Jacob Eisenberg

Past-Chair

Smurfit Graduate School of Business, University College Dublin

Are you passionate about Management Education?

• Do you care about quality and innovation in business school teaching?
• Do you believe that research on management education and learning goes hand in hand with developing a teaching portfolio?
• Would you like to see more emphasis in the Academy of Management on Management Education, Learning and Development?
• Do you want to develop your leadership skills while contributing to the wider academic management community?

If you answered YES to one or more of these questions, WE WANT YOU!!! We Want You to Run for a MED Officer Role. Every year, Academy divisions elect officers that take part in Academy’s governance and leadership activities. The nominations to several officer roles in the MED division (see list below) have opened on January 21, 2015 and will close on February 28, 2015. You should have received at least one email message from Academy that includes a link to the nominations page. I invite you to look at the role descriptions and to nominate one or more people who you think would be good at them.

            And this, by all means, includes YOU!

As immediate Past-Chair of MED, I am eager to get the best people possible from our division’s membership to run for these roles. Some are more demanding than others and all come with a high level of satisfaction. I am glad to respond to your queries.

Leadership Roles Open for 2015

Program Chairperson-Elect

Term: 1 year with four more in other officer roles

The Division Program Chair-Elect, commonly known as the Professional Development Workshops (PDW) Chair, is the first role in a 5-year commitment of service to the MED division. In the first year, the incumbent organizes the division's professional development workshops for the following year's annual conference (i.e., 2015). Working closely with the Program Chair, this includes writing and disseminating the submission call, evaluating proposals, managing the acceptance process for the Division's PDW submissions and help manage the PDW program, as needed.

The progression to years 2-5 in the leadership sequence is 'automatic', that is, it does not involve elections. In the second year, the incumbent becomes MED Program Chair and is responsible for the scholarly track and the smooth running of the Division's part of the conference. This is an excellent opportunity to shape the activities of the Division and to influence members' conference experience. Although the year as Program Chair is quite time-consuming, most of the work is concentrated in the period January-July 2016. The Academy set robust systems set in place as well as excellent training, good support from Headquarters, and a keen and able membership to help the incumbent make the most of the role.

The third year is relatively quiet in the role of Division Chair-elect. It is about support, mentoring, and preparing for the following year as Division Chair, when you will have most impact on the Division. In this role, the elected person assumes ultimate responsibility for all aspects of the Division and it is an opportunity, working with others, to shape our direction.

In the fifth and final year, the person becomes Immediate Past Division Chair, supporting the Division Chair and other officers, with the unique responsibility over the Division's elections.

The elected candidate is expected to be present at the annual AOM conference over the next 5 years as important face-to-face business meetings and discussions are held during the AOM conferences.

 

Research Coordinator-Elect

Term: 2 years (second year as Research Coordinator)

In their first year, the Research Coordinator-Elect works with the Research Coordinator in managing the review process for the Division's Paper and Symposium Awards. The elected person then automatically becomes the Research Coordinator in the following year of the 2-year commitment to the position.

The role involves organizing the Awards review panel, following up on reviewers' evaluations, presenting the review results to the Executive Committee, and liaising with sponsors and other relevant people to ensure that financial awards and plaques are delivered to the division business meeting for the awards ceremony.

The Research Coordinator works closely with the MED Program Chair who, along with the Division Chair, has overall overseeing of the Division Awards.

 

Membership Coordinator-Elect

Term: 2 years (second year as Membership Coordinator)

The Membership Coordinator-Elect works with the Membership Coordinator in promoting the division by identifying members' needs and developing activities that will meet these needs.  The Membership Coordinator-Elect becomes the Membership Coordinator in the second year of a 2-year commitment to the position. It is important that the elected candidate be present at the annual AOM conference over the next 2 years. The Membership Coordinator may assemble a committee to help with various aspects of the work, which may include managing division's social media.

