing the product as a way to watch for the release of confidential or embarrassing information and to measure how much time employees are spending on social media during work hours.

For more…

Weekend Reading: Social Networking for Businesses, by Rawn Shah

shah_cover_mar10From Chris Cameron at readwriteweb.com:

We have talked about the power of utilizing social networks for businesses before in our Weekend Reading series with books like The Facebook Era, by Clara Shih and Crush It!, by Gary Vaynerchuk, and this week we’ve got another book under a similar vein. Published just last month, Social Networking for Businesses: Choosing the Right Tools and Resources to Fit Your Needs, by Rawn Shah is a guide for companies looking to take advantage of the collaborative communities of social networks to improve their business.

Author Rawn Shah has plenty of experience in this very subject as he is the Best Practices Lead on the Social Software Adoption Team at IBM. In Social Networking for Businesses, Shah breaks down the essentials and methods of modeling social experiences for businesses to get the most out of their users and customers. One of the most important factors to the success of social business experiences is the leadership of those experiences, says Shah, who points to the success of blogs and Wikipedia as examples.

For more…

Latest Management Journal Papers

managementcoverThe latest issue of  The International Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Change Management includes:

Innovation for Women’s Empowerment and Gender Equality

innovation-photo From the International Center for Research on Women:

In a new, groundbreaking study, International Center for Research on Women examines how cutting-edge innovations can transform women’s lives. The ICRW report analyzes how a variety of innovations that used technology, changed social norms and strengthened economic vitality helped women.

Researchers identified seven core approaches – or levers – needed for any innovation to create meaningful change for women.

They include:

  • Creating strategic partnerships among governments, the private sector and civil society.
  • Including women in the design and implementation of innovative ideas.
  • Having committed support from governments as well as efforts at the grassroots level.

ICRW’s findings come at a critical moment.

Social, political and economic shifts globally are creating a perfect storm for innovations to benefit and potentially empower women. Take foot-pedaled water pumps. In sub-Saharan Africa, women in rural communities traditionally are responsible for collecting water to irrigate the crops that feed their families and that sell in markets. It can be a time- and labor-consuming effort.

For the web page…

For the research brief…

Management Journal, Volume 9 now complete

The twelfth issue of Volume 9 of The International Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Change Management has now been published.

Volume 9, Number 12 includes:

    How Facts Change Everything (If You Let Them)

    tufte-420-253From Edward Tufte, as told to Jimmy Guterman in the MITSloan Management Review:

    On the (Very, Very Bad) Design of Corporate Web Sites

    The front page of a good news site will have 300 links on it. That’s great. And so the question is: How come your corporate Web site has only seven links on its opening screen, and the links are called “sharing our values,” “participation” and so on? No user has ever asked Google to show him all the Web sites about sharing your company’s values.

    A corporate Web site should do what a good news Web site does. If you look at the really successful Web sites where there are millions of hits, especially nonfiction Web sites, the New York Times and Google News, they all have 300 links on the opening page. How come businesses don’t do that? How come the links are to “sharing,” “participating” and “our values”? That’s flabby design for flabby content. The models for presenting nonfiction should not be what your competitors are doing, but rather excellence in reporting nonfiction. And there are terrific examples out there for reporting nonfiction.

    The kind of conformity toward flabbiness in corporate Web sites is astonishing, and they’re imitating each other in their content and design flabbiness. It’s silly. People are inherently distrustful of them. And yet most of those sites are, in fact, about reporting facts. But they get softened up by the marketing people. You get all these pressures that tend to normalize design, that tend to make it like other corporations and that make things intellectually flabby and visually flabby. They turn into pitches.

    For the article…

    Training the Next Generation of Knowledge Workers

    knowledgeworker_front Training the Next Generation of Knowledge Workers: Readings for Effective Secondary Education & Workplace Learning Practicean edited collection by Jonathan H. Westover is now available from  The Organisation imprint.

    In today’s shifting global economy and the emergence of the technology and service-oriented knowledge organization, how do we train the rising generation of knowledge workers with the knowledge, skills, and the ability to perform and add value in a hyper-intensive competitive global marketplace?

