This week, we take a look at blogs written by business school professors:
“Student as customer” metaphor chaps his hide — Dr. Gad Saad, associate professor of marketing at the John Molson School of Business at Concordia University, offers a rant on the Psychology Today blog about the growing tendency to treat MBA students as customers. This new model translates into shorter, accelerated programs considered “marketable” degrees, and requires that “service providers” (a.k.a. professors) pamper and bend to their executive MBA students’ every whim. “Market realities should not continue to dilute the purity of the educational process,” Saad argues.
The pros and cons of group brainstorming — Stanford GSB professor and author of “The No Asshole Rule” Bob Sutton takes a look at various studies on the effectiveness of brainstorming and concludes that the technique seems moderately useful “in the right hands, in the right organization, and as part of a bigger creative process.”
The challenge: to tweet 100 times in a single day — Andrew McAfee, associate professor in the technology and operations area at Harvard Business School, lost a bet with a friend and will soon be forced out of his comfort zone with the 100-tweet challenge. But how to tweet about something other than the minutia of the day, as so many do? “Am I wrong that just a little self-policing against narcissism would increase the value of the Twitterverse immensely?,” McAfee asks.
Dealing with information overload — Strategy professor Freek Vermeulen of London Business School blogs about becoming swamped with information in our “knowledge economy,” which is a problem for both those seeking the information and those providing it. As a provider, how can you make yourself seen and heard in the information quagmire, he asks. Vermeulen taps into the research of professors Morten Hansen and Martine Haas–formerly of Harvard Business School–who came up with clear insights into what works and what doesn’t.
Business theories and conundrums in film and TV — In his blog The Business of America is Business, MIT Sloan School of Management professor Starling David Hunter looks at managing group and intergroup conflict in House, M.D.; leadership traits in Ugly Betty; stages of group development in Ocean’s 11; and mentoring in V for Vendetta. There are several entries under this topic, all worth a read.
