Management Styles: Bob Knight vs. Coach K
| Peter Klein |
Two of the most successful US college basketball coaches, Bob Knight and Mike Krzyzewski (Coach K), are as well known for their management styles as for their on-court success. Knight (the legendary Indiana University coach now at Texas Tech.) is the in-your-face, marine-style drill sergeant who tears his players down only to build them back up. Duke’s Krzyzewski (a former Knight assistant) prefers to nurture and encourage his players, trying to establish a caring, family-style atmosphere.
Upon pondering these facts, what’s a good management scholar to do? Why, make a leadership case out of them, of course. (more…)
Nicolai’s Secret Life
| Peter Klein |
My co-blogger claims to be a hard-nosed, logical, anti-postmodern realist, but guess what? He has secretly authored a book — in German, no less! — on “Women Who Changed the World,” profiles of feminist intellectuals and activists such as Virginia Woolf, Lou Andreas-Salomé, Bertha von Suttner, and Ellen Key. Here’s the proof. Perhaps he thought by writing the book in German, as Frauen, die die Welt verändern, we wouldn’t find out. Nice try, Nicolai!
Oh, wait, never mind, this is actually an Amazon.co.uk database error. The real author is Katharina Kaminski. (Or is that a pseudonym?)
Scientific Progress in Strategic Management Bleg
| Nicolai Foss |
I have little doubt that strategic management as a field of inquiry has made significant strides forward in the last 3-4 decades. Let’s just ambitiously assert that it has made “scientific progress.” One has little doubt that an overwhelming majority of the Academy of Management’s perhaps dominant division, the Business Policy and Strategy Division, would agree with this assessment. This is not just bias; the BPS may be important because strategic management is a scientific success story. But on what grounds can we assert this? Here are some possibilities: (more…)
Teaching Evaluations: Nationality Discounts and Premia?
| Nicolai Foss |
As is, I suppose, the case with most of the readers of this blog, I am subject to the discipline of student evaluations. I tend to find them pretty useless because their information content is rather low and because the whole process is very noisy and biased, although I do admit that they are a powerful tool for getting rid of teachers who are placed at the left tail of the quality distribution (let me anticipate a possible misunderstanding: I am usually rated in the opposite end of the distribution).
Here is a possible example of bias: I have often observed, and so have many colleagues with whom I have discussed the matter, what seems to be a nationality premium. (more…)
Roundup of Interesting Links
| Peter Klein |
Besides the links in the right-hand-side column below, O&M readers may find the following of interest:
- Work Matters by Bob Sutton, Co-Director of Stanford University’s Center for Work, Technology, and Organization
- Marketing Profs Daily Fix Blog by, you guessed it, a group of marketing professors
- Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science, for the research-methods geek in all of us
- Businesspundit, a general-interest site
Announcing the New O&M Guest Blogger: Lasse Lien
| Nicolai Foss |
Peter and I are privileged to have been joined here at O&M by some magnificent guest bloggers, first Joe Mahoney and currently Dick Langlois. We will soon be joined by an additional guest blogger, namely Associate Professor Lasse Lien, PhD, Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration, no doubt one of the smartest (and nicest) Norwegian business administration scholars
Lasse is a friend of Peter and I. Peter has written a series of fine papers with Lasse, all on aspects of diversification. These have their root in Lasse’s PhD thesis on which I was lucky to serve as a supervisor and which he defended in 2004. I am also a colleague with Lasse at the Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration.
Lasse’s main interest is empirical research practice (don’t expect too many blog posts on cultural conservatism, Misesian praxeology or Lockian/Rothbardian self-ownership from him). He has already announced that he has something provocative in store. We look forward to it, and welcome him at O&M.
Academic Insults: Gordon Tullock Edition
| Peter Klein |
Nicolai recently started a thread on academic insults. Alex Tabarrok has created one exclusively for insults delivered by Gordon Tullock, a legendary put-down artist. To wit:
“Gordon,” I asked, “do you think we should ban child labor?” “No, keep working.”
The other day Gordon asked me to read one of his papers and I pointed out a few typos. “Excellent,” he said, “this will surely be your greatest contribution to economics.”
Gordon is prone to pressing people with difficult questions. One of my colleagues responded, “Gordon, I’m not that good at thinking on my feet.” Without missing a beat Gordon pulled up a chair and said “well sit down and we’ll see how you do then.”
Bob Lawson adds this one:
After going through the model and somewhat apologetically presenting my results which didn’t show what the model predicted. Gordon says to me, “That’s ok, Bob, a lot of other people haven’t found that result either.”
I Know Just What You Mean
| Peter Klein |
Headline of the day, from newsvine.com:
Redmond: FOSS makes our brain hurt
(Actually FOSS here means Free Open-Source Software and the story’s about Microsoft. But it could have just as easily been about Foss.)
