The OBTC '08 Blog

Last is First

2008-06-16T05:38:00.000-07:00

OBTC 2008 ended at noon last Saturday. Nearly 350 wonderful teaching persons spent three days and nights creating an event - the 35th annual OBTC - none will soon forget. I don't know if anyone will have any inclination to read this last OBTC Blog, but I must close the circle with one more thought.

The last class we teach in a given semester starts us thinking about how we'll do the first of the next cycle of courses better than our best previous results. This is how life has honored us for our scholarship and choice of career. We get to bring new ideas to life in our lessons and the context we design to contain our experience as teaching learners and learners teaching.

No, I am not going to be OBTC Program Coordinator for 2009. But, now, a bit more rested, I realize that what the next team does first to bring us to Charleston, SC next June builds upon all that our team did this June. I'll pitch in, for now our purpose is even more compelling to me. Inspired teaching.

With all due respect for what it takes to conduct research leading to publication, I have no doubt at all that people are paying colleges for what only inspired teachers can give them with our presence and devotion to their success. To quote the theme of a great conference - Mind Blowing Learning.

Thank you for reading these. I'd love to correspond. E-mail me at fearon@ccsu.edu.

And so, the OBTC Blog ends.

"We're in business now"

2008-06-05T09:50:00.000-07:00

"We're in business now" was a way we Mainers, back in my day, told each other that something that wasn't working started working.

I am thinking of when I was about 12 years old and was helping my uncle Alan, a master plumber. (I guess that would make me a plumber's helper). I was at one end of a garden hose and he way back at a faucet that he had just repaired. Out of my end of the hose came a rush of water. "Yep, we're in business now", Alan called out to me.

Now, 53 years later, I am teaching business management, and this catch-phrase comes back to me. Moments ago, the last of the big critical supplies came in to Babson College, so that folks up there can prepare the registration packets for our soon-to-arrive OBTC 2008 participants. Until that last item came, we were not yet in business. Then, I got the e-mail - The CD's of our Proceedings arrived. Now, we're in business.

"We're in business" is a handy devise to teaching managing. We can show our learners that being in business is a momentary state of affairs - not a more permanent sounding status. Managing is make sure that all the elements critical to performing as a business are in place, functional, and well-fueled with human energy and wit. That garden hose was pretty much useless in delivering water to our customer's garden, until Alan replaced a broken faucet - one that had been used over so many decades that it "plumb wore out". Seeing that water come bubbling out fixed this image of success in my mind, only to be retreived now.

Yes, OBTC 2008 is in business and we'll work at it from now through program's end next Saturday afternoon. I am sure there will be a few surprises to challenge our capacity to be in business, but we have the team, the will, and the place to keep it flowing from now to then.

Thanks, Uncle Alan, for a durable lesson about business.

Cover Story

2008-06-03T07:49:00.000-07:00

My good friends Olga Fernandez and Jim Sperling, of the Idea Factory, here in Connecticut took my idea for the cover of our OBTC 2008 Program and turned it into this nifty reality.

That lively, hand-waving fellow is our conference icon. Our challenge is teaching that "blows their minds". Or, conversely, their learning that blows our minds. The other two students may be turning ideas over under their more pensive-looking visages.

The point is that all three in that picture present us will minds in various states of awareness. Are we providing experiences, questions, images that make eyes snap open and the excitement rise? No, we don't have to do this all the time, just some of the time, enough times to get them used to constant surprises that await them in our future.
Our subject is creating and sustaining organizations that work in a business world so wildly different each day, that we cannot, in good conscience, send them out of our OB classes with minds barely moved.

Use this bright yellow icon to remind you to design and execute learning events that bring about this high level of excitement. Their future will thank you.

Risk

2008-05-28T06:20:00.000-07:00

Risk deliniates the period for learning. Fortunately, business is behavior activated and sustained by risk. I say fortunately with one main condition - we hae to embrace risk in our teaching, so that our students learn to live with it.

Entreprenuerial teaching > Entreprenuerial learning > Entrepreneurial practice. This is the flow of OBTC 2008. All that we have written, all that we say to each other, show each other, all that we take away from Babson College focuses on one final touch point - practice. Our job is to teach so that student learn in order that they are better able to practice business.

I say "practice business" to suggest that business is a way of being in life that, when chosen, calls upon each practitioner to perform according to what it takes to sustain a state of "businessing".

Businessing means to risk knowing what customers need and want with such certainty as to produce the product or service and see if they buy.

Were we preparing people to practice business in times and settings where there is little risk in knowing what to do, we can scrap the 'entrepreneurial' modifier completely.

Of course, no one of us who teach for business can ignore fresh realities and sleep easy. Risk in knowing what businessing takes is ours, now, as well. We are exposed. Our theories are challenged. Our ways of teaching are tested like never before. We must teach, so that they learn to practice business with risk opening learning terrain like never before.

We must send them out ready to learn in practice or fall out of being in business. What is out there, beyond being in business? Other domains, but not the one that risk so cs sharply, compellingly delineates for superb entrepreneurial learners.

Energy!

2008-05-23T07:39:00.000-07:00

[Hougton-Mifflin eReference]

Energy - Capacity or power for work or vigorous activity: animation, force, might, potency, power, puissance, sprightliness, steam, strength. Informal: get-up-and-go, go, pep, peppiness, zip.

Here it is Friday, May 23rd, the start of Memorial Day weekend, and I am at my desk at school putting finishing touches on the printed OBTC 2008 Program.The campus is pretty much deserted, in that it is the week between graduation and when Summer Sessions begin. I could be home with my feet up. No, this is not a plea for sympathy, it is an exclamation of joy.

I am not tired. I am notfrazzled. I am not worried (well, a little worried). I am not expecting to "crash" after June 14, the end of OBTC 2008. Instead, I am full of energy, crackling with energy, loaded with the stuff.

Why?

It's not my youth. I just celebrated my 65th birthday last Saturday.

It is the fact that I am a teacher.

Being a teacher who loves learning and learning with and from teachers, students, writers, practitioners, the Web, almost any object or person linkable to my questions of how to design ever-better lessons, I am stoked! Just a few short days from now, I will be connected to over 300 innovative OB teachers in a peerless conference at Babson, a college created and sustained by entrepreneurial energies.

Amazing, isn't it? When one is, and her or his core, a teacher, there is a bottomless supply of inside-out energy that, like our OBTC 2008 logo, blows my mind.

I can't wait to start OBTC. This feeling summons how I felt as a kid knowing that in less than three weeks, I'd be going to the Maine State YMCA Camp for two amazing weeks. That is the place and time, when people told me they notice my teaching-leading proclivities, my boundless energy to try new things. Yes, amazing that 55 years later, I feel exactly the same.

Conferencing

2008-05-18T07:35:00.000-07:00

I have been away from this Blog for nearly a week. I travelled from Connecticut to Washington, DC for the 45th Annual Easter Academy of Management conference. In less than a month, we will open the 35th Organizational Behavior Teaching Conference in Boston. I completed service on the EAM Board of Governors at this May meeting and will cap off a year and a half of constant work as OBTC 2008 Program Coordinator. I have a first-hand, from the-back-room , view of these two events. It is a tremendous,all-volunteer undertaking to keep each of these conference going year after year. We run them and attend them at considerable financial cost.

Is conferencing really this important to us a management educators?

Each of us determines the value of spending this rare time in face to face contact with colleagues from near and far. Yet, others who invest in our travel, sponsor our meetings, and otherwise make sure the 45th and 35th happen and the 46th and 36th seem sure to follow, may wonder about their payback.

I will not go on to preach to the choir about why, for example, OBTC 2008 will have a much enlivened and reinvigorated teaching force of over 300 strong issuing forth from our Saturday closing. But I will say one thing.

We are THE principle means of production for colleges, universities and consulting firms. Millions are spent keeping our campuses and technologies maintained and replenished. Conferences like EAM and OBTC cost far less and do far more to enhance the quality of what our learners experience as we teach them and as they teach themselves by reading what we publish. The payback is that we come back rejuvenated and more fully connected to our global academic community.

I look at these end of academic year events as annual professorial tune-ups. We exchange new ideas, tell our stories, put human faces on names we see in e-mails, at the tops of articles, or on book covers. We appreciate and are appreciated.

We come from our train, plane, or road trips weary and somewhat "taught out". I can attest to how I think most of us feel upon return to our homes. Energized. Better known by those in my field. Knowing better that I am in just the right field to sustain my desire to go on teaching, now on the first day of my 65th year.

I look at my Do List for OBTC 2008 and see that I'll have to be on-task right up to the moment we greet the first arrival; so will my fellow coordinators at Babson College Keith Rollag and Danna Greenberg. I have not the slightest doubt that it will be worth putting in the rest of these countless hours to polish off this List. Conferencing is our way of saying to each other "We'll see you next year. Bring stories and your best new stuff." (and so I will)

Grading eggs and people

2008-05-11T07:17:00.000-07:00

Near our home here in rural New Hartford, Connecticut is a small farm. The sign at the roadside says "Eggs here". Farm-fresh, free-range eggs are a treat. I stopped there earlier this weekend. The owner was busily sorting the eggs. Rather she was "grading" the eggs (AA, A, etc). She has an antique-looking tool that did this. I asked her why she sorted them in this time-honored fashion. She replied, "Would you buy our eggs, if you just had to pick them out of this basket? How would I price them?".