    What are the methods and strategies for effectively preparing the future knowledge worker generation? What needs to be done in our institutions of higher learning? What initiatives and methods need to be adopted by organizations for greater engaged learning and transference of knowledge to practical application in the workplace? These are just some of the pressing questions facing the organizations of today.

    This edited collection provides a comprehensive introduction to organizational learning and explores the wide sweeping impacts for the modern workplace, presenting a wide range of cross-disciplinary research in an organized, clear, and accessible manner. It will be informative to management academics and instructors, while also instructing organizational managers, leaders, and human resource development professions of all types seeking to understand proven practices and methods to train the next generation of knowledge workers that will drive an enhanced competitive advantage in an increasingly competitive global economy.

    Accelerating into Trouble: The Company’s Problems Sharply Illustrate the Failings of Japanese Corporate Governance

    From The Economist

    It is201007ldp003 hard to overstate the importance of Toyota in Japan’s business psyche. The company has long been regarded as the pinnacle of Japanese innovation, manufacturing quality and industrial strength—particularly since it overtook General Motors in 2008 to become the world’s biggest carmaker. Its “lean” manufacturing techniques and culture of continuous improvement were the envy of the business world. Companies sent delegations to tour Toyota’s factories in the hope that some of its magic would rub off on them. Within Japan the firm was considered the nation’s industrial champion, as the sun seemed to set on other giants such as Sony and Hitachi.

    But within a few weeks all this has changed. Problems with “unintended acceleration” of its cars, which the firm has only belatedly taken seriously, have triggered an escalating crisis and the recall of a whopping 8m vehicles. Toyota’s woes were compounded on February 9th when it said it would also recall 440,000 hybrid vehicles, including the celebrated Prius, to fix a problem with their brakes. The firm’s reputation for quality, on which the business was built, is shattered. Its market capitalisation has dropped by an amount roughly equal to the entire value of Ford. But the greatest damage has been done by its misreading and mishandling of the crisis.

    To Read More…

    News from the Schools, January 2010: Rolling News from the Business Campuses

    From The Economist

    London Business School has topped the first of the year’s important global MBA rankings. It has taken the top spot outright in the Financial Times list of the top 100 full-time programmes, after sharing the honour with Pennsylvania’s Wharton School last year.images

    • Two business-school heads are on the move. Arnoud De Meyer, the director of the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge, is stepping down to become president of the Singapore Management University. Professor De Meyer had previously helped INSEAD set up its Singapore campus. Meanwhile, Ted Snyder, who confirmed he was leaving Chicago’s Booth School in December, is to take up the reins at Yale School of Management.

    • No surprise that 2009 wasn’t a good one for the MBA job market. The MBA Career Services Council has just released the results of its autumn survey, which show that 79% of business schools saw a decline in on-campus recruitment last year. Traditional sectors such as financial services and consulting were hit particularly hard. But the CSC did note signs of recovery, with some areas—including energy, government and healthcare—seeing increased activity.

    To Read More….

    Globalization, Labor & the Transformation of Work

    westover-globalizationcover_frontGlobalization, Labor & the Transformation of Work: Readings for Seeking a Competitive Advantage in an Increasingly Global Economy an edited collection by Jonathan H. Westover is now available from  The Organisation imprint.

    “Globalization” is a key concept that represents a wide range of complex processes in our modern world. These processes have wide sweeping impacts on the international political economy, international capitalism, and the ability for organizations of all types to gain and maintain a competitive advantage and successfully compete in an increasingly global economy. Additionally, increasing “globalization” over the past several decades has changed the dynamics of an increasingly international labor force, how organizations compete for this labor, their internal labor dynamics, and ultimately how they do business. As such, the nature of work and the workplace has also shifted dramatically over the past several decades.

    This edited collection provides a comprehensive introduction to “globalization” and its wide sweeping impacts for the modern workplace, presenting a wide range of cross-disciplinary research in an organized, clear, and accessible manner. It will be informative to academics and students interested in the interplay between macro global processes and the more micro organizational and individual impacts, while also instructing managers, policy makers, and practitioners of all types interested in the role that “globalization” is playing in shifting international labor dynamics and the transformation of the modern workplace.


