Do managers ignore the business schools?
There's an interesting piece in the FT here today arguing that most managers completely ignore what the business schools put out in terms of research.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/23019972-2555-11e0-93ae-00144feab49a.html#axzz...
"They offered three reasons. First, management was not a profession. Unlike doctors, lawyers or engineers, managers did not need qualifications from professional schools and so paid little attention to them.
Second, management was not a science. Medicine and engineering lent themselves to rigorous experimentation. Human behaviour – and therefore business – was unpredictable and produced less compellingly clear-cut research.
Third, business schools were desperate for respect from other academic disciplines and needed to produce the sort of arcane research that universities demanded. Junior faculty said they would not win tenure if they wrote books that managers actually wanted to use."
Do you ignore the business schools?
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There's a report on this topic by the way from the London Business School.
http://jab.sagepub.com/content/early/2010/11/18/0021886310388162.abstract
There is growing concern within the Academy of Management that a big and growing gap exists between management research and practice. The persistence of this gap is a mystery! Over the past 20 years, literally hundreds of ideas have been proposed to close it. Yet nothing seems to work and according to some, the gap continues to grow. Why is that? Is it that all the ideas proposed are bad or are we simply guilty of not implementing our own ideas in a manifestation of the “knowledge–doing gap”? In this article, the author proposes that a much more serious issue may be at work. Specifically, the author argues that our research is (sufficiently) relevant but still not what our customers (i.e., the managers) want or need. The gap that exists is not between rigorous and relevant research; it is between relevant and useful knowledge. For our (relevant) research to become managerially useful, it still needs to go through a transformation. Unfortunately, academics are not good at this transformation process. This has a serious implication on what we actually need to do to make our research more managerially useful.
Having come into academia late from an International Business Career and now a Post Graduate Tutor in Applied Business Projects several thoughts come to mind.
Universities do not practice what they teach - in most cases the business faculty or school are ignored by university managers. Their organisational research is not used to run the departments.
There are no exemplars so that business can see best practice or latest research in action as applied to them.
The systems from registration to graduation are often bureaucratic and inflexible – HR if it exists is often locked into processes that restrict freedom and innovation.
Time scales – business is 24/7 and often if a business want assistance they have to wait until the next semester.
This not to say that there is not a lot of very good research and work done in academia. But without balancing the immediacy of business with academia the perceptions referred to will continue to exist.
The top schools do better at this and do engage business but again this tends to be the business elite rather than SME’s, the business power houses.
I have one main measure for Applied Business Project, when complete did the business in which it was done implement the recommendations or consign to the waste bin.
I think the universities that do the research could do an awful lot more to promote the research they produce and make it available to people. For instance I looked on the London Business School research page yesterday, and they didn't even have an RSS feed. The whole page made it very difficult to read even abstracts of the research. It's no wonder they don't gain traction when the marketing is so poor.
Sure I read on here not that long ago that many managers don't read management books anyway so it's perhaps hardly surprising. I get the sense that many managers are so snowed under with the pace of working life that they simply don't allocate the time to learn what is happening in the managerial marketplace. In fairness, there are also managers who not only use research data, but contribute original thinking as well but they are few and far between.
There's another piece in the FT this morning on this issue.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/f42b4028-35fb-11e0-b67c-00144feabdc0.html#axzz...
Managers are far more interested in pattern recognition. Does this configuration of external circumstances mesh with my particular configuration of strategies and actions to produce a successful outcome for my company? That is why managers much prefer to read articles in managerial journals that are based on in-depth case studies where there are more variables than observations, rather than large sample statistical studies with many more observations than variables.
Do you agree? Are case studies the best way to communicate research to managers?