Bridgman, Cummings, and McLaughlin in their 2016 paper about the case method tell us that the conventional history of the development of business case teaching is missing some vital elements. I think it is probably fair to say, as they do, that cases nowadays tend to be written largely from the perspective of management. There…
What caused the classic polling disaster?
The Literary Digest’s prediction that Republican Alf Landon would beat the incumbent Democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt in a landslide in 1936 rates as arguably the biggest disaster of opinion polling. Rather than a landslide for Landon instead Roosevelt earned a rather comfortable win. It didn’t just get the winner wrong, the poll was stunningly…
Leadership in Politics
Real world examples often provide concepts that apply in business. I worked in politics for many years and I think that there are lessons for educational and commercial leadership. Good political leaders try and seize temporary opportunities, their dramatic actions make for exciting highs when successful and dramatic lows when not. Doris Kearns Goodwin gives…
Improving How We See The World
Today I’ll share some advice from Hans Rosling’s wonderful book Factfulness. This advocates that the world is getting better, and despite the challenges we need to understand this to see what is working and do more of it. Rosling shows a positive view from the data but how can we get to the positive view…
A Positive View of the World Using Facts
I thought Han Rosling’s book (written with his son and daughter in law) ‘Factfulness’ was wonderful. It was engagingly written but the real joy was the author’s ability to explain the world using data rather than hunches and pre-conceptions. It may come as a great surprise to many that Rosling’s take on the world is…
Evolutionary Thinking in Business
I am interested in evolutionary thinking in business. A key thing to bear in mind is that business evolution is a little different to biological evolution. Market competition is not the same as competition in nature, not least in its more rapid timeframes. So while some similar concepts exist in both, e.g., selection pressure changing…
Net Promoter and lessons for academic research
I value academic work that speaks to the issues of managers and others outside of academia. The Net Promoter Score/System (NPS) is widely used by managers and so it can be valuable when academics look into this metric. We (I worked with Charan Bagga now at Calgary, and Alina Nastasoiu now at Booking.com) reviewed the…
The Influence of Marketing on Managers
The history of business, especially marketing, thought is an interesting topic to me. Modern text analytics techniques can help us get a better understanding of what has happened — if I understand correctly historians seem to be increasing using them. A frequent co-author of mine, Xin Wang, his PhD student, Joseph Ryoo, and Abhishek Borah,…
Colleges and Universities
Andrew Delbanco’s discussion of college in the US is at its most interesting discussing the origins of college. He is keen to emphasize that college and university is not the same thing. He suggests that college, a place for undergraduate education, developed from early American Puritan ideals. This was a place for moral and intellectual…
The Sokal Hoax
A fascinating event in academic history was the Sokal Hoax. In this a physicist, who had become annoyed with ideas that reality is completely socially constructed, got published in a cultural studies journal. Before we celebrate his inter-disciplinarity he was satirizing social studies. The text he sent was gibberish. As he said; “Nowhere in [the…