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 depending 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 inevitably 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.