    The Silence of Mammon: Business People Should Stand up for Themselves

    From The Economist

    Henry Hazlitt, one of the great popularisers of free-market thinking, once said that good ideas have to be relearned in every generation. This is certainly true of good ideas about business. A generation ago Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan did an excellent job of making the case in favour of business. Today it looks as though the case needs to be made all over again.d5109wb0

    It is hardly surprising that business has fallen from grace in recent years. The credit crunch almost plunged the world into depression. The new century began with the implosion of Enron and other prominent firms. Some bosses pay themselves like princes while preaching austerity to their workers. Business titans who once graced the covers of magazines have been hauled before congressional committees or carted off to prison.

    Business people have been at pains to point out that it is unfair to judge all of their kind by the misdeeds of a few. The credit crunch was the handiwork of bankers (who lent too much money) and policymakers (who fooled themselves into thinking that they had abolished boom and bust). Corporate criminals like WorldCom’s Bernie Ebbers and Tyco’s Denis Kozlowski were imprisoned for their crimes. Avaricious bosses like Angelo Mozilo, who pocketed more than $550m during his inglorious reign at Countrywide, are exceptions. The average American boss is actually paid less today than he was in 2000.

    To Read More…

    The eleventh issue of Volume 9 of The International Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Change Management has now been published.

    Volume 9, Number 11 contains:

    The Incomparable Economist

    From Paul Krugman, Vox.

    There have been hedgehogs; there have been foxes; and then there was Paul Samuelson.

    I’m referring, of course, to Isaiah Berlin’s famous distinction among thinkers – foxes who know many things, and hedgehogs who know one big thing. What distinguished Paul Samuelson as an economic thinker, making him like nobody else, past or present, was the fact that he knew – and taught us – many big things. No economist has ever had so many seminal ideas.

    With a little help from Google Scholar, I’ve compiled a list of some of Samuelson’s big ideas. I say “some” because I’m sure it’s not complete. But anyway, here are eight – eight! – seminal insights, each of which gave rise to a vast and continuing research literature:

    1. Revealed preference: There was a revolution in consumer theory in the 1930s, as economists realised that there was much more to consumer choice than diminishing marginal utility. But it was Samuelson who taught us how much can be inferred from the simple proposition that what people choose must be something they prefer to something else they could have afforded but don’t choose.

    To Read More…

    The Rise of the Hybrid Company

    From The Economist

    Sometimes confusion can be as instructive as precision. The travails of Dubai Inc have left commentators struggling for the right phrase to describe Dubai World and its various siblings. They have come up with various formulations—state-controlled, state-supported, quasi-state, parastatal—without ever quite capturing what they are talking about. And Dubai is not the only place that is challenging the business vocabulary in this way.company

    Wherever you look you can see the proliferation of hybrid organisations that blur the line between the public and private sector. These are neither old-fashioned nationalised companies, designed to manage chunks of the economy, nor classic private-sector firms that sink or swim according to their own strength. Instead they are confusing entities that seem to flit between one world and another to suit their own purposes.

    To Read More…

    Management Journal, Volume 9, Number 10 available

    The tenth issue of Volume 9 of The International Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Change Management has now been published.

    Volume 9, Number 10 contains:

    Is AOL Trading One Obsolete Business Model for Another?

    From, Matt Pressman Vanity Fair.

    AOL went from pioneering powerhouse to laughed-at laggard when changing technologies made their business model of charging people for e-mail accounts and Internet access obsolete. So now they are remaking the company with an entirely different strategy: selling ads against original content produced by an army of well-paid professional journalists. Unfortunately, that’s the same business model that has driven America’s newspapers to the brink of ruin.

    When most people think of AOL, they think of it as the e-mail provider for people who aren’t with it enough to switch to a free service such as Gmail. But while the bulk of AOL’s revenue still comes from its old-school subscribers, the company’s future is in the content business (with a sideline in social networking). In advance of its long-awaited split from Time Warner, which will occur next month, AOL has been on a hiring-and-acquisition spree. It now owns upward of 75 niche blogs and news sites, including DailyFinance.com, Engadget.com, and Fanhouse.com, staffed in large part by reporters who used to work in print. C.E.O. Tim Armstrong said at a conference last month that AOL employs more than 3,000 journalists.