 

Practitioner Liaison-Elect

Term: 2 years (second year as Practitioner Liaison)

The Practitioner Liaison-Elect works closely with the Practitioner Liaison Officer in promoting the division to practitioners by identifying practitioners' needs and developing activities that will meet these needs.  The Practitioner Liaison-Elect becomes the Practitioner Liaison Officer in the second year of a 2-year commitment to the position.   It is important that the elected candidate be present at the annual AOM conference over the next 2 years.

 

Representative-at-Large

Term: 2 years

The Representative-at-Large helps the Division Chair and other officers in their duties and, occasionally, is in charge of special divisional project. This is an excellent way to get to know the MED leadership team and officers' different roles.

MED Program Update

Peter Mc Namara

MED Program Chair

Maynooth University, Ireland

I am delighted to report that MED paper and symposium submissions are at a four-year high for our division and up 50% on last year. We had 162 paper and 20 symposia submissions. 343 people volunteered as reviewers of which over 300 are currently reviewing papers. It is great to see this year that changes to the MED awards process are resulting in many more papers being nominated for a wide range of awards. I was program chair last year and the hardest thing to do was reject papers, knowing that many that were rejected were excellent. The threshold for acceptance was very high and is also likely to be this year.  

Over 10% of reviews are already complete. It is clear to me is that we have both a diverse and strong field of submissions this year. To those of you reviewing, thanks for your volunteering spirit and please do complete your reviews on time! Reviews are at the heart of the decision making process in determining what gets on the MED program. High quality, developmental, reviews are the central value adding service for submitters so thank you in advance for the time and attention you give to reviewing.  

Please do remember that if your paper is not accepted that you can apply for the MED Writers Workshop, where editors and reviewers work with authors to develop their papers further face to face at the conference. One person last year had a paper accepted (that won an award) and another rejected. Their comment to me about the Writers Workshop has remained foremost in my mind: they benefited more from the MED Writers Workshop than winning an award. Take this advice to heart: if you have the chance to have your paper in the Writers Workshop seize this great opportunity for first hand developmental feedback!  

So what are the areas that our submitters are focusing on this year and what are the ones that our reviewers were most interested in signing up for? As it happens there were some surprising differences between the two communities! Having been program chair for a second year (and thus seen three years of submission data) some highlights do seem to be emerging that I think worth sharing with the community.  

Submissions and review volunteers were high in the core theme of our division, namely teaching and learning. It was great to see that teaching methods, experimental learning (the focus of our keynote speaker David Kobb last year), curriculum and course design remain a rich reservoir of research and are of central interest to our reviewing community. A large and growing area of interest is institutional level themes, especially focusing on the role and impact of business schools and the career development of academics. A steady stream of submissions focuses on the issue of management development, especially leadership and behavioural skills development and developing a learning culture.  

I think that research on these broad themes is of great value to our membership. We all need to learn from best practice and research about how to improve our teaching and learning. Understanding the role of business schools is key to established academics that are involved in the shaping and development of their schools. The issue of career development in general, and the role of teaching within it, is of vital import to early career academics, to academic mentors and those involved in career development.  

Here are the top five-keyword themes that submitters described their papers as:

• Teaching methods
• Experimental learning
• Developing leadership and learning culture
• Role of Business Schools
• Leadership skills

 

We had relatively few submissions in three areas that seem key to the challenges we face as management educators, and popular as reviewer keywords:

• Technology
• International and cross cultural themes
• Executive education

 

Ethics is an area that we have relatively few submissions, but is clearly important and attracting some very high quality submissions, including an award winning paper in 2014.  

I dread the process of selecting papers that will commence at the end of this month, but am very much looking forward to the exciting work of putting these papers together into coherent (I hope) themes as I know that we have high quality papers to work with. Vancouver promises to be a rich hunting ground for those of us interested in understanding advances and best practices in management education research and also the chance to hear leaders (and future leaders) offering us their insights on a wide variety of education themes in both paper and symposia sessions. Summer in Canada – here we come!

