It seems that social science disciplines suffer from “Plato’s disease.” There is the belief that behind all of the noise there are same basic abstract principles that unify the discipline, and the goal of research is to discover those grand principles.

The trouble is that by looking at more and more abstract principles, one becomes more and more detached from messing and complex reality, which may be a problem if unifying abstract principles do not exist and all that is “real” is messy reality.

The whole area of how practitioners engage in sense-making about the problems they are facing is fascinating to me. You seem to suggest that they put little thought into it, suggesting some sort of heuristics or rules of thumb might be in operation.

Could the goal of MBA education be to program managers with (better) heuristics? Of course, there must be other influences, including the legendary school of hard knocks.

Anyway, I don’t see an Exclusive OR problem here: Rigour OR applied? Theory OR practice? To me, it’s rather a question of how to mix, combine, connect them — for better results.

I think people in academia have great potential to solve problems precisely because the environment, the economy are different there. Problems are approached from a different perspective, a bit like having a smörgåsbord where you can choose dishes according to your taste and if you like one then you can go back for some more.

The relation to problems when you work in industry is a lot more strained and therefore solutions tend to be ad-hoc. You seldom come to choose your problems, instead they jump at you as in an arcade game; as soon as you shoot one down the next one arrives, you just shoot without thinking (much) ~:-o

I lalso earned more in academia and enjoy academia much more. (I guess that’s why I’m still here!) However, I think the pendulum may have swung too far towards rigor and needs to swing back towards the applied end. I am just not sure how to achieve this or whether others feel it is a problem.

Your experience with IMD is interesting. I would have thought they you would have been most likely to mix practice (i.e. consulting) with an academic life at a place like IMD. I guess not.

Where did you learn more, what brought you more insights, what was more enjoyable — your work as a researcher at university or your work as a practitioner in industry?

I guess everyone would have his own answers to this question and I don’t expect all to agree.

Sometimes I notice that I understand problems better when I encounter them face to face. And sometimes I notice that I arrive at better solutions when I step back to gain a perspective from the side.

I think academic institutions should give their people the possibility to spend some time in practice, at one’s own discretion.

Some time ago IMD-Lausanne posted an advert for some open research positions. I’ve always had an interest in research and teaching, but I also didn’t want to lose my practical touch, so I asked the person from HR whether it was possible to mix the job with practical work away from the school. Unfortunately, it turned out that they didn’t have a well defined provision for that.