Does France Have a Silicon Valley?
| Peter Klein |
Jeremy Fain says yes, in southwest Paris. Not quite Silicon Valley, perhaps, but an important innovation cluster nonetheless.
I find this sort of discussion interesting, but am troubled by the “How-can-we-create-another-Silicon-Valley” approach so common in the clustering literature. The assumption is that technology clusters are created, or at least encouraged, by government policy, and that such policies that are in principle replicable. By contrast, if clusters emerge from the bottom up, there is little that policymakers can do, besides removing obstacles to entrepreneurial activity. (See Desrochers and Sautet, “Cluster-Based Economic Strategy, Facilitation Policy and the Market Process.”)
Update: Austan Goolsbee says investing in universities is not likely to produce the next Silicon Valley.
NYU Journal of Law and Liberty
| Peter Klein |
The NYU Journal of Law and Liberty is a new journal focusing on classical liberal legal scholarship. Volume 1, Number 1 revisits Lochner v. New York, the landmark 1905 case that defended the freedom of contract and became, to its critics, a hated symbol of heartless, dog-eat-dog capitalism. (During the New Deal the word “Lochner” meant about what “Enron” means today.) Volume 1, Number 2 contains an interesting piece by Mario Rizzo, “The Problem of Moral Dirigisme: A New Argument Against Moralistic Legislation,” which opens thusly:
This Article applies a theory of rational choice to moral decision making. In this theory, agents act primarily on local and personal knowledge to instantiate moral principles, virtues, and moral goods. The State may seek to prevent them from acting as they independently determine by prescribing or proscribing certain conduct by formal legal means. If its purpose is to ensure that people act morally or become better persons, we call this “moral dirigisme.” Our thesis is that the need to use decentralized knowledge to determine the moral status of an act makes the task of the moral dirigiste well-nigh impossible.
“Critical” This and “Critical” That
| Nicolai Foss |
At the ongoing Academy of Management Meetings there are a number of sessions with titles such as “Critical Perspectives on Power in Organizations.” Of course, we all know that “critical” is a code-word for left-leaning (often extremely so) work on the issues with which social science deals, in the traditions of mainly European lefty and muzzy sociologists and philosophers, such as Foucault, Habermas, etc.
Still, I am somewhat disturbed that a scholarly organization, such as the AoM, can accept session titles of these kind. The clear implication of these kind of titles is that the rest of us, who may also be interested in, say, “power in organizations,” are not really critical — which to me means that we are not serious scholars. That implication is evidently preposterous, particularly given the low level of scholarship that often characterizes so-called “critical studies,” including those in management.
Architecture
| Richard Langlois |
I too am at the Academy of Management meeting in Atlanta. And I have already run into Peter and Nicolai more than once.
It occurred to me that I ought to write about whatever important new idea I’ve picked up here. I now think that I see such an idea, and it would come under the heading of architecture. (more…)
Joel Klein, Monopolist
| Peter Klein |
Joel Klein does not have a well-developed sense of irony. As Clinton Administration antitrust czar, he became a household name with his relentless pursuit of Microsoft, a $40 billion company with 70,000 employees in 100 countries. Today Klein heads the New York City public school system, a conglomeration of 1,450 schools with 136,000 employees, 1.1 million students, and a $15 billion operating budget. Oh, did I mention that it’s a monopoly? Not a private company with a large market share, but an actual monopoly, an organization protected from competition by an exclusive government franchise.
Klein was Distinguished Executive Speaker at tonight’s Academy of Management Convocation, which I attended. The speech was disappointing — not because of Klein’s political philosophy, which I don’t share — but because it was a shallow, fluffy talk about “leadership,” “accountability,” “change agents,” and the like. (I did enjoy his voice, however, a smoother version of Jimmy Durante’s.) (more…)
Thoughts on Stakeholder Theory
| Peter Klein |
Yesterday I attended the Academy of Management session “Stakeholders: The Keys to Effective Strategy and Performance Measurement.” Panelists included Joe Mahoney, Russ Coff, Christos Pitelis, Tom Donaldson, Amy Hillman, Sybille Sachs, and Kathryn Pavolovich. I’m pretty much an unreconstructed Friedmanite on this issue so I went to raise my consciousness.
What I learned was interesting, but I still have several questions about stakeholder theory, at least in its normative version. (more…)
New Entrepreneurship Journal
| Nicolai Foss |
I have been hearing the rumours for some time, but now it is an established fact: I just picked up a flyer annoucing the new Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal.