Now, a day after, I am here in my home office grading.! The tool that I have is rather modern - almost all the measured samples of student OB learning are recorded in the e-learning systems my university and text publisher give me to use. Yet, it is not eggs I am grading, it is the proven gain in each unique learner's capacity to think with and act according OB concepts met in 15 weeks of inquiry.

I have been grading students, placing on permanent record, a final measure of their OB/Managerial readiness, since 1973. You might think I am as settled in my reason and ability to do this, as our New Hartford egg-grader. "Would you hire this student from our university, if you just had to pick them out of the graduating class without a GPA to go by?". Students want to be priced high, like my egg-farmer's best.

I'd rather say, yes employers, please do make me work to produce more predictive and humane accounts of student progress;but the hiring community and graduate schools seem to prefer the easy economy of looking for the 3.6 GPA and buying no less than that grade human being.

You OB teachers with some long mileage on your careers know as well as I do - our former students are all over the success map. I have not come across research that proves that the one I am about to "give" a C- when I go back to my grade sheet this morning will end up ten years from now less able to be an alert judge of human behavior than the young woman whose "A" I recorded with ease and pleasure for her stellar performances in Mgt 426.

Me, an Entrepreneurial Teacher? Pish tosh. I am still grading human beings like the person who graded my breakfast (quite tasty, by the way).

By the force of their intelligence

2008-05-06T11:46:00.000-07:00

My 23 mile daily commute from home to campus gives me the time to listen to unabrdiged books on tape/CD. I choose relaxing fiction, reserving my conventional reading time for work reading. I keep a tape recorder handy for those moments when something is said or done in a story that I connect to what I am teaching or what I say about teaching, as in this Blog. This morning, a man tells a CIA Agent, "You get to the truth by the force of intelligence." That notion was recorded, and then offered to my students in our last class of the semester. I asked them to think of educating as a principle means of growing the force of their intelligence. Like this Agent, they will be recognized and rewarded for bringing about solutions alone or in concert with others. How do we teach so that our learners may increase the force of their inborn intelligence? Surely, we have to give them chances to dissolve the reasons for uncertainty in various learning exercises. One does not grow this essential asset by repeating what has been memorized or similarly safe and easy tasks. Entrprenuerial learners win by the sheer force of their intelligence.

To impel or not to impel, that is the teaching question

2008-05-03T08:39:00.000-07:00

im·pel (ĭm-pĕl)tr.v. im·pelled, im·pel·ling, im·pels
1. To urge to action through moral pressure; drive: I was impelled by events to take a stand.

2. To drive forward; propel.

im·pel·ler (ĭm-pĕlər)

n.
1. One that impels, as a rotating device used to force a fluid in a desired direction under pressure.

2. A rotor or rotor blade.

These two definitions of impell and impeller from my American Heritage e-dictionary came to mind this morning as I went over the accounts my OB learners made of their knowledge gains in the next to the last unit of the course.

There are 60 of them. Most will graduate this month or next December. Arriving in what they call the "real world", how fast and well will they be able to learn to do their part in keeping a business in business?

This question brough "impelling" to mind. I believe they will have to learn at "entreprenerial speeds". How fast is this? Faster, by far, than the slow, plodding rate at which we can lead them through familiar material, slowly so they may commit the correct answers to rote memory.

Who teaches this pedantically?

The classroom I use for OB is filled later in the day by a teacher who stands at the white board, rarely looking at the near comotose students, talking, touching the numbers, talking, touching the numbers.....................Sorry, I feel into a trance.

No, sirs and madams, business happens in sprints, marathons, dashes, sometimes all three ways of running happening at the same time in a business unit.

My worry is that I have not yet found enough ways to impell (the first definition) learners to greatly pick up the pace of the attention they give to understanding humans behaving as organizations. I feel the moral pressure I give to myself to adopt, adapt, or invent new teaching practices that breed learning practices that open and fill knowledge gaps as quickly as must a business practitioner out there trying to keep a plant in China producing and sending product to his US distribution center at a rate and cost that still justifies the decision his company once made to close the "costlier" US plant. This, by the way, was my guest this week in the OB course - a '94 grad whose is VP-Sales for a company whose once stable ow price-point has started to jiggle like the needle on a seimic gague. China's labor costs are rising as is the cost of fueling the container ships for their 15 day run to California. There is no chapter in his company's history book with corrective steps to memorize. Tom is learning with his sales team what to do next with little hope that we they do will still that price needle. In the meantime, his business to business customers, mostly in healthcare, are flooding his voice and e-mail.

When we all say goodbye this Tuesday, and Mgt 426 is no more, I will look at each of those very fine yound men and women and try to gague their learning speeds.

Impell or not to impell. There is no question in my mind. Teach to impell and hurry up learning to do it better.

EE-teaching without a net

2008-04-27T06:20:00.000-07:00

"E"-teaching without a net could mean entrepreneurial teaching - the theme of this OBCTC '08 Blog and our Babson conference. In the way that I report this event, it does, but it also means "electronic" teaching - the e (as in e-mail) that has preceded so many of our current ways of reaching others. Entrepreneurial teaching is definitely working without a net to catch us. That net would be to be in full control of our classes and the students' assignments. It would be to lecture the whole hour, so as to be sure the content was delivered. It would be to craft exams for east grading, with a high percentage of T-F and multiple choice answers to remove our responsibility for adjudicating correctness.

I am reporting here a moment of "ee (entrepreneurial electronic) teaching that happened last Friday in front of an international OB teaching audience. It turned out fine, but for about 15 minutes, we three who were teaching the OBTS Webinar held on to our proverbial trapeze bars with one hand and swung for deal life.

Well, for dear life is an exaggeration. We just hoped that the cause of nearly our entire roster of signed up participants would be let into the Website. We were ready precisely at 2 PM, having done all the technology testing a few days before. Then, we noticed no one had been let in. Hmmm. Fortunately, one participant got in to the web-room to tell us that the link to the webinar had not been switched on. A scary moment of flying across the void with one hand slipping off the trapeze bar hit me - the moderator of this event. My fellow teacher and I talked about the coincidence of his life's work being about learning leading in and from action, and here we were in one of those free-fall moments that happens when we release our controls that attempt to govern what and how students learn from us. Unfortunately, there was only that one person able to hear us be reflective practitioners.

Meanwhile, our partners whose campus hosted the event leaped into action and quickly learned that our web-master in India had been detained from coming to his company to activate the link by a traffic accident. He made it in time to let in the registrants who waited and 20 went on to experience an hour of quite fascinating virtual teaching and learning.

Afterwards, Our web-host, fortunately unhurt in the accident, sent us an email and called to apologise. My response to him was genuine. Assuring him that his escape from being harmed in the accident meant far more to us, I said that we are just learning how to stage these OBTS webinars. This was our third and each time we discover something that could have sent us plunging to the floor of the center ring. Now we know how to make sure this sort of glitch does not happen. There will be others, as we extend and expand the experiment.

Our knowledge of how "EE-teaching" grows along with our confidence to do more of these after OBTC 2008 leading up to OBTC 2009. We are compelled by the potential to foster rich e-conversations among us about and in between the Webinars. Each one is recorded and archived on our OBTS website. Here online is a new sort of interactive literature, live and lively. This is what it means to be a teaching society bent on making management education work (without a net.

All's well the starts something better the next time.

Putting us in the Story

2008-04-17T05:39:00.000-07:00

I am preparing a short workshop for a segment of the Spring Conference of the Connecticut Town Clerks. They asked me to help them notice and manage the generational differences of townspeople, so that changes they make in policies and practices in these bedrock offices accommodate the values and preferred ways of being of voting adults born from 1920 to 1990.

I could give them a PowerPoint lecture summarizing what research tells us about the Silent Gernation or Gen X. That would be a short prep. It is not what a chronically entrepreneurial teacher would do. So, I put many more hours into designing this experience (for them and me) than my honorarium covers.

Why? I want to make a difference in their practice that lasts. I want them to be more entrepreneurial in their practice.

One might ask, how could a Town Clerk who issues dog licenses and let's people into the vault to search property titles possibly care to be an innovator? Well, the Gen Y-Millennial citizen is miffed, because she cannot simply fill out an online form to license Bowser and charge the fee to his debit card. A drive down to Town Hall and back costs her time, gas money (she is saving up for a Prius) and she has to leave the puppy Bowser back at the condo, because he cannot be brought into the building and tends to defecate on the car upholstery when left alone.

Well, then, what is my design and how does this have anything to do with "putting us in the Story"? I'll have the Clerks work in teams to invent the World's first "Generational Positioning System" - a Clerking GPS. This takes off on the analogy to a driver's GPS (global positioning system) and casts the session inside the title "Navigating the differences generational differences make".

I have large rolls of paper, crayons, and other material for each table team to use to create their own GPS prototype. Then, we'll go to role play, whereby half the 150 of them will take on assigned generation aspects and rotate through some of the teams of clerks who will present them with a pre-selected change they are considering such as the e-forms for purchasing licenses.

Will it work? I hope so.

Have I ever done this before? Nope.

