..and so does this blogging thing. This is my last blog, and I’ll be sharing my experiences and give a few thoughts on the paper and the confrontation lecture.
When this course started out I had no idea what to really expect when Wolters was giving his opening lecture. I remember I was thinking..what the hell? Did I sign up for the right master? I can say that I’m quite sure now that i made a good choice. After years of just ‘learning and applying’ there was now a whole critical new view. We had learned this already a bit, but it was never the main subject of a course. Therefore I think its good that we finally had a course like this. Why study management? I hope you found some answers to this question aswell. I think I did, atleast. The challenges were sometimes hard, sometimes they were weird, sometimes they were easy..but above all, they were real challenges! I found it very refreshing to go through a course that has these elements in it, and i must say that I enjoyed this course a whole lot more then the other course, SCD.
Good, we ain’t done yet. There still is a paper to be delivered. Don’t worry Marianne, I don’t got anything on paper yet either. I do have it all in my head though. I’ll try to give you a bit of a walkthrough. I start my paper with a general introduction, studying the actual word. After that, I present the various stuff a guru does, and how they tell it. I think I zoom in on one guru in particular here. Then I will try to incorporate soem concepts from the Bad Management Theories Destroy Good Management Practices article. Explain why there is a need for gurus, citing different articles, both scientific and regular. Lastly, I will present my empircal findings and give a conclusion. Yes, I know it looks a bit vague right now, but everything is under control.
As for the final confrontation lecture, i think Marianne posted some good suggestions for questions. I think this is a very good one:
What is the role of the empirical investigation; to what extent should the empirical investigation support the findings from literature. Should it just give a nice taste to the paper or is this a far more important element in the paper?
As for how we can prodice a good paper..I think two of the most important things are being original, and keep in midn who your audience is. Sell your paper like a true guru!
My paper: As I didn’t find the time to begin with writing the paper earlier in this course, I will start next monday (Gladfully I saw someone else also begins next week!). Of course, I did do a lot in the meanwhile and in this post I would like to summarize a bit what I will do to complete my final paper before the deadline. As the Quest-ion is build up with some sub-questions I will use these questions as the ‘red line’ in my paper.
Chapter 1: what a management guru actually is, what they do, what is written about them in literature or newspapers/magazines, and what makes them differ from managers and academic people. Here I will use my findings from the empirical investigation as this shows differences between the businessworld and the academic world.
Chapter 2: what their value is according to the management/practical view ánd the more philosophical view (using the blackboard article). Here I will discuss about 3 articles per view. Here I will also use the findings from the empirical investigation.
Chapter 3: how to become one. I found an interesting article about ‘telling stories’, which stipulates several factors used in a live presentation of a guru, which could be used when you become a guru. I don’t know yet if I will focus on the ’story telling’ or make it a sum of several articles which address the issue of the way you become a managementguru.
Chapter 4: conclusion. Which will also give an answer on the question why someone would study management. The mainquestion of the course.
The most important thing is to keep the paper understandable, with ‘Jip & Janneke’-language.
Questions for the final confrontation lecture:
- What is the role of the empirical investigation; to what extent should the empirical investigation support the findings from literature. Should it just give a nice taste to the paper or is this a far more important element in the paper?
- To what extent should we speak in general about the gurus or should we focus on specific aspects/factors/gurus? I think for example, a layperson would prefer a general answer because this is simple to understand. As you focus, you can’t say something about ‘the managementgurus’. But maybe it is hard to be general because of the bulk of information/literature about the gurus.
- How to write in laypersons language? (This question was also marked by Wolters himself). What is the role of academical findings and what do laypersons think of the use of academic literature. Are citations possible, when you talk to a layperson?
- What are the assessmentcriteria for the paper? What are the main points to make your paper good.
What kind of questions do you think we can ask in the lecture?
My experiences from Challenge 4...Unfortunately I can’t show my video as the company I visited (180 Amsterdam; a marketing/communication firm) has to keep their businessproducts and ideas confidential because their clients appreciate that. But!…. I can tell you about my findings in a general way. I experienced a great dynamic international culture with at least 22 nationalities walking around there. I walked in during lunchtime (12.57pm) and noticed a lot of employees walking or hanging around with spaghetti, soup or nice sandwiches. After a while people began to stress, because someone important would visit the company (make everything allright before he comes up!) and some deadlines for meetings where passed and had to be extended. Other meetings had to be cancelled. Those stressing situations asked from the employees to be flexible and creative. Another interesting thing I noted during my visit, was ‘the stairs’ in the building. In the middle of the building there was a stairs, and this seemed to function as a meetingpoint where people could chat, decide, overthink, motivate others, contact, etcetera. You could stand there for about 5 minutes and hear a lot of the ‘insides’ of the company, the relations between the employees, their struggles with cultural differences, their conflicting issues or their jokes to keep the atmosphere nice.
I would like to thank Thelma who was so kind to show me the company and her colleagues! Nice to meet your friendly colleagues and to see the fantastic place where you work.
