A few years ago I was convinced that I wanted to be a business school professor. I spent a lot of time researching various PhD programs; met a lot of professors (most of them are pretty incredible, creative people); read a mountain of academic literature (I still like reading research articles); and even went so far as to take the GMAT (the required admission exam).
I've since decided that academia might not be the course for me (at least at the moment), and although I've maintained most of my academic relationships, I've become a little disillusioned with business academia and I'm more than a little convinced that very little innovation in the way we build our organizations will come out of academia.
I should probably give you a bit of background.
I've spent the better part of the past six years working on building better organizations. I think my academic aspirations came, in part, from my belief that academic training would better equip me to make progress on that front. In theory, I guess it's possible that a PhD program might enable me to make greater progress toward my Mission, but in reality, it's very unlikely. First, there's the process of getting a PhD in Business:
A business PhD takes, on average, 5 years to complete. Your first two years in the program will be a lot of coursework; some portion of the coursework will be related to the discipline you're planning to study (in my case it was management and organizational behavior, so it would have been some psychology courses and some general management courses). The other portion of the coursework is methodological: basically, teaching you how to do research. It's a lot of statistics and econometrics.
This whole time, you have an ongoing commitment of 15-25 hours per week as a teaching assistant (TA) or research assistant (RA) for some professor(s). From the stories I've heard, what this means varies widely depeding on the university you're attending, and the professor you're assigned to. It can range from the equivalent of high school study hall, to what might best be described as indentured servanthood.
Add to all this the expectation to generate some meaningful research (probably in conjunction with a professor or two), and your weekly workload is between 65-80 hours per week. On the upside, tuition is free, and you receive a stipend (generally $20,000-30,000 per year), so unless you're married and have children, you don't have to worry about generating any additional income.
At the end of the two years you take your exams. Everyone I've ever interviewed about these exams tell me stories that cause me to think that they were devised by the demon responsible for coming up with creative punishments in Dante's third or fourth level of hell. There are hours of intense interviews by a variety of professors. They grill you on the nuances of hundreds of different research papers that you should have been exposed to by this point (that is, if you're doing the work), and you have to come up with deeply thoughtful responses that convince them that you belong in the brotherhood of those who write incessantly inscrutable literature. There's also a written portion that usually goes something like this: Friday evening you get a one page question in your email (again, relating to the nuances of one or more of the research areas that you've studied over the last two years). On Monday morning you're expected to deliver a written response to that question that is of sufficient length to make Leo Tolstoy wince, and with a sufficient number of citations to convince the reader that you actually spent 12 months preparing this paper.
Moving forward to years three through five: these are generally a little less intense in that, at this point, you're done with coursework and you've passed your qualifying exams. During these three years, you: a) continue your valuable work as a TA/RA; b) teach a few classes (something that you won't have to do as much of once you're a fully certified professor [this always struck me as really screwed up]); and c) continuing your research. The end goal here is to generate a doctoral dissertation that you'll present at the very end of your education. Additionally, you're working on a number of research projects (again, probably as an RA for a number of professors) that will, hopefully, someday (probably 3-5 years down the road) be published.
When you graduate, you (hopefully) get a job as an Assistant Professor at a business school somewhere. By this time, if you're a really good researcher, and you've developed relationships with a few really prolific professors who are doing research that is considered "cool" at the moment, you might have an article published. If you do, you're in very good shape. One way or the other, the minute you start your job as a professor, the "academic clock" starts ticking. This clock is similar to the proverbial biological clock in that if you can't get the job done before the clock winds down, the gig is up. There might be some other alternative ways to realize your dream, but they aren't going to be nearly as fulfilling as the more "natural" way, and they'll probably be quite a bit more painful.