What it is bombs? We can talk about why and they can take me off the list of conference speakers.

I believe that putting myself and them inside the story of Connecticut Town Clerks inventing the World's First Clerking GPS will lead to entrepreneurial learning which will infuse entrepreneurial practice. Those back seat covers may one day be spared Bowser's wrath.

What's new?

2008-04-11T05:45:00.000-07:00

"Hi, what's new?" was a familiar greeting back in my growing up years in Maine. It was an easy way to start a conversation. There was almost always, something new for the other to recount. "Nothin'" was the other choice. What if our students were to be mainly predisposed to saying that nothing is new for them? Isn't it much more energizing for us at teachers to work with learners for whom there is always news? My take on this is that business as a domain and management as a process and practice is always about what's new, or is going to be new. What do you think?

In the moment - we learn, we teach

2008-04-06T05:12:00.000-07:00

It was my pleasure to talk at some length the other day with Bill Torbert. We are preparing for his OBTS Webinar on Friday, April 25th at 2:00 PM EDT. (Webinar registration is linked on the OBTC Web page). I cannot begin to do justice to Bill groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of organizational dynamics, but I do have this abiding thought, looking back at this call.

Action inquiry, a cornerstone of Bill's works, IS entrepreneurial teaching, entrepreneurial learning and entrepreneurial practice.

How so?

First, because we inquire. We don't tell, we ask, for we are willing to risk others seeing us as seekers for creating new knowledge, not just purveyors of our own congealed knowledge.

Secondly, it is entrepreneurial because we are IN the action while inquiring. The first source of information is ourselves. We count on the keenness and authenticity of our own perceptual powers. Secondary and tertiary sources come into play, but we are fully engaged, steeped in exquisite subjectivity, forming and reforming our beliefs on the fly.

We are scholars of the moment, in the moment, for the benefit of the moments to come.

How might this make us better teachers of those who practice to keep business in their lives?

My hunch is that we model the way effective managerial practice actually happens in what our students call "real world" time (vs on our academic time). I am taking my OB classes to a tiny new business that started up next to our campus last April. The two founding owners will tell their story. It is how they have put this new business on the face of our Earth as an Act of sheer, unremitting, whole-body, mind, and spirit action inquiry. It started five years ago with the question, "What if we were to combine a Laundromat and cafe and open it next to a large metropolitan college campus?". We will share a moment of action inquiry with Laury and Jesus on April 15 at the SpinCycle Laundromat and Cafe.

Of course there is value in research done by standing outside of the action - surveying, counting, cataloguing, writing the descriptive case. This seems to produce the sorts of codified knowledge of OB that editors and reviewers allow to be published. So be it. While the form of scholarship grinds along, I'll keep my teaching centered upon action of "humans being organizations". I'll relish the ambiguity of not yet knowing for sure why things go the way they seem to in the pursuit of common objectives. I'll hope this also rubs off on my learners.

Perhaps this could be considered entrepreneurial scholarship? What do you think?

We who are about to teach

2008-04-03T06:01:00.000-07:00

What is it about these moments before we go to our classrooms that is so delectable?

No matter what else comes my way; no matter how much I have swampued myself (OBTC Program Coordinator, among the ways), I love this feeling!

Today's session will be on leadership. Tuesday, they watched a clip from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest where Randall McMurphy (Jack) tries to pull the marble sink out of the tub room floor. They talked about moments like this in their lives, when they "tried, Goddamn it, at least they tried". Then, they had a lively conversation with two of my former students who are the front-line team marketing their company's premium-priced products and winning against the Wal-Mart of their industry - 3M.

Today, they will experinence an exercise I designed and have modified from the old Block Stacking game of the Kolb, Rubin, and Macintyre (spelling from memory) OB book of 1972. We use tiny sugar cubes. It raises energies and ideas about the intimate moments when one leads, another, seeing less well what is ahead, follows. We'll cap off this class by listening to another installment of a CD book version of Company, by Max Berry (2006). They consider the satirically jumble corporate life of a recent college grad- Stephen Jones. In less than two months, over half these classes will be college grads, hoping they do not land a job as bizzare as our man Jones.

I am never sure how it will all come out. I'll read their accounts of lessons learned in our Vista Blackboard postings.

Yes, I who am about to teach, thank my lucky stars that I have had nearly 40 years of these delectable moments.

Have you?

My Way

2008-03-23T07:25:00.000-07:00

It is hard to read these two words "My way" without my mind starting up a memory tape of Frank Sinatra signing "I'll do it my way".

Is this not what our forthcoming OBTC 2008 at Babson College is all about?

Are we not drawn to this special annual moment when I get to talk about, demonstrate, and, most importantly, refresh my own way of teaching. To refresh is to give new freshness or brightness to; restore. Out ways of teaching are not set in stone. We come to OBTC's, read and write for the Society's Journal of Management Education, and open our minds to all sorts of influences to keep our teaching fresh, relevant, and, admittedly, personally rewarding.

Is there one best way to teach organizational and managerial behavior?

Walking the halls of our classroom buildings, looking in to classrooms through the windows on the doors, it may look like there is one and only one accepted way of teaching. There are the students, sitting where they are supposed to, acing as they are supposed to. Here is the teacher, in position at the whiteboard, PowerPoint clicker in hand. We see some pens moving, so that must mean knowledge is being transmitted from teacher to learner. Yes, I know this sounds like I am panning the lecturer. Perhaps I am. However, that professor may well be lecturing brilliantly. It may well be her way of teaching honed over years of careful, self-reflective practice.

Now, come by my door and you will see students sitting in teams, a Vista Blackboard image projected from the ceiling on the screen up front.I will be somewhere in the room, coaching, cheer leading, observing as learners work through an exercise. A blended course with high involvement and interaction on the ground, bolstered by a tightly designed learning module accessed 24 x 7 in the air, is my way. There might be a business leader guest in there, as you walk by.

Or, if you were to walk by next Tuesday, the room will be empty. We are going to tour a highly successful health and fitness club on the road next to campus. Look on my Vista discussion site and you will see over 6,000 postings to date, as each of each tasks x 14 units require written postings of several sorts. My way includes reading all of these.

Watch me on about any night, here at my desk at home. I am going over 60 Unit Sign Offs, 32 questions in which learners account for their performance of the tasks and all that pertains to accomplishing them. It makes for some long days. It makes my days to see how the teaching is turning out so far. It is my way.

What is your way?

"I find myself thinking of Mgt 426 all the time"

2008-03-20T05:12:00.000-07:00

"I find myself thinking of Mgt 426 all the time", wrote a student signing off Unit Six of Mgt 425 Business Organizatonal Behavior.

Victory!

An Entreprenuerial Teacher in Progress,my course design is benignly insidious. I want my learners to notice humans being organziations wherever they go in their day. I want them to notice themselves being the several organizations they perform for income and/or for knowledge.

This should, when it works as it seems to be working for this student, enhance their appetite for explanations. It should make them seek reasons to bolster their reasoning about why things seem to be going right, wrong, or undeterminantly in between.

An entreprenuer has something to sell and a burning desire to sell it in ways that sustain the buying.

An Entreprenuerial Teacher sells explanatory material and rules for using it for making better sense of the subject at hand.

Do not our theories of human behaving as organizations serve to explain or clarify? Are they not valuable in the hands of those who know how to use them for clarification, construction, decipherment, elucidation, exegesis, explication, exposition, illumination, illustration, or interpretation?

Victory is mine, when student like this one cannot go through a day without being reminded that here, back at the farm, he can find a professor ready and able to sell.

Do you find this notion of selling jarring?

Care to comment?

Humans Being Organizations

2008-03-15T08:45:00.000-07:00

Entrepreneurial learning. Organizational Behavior.

I look at these two subjects of our OBTC 2008 and ask myself to see a connection worth blogging about.

Entrepreneurial organizations. Are these not what act in the economy to change ways business happens in society?

Starbucks was an entrepreneurial organization. They changed the reason we go out for coffee. Southwest Airlines made cheaper flights work. Babson College is changing how undergraduates learn business.

We need entrepreneurial organizations in business and government to keep a green, growing edge on our lifetimes on Earth.

Organizations really don't behave, do they? Humans being organizations behave. They behave in the ways they believe that must act to manifest what they want to comeout the work they do together. Therefore, humans being entrepreneurial being organizations enact entreprenuerial organizations. This is my claim. What do you think?

My Organizational Behavior course has as its main theme and goal to develop keener, deeper understanding of what it means to be humans being business organizations. Each human's way of being that organization constitutes the organization's way of being Starbucks, Southwest, or Babson (home of OBTC 2008).

Again, how are organizations entrepreneurial? When most humans being that organization are being entrepreneurial at a given moment of time.

How do we humans manage ourselves be entrepreneurial? We learn to be so.

Thus we management educators need to practice teaching in ways that model and foster entrepreneurial learning.

Doing so, we send out to or back to the organized world of enterprise, humans being entrepreneurial when they are being whatever organization they join. And, we need to send out legions of them.

Comments?

OBTC 2008 - Where are we now?

