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?
Thursday, February 28, 2008
Friday, February 15, 2008
The Bold and the Bountiful?
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.
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.
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Entreprenuerial Learner, thy name is Melissa
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?
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?
Thursday, February 7, 2008
All this expense so that we may teach!
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?
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?
Sunday, February 3, 2008
Super Tuesday - a laboratory for what leadership means to millions
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.
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