PDWs in Vancouver’s AOM 2015

Miguel R. Olivas-Luján

PDW Chair

Clarion U of Pennsylvania  

If you submitted a PDW (professional development workshop) proposal this past January, you probably have now received one (or more!) messages sharing both good and “bad” news about this year’s program. But even if you didn’t submit a PDW proposal this year, I feel very confident that you will find many of the workshops extremely useful, inspiring and helpful for your career and your students. Why this confidence? Consider this:  

• Fifty-two PDW proposals were submitted this year! This is the highest number in the past six years! Only Boston 2012 received almost as many (49), and all other years in this decade were in the 20s. To be exact, we had a 108% increase in submissions from 25 received in 2014!

 

• Quantity is a good thing, but a significant number of proposals show a level of maturity (in terms of the caliber of presenters, literature reviewed, interactive design, earlier versions improved for our meeting in Vancouver, etc.) that is truly exciting.

 

• Sponsorships from ASFOR (Associazione Italiana per la Formazione Manageriale) for the “Best AOM MED Division PDW Award” and from The Case Centre (thecasecentre.org) have been renewed for 2015. I believe we are one of the few divisions (perhaps the first, or even the only one?) to offer an award for sessions in the PDW part of the program. Could that be a reason for the very pronounced spike in submissions this year?

 

• This year, the MED Writer’s Workshop is being sponsored by Academy of Management Learning & Education, Journal of Management Education, Management Learning, and Organization Management Journal. The Management Learning journal will be providing refreshments to facilitate the networking and learning in this PDW. Kathleen Barnes’ organizational skills are profusely acknowledged for her expert chairing of this PDW with strategic value for our field!

The bad news is that we only have thirty-three (33!) hours allotted through the formula used by AOM headquarters. Even if each of the 52 PDWs were asking for just two hours (the median), the highest acceptance rate we can reach is 31% (from 68% in 2014)! In reality, many PDWs require more than two hours –and several have requested four, six and even seven hours!  

I cannot tell you how much I dislike having to decline such a high number of well-crafted proposals from talented colleagues, but I trust that this abundance of talent will help me and my colleagues create one of the highest quality PDW Programs our division has ever had. I hope to see you taking advantage of it in Vancouver!!

Business School Programs’ Rankings:

Is it Time to Click the ‘Refresh’ Button?

by  Jacob Eisenberg

Smurfit Graduate School of Business, University College Dublin

The Financial Times (FT) Global MBA rankings, the most known business school rankings among international students and faculty, are coming out on January 26th and there is a lot of buzz in the Business Education media along with hope and worry among business school faculty, Deans and maybe students and alumni. Many of you have heard about academic rankings of graduate (Masters) business school programs schools, which include the FT, Economist, BusinessWeek, US News & World Report, Forbes and meta-rankings such as Poets&Quants.

So rankings are popular and get attention. Mine too. In a media-driven world, is there anything wrong with it? Possibly not and such rankings (as well as rankings of other academic disciplines and universities) have evolved for a reason; that is, they satisfy certain needs. However, this is not to say that we, the management education community, should not reflect and discuss their impact. I want to share with you some thoughts on the current state of business school rankings and their potential detrimental effects. At the outset, I want to emphasize that I am not necessarily attacking 'academic rankings' as a practice here: while there are many shortcomings to these quantitative exercises, there are various reasons that rankings, of all sorts, continue to be in high demand (and, I suspect, increasingly so) among students, employers, academics and other stakeholders. I think that rankings satisfy a wide need to compare and contrast and to reduce uncertainty in a very complex and increasingly global market. My aim is rather to help create a public forum to discuss the relevance and validity of the criteria used in current business school rankings and to examine their potential effects on our industry and stakeholders.

I have been in the Business School education business for over 12 years now, teaching and directing programs at the Masters level. As such, I am acutely aware of the importance that many leading (and, even more so, aspiring) businesses schools place on the outcomes of such rankings. I understand this and took part in my own school’s efforts to that end. At the same time, I have grown increasingly frustrated with the narrowness of the criteria feeding into the main Business School Masters programs' ratings (in the context of a European-based international school, we are more aware of the criteria used by the FT and Economist). In short, the majority of criteria that indicate how well a Business Masters program will fair in rankings relate to salary, status of job obtained (as measured by size of company and seniority of position) and post-graduation employability metrics.