2008-03-14T07:45:00.000-07:00

The Program is fully scheduled. It will be opened soon after presenters receive an e-mail giving them the day and time of their session. This will go out starting next Monday. Plenary and Showcase events are nearly set. As soon as they are, we will add them to the Program and let people know about our special guests. I must say that it was very hard to let many colleagues know that we reached our upper limit for sessions, even though many we had to reject were favorably reviewed. These were mainly those submitted after our early-decision deadline of December 7 and before we closed accepting proposals on January 15th. We had over 220 submissions and are going with 150 sessions. OBTC 2009 with be at the College of Charleston, in Charleson, South Carolina. I hope those who were not invited this year will submit for next year.

Did my idea work?

2008-03-06T12:45:00.000-08:00

Hopefully, you read what I posted earlier today. Now, I have tried that idea that came to be on my drive in. I did ask two of the 28 undergrads in each OB section to stay at their tables and ushered the other 26 out. I told them to stay close to the door, but nothing elese. I let everyone stew a bit, then I told the two "keepers" that I had actually chosen them at random. I told the "discarded" that there was really no reason to exclude them. In between, those outside the door told me they have speculated on all sorts of reasons. When they all came in and we went on with the pre-planned activity. Here is what John, one of those chosen to stay, wrote in the reflections they post on all our class events.

Thursday, March 6

Event # 3 – One Bean in a Million – Well, not a million beans await you, but a whole mess of ‘em. Among them is The One. This is The Bean who has all the Me qualities needed to be GKN Aerospace Structures. Teams become head hunters (wait a minute, beans don’t have heads, do they?) for our GKN – seeking the next Intern. Teams will conduct a Bean Search, drawing candidate “beans” from the large pool of applicants, examining each to find that special one. The first to find it, earns the Game Points (and a double bean bonus) There are three other high-potential beans in the pool for second, third, and fourth place. Find them and (L)earn.

Q: What was the point of this odd bean exercise? Doc may have had one in mind, but the actual point of it is what each of you thinks it is, looking back on the search for the “one bean in a million? What does it mean to you?

A: To me the point of this exercise was to demonstrate the value of being different, and the work neccesary to identify and separate those that have a potential to be great and add value to an organization.

Q: Imagine for a moment that you are one of those rare, highly sought after beans. How would this make you feel and what would you do about it?

A: For a moment I was when Doc asked Michelle and me to stay in the room. There was a strange mix of feelings that came over me. First, being chosen meant that someone had set an expectation of me that now needed to be lived up to. That felt good but at the same time I worried that they may have set their expectations too high. I began to hope that I could live up to their expectations. Second, the pressure of being the chosen one is much higher than being on the side line waiting to be chosen. This is because I had done something right and the spot light was on me. I frantically started searching my mind for the reason that set me apart so that it could be duplicated or acted upon. Third, I realized that those who are rejected will look at me differently from now on; for just a minute ago we were all on the same page, but now I am ahead. I didn't want anyone to look toward me any differently than before. Overall it felt great. It was good to feel that someone believes in my abilities. I believe that doubting oneself after being chosen is natural. I have found through experience that when I let my doubt get the better of me I begin acting out of character in an attempt to prove to myself that there is nothing to worry about. If this were a real hire or promotion I would enter the job with my doubt on the backburner. I would be myself, the same person I was when I was spotted and interviewed, and do my best to be a positive contributor to that organization.

Q: Imagine, for a moment, that you are not one of those “special beans”. You are one of the many. How would this make you feel and what would you do about it?

A: It would send me back to the drawing board looking for answers. I have been told at times in my life that I over analyze situations, and I would certainly be dissecting my character looking for answers to why I wasn't chosen. I can understand why people who are not chosen begin to look differently upon those who are. I would analyze the character of the chosen ones to see what sets them apart. A set back like this would drive me to do better the next time around.

Until the ideas stop!

2008-03-06T04:52:00.000-08:00

Perhaps you, like I, are contacted periodically by the agent of your college class whose mission is to collect news of us to publish in the college alumni magazine. And, perhaps like I, when yours arrives in the mail, you turn first to the last section of the magazine - the one that contains Class News. Well, to be honest, I go first to the page of obituaries to see if there are people from around or in my class at Colby College who have died. Each issue reminds me, a member of the Class of 1965, that more are, in fact, dying. Yet, as I read the Class News, I see that many of us tell our Agent, "Hell, no, we're not done yet. I see a hopeful rise in post retirement careers being reported.

Why have a dragged your attention through this prelude?

The current issue of the Colby Alumni Magazine contains a message our Class Agent delivered for me. First, I told of having the sheer pleasure of presenting a session at OBTC 2007 with my son Dave. Then, responding to the cue he seems to give all of us in his solicitation about how we are handling retirement, I respond to this effect. "No, I love teaching. I don't see retirement as an attractive alternative." Then I said. "I'll keep going until the ideas stop".

What a ghastly prospect!

Imagine you, I, any of us who have the juice to want to be part of OBTS, going on acting like teachers AFTER the ideas stop! We could keep invoking the ideas of others. We're quite good at that, are we not? But, what if we are driving to school one morning, as I just did, and roll our minds to the point of a class to begin at 9:30 AM, as my OB class will, and......Nothing. Nada. White noise.

Here is what I think today it means to be an entrepreneurial teacher. We have fresh, original ideas about how to enliven the learning experience that crowd out every other. They come to us on demand, and even undemanded. Like the genius of the business entrepreneurs who blow minds every day with new products, services, and ways of operating the business, we have and TRY OUT some of these ideas in the classroom. Some blow learners minds. Some blow up in our faces. We and they always learn something as a consequence of the experiment.

Today, we are examining what it means to be chosen according to how others read our personalities. I have the class all pegged out - opening remarks, a sure fire exercise I have used and refined, an episode of the semester long story we are listening to using a CD version of Max Berry's satirical novel Company..
Yet, on the way in, I had an idea. What if, to start this class, I point out two of the 28 students and tell them to stay, while I send 26 out of the room? They can look in through the glass door. What might they be saying to each other? Five minutes. All are back in their seats and we run the planned exercise. Will I use it? Most likely.

What is OB teacher and OB learner Hell?

Going on after the ideas stop.

March 1 - where we are in the process

2008-03-01T06:27:00.000-08:00

We are at the step of scheduling 150 sessions (out of 215 submissions) across the three main days of OBTC 2008 programming. Over the coming weeks, presenters will receive e-mail with their time allocations and day and times on the Program, and a request to polish abstracts and start working on Proceedings version of their offerings.

Our new fully-on-line OBTC Registration page is up and running nicely, as of last Tuesday.

Watch for update mailings from now until the June 11-14 conference.

Continually Producing our Organizational Context

2008-02-28T05:41:00.000-08:00

Two weeks have passed, since my last posting. As I walked in to school this morning, realizing this gap, I first asked myself why? Why have I been filling long days the last two weeks with other work rather than sustain this Blog? Insight struck. I allowed to OBTC Blog to fall out of organization while keeping in all else that mattered at the time. I name this "continually pro ducting our organizational context", for the sake of discussion.

The task was always there outside of my orbiting attentions. It simply did not reintegrate it into the use of my time and meager talents. By leaving the Blog task out there, all my organizing work was focused on what I did allow - some routine, much not. Reconnecting with this task, I revise the organization context of my work by now including this Web-based technology in what I have to work with. This brings along with it a whole suite of unrealized tasks still ahead for me, as we set the OBTC program into final form, solicit proceedings pieces, and so on. Momentarily, something will call my attention away from all things OBTC, and I will recompose the organizational context in which I exist still again.

So what am I offering here? An early morning theory of management and organizational behavior.

What we tend to teach as managing of organizations is that our learners, as managers, will see to it that others have an organization in which to perform what they think it takes to keep the business running. What I see now is the fallacy of this presumption that managers are makers of organizations for others. Each of us makes our organization happen for ourselves moment to moment. Each of us produces the social context we believe we need to go from this moment to the next. When we think we are seeing a single, unitary organization in action, what I propose is that we are actually seeing is the result of each choosing to include the others in the context each creates for themselves to get the most out of the moment.

I picture it this way. There are 100 humans whom we think are being a company. Take a snap shot of 100 orbits. I'd guess that a best case scenario would be that 80 or so would be thinking of the whole and taking care of the whole, while meeting their own needs. Blink, and it can drop to 55, blink again, and if more realize they need to put organizing tasks back into play, it goes to 70. And so on.

Well, I will stop. Maybe there will be comments on this one?

The Bold and the Bountiful?

2008-02-15T07:26:00.000-08:00

No, title this “The Bold and the Bountiful” is not a misstating of the name of the soap opera The Bold and the Beautiful. Yes, we management educators are all beautiful by some measure. Yet, the notion that took my mind away from the pressing duty of finishing finalizing the selection of sessions for OBTC 2008 is about being bold and bountiful in our advise.

Are we boldly proffering our beliefs to learners and readers about managing to effect organizations that are good for humans and for business. Our bountiful views accumulate in great abundance inside our classrooms, our training centers, our articles, our consultations, our books, new and old media, and, of course, in our conferences. I cannot recall where I read the other day that there were over 10,000 business books published in 2007 alone.

This is both wonderful and troubling to me. Wonderful, because we are still intrigued, even excited by the challenges of capturing and explaining sustained moments of true effectiveness found at the point of organizational action. And, that people seem to still be paying attention to us. This is also trouble that they are.