Link the challenge with our paper…..I think this experience (challenge 4) showed us how complex the daily practice of an organization can be and that the dynamic environment of a company can enforce or create problems which you need to solve. To solve the problems you can read a book of a managementguru or take a look at academic results written in academic articles. I think I would prefer the managementguru book as it would be a fast and simple way to understand the complex problem and get tools to solve the problem. Academic articles are mostly too extensive and not moralistic/pragmatic.
Later on this day I will make a post about the final paper and the questions for our final confrontation lecture.
The weeks passed by very quickly because this is my last post already and this time I want to focus on the compulsory paper. So I chose to read the compulsory paper of Sumantra Ghoshal. It was about bad management theories destroying good management practices.
Just only by reading the title of the article, I tried to make a link with our quest. It actually made me think if a management guru could be an asset for causing bad management theory that would destroy good management practices?
According to Goshal, “the theory is wrong, the truth is preserved for discovery by someone else. In contrast, a management theory –if it gains sufficient currency- changes the behaviors of managers who start acting in accordance with the theory”. I think this is a part where in fact a management guru can play a role within. This is because a management guru has the ability to persuade people to accept and to use a theory. But actually I don’t think a management guru can be the cause of developing bad management theories that destroys good management practices. Since this statement is from my opinion a bit subjective. This is because management theory can be good as well as bad. I think this is depending how managers interpret the theory and when they apply the theory wrong in practice then it will be often marked as a bad management theory because it is “destroying” good management practices or having negative effects on the practice. If a management theory is used and it leads to good results then it will be marked as stimulating good management practices. So I think this is depending what the purpose is for using a manager to use a certain theory and the way they apply it. From my point of view can every management theory or other scientific theories be bad as well as good for the practice. I find it very awkward that bad management theories or a negative way a theory is used are often discussed in articles in stead of discussing the positive and good effects of theories or methods.
Because of our confrontation lecture up coming Monday, I want to talk about what kind of questions I have for the lecture. There are some points that I have doubts about, for example the empirical research and using a compulsory paper.
Actually I want to know what exactly of our empirical research we need to use in the compulsory paper. Do we need to discuss the entire research or just the results? Of course I will add my research as enclosure.
The second issue is that I actually don’t understand why we need to use a compulsory paper in our paper. From my opinion I don’t think the given papers on BB are important to our quest.
Hopefully we can give each other ideas about how to write the paper for a layperson. I think it’s quite difficult because of our background. We are or I’m used to write for persons who are already have the knowledge or expertise about a certain topic.
Finally, my last point that I really question about is that the purpose of the paper. Needs the paper to be written in order to convince the laypersons that studying management studies make senses and /or convincing them that we are capable in understanding en answering the question and persuade them that we are right?
Hope to see you all Monday. And good luck with the final paper.
No, I’m not talking about the Dutch Taptoe or other military trumpet sounds. It’s just the last post on this blog. I thought it would be fun to use this to look back on the five weeks we camped on this weblog and reflect a little on the process.
When we first started and had to pick a Quest-ion, the management guru thing had my immediate interest. The more I thought about it, the more I realised how surprisingly it in fact is that something as a management guru exists. Or that we ‘invented’ the concept (which is in fact a construct) of management gurus. After all, management gurus aren’t inevitable doomed to exist, whether we named it or not. I mean, things like the air we breath or the sun we look at isn’t there because we identified it, but wouldn’t also be there if we had no idea it was – and off course there were times we indeed didn’t. In the case of the subject of our Quest, the management gurus, this works the other way around: because we named it, because we invented it, the concept exists.
From the beginning of this Quest, I tried to really look beyond the concept of management gurus and not take anything for granted – including the gurus themselves. That resulted occasionally in really abstract, conceptual and/or philosophical wonderings which I can imagine weren’t always easy to follow. I did however try to derive assumptions from that. I liked this way of working and I realise this is (at least partly) possible because of the way the course was structured and organized. I like the idea of a ‘simple Question’ and the laymen approach, although I do think some assignments crossed some lines.
What’s left to do now in the next week is writing the final paper. The objective is threefold: it has to be convincing for laymen, it has to be scientific and it has to show that management research in general makes sense. The problem with these objectives is that some of them are opposed to each other. Writing scientific means in most cases that it could be hard to follow for laymen. And try to show that the research of management is actually useful may be even harder. It is going to be the last challenge, but I’m sure there are several ways to work this problem out.
An end to our (what seemed to be endLESS) blogging is in sight! This will be my last blog, as coming monday we will have our final confrontation lecture and we need to focus on writing our final lay-man style essay from now on.
In this post there are still a couple of things I would like to discuss with you about my final paper before the blogging is over. First of all, about the whole course and its blogs, challenges etc. Also, I would like to give the insight of another ‘guru’ I interviewed and finally about the coming confrontation lecture and the questions we will need to ask.