    To Read More…

    Remembering Drucker

    From Schumpeter, in The Economist.

    In the normal run of things the management world is divided into dozens of mutually suspicious tribes—theoreticians versus practitioners, publicity-hogging gurus versus retiring academics, supporters of “scientific” management versus advocates of the “humanistic” sort. But this month has seen unusual comity: the leaders of all the management tribes came together to celebrate the centenary of the birth of Peter Drucker, a man who is often described as “the father of modern management” and “the world’s greatest management thinker”.

    The celebrations took place all around the world, most notably in Vienna, where Drucker was born, in southern California, where he spent his golden years, and in China, where he is exercising growing influence. The speakers were not limited to luminaries of management: they also included Rick Warren, the spiritual guru of the moment in America, Frances Hesselbein, a former head of the American Girl Scouts, and David Gergen, an adviser to both Republican and Democratic presidents.

    To mark the centennial, the Harvard Business Review put a photograph of Drucker on its cover along with the headline: “What Would Peter Do? How his wisdom can help you navigate turbulent times”. Claremont Graduate University in California, where Drucker taught, boasts not one but two institutions that are dedicated to keeping the flame alive: the Peter Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management and the Drucker Institute. The institute acts as the hub of a global network of Drucker societies that are trying to apply his principles to everything from schools to refuse collection. It also produces a “do-it-yourself workshop-in-a-box” called “Drucker Unpacked”.

    Why does Drucker continue to enjoy such a high reputation? Part of the answer lies in people’s mixed emotions about management. The management-advice business is one of the most successful industries of the past century. When Drucker first turned his mind to the subject in the 1940s it was a backwater. Business schools were treated as poor relations by other professional schools. McKinsey had been in the management-consulting business for only a decade and the Boston Consulting Group did not yet exist. Officials at General Motors doubted if Drucker could find a publisher for his great study of the company, “Concept of the Corporation”, on the grounds that, as one of them put it, “I don’t see anyone interested in a book on management.”

    Read more here…

    Management Journal, Volume 9, Number 9 available

    The ninth issue of Volume 9 of The International Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Change Management has now been published.

    Volume 9, Number 9 contains:

    Continue reading ‘Management Journal, Volume 9, Number 9 available’

    How to change the system

    The Economist writes in praise of the ideas of Russ Ackoff,

    Today’s crisis is the result of a catastrophic failure, primarily in the financial system but also of our economic and political systems. Mr Ackoff spent most of the past half-century as the premier evangelist of systemic thinking, which he contrasted with the reductionist, atomistic thinking that had long dominated humanity’s approach to problem-solving in his view. Time and again, he would point out, decision-makers faced with crises failed to heed Albert Einstein’s warning that “we can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

    More…

    Product life cycle

    Tim Hindle writes,

    This is the idea that products, like people, have a birth, a life and a death, and that they should be financed and marketed with this in mind. Even as a new product is being launched, its manufacturer should be preparing for the day when it has to be killed off. Its sales and profits start at a low level, rise (it is hoped) to a high level and then decline again to a low level. This cycle is sometimes referred to simply as PLC.

    More…

    Matrix Management: A Structure for Running Those Companies That Have Both a Diversity of Products and a Diversity of Markets

    From Tim Hindle, The Economist.

    Matrix management is a structure for running those companies that have both a diversity of products and a diversity of markets. In a matrix structure, responsibility for the products goes up and down one dimension and responsibility for the markets goes up and down another. This leaves most managers with a dual reporting line: to the head of their product division on the one hand, and to the head of their geographical market on the other.

    Despite the potential confusion that this duality creates, matrix management was enormously popular in the 1970s and 1980s. Leading the fashion was Philips, a Dutch multinational electronics company, which first set up a matrix structure after the second world war. It had national organisations (NOs) and product divisions (PDs), and for a while they operated successfully as a network. The network was held together by a number of coordinating committees, which resolved any conflict between the two.