Why?

By chance, I just opened a book by Gary Hamel returned to me yesterday and my eyes fell on this line:

Management is out of date. Like the combustion engine, it's a technology that has largely stopped evolving, and that's not good. Why? Because management - the capacity to marshal resources, lay out plans, program work and spur effort - is central to the accomplishment of human purpose. When it's less effective that it could be, or needs to be, we all pay a price. What ultimately constrains the performance of your organization is not its operating model, nor its business model, but is management model.
[Gary Hamel, The Future of Management, Harvard Business Press, 2007]

What is we are boldly and bountifully teaching a management that has “largely stopped evolving”? Moreover, what it is has stopped evolving because we so forcefully and confidently teach it managing as is so very well?

Just a thought.

Entreprenuerial Learner, thy name is Melissa

2008-02-12T17:04:00.000-08:00

I look back on the morning's OB classes and know now how to define the Entreprenuerial Learner aspect of our OBCT 2008 theme. Melissa.

She graduated from my university last May with a BSBA. From the previous summer and part time over her senior year, Melissa worked for Cintas Corporation in their internship channel. Then, she became one of their management trainees.
Melissa was our guest this week in my OB class, telling her story in the context of our unit on diversity.

How does she embody my vision of an entreprenuerial learner? For the last eight month she has been driving a big Cintas van loaded with first aid and safety supplies and equipment, making stops at her 180 business customers spread across a large part of Connecticut and Rhode Island.

She stands about 5 feet tall, a 22 woman, lovely, with sparkly dark eyes and a winningly bright smile. Her heritage is Puerto Rican, so she is bi-lingual - a plus for working with Latino customers. The main point is that Melissa is the only woman MT doing this demanding job in this sector of the company. Those are her customers to keep or lose. She is keeping them by bringing timely solutions to whatever they throw at her and Cintas to do for them.

Melissa passed up a desk job in insurance to go out into this rough and tumble blue-color world. She is staking her future in this global corporation on demonstrating that she is more than capable of doing what is regarded as "man's work".

Next in her training, she changes out of her uniform and into a business suit for a long stint in business to business selling of the products and services she has taken out on the road. This is the pathway that most in this company take to enter the higher ranks.

Here is why I see Melissa as my prototypical Entreprenueral Learner. She told the class that no one day is like the next, that she finds changes can happen overnight in her customers' business; that tasks she finally mastered are eclipsed by new ways either her company or customers or both need changes to accomodate the upheavels in this dynamic business environment. She spoke of how she deals with turmoil with zest, recognizing that THIS is real business putting her to the test; not a professor with blue book and term paper. Melissa reaches out to the people who can help her shape her answers, does her own action research, and leaves creative solutions in her wake.

I wish I could show you a video clip of Melissa's poised, animated, and optimistic way of being there today. Her "bring it on and let's tame this problem look" was not missed by my students, many of whom will soon be graduating. Yes, last Spring, Melissa was one of them, taking this same course with me, wondering how it would be to get out there and work a territory. Now she knows that she can do business with the best of them.

Do you have Melissa's in your teaching history? Isn't a the grandest feeling to know they credit us as being among those who believed in their limitless capacity to learn?

All this expense so that we may teach!

2008-02-07T04:59:00.000-08:00

I walked into my Business School building at 6:55 this morning, a Do List hammering me awake. For months, OBTC 2008 programming matters are always among the most demanding "Do's". One has to pause and wonder if all this effort to bring management educators together in June is worth it.

I walked past the empty classroom that my learners and I will bring to life in awhile. This thought crossed my mind. This well heated, well lit, well cleaned, well appointed facility is being paid for by our state, tuition payers, and other benefactors, just so that I may do what I love doing still another Thursday. Teach.

Now, at my desk,looking at this devilishly insistent Do List (we still have a dozen or so of the 213 proposed sessions to decide), it strikes me why we have OBTC, OBTS, the Management Education Journal, and the Academy of Management Education and Learning Journal. How well we teach matters more than ever. Look at how we are being staked to do the job.

Yet, can we possibly be doing what it takes to bring sufficient learning. We may claim sufficiency when we plunk down the A or B; or when we hit the mark of an assessment metric. Yet, who can say that she or he is fully prepared to make those 75 minute engagements on a cold February morning work "well enough"?

Good Lord, if we were to figure out all the it costs - all the way out to debt reduction on the millions this building alone, out of the 70 or so on my regional state university campus, that 75 minutes I will soon fill for the 28 OB learners had better deliver!

So, to the point of OBTS and our annual OBTC's. Several hundred of us sustain a society whose purpose, at least for me, is to thougfully consider pratices which seem to work better than well enough for us with the intention to dissmeninate this as knowledge for use by our peers. Let's see, how long has it been since "pedagogical research" has even been allowed to have a place among listed research attainments on our Promotiona and Tenure vitae? Barely a recent moment or two in my 40+ higher education career.

Yet. Yet! All this expense, more importantly, all this trust, that goes into your abilty to foster not just sufficient, but superb learning, tells me there is hardly anything about management education more important to research and share than what we each must know and do to teach.

Care to comment?

Super Tuesday - a laboratory for what leadership means to millions

2008-02-03T14:33:00.001-08:00

One way or another, leadership is what we teach (and do) as management educators. This coming Tuesday, February 5th, millions (I hope) of US voters will create data in their polling places that we and our learners may plum for meaning. All remaining candidates are promising change. Each claims to be the one to put us on a better path and manage a government that will get us there. As far as I can tell, this has to be an altogether new path and the ways of managing that brought us "down here" must be replaced with practices that we take us "up there". Is this not a promise to be entreprenuerial? Yes, this is a shameless plug for the theme of OBTC 2008; but it is also recognition an unprecedented opportunity to let millions of voters teach us a big lesson. Who, in both parties, will come out of those Super Tuesday primaries selected (or at least advanced) as the leader who can make good on the promise of change? Why? What can we and our students learn in this enormous laboratory test to possibly disclose who will become our next President of the United States? This Wednesday ought to be an interesting day to teach OB.

Entrenuerial Learning calls for Integrative Thinking

2008-01-27T16:57:00.000-08:00

Are you like me on this? You have a stack of books nearby your favorite workstation (in my case, a bedroom long vacated by my son Dave, now my home office). When in need of a treat, a break from that fecund Do List which ads tasks autonomically, you grab a half hour and dive into a book to see what smart people have to say about managerial and organizational behavior.

Today, my break was with Roger Martin's, The Opposable Mind. My place was near the end. He presents the "Art and Science of Generative Reasoning". He talks about how at the Rotman School (University of Toronto) he leads his MBS students into using their minds opposibly.

This passage struck me: "We teach them how to seek insights that don't fit into the existing models. Then we ask them to proceed from those insights to visualize new models (the root of entrepreneurial learning). We also teach them how to prototype and refine their mental models, gathering additional data with each interaction."

What they say next is a message to all of us management educators. "Many students find it scary, and somewhat transgressive, to flex their abuctive logic muscles, having been taught to see deductive and inductive logic as the only legit mate forms of reasoning."

Comment, please. Are we the unwitting source of this Mind constraining teaching? Or, can and do we teach in ways that encourage learners to create their own models of how their work works (so far)?

What if it were to be blank?

2008-01-26T06:49:00.000-08:00

I pause to think about what it might mean to experience a moment of entreprenuerial learning. I glance over at the Hitt et al OB text my students are reading this semester. I am proud to say I worked on that project for Wiley developing the teaching/learning guide. That plug given, here is the point of the title of this posting. What if a student were to turn the page of this text and find the next one blank? Would he or she feel rooked? Look to see if it resumes were she left off on the previous page of material? Would this breach have stopped the OB learning? Not if there were what I think of as the sort of learning we need to encourage. There were be intrigue. "How did the publisher allow this gaff? Or, is it a gaff? What if the white space were placed there just to tell me to pause and think over what was just read? Or, while I am at this spot, I might as well ask myself if there is not a better way to put this information into my head. An e-book? Not yet. I like to flip pages and mark them up. Hmm, what about an e-book that has pages and saves the markings? Too nutty? Well, I guess I'd better plow on with this chapter. I wonder if there will be more blanks up ahead?"

I am tracking the knowledge/work day of an older student right now. He is posting daily journals giving me an 7AM - 5PM accounting of significant moments. I mention this because he actually relishes the times when the clock ticks over onto the workplace equivalent of a blank page in his stored knowledge. He is in a high-tech, global manufacturing company coordinating now product development. When presented with a situation of unprecedented challenges, he seems to not panic, instead, to rub his mental hands together and dive into the newness of it all. He doing entreprenuerial learning because his position in the firm calls for entreprenuerial practice. There a lots of blank pages when you are learning your way across a day of surprises.

Pumped!

2008-01-22T09:30:00.000-08:00

I am pumped! I just came back from opening still another semester of teaching. In this case, it is Business Organizational Behavior, a core course for our Management majors. The first semester I taught my first OB courses was Fall 1973. Yes, 1973. That was over 35 years ago - more years than many of you, my fellow teachers, have lived. Yet, I am pumped. I just plain love designing and running my classes. I tweak what worked from last time and install risky new practices to learn what might work better this time. I had 58 fresh faces looking at me this morning, some hopeful, some expressionless, some worried. My designs are entrepreneurial. Different that what most are used to in an undergraduate college course. For them to succeed, they need embrace the differences and let it fuel their learning.

