My Way

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"

"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

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?

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?

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!

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

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.