Last is First

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"

"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

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

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!

[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

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

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).