I open the class with the "Dawn of Man" scene from Kubrick's' film of Arthur C.Clarke's sci fi novel, 2001: a Space Oddessey. The point is to show that before our species developed what I call a Mind for Managing, they just let life happen to them (and death happen to them, as in being eaten by a saber-toothed leopard). When they dare to encounter and learn about the obelisk that appeared in their space over night, it ignited imaginations which led to the invention of tools and weapons - ways to make life last a bit longer and go a bit better each day. The "beat goes on eons later - still making products and rendering services to make life last longer and go better each day. Nice cause.

Yes, the first day back to classes reminds this old veteran how fortunate I am, all of us are, to have this rare opportunity to start fresh and become better at our craft.

If you are out there, will you offer comment on your first day back to the classroom?

Hearing from the grads

2008-01-18T09:40:00.000-08:00

A large number of our students graduated in December. I am hearing now from several who are either asking me for a reference or telling me about being hired for a job. It is these moments that frame all we do as teachers. Yes, yes, I know, we are not working in vocational schools. It is not all about jobs. Or is it? Were we professors of theatre, our graduates, hopefully, would work in the state or before the camera. Our learners will practice jobs. Jobs become their stages. They "stage" their professional and managerial work by enacting their interpretation of the requirements of the job. I think we prepare them, as entrepreneurial learners, to stage jobs that produce so much value to stakeholders that they flourish in their careers. I just read Tim's e-mail. He has been hired by Enterprise. He took three undergraduate courses with me. My hope and expectation is that how Tim practice this job will amaze the Enterprise management. "Give us more from Tim's School. Look what he can do with this job!". Tim wins. Enterprise wins, and we who taught Tim win.

What are you hearing and learning from your recent grads?

The day after January 15

2008-01-16T05:52:00.001-08:00

The day after our final deadline, January 15th, we have 208 submissons. Each have had or will have 3 independent peer reviewes; some 4, when I felt I needed another assessment. 183 of our colleagues have completed or are currently completing over 625 reviews. I see in those documents and bios that OBTC 2008 is attracting a wonderfully diverse, energetic, reflectie community of management educators ready to share lessons learned inside those sessions and in every nook and cranny of time from Wednesday night, June 11 until we close Saturday afternoon, June 14. Babson College or Bust.

Nearly done reviewing

2008-01-15T07:27:00.000-08:00

This is the text of an e-mail being sent to our over 175 volunteer reviewers. We are almost there!

"Subject: OBTC 2008 Reviewing Nearly Done

Today, Tuesday, January 15, 2008 is the final deadline for OBTC 2008 session proposals. Over 150 of them are fully reviewed, or pending a fourth opinion. I am assigning reviewers to the last batch of about 15 that are in or I expect will be in by the end of the 15th. Unless I have a need for a fourth opinion, that will be it. No more calls for reviews cropping up in your mailboxes!

Our goal was to be able to notify all of our colleagues on the outcome of their proposals by the end of January, so that travel plans can be made.

This sets us up to design the bulk of the Program in February. Colleagues will have more time to polish their sessions and submit them to a Proceedings can be handed out at check in.

We had over 175 colleagues volunteer to review. All had at least 3 to review. Some kindly reviewed as many as 6. This gave us extraordinary coverage of each. In that we had many more proposed sessions than space and time would allow, it was indispensible to have such cogent evaluations made in advance of deciding on acceptances.

I will thanking each of you again, but perhaps the thanks you need now is to learn that we are almost done!"

Progress

2008-01-12T08:56:00.000-08:00

The first wave of decsions on the proposed sessions has been made. Notices will be mailed by Monday, the 14th. There are proposals still under consideration that were posted by the first call deadline. Those went out for further review. Those submittted more recently are under review. Notices on both sets will be sent as soon as the review process allows. That said, it is shaping up to be a fascinating conference.

Reviews are essential

2008-01-10T04:54:00.000-08:00

Spending most of the last three days and evenings working up through the proposals for sessions, I have come to more fully realize what a vital service our 178 OBTC reviewers are giving us. The ratings are important, no doubt about it, however, the constructive and detailed comments to the author(s) and to the Program decision makers are essential. One mind, even mine that has been marinated in over 40 years of OB teaching, reading, writing and presenting, could not possibly provide the thoughtful, insightful attention each deserves. We are giving each proposal three blind reviews. More, when I see issues that need one more point of view to settle my mind on a go, no go decision. Many of you who see this post are among our reviewers. Please know that your timely attention to this opportunity to shape OBTC 2008 makes this critical step in our building process almost pleasant! Thank you.

Where we are in the process

2008-01-08T06:57:00.000-08:00

Our Last Call for proposals due January 15th went out late last week. In the meantime, most of the over 160 session proposals submitted to date are under review or have been reviewed. Those reviewed are being considered this week for acceptance. Notices on those decisions will be e-mailed from the OBTC 2008 site early next week.

Old Wine in New Bottles?

2008-01-03T18:12:00.000-08:00

Forgive the cliche, but I just got through reading Gary Hamel's newest book - The Future of Management, a Harvard Business Press publication (2007).

The "old wine" is what he calls conventional management theory. Principles, mind sets, mental models, it all clusters around us teaching hierarchy as an uncontested given.

"New bottles" would be entreprenuerial teaching, learning, and practice. To be different in each venture - teaching, learning, doing - would it not require management to be conceptualized to guide and energize being different?

I loaned Hamel's book to a colleague today, so I cannot do justice to the innovations of management (theory) itself that he helps the reader envision. His awowed purpose was to ignite our thinking about our most deeply held assumption, even convictions, about how to best organize human endeavor to bring out the best in all concerned.

My point in posting this tonight is to place a bookmark where "new and better management theory" ought to be factored in to our conversation on line and at OBTC 2008.

158 proposals

2008-01-01T06:36:00.000-08:00

Here is an update on submissions to OBTC 2008. We have 158 proposals for sessions. The average authorship is 2. Thus, we have potential of 316 attendees from this pool, should all be accepted. There are under blind review. Some will not meet our criteria, many, perhaps most will. During the first two weeks of January, those fully reviewed will be notified via the OBTC 2008 Web-based system of the decision. It is an exciting moment. With January 15th being the final deadline, we may have nearly 200 sessions to consider for around 120 time slots. Stay tuned.

Practice - the other hand clapping

2007-12-28T06:35:00.000-08:00

Our theme has been Entreprenuerial Teaching. Entreprenuerial Learning. Entreprenuerial Organizing. Now, I realize the flow should be from teaching to learning to practice.

I wrote in the post "Glitch" about feeling, as solo contributor to this Blog, like "one hand clapping". Now, it occurs to me that we who educate for management are all this proverbial one hand when it comes to having an real impact on the quality of human-organized life.

The "other hand" is practice.

This is the hand our Entrepreneurial Learners got to play. Only they can do this.

Our next job is Entreprenuerial Research. We need to listen carefully for the sounds of impact. This means we have to invent ways to put our "ears" closer to the action. Certainly, to the action-takers, asking them what works, what doesn't, and helping each other figure out what makes the positive difference.

Imagine the sheer fun of teaching (and learning) at the pace and rhythm of both hands clapping out the beat of innovative performance.

Let's make this the beat of OBTC 2008. What do you think?

Glitch?

2007-12-28T06:33:00.000-08:00

A colleague has e-mailed me that she has tried to post a comment to one of my posts, but could not do so. I have alerted our technical support person who will help me dissolve this glitch. Then, perhaps, I will not be "one hand clapping".

To Teach

2007-12-19T10:23:00.000-08:00

There are terms that play such a central role in our lives that we feel no need to probe their meaning. For us, the term is teach.

What does it mean?

Houghton-Mifflin eReference furnishes quite a list. The main thrust is to "impart or provide knowledge and skill. This presumes that we teachers know something that our learners don't; accordingly, we give it to them. Now they have it.

Entreprenuerial teaching and entreprenuerial learning, our OBTC 08 theme, challenges this tidy transaction. I see it as less a give to take proposition and more a matter of take to give.

I use take in this latter sense: to be receptive to; or to be naturally attracted or fitted to. . When being entreprenueiral, we are seeking to cross and close gaps in knowledge, so we have less to impart and more to investigate. "Take to give" means teachiing is to exhibit a receptivity to new information, fresh theories, and uncommon situations. We learn in this stance in order to give others the benefit of our findings or realizations.

Teaching this way, I would encourage learners to share my attraction to knowing more about a given topic or subject, rather than to just tell them what I know. My job is to foster their attraction to same; then structure the lesson so that they explore it, create their own unique brand of knowledge about it, then give their interpretation as information for others to use to build on the attraction and enhance their own "take" on the question at hand.

Here is the definition of teach that seems to come closest to what I am espousing: To condition to a certain action or frame of mind.

What do you think about teaching so as to encourage an entreprenuerial frame of mind?

Un

2007-12-14T05:59:00.000-08:00

"Un".

It dawns my me that this is the prefix that sets enterprenerial behavior apart from practiced behavior.

How so?

