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?