Managing Chaos

May 12, 2006

How's Your Workforce IQ?

How's Your Workforce IQ? Lifelong learning has advanced from a nice-to-have to a business essential, write the authors of Workforce Crisis. Their book examines the business implications of trends in the pool of current and future employees. Here's an excerpt:

One of the largest companies in the oil and gas industry, BP LLP (formerly British Petroleum) is a federation of financially successful business units with over 100,000 employees. As BP's corporate leadership knows, size matters only if BP can leverage its knowledge of technology, customer relationships, and business methods across the company—without interfering with business unit autonomy. To promote such knowledge sharing behaviors, BP implemented three explicit "peer processes":

Peer groups of senior managers share know-how across business units and with the Executive Committee.

Peer reviews of specific unit activities or business processes by senior professionals from other units identify strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities to improve or learn from other groups.

Peer assists get the right corporate know-how to the right place at the right time. Anyone can request expert assistance from a peer anywhere in BP, and the in-demand expert must do his best to help.

Such regularly shared knowledge and expertise has bolstered individuals' efforts, enriched customer outcomes, and improved BP's business methods directly. The collaborative learning here is more organic than systematic—that is, embedded in BP's culture and integrated into people's daily work. The increasingly valuable flow of knowledge among businesses and along leadership chains eliminates red tape and makes each business unit faster and more nimble. In short, BP's institutionalized learning through peer processes drives actual business results.

March 22, 2006

Integrative Thinking at Rotman

I've long been impressed and fascinated by Joseph L. Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, and the revolution that they're starting in business education. Rotman, under the leadership of Roger Martin, has refocused their education around the concept of Integrative Thinking. From the Rotman website:

The key job of a leader in today’s climate is to make valid, rather than reliable, choices out of messy, complex situations. Such decisions typically cannot be made from within narrowly-defined functional, regional or operational boundaries. Modern leadership necessitates the flexibility and creativity of Integrative Thinking.

Integrative thinkers build models rather than choose between them. Their models include consideration of numerous elements — customers, employees, competitors, capabilities, cost structures, industry evolution, and regulatory environment — not just a subset of the above. Their models capture the complicated, multi-faceted and multidirectional causal relationships between the key variables in any problem. Integrative thinkers consider the problem as a whole, rather than breaking it down and farming out the parts. Finally, they creatively resolve tensions without making costly trade-offs, turning challenges into opportunities.

At Rotman, our goal is to teach students to become skilled consumers and shapers of models. Our students learn how to audit a model’s logic in order to decide whether to use it, and if necessary, how to refine it. We teach them that when models clash, it is an opportunity to build new, more powerful models for understanding the messy world that we face. Equipped with skills in model building, our graduates are better positioned than their counterparts to diagnose the implicit models behind decisions and strategies; to assess the validity of models; to identify the ways in which the model in question conflicts with their own; and to build new models that are more powerful.

In short, the Rotman School is teaching business students to think in unique new ways, and they will be equipped to encourage new and valuable ways of thinking in their organizations.

The Rotman School’s evolving and innovative curriculum continues to undergo scrutiny and updates. We view our students as our partners in building and shaping our offerings. Our graduates leave the Rotman School assured in the knowledge that they are equipped to tackle all facets of business problems in order to find creative solutions.

This is a significant change from standard business education, where the Finance class teaches you that all problems have a financial solution, Marketing class teaches you that all problems have a Marketing solution, and on and on. Real world experience, of which many business school faculty have none, shows that problems rarely exist within a single domain, but are normally spread out across multiple business areas. Solutions require work across multiple business areas, not a slew of single-topic experts.

Four folks at Rotman, Lesya Balych-Cooper, Kirsty Duncan, Alison Kempler, and Rod Lohin, expand upon this in a proposal to the Aspen Institute:

The Context

At the Rotman School, we have significantly revised our curriculum, moving towards a program that emphasizes “integrative thinking” rather than a primarily case-based or functional approach. Future business leaders are taught how to think about the whole organization rather than the parts. In keeping with this approach, we would like to focus on the big picture and not on subsets of sustainability (e.g., specific social issues or impacts, or specific approaches such as stakeholder relations).