Sounds familiar? Not surprising, as this is launched as a sister journal to the Strategic Management Journal (the flyer displays the frontpages of both journals) with overlapping editors (Dan Schendel and Michael Hitt are the co-editors, the senior advisory board consists of Howard Aldrich, Arnold Cooper, Morton Kamien, Robert Strom and Michael Tushman). The launch of the new journal is so recent that it doesn’t even have a homepage with the publisher (Wiley).
Airport Security Quote of the Day
| Peter Klein |
From Chris Westley: “Every time I take off my shoes in the security screening process at the airport, I find it consoling to remind myself that at least Richard Reid wasn’t wearing an underwear bomb.”
Update: Civil libertarians warn that new passenger screening technologies might as well be underwear searches.
Private and Public Investment in R&D, Crime-Prevention Division
| Peter Klein |
Further to Nicolai’s post on terrorists and cops: Government security officials have attenuated incentives not only for effort, but also for innovation. Just yesterday I read about the new Volvo S80, which has a special key fob that beeps when someone is hiding in the locked car (using a heartbeat sensor). Can you imagine the police coming up with that?
More generally, Bruce Benson offers compelling evidence, in his 1998 book To Serve and Protect, that the reduction in crime in the US over the last decade and a half owes little to improved police protection, but is due instead to increased investments in private security. (See also Benson’s short piece “Why Crime Declines.”)
Property Rights at the AoM
| Nicolai Foss |
A host of economics approaches have been influential in strategic management research, inclucing transaction cost economics, and the highly overlapping approaches of information economics, game theory, and industrial organization theory.
However, property rights economics as developed by Ronald Coase, Harold Demsetz, Steven Cheung, and its perhaps most sophisticated contemporary proponent, Yoram Barzel, has not been much used in strategic management, save for discussions of intellectual property rights (a big problem with communicating principles of property rights economics is that most academics immediately associate to IPR which, of course, is just a small subset of the many applications of property rights economics).
Things may be changing, however. (more…)
Where Are the Academic Management Blogs?
| Peter Klein |
Our inaugural post noted the dearth of academic blogs in management, strategy, and other parts of business administration, compared with the many in economics and law. Tonight witnessed a gathering of the near-universe of academic management bloggers — Nicolai, Teppo Felin of orgtheory.net, and myself (Brayden King joins us later) — at the Academy of Management meeting in Atlanta. Why, we asked ourselves, are there so few academic management blogs?
One possibility is opportunity cost. Economists and law professors have fewer consulting opportunities than management professors, and hence more time for blogging. Another is that bloggers appropriate very little of the value their blogs create (OK, assume, arguendo, positive value creation), and business-school professors are too savvy to give away knowledge for free. (Of course, while that might apply to researchers in corporate strategy, which is all about making money, it hardly applies to those in organizational behavior and the other “softer” areas of management.)
I suspect another explanation. Blogging requires a certain temperment, a particular way of thinking. The best bloggers have not only catholic interests, but also — more important — a belief that they can explain a variety of interesting and important phenomena with a few basic principles, consistently applied, and in just a short paragraph or two. This is exactly the way most economists think. “Give me a simple model, and I can explain the world.” Those who prefer more subtle, complex, and ambiguous modes of thought are apt to find blogging an unsatisfying pursuit.
Why Are Terrorists More Inventive Than Cops?
| Nicolai Foss |
National Review Online has an interesting symposium, “Plans Destroyed,” on yesterday’s terror plot (which caused me to spend 3 hours in the airport here in Atlanta; well, perhaps not the worst way to spend your time in Atlanta ;-)). Daniel Pipes offers his reflections, arguing that
Airplanes represent an outdated target because passenger screening techniques quickly adapt to threats. As soon as terrorists implement new techniques (box-cutters, shoe-bombs, liquid components), security promptly blocks them … Conversely, trains, subways, and buses, as shown by attacks in Madrid, London, and Bombay, offer far richer opportunities for terrorists, for access to them can never be so strictly controlled as to aircraft.
Indeed; but as he points out himself terrorists do target planes, and “One cannot but wonder, however, why creatively, cops invariably lag behind criminals.” Pipes is surely not the first to make this observation; however, as far as I know nobody has tried to seriously answer it.
One answer may be that criminals are smarter than cops. For petty criminals that is probably very far from the truth. For terrorists it may come a bit closer to the truth: Many of today’s terrorists are likely to be better educated than many, perhaps most, cops. Still, intelligence agencies have, of course, highly educated experts employed.
Rather than a capability explanation, the explanation may turn on incentives/property rights. Intelligence officers are government bureaucrats with twarthed incentives to think ahead of highly motivated terrorists (even if their motivation is wholly derived from the expectation of other-worldly rewards). Career ladders may, perhaps, provide incentives, but these are extremely blunt. May this be an argument for privatizing intelligence services?
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