I have created a number blogs to publish useful information. One is a Teaching Blog dedicated to providing past, present and future students useful information. My Research Blog is dedicated to disseminating useful information to other researchers and scholars. A new blog is focused on how to improve forecasts, which is a key strategic skill:… More »
My Notes
Irrational fear: No good at risk
The Economists reviews of “Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear” by Dan Gardner
THE official death toll from the September 11th terrorist attacks in 2001 was 2,974. But in 2002 America’s death toll on the roads grew by more than 1,500—casualties of the terrorism-inspired exodus from safe aeroplanes to dangerous motor cars. A swan washes up on a British shore, dead from bird flu, and the press panics, while the 3,000 people who die every year on the country’s roads (13 times the number of people who have ever died from bird flu) go largely unremarked. Human beings are notoriously bad at dealing with risk. Two new books explore why, and investigate the effects that misunderstanding risks can have on public policy. The first, an excellent work by a Canadian writer, Dan Gardner, is a broad meditation on the nature of risk, beginning with a psychological explanation for why people find it so difficult to cope. Mr Gardner analyses everything from the media’s predilection for irrational scare stories to the cynical use of fear by politicians pushing a particular agenda.
The Power of Richness IV: How Can Qualitative Methods Help us Ask Better Questions
Over 150 people came to the Power of Richness PDWs at each of the last three Academy meetings, drawing from many different divisions and interest groups. With the demand for the workshop running so strong, Diana Day and I will try to organize an All-Academy PDW for the next meeting Annaheim. The format this past… More »
January 17, 2008 · Methodology Research
The Power of a Good Meta-Analysis
Chinese scientists have carried out a powerful meta-analysis and created new knowledge about the chemical pathways that lead to addiction. Can social scientist imitate this model? I am not sure. But certainly we should strive to do so. Dr Wei therefore ran her 396 genes through a database of all known pathways to see which… More »
December 27, 2007 · Psychology Research
Malcom Gladwell Reviews the Problems with IQ Measurements
This is an excellent piece that shows how important it is to actually understand how IQ measures are constructed. Any empirical researcher can learn from the New Zealander who showed how much the alleged genetic intelligence is socially constructed. Read NONE OF THE ABOVE: What I.Q. doesn’t tell you about race.
August 21, 2007 · Management Teaching
Introducing the Meeting Meter?
Are you participating in too many meetings? Are these meetings too long? Time is money and group time costs much more money than the time of a single person. With the Meeting Meter™ you can develop an agenda and calculate the true cost of meetings while they take place. The Meeting Meter™ is a simple… More »
What CEOs are Reading
The common perception is that CEOs are reading the latest popular management books to help them with their difficult job. An article in the New York Times suggests otherwise. I am not sure if the CEOs that Harriet Rubin portrays in here article are representative of all CEOs and I think the title of the article “C.E.O. Libraries Reveal Keys to Success” is an overstatement, but any manager should read what she has to say.
Harriet Rubin: Michael Moritz, the venture capitalist who built a personal $1.5 billion fortune discovering the likes of Google, YouTube, Yahoo and PayPal, and taking them public, may seem preternaturally in tune with new media. But it is the imprint of old media — books by the thousands sprawling through his Bay Area house — that occupies his mind. “My wife calls me the Imelda Marcos of books,” Mr. Moritz said in an interview. “As soon as a book enters our home it is guaranteed a permanent place in our lives. Because I have never been able to part with even one, they have gradually accumulated like sediment.” Serious leaders who are serious readers build personal libraries dedicated to how to think, not how to compete. Ken Lopez, a bookseller in Hadley, Mass., says it is impossible to put together a serious library on almost any subject for less than several hundred thousand dollars. Perhaps that is why — more than their sex lives or bank accounts — chief executives keep their libraries private.
July 19, 2007 · Methodology Research
Charles Tilly’s Writings on Methodology now on the Web
Charles Tilly is one of the most innovative and productive social scientists alive. His research know-how should be passed on to the next generation of researchers, not only to those who are fortunate to take his classes at Columbia University. With the approval of Tilly, Sekou Bermiss and I made electronically available all his writings… More »
April 12, 2007 · Uncategorized Teaching
New School of Strategy & Entrepreneurship launched in Sydney
The UNSW Academic Board has approved the creation of a new School of Strategy and Entrepreneurship within the Faculty of Business (incorporating AGSM) to continue AGSM’s general management teaching and research. To be headed by Associate Professor Peter Murmann, the new school will focus on innovation and entrepreneurship as a subject within general business. Welcoming the move, Professor Alec Cameron, Dean of UNSW’s Faculty of Business (incorporating AGSM), said the new schools’ vision was to be recognised as Australia’s leading cluster of scholarship in the area of strategy and entrepreneurship research, teaching and executive development. “After the integration of AGSM and the Faculty of Commerce and Economics there were several existing schools but none was dedicated to general management and strategy,” said Professor Cameron. “So as part of the integration the idea was to create a separate school, and to include entrepreneurship to highlight the fact that the concerns of the general manager and the entrepreneur were both being addressed and people were being prepared for these roles.”
The Power of Richness III: Crafting Qualitative Research Papers
The large crowds that came to the Power of Richness PDWs in Atlanta and the year before in Hawaii have convinced us there is significant demand in the Academy for learning how to do qualitative research well. This year we will build on the success of our two previous qualitative methods PDWs and create an… More »