    Read more…

    Management Journal, Volume 9, Number 8 available

    The eighth issue of Volume 9 of The International Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Change Management has now been published.

    Volume 9, Number 8 contains:

    Continue reading ‘Management Journal, Volume 9, Number 8 available’

    Mass Production

    From Economist.com

    Based on the principles of specialisation and division of labour as first described by Adam Smith

    Mass production is a way of manufacturing things en masse (and for the masses) that takes the initiative for choosing products out of the hands of the consumer and puts it into the hands of the manufacturer. Before mass-production methods were introduced, producers made things to order. They did not, by and large, manufacture things in the vague hope of selling them at some later date. They made things when they knew they had a customer.

    In Elizabethan times, shops were not stuffed with goods waiting for buyers. They were full of craftsmen waiting to fulfil orders. With mass-production methods, manufacturers produce things in large quantities without having orders for them in advance. They worry about selling them later—the price they pay for enjoying economies of scale in the manufacturing process.

    More…

    Lean Production

    Oct 19th 2009 From Economist.com

    It aims to combine the flexibility and quality of craftsmanship with the low costs of mass production

    Lean production is the name given to a group of highly efficient manufacturing techniques developed (mainly by large Japanese companies) in the 1980s and early 1990s. Lean production was seen as the third step in an historical progression, which took industry from the age of the craftsman through the methods of mass production and into an era that combined the best of both. It has been described as “the most fundamental change to occur since mass production was brought to full development by Henry Ford early in the 20th century”.

    More…

    The methods of lean production aim to combine the flexibility and quality of craftsmanship with the low costs of mass production. In lean-production systems a manufacturer’s employees are organised in teams. Within each team a worker is expected to be able to do all the tasks required of the team. These tasks are less narrowly specialised than those demanded of the worker in a mass-production system, and this variety enables the worker to escape from the soul-destroying repetition of the pure assembly line.

    Twilight of the Efficient Markets

    By Cosma Shalizi American Scientist

    THE MYTH OF THE RATIONAL MARKET: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street. Justin Fox. xviii + 382 pp. Harper Business, 2009. $27.99.

    The Myth of the Rational Market, by Justin Fox, is an account—popular but thorough—of the roots, rise, triumph and ongoing fall of the theory of efficient markets in finance. This school of thought is an exemplary specimen of a type of social science that flourished after World War II: It has mathematical models at its center, has supposedly been empirically validated by statistical analyses, is indifferent to history and to institutions, and takes as an axiom that people are intelligent, farsighted and greedy. Unlike many economic theories, the efficient-market school has been influential beyond academia. It helped reshape ideas about how companies should be run, how executives should be paid, and indeed how the economy should be regulated (or not) to promote the general welfare. (In comic-book form: A mild-mannered social science by day, at night efficient-market theory puts on a cloak of ideology and struggles for the Capitalist Way.) The theory contributed, arguably, to setting up the crisis that has gripped the world economy since 2007. Its story is of much more than just scholarly interest.

    More…

    Management Journal, Volume 9, Number 7 available

    The seventh issue of Volume 9 of The International Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Change Management has now been published.

    Volume 9, Number 7 contains:

    Continue reading ‘Management Journal, Volume 9, Number 7 available’

    Management Journal, Volume 9, Number 6 available

    The sixth issue of Volume 9 of The International Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Change Management has now been published.

    Volume 9, Number 6 contains:

    Continue reading ‘Management Journal, Volume 9, Number 6 available’

    Management Journal, Volume 9, Number 5 available

    The fifth issue of Volume 9 of The International Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Change Management has now been published.

    Volume 9, Number 5 contains:

    Continue reading ‘Management Journal, Volume 9, Number 5 available’

    Management Journal, Volume 9, Number 4 available

    The fourth issue of Volume 9 of The International Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Change Management has now been published.

    Volume 9, Number 4 contains:

    2010 Management Conference - Accommodation

    Accommodation for the 2010 Management Conference in Montréal, Canada may now be booked. Please see the Conference Accommodation webpage for more information.

    Management Journal, Volume 9, Number 3 available

    The third issue of Volume 9 of The International Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Change Management has now been published.

