13 | December | 2006 | Organizations and Markets

Archive for 13 December 2006

Academic Insults: CCSM Edition

| Peter Klein |

Time to begin a new thread on academic insults (1, 2, 3). Overhead at the CCSM:

Session chair to audience: “Thank you, [Presenter], for your excellent time management.” [But not your paper.]

Discussant to presenter: “Your paper is beautifully written. When I got to the end I realized that I totally disagree with it, but I couldn’t remember where in the paper you started to go wrong.”

Audience member to presenter: “Your paper reminds me of my lecture on fallacies of strategic management research. You committed every one of them.”

13 December 2006 at 7:22 am Peter G. Klein 7 comments

CCSM: Reflections on Day One

| Lasse Lien |

Nicolai recently accused me of being overly positive, and he also committed me to providing real-time reports from the CCSM. So here goes my attempt to display my dark side.

We started out Tuesday with Jay Barney identifying Nicolai’s advantage as his sauce (a TCE sauce, presumably) and advising that the sauce should be bottled (see below). Next the CEO of Lego asked us what would be missed if we — or our organizations — died tomorrow. This produced some unorthodox facial expressions among a lot of the academics present, myself included. Next Peter Lorange of IMD advised businesses to keep things simple, followed by José Santos arguing that firms should become meta-national. I’m not going to take sides, but neither being or becoming meta-national strikes me as particularly simple. This was followed by an over lunch talk by the US Ambassador, a session I couldn’t attend due to neurosis about my own presentation.

We moved on to a discussion of the scientific progress in strategic management. The presentations here ranged from arguing that by way of analogy we are moving beyond the stage of the standard model of particle physics (the R2 of the standard model is so large that it would take a page or so to write down the number), to Peter Abel telling us that knowledge accumulation in strategic management is not significantly different from zero. We then went into paper sessions, were in my opinion we proved both of these assessments wrong. I cannot summarize all the papers presented in the session, but my feeling is that the average quality of the papers presented was at least as high as in the bigger conferences, such as AoM and SMS, but with a much lower variance. So there goes my attempt to come across as negative. . . .