As in uncertain, unknown, unreliable, unexplored.

Uncomfortable.

This last one is a true demarkation.

We who teach from deeply-grooved, well practiced syllabi and methods are comfortable.

So, it seems, are student comforted by common practices (quizzes, mid-term, final, term paper, presentations).

Yet, where is the powerful fresh learning for us and them?

In that imposing "Land of Un".

I go there rather often, bringing my students with me. There is a reward. It stops being Un and becomes another thing and place we know.

Are you one who visits Un as a teacher and scholar?

My student's eyes

2007-12-11T07:09:00.000-08:00

A moment ago, one of my seniors, a Management major, left my office after thanking me for a valuable semester of learning (couldn't hurt). I can still see her eyes. She believes that what she learned and how she learned it was valuable. She looked me squarely in the eyes, from across the table I have between me and my guests. "Thank you, Doc".

Why am I so restive about this? I did a hell of a good job on that course. Now it dawns on me why I cannot get those trusting, appreciative eyes out of my head.

She is on a COOP (cooperative education) at a huge insurance company here in Hartford, Connecticut. She will stay on part time this Spring, until she graduates. She is the sole person (even as a COOP) handling incoming retirement items that they had underestimated in volume and complexity. They are hiring a temp worker to pick up the slack of her moving from full to part time. She is supposed to train this person, even though she is traveling over the semester break.

This is one 21 year old woman with a good mind and good heart upon whose shoulders this vast, global financial services company is resting a big chunk of new business.

Ironically, I came to my office from a 1:1 meeting with my retirement advisor from her company. That line of business my student is supporting included what I count on for a smooth transition to life beyond this work. She looked at me with those eyes and said, "Doc, my supervisor doesn't even understand this new material. They planned on 20 a day. Yesterday, we had over 200. I can leave (xxxx) in May and go out to find other work. She has been there 20 years and I think she is on the verge of a nervous breakdown."

What I am I driving at here?

This good young person thanked me for a course of study that I am not at all sure prepares her for the complexities, uncertainties, and managerial vagaries of today, let alone five years from now.

Entrepreneurial teacher? I thought I was, but now?

Entrepreneurial learner? She took it upon herself to write up the processes that she had pretty much invented to manage the volume of those in comings, but has far less stake in how things turn out than her supervisor does.

What do you see in the eyes of your students?

Will they be able to sustain?

2007-12-09T04:51:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, my wife Connie and I went on a charity house walking tour in the affluent Connecticut River town of Essex. Not only were the homes themselves representative of great (and comforting) wealth, the people thronging the tour seemed mainly our age (over 60), and well to do. My 2000 Subaru shared a lot with cars that cost more than we owe on our house (and will take another 6 years to pay). My point?

These are people who managed (I assume mainly in business) to demonstrate to others that they were highly valuable to enterprise. In exchange for what they could do with their talents for business, they made a lot of money. Further, I must assume that why they were valued so much is that they had learned how to sustain their businesses. To sustain is to To hold up: bear, carry, support. These folks were apparently able to do this.

I put this in the past tense. For there is tomorrow and a business future so much more challenging to our current learners than any of these prosperous Essexians could even imagine. We/they got ours. Much money is tucked away to fund many more charity house tours. While standing in line, I could not help overhear some talking about the private colleges they paid their kids' ways through, the big weddings, the second homes in Vermont or Cape Cod.

What about tomorrow?

Are we teaching so that our current business learners will be able to sustain the business organizations they are signed on to serve?

Is the content we proffer relevant to a globally competitive business future?

Are the ways we teach compatible with the the ways these students must go forth and learn their way into the future?

Will they be able to sustain business so well as to be enriched to the extent that one day, after 30 or so years, they will walk the streets of a still prosperous Essex, Connecticut, admiring the homes of our former business students?

I know, some reading this will be put off by the very notion that our job is to launch careers of the next wave of elites. I know I am, but, then again, I do hope one of my former students is able to give a gift to my school that creates scholarships and other opportunities for those whose families live far and away from that pricey corner of my state.

What do you think?

Teaching without a Net

2007-12-06T06:53:00.000-08:00

It was about 15 years ago that Steve Meisel (LaSalle University - Philly) and I led off an Eastern Academy of Management meeting with the theme; "Teaching without a Net". Do you remember the world back then? You Tube would have been a ranking, as in "Pick up that sweat sock, you dumb tube". Now, we have this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fi4fzvQ6I-o) We said that managers were working without a net back then. Imagine how scary the view is from up on today's managerial high wire! Back then, the arena below was encircled as mainly a domestic marketplace. Today, the Globe. Yet, I told a highly respected management educator colleague in an e-mail this morning that I believe we professoral management eductors are the most protected and insulated of all who are in the galaxy of managerial leaders whom we serve. Why be entreprenuerial in our teaching? Take risks that our more radical views and learning venues will blow up in our faces, rather than "blow learner minds"? Hell, Steve and I were worng. We did have a safety net back then. We have it (somewhat) now. However, how long will they come to us for our wisdom, if we dish out pablum?

Drucker on our Theme

2007-12-03T08:05:00.000-08:00

In his book The Age of Discontinuity, Peter Drucker gives us management educators a powerful rationale for entrepreneurial teaching. On The New Entrepreneur he writes:

"We are again entering an era in which emphasis will be on entrepreneurship. However, it will not be an entrepreneur of a century ago, that is, the ability of a single man to organize a business he himself could run, control, embrace. It will rather be the ability to create and direct an organization for the new. We need men and women who can build a new structure of entrepreneurship on the managerial foundation laid these last eighty years. History, it has often been observed, moves in a spiral; one returns to the preceding position, or the preceding problem, but on a higher level, and by a corkscrew-like path. In this fashion we are going to return to entrepreneurship on a a path that led out for a lower level, that of the single entrepreneur, to the manager, and now back, though upward, to entreprenuership again. The businessperson will have to acquire a number of new abilities, all of them entrepreneurial in nature, but all of them to be exercised in and through managerial organization."

Are we teaching so that learners develop entreprenuerial abilities, not as a side specialization, but at the core of our lessons?

Judgement

2007-11-30T09:07:00.000-08:00

I am enjoying my thoughts spurred by Noel Tichy and Warren Bennis' October 2007 HBR article "Making Judgement Calls". What I enjoy is a good intra-cranial dialectic.

One the one hand, I am unabashedly promoting entrepreneurial teahing, learning, and organizing. Experiment, see what works, grab opportunity as you fly by. Risky, even reckless come to mind.

On the other hand, Tichy and Bennis rightfully sober me up by reminding me of my obligation to exercise and demonstrate good judgement as a teacher for leaders, further, to help them realize how the results of calls they will make can and will effect the lives and livlihoods of others.

Perhaps there is only one hand on this question. Our management learners will be working in what Peter Vaill named "Permanent Whitewater" back in 1989. Events will come at them like those imobile bolders in a Wyoming Level 5 river. They must be ready to make judgement calls that first steer them and their followers around the immeadiate crashes, but then must be developed into well executed course corrections with little chance of steering to calm waters for deliberations.

I look forward to reading Noel and Warren's forthcoming book on this subject.

What do you think? Is entrepreneurial behavior in conflict with exercising well reasoned judgements?

Curiously Strong

2007-11-29T05:23:00.001-08:00

Altoids come to mind. "Curiously strong" is the legend on the box.

What if this were to be a legend representing those who propose to make offerings of our thoughts and practices on teaching at OBTC 08?

My trusty e-dictionary from Houghton-Mifflin offers these meanings:

curious (adjective)

1. Eager to acquire knowledge: inquiring, inquisitive, investigative, questioning. See investigate.
2. Unduly interested in the affairs of others: inquisitive, inquisitorial. Informal: nosy, snoopy. See investigate.
3. Deviating from the customary: bizarre, cranky, eccentric, erratic, freakish, idiosyncratic, odd, outlandish, peculiar, quaint, queer, quirky, singular, strange, unnatural, unusual, weird. Slang: kooky, screwball. British Slang: rum, rummy2. See usual.
4. Causing puzzlement; perplexing: funny, odd, peculiar, queer, strange, weird. See usual.

There you have it. This is what it means to me to be an entrepreneurial teacher, learner, and organizer (think manager).

Our work is curiously strong. It startles. It clears minds the way an Altoid makes our taste buds forget the last thing we ate. It lingers.

Our work is curiously strong, because we, who are attracted to this Teaching Society for Management Educators are, ourselves, curious.

Are we not?

Entreprenuerial organizing?

2007-11-25T08:50:00.000-08:00

The third part of our OBTC 08 theme is entrepreneurial organizing. Consider this the output of the first two. Entrepreneurial teaching opens the range of possible ways to stir entrepreneurial learning.

Once one has become acclimated to riskier (few correct answers) management learning, would not it follow that her or his notions about the core act of organizing to do business be freed from usual conventions?

What are we talking about?

To organize is to bring into existence formally: constitute, create, establish, found, institute, originate, set up, start.

Is this not what business and social entrepreneurs do? My thought is that people do this at the start of each business day - bringing back into existence the way people organized to work the day before (but always open to invention).

To organize is to arrange in an orderly manner: methodize, order, systematize, systemize.

