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).

By the force of their intelligence

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

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.