One source for worry and frustration is that there is no reference (or very minimal) in these criteria to the outcomes, which so many of us, educators and other stakeholders, consider relevant and important in the learning & educational experience of graduate students, such as analytical skills, self awareness, critical thinking, creativity, various EQ competencies, appreciation of and comfort with diversity and developing socially aware perspectives on business.

Another source of concern is that most rankings do not really tell us much or reliably so about the Delta that can be attributed to our business schools programs; that is, do these rankings really reflect the change in students’ management and professional skills and abilities that came about as a result of them taking our Masters program? Increased salary and employability may hint at employers’ perceptions of this but I suggest that these are very ‘contaminated’ variables and we cannot tell what is the role of students’ initial ability, motivation and characteristics play in this, nor how big is the impact of school’s reputation to start with. Several colleagues (e.g., Denny Gioia and Jeffrey Pfeffer) wrote about the problematic issue of such business school rankings perpetuating existing hierarchies and reputations, without necessarily reflecting real differences in neither the quality of education nor the quality of graduates.

When we discuss program design and content of courses we consider various learning and practice (i.e., competencies and skills) outcomes. How many of us enter a class thinking ‘how would what I teach my students today will earn them more money in their job?’ The Assurance of Learning frameworks, such as those used by various accreditation bodies (e.g., AACSB and EQUIS) also refer to demonstrating that our Masters students learn useful and relevant skills and that we can demonstrate that our educational programs created a change in our students’ thinking, attitudes, and behaviors. But the rankings do not tell us much about any of that. It may be complicated to assess such elements but, with all the knowledge accumulated in our fields, surely not impossible.

And then there are the typical career success indicators, that are based on the principle of ‘more and higher is better’. The main problem with this line of thinking is that it is old, very old and does not represent well enough the values of current generations. Where does work-life balance enters here? Where are the preferences for a company that has a culture that the Masters graduate can respect? What about those graduates who prefer a lower paying job, possibly in a non-profit organization, because they find it more interesting or fulfilling?! What about people who take a year off to travel the world and get a different perspective? In December last year I attended the EFMD Annual Conference on Business Masters Programs. Anne-Fleur Barret, one of the speakers in a panel of masters programs alumni and employers, shared personal perspectives that stroke a cord. This very talented and well-educated person made a choice not to go into an executive position in her company, in spite of being invited to do so. While she likes the company she works in (HP), her choice reflected her life-work balance preferences. She asked us: ‘am I a failure of my graduate school (which is well known and highly ranked) because I am not heading for an executive position? Even though I have a high level of career satisfaction and doing what I want to do in life and at work?’ From the current ranking perspective the answer to her question is clear: you are not doing that well in your work; you have failed your Graduate Business School because you are not going for the formula of “higher, faster, more”.

Yes, money and externally validated career success are important and, I suspect they will continue to be for many MBA and MSc graduates. I have no issue in stating that many of us, including myself, strive for status recognition, higher salary and various external indicators of success. But what we know from decades of research is that there are several other factors that tend to be ranked above financial outcomes when people are asked whether they are happy with their work. In the past couple of decades, rigorous empirical studies demonstrated the importance of internally determined job satisfaction, of working with good colleagues and managers, of feeling that your work is meaningful, of knowing that your company does good. How is it that none of these insights of what motivates us at work made its way to the career outcomes of business school graduates assessed in these rankings?

I am frustrated and concerned because I am well aware of how measurement shapes practice. The rankings are here to stay but I wonder: Must they be so narrow? Do they truly represent what students want to get out of their Masters education? Is there a place to revisit these criteria and update them? And, if not, isn’t it time for a consortia of business school faculty to create an alternative model that includes more valid and relevant indicators of both the quality of education as well as career outcomes of our graduate business students? Let’s start this conversation going!