    Volume 9, Number 3 contains:

    Management Journal, Volume 9, Number 2 available

    The first issue of Volume 9 of The International Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Change Management has now been published.

    Volume 9, Number 2 contains:

    Was there Really a Hawthorne Effect at the Hawthorne Plant? An Analysis of the Original Illumination Experiments

    A new analysis of the original data from the famous Hawthorne Studies by Steven D. Levitt, and John A. List questions the conclusion found in most textbooks.

    The “Hawthorne effect,” a concept familiar to all students of social science, has had a profound influence both on the direction and design of research over the past 75 years. The Hawthorne effect is named after a landmark set of studies conducted at the Hawthorne plant in the 1920s. The first and most influential of these studies is known as the “Illumination Experiment.” Both academics and popular writers commonly summarize the results as showing that every change in light, even those that made the room dimmer, had the effect of increasing productivity. The data from the illumination experiments, however, were never formally analyzed and were thought to have been destroyed. Our research has uncovered these data. We find that existing descriptions of supposedly remarkable data patterns prove to be entirely fictional. There are, however, hints of more subtle manifestations of a Hawthorne effect in the original data.

    “Community Banks Tested”

    EVEN grassroots banking hasn’t been able to escape the global financial crisis. Dozens of the community bank branches operated jointly by Bendigo and Adelaide Bank and a local community have experienced deepening losses over the past six months, with branches from Balmain in Sydney to Cobden in Victoria’s west, seeing their balance sheets turn a little shaky. More..

    Management Journal, Volume 9, Number 1 available

    The first issue of Volume 9 of The International Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Change Management has now been published.

    Volume 9, Number 1 contains:

    Continue reading ‘Management Journal, Volume 9, Number 1 available’

    Management Journal, Volume 8, Number 12 available

    The final issue of Volume 8 of The International Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Change Management has now been published.

    Volume 8, Number 12 contains:

    Continue reading ‘Management Journal, Volume 8, Number 12 available’

    The Organisation Imprint Launched

    Common Ground Publishing has launched a new imprint, The Organisation.

    You can now submit proposals or completed manuscript submissions of:

    Books should be between 30,000 words to 150,000 words in length. They will be published simultaneously in print and electronic formats.

    2009 Management Conference - Plenary Speaker Added

    Maria E. Burke, University of Salford, Salford, UK
    www.ManagementConference.com

    Dr. Burke’s research is based in the area of Information Management. She currently holds a position at the University of Salford’s Business School within the Information Systems Group which was awarded a 6* rating in the 2001 Research Assessment Exercise. In addition she is a Visiting Fellow at the Jagiellonian University in Poland and has held visiting posts with the Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest, Budapest University of Technology and the Nicholas Copernicus University in North Poland. More…

    2009 Management Conference - Plenary Speaker Added

    Richard Harris, University of Glasgow, UK
    www.ManagementConference.com

    Richard Harris is the Alec Cairncross Chair of Applied Economics and the Director of the Centre for Public Policy for Regions at the University of Glasgow, UK. His research interests include micro-analysis of firm/plant level productivity in the UK using panel data; differences in (UK) regional performance; evaluation of government industrial policy; and, relative performance of UK SMEs. Future research includes Gibrat’s law - estimates for UK industry; Evaluation methodology for impact of government assistance on TFP; and, Relative performance of family-owned SMEs. More…

    Sharia-Compliant Banking

    The London Review of Books has recently published The Money that Prays, an article by Jeremy Harding about banking in the Islamic world and how it fares in the economic downturn.

    Last September, as dust and debris from the tellers’ floors began raining onto the empty vaults below, a note of satisfaction was sounded by bankers in the Arab world. Financial institutions sticking to the tenets of Islam, they announced, were largely immune from the debt crisis. Devout Muslims may lend and borrow under certain conditions; they can even buy and sell debt in the form of ‘Islamic’ bonds, but most other kinds of debt trading are frowned on. Al Rajhi Bank, based in Saudi Arabia, and the Kuwait Finance House posted impressive profits in 2008. Both have come under some nervous scrutiny in 2009 but their ability to weather the recession that has set in behind the credit crunch is not at issue.