The academic clock: it's basically this idea that, in order to keep your job, long-term, you have to gain tenure (which basically is a label that your university gives you that guarantees that you can't be fired). Obviously, the university wants to be very careful about who they guarantee can't be fired, so they set a very high bar: you must publish, publish, publish in order to gain tenure. And you only have a certain number of years to convince the powers that be at your university that you are worthy of never being fired (generally about 7 years).
So you have this clock winding down, and within that time, you have to publish some signficant number of articles, a great proportion of those being in "A" rated journals (there are only a handful of "A" rated journals, each of which is published 4-6 times per year, each issue of which contains maybe 8 articles; all told--there are probably only 150 or so articles published in "A" rated journals annually).
So what does it take to get publications in "A" rated journals? Well, first, it's important to note that if you submit an article to a journal today, you probably won't receive a response from the editor for 4-6 months. That response is statistically likely to be either an outright rejection or a "revise and resubmit" (literally NO article is accepted outright--that's not an exaggeration). These revise and resubmits go out to maybe 10-15% of the submitters, and they basically amount to the reviews of three other professors who serve as editorial reviewers for the journal. The remaining 85-90% of submissions are simply rejected.
I've received one of these "revise and resubmits". They make you cry; professors (in their reviews) are very effective at communicating how little value you bring as a researcher. But more importantly, they tell you "I would like this article better if it were to focus on these ideas/research questions". So you then spend the next 4-6 months revising the article--maybe a little longer if you need to do a little more research--with the goal of making it more interesting to the reviewers. And then you resubmit, fingers crossed that you get an acceptance a few months later. Now you're 12-16 months in; the journal will actually be printed perhaps 6-12 months down the road. So from the time you submit your article to the time it reaches production is 2-3 years. That doesn't include the time you actually spent doing the research and writing the initial paper (which, can range from a few months to a year or two, depending on how prolific you are).
Long way of saying, it's a lot of work, and quite a lot of time, to get the requisite number of "A" publications while your clock is still ticking. The best strategy to take: try to figure out what topics are currently of interest to the editors of the "A" journals, and do research that'll probably interest them. Here's the thing: academic business journal publishing is strangely incestuous; there are topics that are currently "en vogue", and topics that aren't. Whether or not a topic is "en vogue" has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not the topic has any practical import; it has everything to do with who runs the journal. So most submitters try to write articles that are of interest to the editors, and a publication invetibly ends up having a few common themes for an editor's tenure. And then other editors look to those highly rated journals, see those themes, and assume that this is the stuff "A" journals are made of, and so they begin to only accept articles that look just like those in the "A" journals. Before long, you have the academic equivalent to the entire pop-music industry recording albums full of slightly differing covers of Justin Bieber's song "Baby". All in all, a really boring world.
So what does this all mean with respect to management innovation? My view from here in the cheap seats is that the deck is stacked against you if you enter the academic system. There are a great number of incredible professors who entered business academia because they wanted to do something that would fundamentally improve management and organizations, but in order to survive in that world, you MUST conform to the system. And conforming to the system is an all-consuming prospect; you don't have a lot of time available to change the world--it's everything you can do to just stay alive.
I might be wrong, but I don't think so. I just performed a Google Scholar search for the terms "management" and "innovation". Google sent me a list of over 2.1 million unique articles--the vast majority of them academic articles of some sort. But you tell me: how many truly groundbreaking things that are going to revolutionize the way you run your business have you seen come out of academia in the last year? Or two years? Or ten? They're great people writing lots of very interesting things--but with very little likelihood of fulfilling what I believe their Mission should be: to fundamentally change the way business operates for the better.
I think it's important to point out that this has very little to do with the people; business academics, as a whole, are incredibly brilliant, creative and hardworking people who are, interestingly, very focused on trying to fundamentally improve organizations. It's a problem with the system that they're a part of. It's a broken system, and I sometimes worry that there's no real way to fix it. The system might be so pervasive that the change will be of the disruptive sort--an alternative system that ultimately displaces the one we've got.
Which, when you think about it, would make a great business school case study.