Well, about this course. I find, like most of you, that this course was quite demanding. The combination of two posts and 2 comments a week and the 4 challenges were a heavy load. As we are the first group to try-out the blogging and challenges for this course, I hope the coming courses for other students will be a little less demanding. The idea of an innovative course including new multimedia elements seems appealing, also being forced to engage in the subject of your final paper is in our own advantage, but not when the workload exceeds the expectations of every student.
Further, in order to complete my empirical research for my final paper I interviewed another person. As Ben Tiggelaar, Tom Peters and dhr. Trompenaars did not respond to my e-mail, I had to approach other people relevant to the research. A man that gives seminars to managers, to board of directors, but also to individuals but does not call himself a guru, replied to my questions (that I posted last week if I am not mistaking). The most interesting I could extract from his reply, was that he was confirming the fact that marketing of gurus are indeed almost more important than the content of gurus. He notices he often has better things to tell than a lot of well known management gurus, but because he does not exploit marketing he has not achieved the status of a management guru. Also, he has not written any books yet, but that is because he is dyslectic, not because he is not good enough…
About the final confrontation lecture, what will we be asking? Have we already decided on that? I think it might be a good idea that everyone posts his or her questions so that we can make a selection of which questions are the most important and which questions are practical to ask. Or do we just have to decide on our own questions for our personal papers?
Well this was my final blog,
See you all on monday for the final cl-lecture, good luck with studying!
Did everyone survive their last challenge 4?? What an assignment this was… Mine eventually turned okay I think, although it took me for ages to make it smaller in order to upload it and eventually make it bigger again because I was not able to read the texts anymore.
I decided to shoot my film at the company of my part-time job, in the office of NIBE-SVV. This is a training institute that provides professional trainings and examinations for professionals in the financial and insurance branche.
You can check it out if you like:
Keep in mind that this YouTube film is of little quality and therefor not so clear, I improved this later on!
I found it amusing to see that everyone within the company was very enthusiastic of me wandering around and filming all kinds of different departments. Everyone was helpful and not afraid of getting in the film. I would very much like to thank them for that.
Furthermore, I did find it relatively difficult to illustrate the dynamics within the company. A lot is going on and everyone is busy with their own cases and I really tried to illustrate this in my film, but I am not an experienced filmmaker nor an editor….
I will have a look now at other movies, very curious!
Oke the finish is in sight! It was a interesting and sometimes unexpected course. mr Wolters suprised me every week with this new kind of study method. The interaction is very good, also this blog experience was new for me. Writing the posts and comments was a nice excersise to participate in the course, but sometimes the working pressure became too much, writing posts, comments, paper AND challenges was al lot of work. I have red the comments on challenge four and they were not very positive. I agreed in this, challenge four was sure a good intention but if you are not a filmdirector or you do not like this kind of work it was difficult to do. Therefor as i have written in my previous post i did the challenge but the editing was quite poor. I filmed how the CRM system at work is functioning, the dynamic became clear because after you got a deal the order has to go to the backorder. A whole process is behind it, but unfurtunately i could not pasted the video on internet.
Ok challenges are finished, now we can focus on the last parts of the paper. A clear answer of the quest i dont have, but i dont think that was the purpose. The purpose was that you must show your creativity and be critical. All quests were so formulated that there is always a ”but” in my paper i try in understandable langauge to explain what a managment guru like Peters and Robbins do what their value is and how you can become one. In retrospect i would have choosen an other question more focused on strategy or business, this subject was rather vaque and i did not had much knowledge about this. But the subject was quite interesting to learn more about.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with the concept: a perpetual motion is some kind of movement (whether ‘real’ or in theory) that goes on forever. It’s a concept that at first sight may not be related so closely to our Quest, but if we think about it, it is.
As we are approaching the end of this Quest (that is, the last week of blogging), I’m wondering what is in fact the end of our Quest. Is there a point at which we can really say we ‘ended’ our Quest or we ‘answered’ our Quest-ion? In fact, deciding on where to stop is an issue in almost every scientific research or any paper we had to write and will write. Can you say you looked at all the possible views, from all possible angles, you elaborated on all available literature and thought thoroughly about all the related concepts?
Probably that moment in time will never come.
So, it seems that they only point at which you think you’re done is the deadline of handing in. That is rather arbitrary. Hence, I will also feel like I’m done with my Quest when I hand in my final essay and I guess I won’t be thinking too much about management gurus afterwards too. We do however, and that’s kind of what I realised and the message of the post, that by definition we’re going to hand in an incomplete essay. That has implications for the pretences we write it with and the implications we derive from it. It all sums up to the fact that we can never be sure of what we (and what we don’t) write. So in my view, our Quest shouldn’t be seen as a research to an object, but rather as a random part of a process of thinking about and elaborating on a concept. A process that continues forever.
After all, our Quest is a perpetual motion.
Tonight or tomorrow I will reflect and look back a little bit on these Grail weeks. Have a nice weekend in advance.