We see managers doing this; but must they do so according to the models we have drilled into their heads? It seems to me that global realities beg for new ways of organizing to conduct business.

The call is for entrepreneurial organizing. Who is teaching so that those who learn will heed and lead this call?

What about Entreprenuerial Learners?

2007-11-19T06:23:00.000-08:00

I see the object of teaching to be that others will learn. We teach managerial and organizational behavior so that others may learn what works, how, and why.

Here is the rub. Do we know what works, how, and why? Are we sure?

Despite the care taken by the researchers whose findings we assimilate into our own understanding of organizations managing to create and sustain business, are there sufficient truths to tell?

No, say I. Thus, I am attracted to the notion of entrepreneurial teaching and entrepreneurial learning.

As one who teaches this way, I am publicly exploring. My students see me as an optimistic skeptic. I acknowledge that the concepts I have them read for use are quite good, but I say, "Until they, you, or I find a better explanation.". After all, we are talking about senescent humans behaving, not gears and pulleys. So, like the opportunistic business entrepreneur, I am constantly looking for threads, leads, smart folks, themes, patterns, rumbles. I want to be formed, not just informed.

I want my students to believe that this is authentic learning behavior for a PhD with over thirty years in the profession.

Why?

I don't tell them to be entrepreneurial in how they go about OB learning, I behave it (as best I can). I design my courses and classes to foster making, testing, and communicating one's own sense of what is before us.

What do you think about this? Am I just having a solo peacock moment, or is this helpful to you in understanding the theme of our conference?

Entreprenuerial learner?

2007-11-05T11:06:00.000-08:00

Our OBTC 2008 conference theme is: Entrepreuerial teaching. Entreprenuerial learning. Just what is meant be the latter? Management educators share responsiblity with those who come to us for teaching for what they become thereafter. Convention would have it that they become managers, or better at managing. Our job is to show them how it is done. Speaking only for myself, I don't know how it is done. I have research that tells me something of how is was done and how it seemed to work yesterday. What managing will take tomorrow is, for me at least, an open question. Thus, I must adapt and adjust my teaching to favor learning over knowledge aquistion. My mission is to model and support what it means to be an entreprenurial learner. This is one open to every opportunity to extract valuable lessons from our daily experience. Entreprenuers are restless seekers; a human-sized itch from head to toe, to discover the early edges of something the future will reward, if only someone would create it. I want to point my learners to where I see those "early edges" of new ways to practice and join them in scratching the itch of curiosity that encountering new ideas inflames. I know I am torturing an analogy here, but itch it is. How would your teaching change if the body of formal knowledge about managerial and organizational behavior were to be presented as interesting history, with the most time and energy devoted to what it will take next to make history? When you come to Babson College for OBTC 2008, you will see their Entrepreneur Hall of Fame. Read their stories. They made business history. Nothing less than entrepreneurial teaching and learning will give me assurance that many, not just a few, of my students are going to earn their places in business history.

A familiar silence

2007-11-01T05:31:00.000-07:00

So far, it appears that no one who has come to our OBTC 08 Conference page has both clicked into this Blog and posted a comment. I know that I have to promote its existence overcome this stony silence. In the meantime, I will use "it" as an object lesson for what it means to be an entrepreneurial teacher (and learner).

We initiate something so new that no one is looking for it, expects it, even recognizes it. When I do this in class, there is a stunned silence. Students look down or at each other. "What?" "Do what?". "How could this possibly help me learn this material?"

They wait for me to break the silence. I wait for one of them to break the silence. This is the sort of silence that hurts deep inside where our ears are rooted in our brains.

Break.

Energy released.

A few timid steps taken in the new direction.

More engagement.

Entrepreneurial (risky) learning happens.

Wow! Now that was a nifty way to understand motivation, conflict, leadership (you fill in the concept).

Minds are blown.

Or not.

After the broken silence and a flurry of activity, my idea may blow up i our faces, not blow our minds. It does happen. After all, it is something I am trying out for the first time.

Here is the good news. A flop becomes the subject of managerial attention and thinking. Just pass the noise and heat of once silent and cold pre-tryit behavior is a conversation about if and how to try it again in a new way. THIS is the conversation that prepares us all to be more entrepreneurial in how we will do business in the future.

Being Entprenuerial

2007-10-25T05:10:00.000-07:00

We may convince ourselves that we must teach and our learners learn in within the confines of syllabus, program, institution. Thus, our OBTC call to be entrepreneurial is incongruous at best and a hell of a tease at its worse. After all, business entrepreneurs can venture away uninhibited by convention. Bunkum. What my students call the "real world" is just as constraining, perhaps more so. Those who breakthrough create their own conditions for innovation within. I see it not as thinking and working outside the proverbial "box". I see entrepreneurial behavior as making the interior of that box as different as it takes to "blow minds". We who have designed, run, and published experiential teaching exercises over the past 20 or 30 years have been doing just this. You get your 75 minutes twice a week, a classroom, tables and chairs, and a bunch of registered potent learners. That's the box. Today, in my two 75 minute periods of OB teaching, my students will be playing an adaptation of Trivial Pursuit to draw them into inquiry about the nature of motivation. Steve Meisel and I demonstrated this way of re-decorating the "box" at last year's EAM conference. See the 2006 Proceedings. When I leave that room at 2 for the next professor and class of students, it might go back to being just a box. But, for my 150 minutes, it was the scene of eight teams battling with their knowledge of popular culture to win beans redeemable in December for (maybe) a new car! They will be posting reflections on that exercise in our Vista Blackboard blended course site.

Entrepreneurial teaching? Yes, for I never quite know how these experiments in active learning will turn out (thank goodness).

Entrepreneurial learning? Sure. They don't know what they have learned, until they look back and probe this fresh, novel experience. It could be a flop. It could be an event they'll not soon forget, when thoughts of motivation swim into mind.

How about you? Can you bring to OBTC 08 a way you have turned that "box" into an exotic realm?

Why us? Why now?

2007-10-18T05:29:00.000-07:00

Why entreprenuerial teaching? By us OB and Management educators? Now?

I picture Earth as a ball scaled down to about 10" x 10". The North and South Poles are on a post that runs through and sticks out each end. They are tipped to sit on two braces, so that it can spin freely. We mount a set of stairs. We stand on the verge of stepping out onto that spinning orb. The challenge is seductive. We have to run as fast as it spins, to keep from being spun off into the Void. Why try it? It could be fun. We'll get a heck of a workout. With our feet on that ground, we'll be connected to the World. With our feet on the top step, we are just observing, counting its rotations, perhaps noting how some tiny human figures are flying off its face, no longer able to keep up.

As one flies past our nose, a nearly inaudible voice squeaks out, "Are you just going to stand there watching us fail?!". "Sorry", we exclaim, looking back fondly at the bottom stair and the path that led us here.

Forgive the tortured analogy. To the point - OBTC '08 is about stepping out there, and running with all we've got.

We have to run with those who are fleetest of foot and still able to stay on the Ball. We have to learn how they do it. How they stay so fit, so balanced, so determined to run businesses that not just keep pace, but set the pace.

These are the practitioners who are making the Globe spin as fast as it does now. We can try to talk them into pausing with us for long, lingering lectures, but they those who cannot stay on the ball flying out to that Void. Here is their proposition. "Keep up with us. Learn with us on the fly. Teach at this pace. Share our risks. But, we are not getting of the World to spend a fortune in time in money, just so that we can say that you say that we are proficient in business."

Well, my feet actually hurt. I am pooped. My mind is flooded with defenses against this exhortation. Why me? Why now?

It is us. This is the time. Period.

"Blow their minds"

2007-10-15T10:57:00.000-07:00

We are adopting a rather audacious logo for the conference. It is a figure of a very surprised little version of the classic Smiley Face (see it on the Webpage for our Call www.obtc.org ) The message is "Blow their minds!". Why this? I believe that most conventions of teaching management and organizational behavior, while effective, do not stir oneself as a teacher to entreprenuerial ways of teaching nor learners to break lose from custom and learn differently. Our review process will, of course, consider all proposals. I'll be looking for the ones that can at least make the windows of the Mind shake and rattle. Even I, the originator of this theme, might not be teaching on my best days to lift those heads in utter surprise, but I do love to be reminded that our hiring world is counting on innovation to sustain them. Conventional thinker/learners are not likely to bestir and invigorate. What do you think?

OBTC '08 - the Online Conversation Begins

2007-09-14T12:58:00.000-07:00

Summoning innovation: Entrprenuerial Teaching. Entreprenuerial Learning. Entreprenuerial Organizing. This is the theme and the opportunity of OBTC '08. Conversations in response to this theme will go on in several orbits. This will be one - a principle local, easily accessible in most senses of this term. This Blog is where ideas can bubble and squeak leading to proposals for OBTC sessions and other events to make those four days next June at Babson College blow the lids off the tops of our teaching and learning minds. The dates are June 11-14. As Program Coordinator, my role is this Fall is to bring together the best ways to use this precious conference time for the innovators in us all. I will moderate this OBTC 08 Blog, posing and fielding questions, seeking, giving, and finding answers. I hope you will make this conversation part of your days leading up to June 11, 2008. - David Fearon.

If you wish to communicate directly, I am fearon@ccsu.edu; 860 832 3280