The Goal

Our goal will be to develop a useful model for business leadership in a sustainable global society. Such a model will provide the basis for an improved curriculum for current and future business leaders, including students, alumni and other members of the business community.

Clearly, this is no small task. To do this, we will engage senior faculty, staff and business leaders to conduct new research, hold seminars and conferences with academics and executives, and develop new curricular content and materials. These activities will be carried out leveraging our related networks and assets, including the AIC Institute for Leadership, the CCMF Center for Integrative Thinking, the Clarkson Center for Business Ethics & Board Effectiveness, and with the involvement of our students, alumni and the business community. We also look forward to learning from, and working with, the other members of the Aspen Institute’s TIP network in the development of all our important projects.

The Result

We believe that the creation of a model for business leadership in a sustainable global society is a key opportunity for influencing management education and the way business is conducted.

Success will be measured by products, profile and impact. As we engage in the process, there would be a number of possible interim products: research and discussion papers, published papers, reports from conferences and seminars, curriculum recommendations and changes, and new curricular content and materials for current students and business executives. We would also seek to build profile for these issues with our internal and external marketplaces.

Ultimately, impact is everything. The project’s success would not only be determined by the development of a new conceptual model, but also by the use of that model in our curriculum and by current and future business leaders who come into contact with Rotman. Beyond Rotman, we will look for our impact on other schools and business leaders more broadly through the Aspen TIP coalition and by the number of references to our publications and ideas in journals.

For more information on Rotman and the work being done there, they publish Rotman magazine, similar to the Harvard Business Review. Back issues can be downloaded from their website, unlike HBR!

March 16, 2006

From Acceptance Letters to iTunes

The Chronicle of Higher Education is reporting that Fitchburg State College in Fitchburg, MA, has done away with the college acceptance letter, and replaced it with a podcast from iTunes. From their Wired Campus blog:

Pity the poor college acceptance letter. Sure, it's timeless and classy, but it's slowly losing ground to its more convenient little sibling, the e-mail announcement. And now, thanks to an odd new plan at Fitchburg State College, the old-fashioned letter will also have to compete with the academic world's tech obsession du jour -- the podcast.

This month, more than 1,000 students accepted to the college will receive e-mail messages that direct them to iTunes, Apple's popular music store. There, the students will find a podcast in which Robert V. Antonucci, the college's president, lets them know that they've made the cut.

July 21, 2005

PMBA 40 Released

Josh Kaufman has released the final(?) version of his Personal MBA book list here. The list of 40 books to read for self-education goes hand-in-hand with a Change This manifesto that he says has been approved and will be posted shortly.

Kaufman has also registered PersonalMBA.com, which will be the new home for the project.

Great site, well worth taking the time to check out and bookmark.

July 08, 2005

Are B-Schools Still Relevant?

In a recent Harvard Business School Working Knowledge article, Professor Jim Heskett asks a question that is being heard a lot these days: Have business schools lost their relevance?

Professor Heskett asks:

First, have business schools in general lost their relevance? Are they preparing graduates in useful ways for careers in management? If there is room for improvement, can it be achieved within the "academy," where business schools seem to be caught in a tug-of-war between the "scientific" and "professional" models? Or will it increasingly be achieved in the institutions created and run by large business enterprises to train not only their own employees but those of other organizations as well?

He also quotes from a New York Times interview with Professor Jeffrey Garten, dean of the Yale School of Management:

The real question is how to be relevant. . . . I was an investment banker for fifteen years. I was in four presidential administrations. But this job has been the most difficult of all.

...which either says something about the relevance of business education, or says quite a bit about the four US Presidents he served under. But I digress...

Heskett's interview invites feedback from readers here.