    Management Conference 2009 - Accommodation

    Accommodation for the 2009 Management Conference in Boston, USA may now be booked. Please see the Conference Accommodation webpage for more information.

    Accouncing The Tenth International Conference on Knowledge, Culture and Change in Organisations

    26 - 29 July 2010
    HEC Montreal, Montreal, Canada
    http://theorganisation.com/conference-2010/

    Management Conference 2009 - Tours - Added

    On Wednesday, 24 June 2009 - Museum of Fine Arts Tour
    Join us at the Museum of Fine Arts. We’ll enjoy a private one-hour tour of the Museum’s rich and extensive collection led by a trained guide.

    On Friday, 26 June 2009 - Heart of the Freedom Trail Walking Tour
    Join us after the last session for the perfect introduction to Boston.

    On Saturday, 27 June 2009 - North End Walking Tour
    Relax after a successful conference and join us for a walk through America’s oldest neighborhood.

    For more information please see the Conference website.

    Management Conference 2009 - Conference Dinner

    Join us at the Prudential Center Top of the Hub Restaurant and Skywalk for our conference dinner at one of Boston’s finest dining destinations.
    For more information please see the Conference website.

    Management Conference 2009 - Plenary Speakers - Added

    Marcus Breen, Department of Communication Studies, Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

    Cynthia Lee, Professor of Management and Organizational Development, College of Business Administration, Northeastern University, Boston, Masssachusetts, USA

    Kathrin Zippel, Assoc. Prof. of Sociology, Sociology, Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

    Journal now included in Scopus



    We are pleased to announce that The International Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Change Management has been accepted for inclusion in Scopus.

    Scopus is Elsevier’s abstract and citation database; one of the largest in the world.

    Management Conference 2009 - Plenary Speakers

    Verna Allee, President, Value Networks LLC, Martinez, CA, USA

    Susan Bolt, Coordinator Teaching and Learning, Curtin Business School, Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Western Australia, Australia

    David P. Boyd, Professor, Management and Organizational Development Group, College of Business, Northeastern University, College of Business Administration, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

    Ninth International Conference on Knowledge, Culture and Change in Organisations

    24-27 June 2009
    Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
    www.ManagementConference.com

    International Award for Excellence in the area of knowledge, culture and change in organisations

    Congratulations to Susan Bolt, the winner of the International Award for Excellence in the area of knowledge, culture and change in organisations.

    Tina’s paper ‘Building the Capacity of Learning Professionals through an Infusion of Formal and Informal Learning’ can be accessed in the online bookstore: http://ijm.cgpublisher.com/product/pub.28/prod.844

    Paper Abstract: The success of many organisations depends on their capacity to learn and because of this learning professionals in the fields of education and training are often engaged to build workforce capacity. The success of this scenario depends on the expertise of these learning professionals, but how is their capacity built? Formal learning is typically standardised, centrally controlled and vertically integrated approaches to the transmission of knowledge through organised curriculum modules that can lead to a qualification. Informal learning is more horizontally integrated, dynamic and occurs when people make a conscious effort to learn from their experiences and engage in individual or group reflection (Burns, 2002; Foley, 2004). In the past formal and informal learning were considered separately but an infusion of formal and informal learning may be a more appropriate approach in this new economy. This paper, based on results from an interpretive study investigating professional development in large Australian organisations in 2007, explores the professional development experiences of staff employed in training and educational organisations. Semi-structured interviews and questionnaires, using mixed methods, were conducted with staff from all levels of these organisations to investigate the relationship between adult learners’ professional development and organisations’ change agenda. Results indicated that in some situations there was considerable blurring of boundaries between informal and formal learning experiences. The conclusion is made that a balkanised approach to professional development is insufficient to build the capacity of learning professionals in the 21st Century and a more dynamic approach that moves flexibly between formal and informal learning approaches is recommended.

    Paper Submissions Open for Volume 9 of the Journal

    Paper submissions are now open for Volume 9 of The International Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Change Management.

    You will first need to submit a presentation proposal for the conference as either an attending or virtual participant. If accepted you will be able to submit your full paper for refereeing and possible publication in the Journal.

    Please check the submission guidelines prior to submitting your paper.