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.

EE-teaching without a net

"E"-teaching without a net could mean entrepreneurial teaching - the theme of this OBCTC '08 Blog and our Babson conference. In the way that I report this event, it does, but it also means "electronic" teaching - the e (as in e-mail) that has preceded so many of our current ways of reaching others. Entrepreneurial teaching is definitely working without a net to catch us. That net would be to be in full control of our classes and the students' assignments. It would be to lecture the whole hour, so as to be sure the content was delivered. It would be to craft exams for east grading, with a high percentage of T-F and multiple choice answers to remove our responsibility for adjudicating correctness.

I am reporting here a moment of "ee (entrepreneurial electronic) teaching that happened last Friday in front of an international OB teaching audience. It turned out fine, but for about 15 minutes, we three who were teaching the OBTS Webinar held on to our proverbial trapeze bars with one hand and swung for deal life.

Well, for dear life is an exaggeration. We just hoped that the cause of nearly our entire roster of signed up participants would be let into the Website. We were ready precisely at 2 PM, having done all the technology testing a few days before. Then, we noticed no one had been let in. Hmmm. Fortunately, one participant got in to the web-room to tell us that the link to the webinar had not been switched on. A scary moment of flying across the void with one hand slipping off the trapeze bar hit me - the moderator of this event. My fellow teacher and I talked about the coincidence of his life's work being about learning leading in and from action, and here we were in one of those free-fall moments that happens when we release our controls that attempt to govern what and how students learn from us. Unfortunately, there was only that one person able to hear us be reflective practitioners.

Meanwhile, our partners whose campus hosted the event leaped into action and quickly learned that our web-master in India had been detained from coming to his company to activate the link by a traffic accident. He made it in time to let in the registrants who waited and 20 went on to experience an hour of quite fascinating virtual teaching and learning.

Afterwards, Our web-host, fortunately unhurt in the accident, sent us an email and called to apologise. My response to him was genuine. Assuring him that his escape from being harmed in the accident meant far more to us, I said that we are just learning how to stage these OBTS webinars. This was our third and each time we discover something that could have sent us plunging to the floor of the center ring. Now we know how to make sure this sort of glitch does not happen. There will be others, as we extend and expand the experiment.

Our knowledge of how "EE-teaching" grows along with our confidence to do more of these after OBTC 2008 leading up to OBTC 2009. We are compelled by the potential to foster rich e-conversations among us about and in between the Webinars. Each one is recorded and archived on our OBTS website. Here online is a new sort of interactive literature, live and lively. This is what it means to be a teaching society bent on making management education work (without a net.

All's well the starts something better the next time.

Putting us in the Story

I am preparing a short workshop for a segment of the Spring Conference of the Connecticut Town Clerks. They asked me to help them notice and manage the generational differences of townspeople, so that changes they make in policies and practices in these bedrock offices accommodate the values and preferred ways of being of voting adults born from 1920 to 1990.

I could give them a PowerPoint lecture summarizing what research tells us about the Silent Gernation or Gen X. That would be a short prep. It is not what a chronically entrepreneurial teacher would do. So, I put many more hours into designing this experience (for them and me) than my honorarium covers.

Why? I want to make a difference in their practice that lasts. I want them to be more entrepreneurial in their practice.

One might ask, how could a Town Clerk who issues dog licenses and let's people into the vault to search property titles possibly care to be an innovator? Well, the Gen Y-Millennial citizen is miffed, because she cannot simply fill out an online form to license Bowser and charge the fee to his debit card. A drive down to Town Hall and back costs her time, gas money (she is saving up for a Prius) and she has to leave the puppy Bowser back at the condo, because he cannot be brought into the building and tends to defecate on the car upholstery when left alone.

Well, then, what is my design and how does this have anything to do with "putting us in the Story"? I'll have the Clerks work in teams to invent the World's first "Generational Positioning System" - a Clerking GPS. This takes off on the analogy to a driver's GPS (global positioning system) and casts the session inside the title "Navigating the differences generational differences make".

I have large rolls of paper, crayons, and other material for each table team to use to create their own GPS prototype. Then, we'll go to role play, whereby half the 150 of them will take on assigned generation aspects and rotate through some of the teams of clerks who will present them with a pre-selected change they are considering such as the e-forms for purchasing licenses.

