Practice - the other hand clapping

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?

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

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

"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

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?

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

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

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

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

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?

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?

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?

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

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

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?

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"

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

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