Will it work? I hope so.

Have I ever done this before? Nope.

What it is bombs? We can talk about why and they can take me off the list of conference speakers.

I believe that putting myself and them inside the story of Connecticut Town Clerks inventing the World's First Clerking GPS will lead to entrepreneurial learning which will infuse entrepreneurial practice. Those back seat covers may one day be spared Bowser's wrath.

What's new?

"Hi, what's new?" was a familiar greeting back in my growing up years in Maine. It was an easy way to start a conversation. There was almost always, something new for the other to recount. "Nothin'" was the other choice. What if our students were to be mainly predisposed to saying that nothing is new for them? Isn't it much more energizing for us at teachers to work with learners for whom there is always news? My take on this is that business as a domain and management as a process and practice is always about what's new, or is going to be new. What do you think?

In the moment - we learn, we teach

It was my pleasure to talk at some length the other day with Bill Torbert. We are preparing for his OBTS Webinar on Friday, April 25th at 2:00 PM EDT. (Webinar registration is linked on the OBTC Web page). I cannot begin to do justice to Bill groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of organizational dynamics, but I do have this abiding thought, looking back at this call.

Action inquiry, a cornerstone of Bill's works, IS entrepreneurial teaching, entrepreneurial learning and entrepreneurial practice.

How so?

First, because we inquire. We don't tell, we ask, for we are willing to risk others seeing us as seekers for creating new knowledge, not just purveyors of our own congealed knowledge.

Secondly, it is entrepreneurial because we are IN the action while inquiring. The first source of information is ourselves. We count on the keenness and authenticity of our own perceptual powers. Secondary and tertiary sources come into play, but we are fully engaged, steeped in exquisite subjectivity, forming and reforming our beliefs on the fly.

We are scholars of the moment, in the moment, for the benefit of the moments to come.

How might this make us better teachers of those who practice to keep business in their lives?

My hunch is that we model the way effective managerial practice actually happens in what our students call "real world" time (vs on our academic time). I am taking my OB classes to a tiny new business that started up next to our campus last April. The two founding owners will tell their story. It is how they have put this new business on the face of our Earth as an Act of sheer, unremitting, whole-body, mind, and spirit action inquiry. It started five years ago with the question, "What if we were to combine a Laundromat and cafe and open it next to a large metropolitan college campus?". We will share a moment of action inquiry with Laury and Jesus on April 15 at the SpinCycle Laundromat and Cafe.

Of course there is value in research done by standing outside of the action - surveying, counting, cataloguing, writing the descriptive case. This seems to produce the sorts of codified knowledge of OB that editors and reviewers allow to be published. So be it. While the form of scholarship grinds along, I'll keep my teaching centered upon action of "humans being organizations". I'll relish the ambiguity of not yet knowing for sure why things go the way they seem to in the pursuit of common objectives. I'll hope this also rubs off on my learners.

Perhaps this could be considered entrepreneurial scholarship? What do you think?

We who are about to teach

What is it about these moments before we go to our classrooms that is so delectable?

No matter what else comes my way; no matter how much I have swampued myself (OBTC Program Coordinator, among the ways), I love this feeling!

Today's session will be on leadership. Tuesday, they watched a clip from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest where Randall McMurphy (Jack) tries to pull the marble sink out of the tub room floor. They talked about moments like this in their lives, when they "tried, Goddamn it, at least they tried". Then, they had a lively conversation with two of my former students who are the front-line team marketing their company's premium-priced products and winning against the Wal-Mart of their industry - 3M.

Today, they will experinence an exercise I designed and have modified from the old Block Stacking game of the Kolb, Rubin, and Macintyre (spelling from memory) OB book of 1972. We use tiny sugar cubes. It raises energies and ideas about the intimate moments when one leads, another, seeing less well what is ahead, follows. We'll cap off this class by listening to another installment of a CD book version of Company, by Max Berry (2006). They consider the satirically jumble corporate life of a recent college grad- Stephen Jones. In less than two months, over half these classes will be college grads, hoping they do not land a job as bizzare as our man Jones.

I am never sure how it will all come out. I'll read their accounts of lessons learned in our Vista Blackboard postings.

Yes, I who am about to teach, thank my lucky stars that I have had nearly 40 years of these delectable moments.

Have you?