BusinessWeek just put together a list
of “B-School
Stars,” which they describe as “10 B-school professors who are influencing contemporary
business thinking beyond the halls of academia.” I am honored to be on the list, to join the
likes of Warren Bennis, Steve Levitt, and Nobel Prize winner Myron Scholes. But a few things about the story are bugging
me. For starters, I confess that,
although I enjoy the benefits of sometimes being called a “thought leader” or “management
guru,” these labels have always made me squirm a bit because they imply a
flawed perspective on how knowledge is developed. As I wrote in CIO Insight a few years back when Business 2.0 applied the “guru” label to me:
‘My main objection is that gurus are glorified as lone geniuses
who conjure up revolutionary new ideas about strategy, innovation, marketing,
managing people and the like. Gurus seem to do everything in their heads
without thinking about others’ work, while famous scientists thank those who
came before them, as Sir Isaac Newton did when he [supposedly] said, "If I
have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." The
implication is that management knowledge is developed through a drastically
different process than that in the physical sciences, that only an anointed
management genius can generate big new ideas, that they do it alone, and that
their ideas are magically produced in complete form without drawing on others’
work.’
Toward this end, Hard
Facts proposes Sutton’s Law: “If you think that you have a
new idea, you are wrong. Someone probably already had it. This idea isn’t
original either; I stole it from someone else.” I
think that this law especially holds true when it comes to business ideas. For
example, when Jeff Pfeffer and I were writing Hard Facts, we took a
detailed look at Harvard Business Review’s annual lists of “Breakthrough
Business Ideas,” examining lists that were published across several years. We concluded that none if these 60 or so “breakthroughs’
were actually original (including ideas on these lists that were credited to us,
such as the no asshole rule and evidence-based management). Making claims that one has spanking-new
breakthrough may fuel book sales and help consultants land new clients, but as Stanford’s
Jim March once wrote
me “most claims of originality are testimony to ignorance and most
claims of magic are testimony to hubris.”
In
addition to my concerns that stories about star academics can fuel the fiction
of the lone genius, and that most alleged breakthrough business ideas are
really repackaged old ideas, another
thing about the BusinessWeek list REALLY
bugged me: All ten “stars” were men, and from what I can tell from the
pictures, all white men. This bugged me because I could immediately think of
women management professors who have had huge impacts outside of academia. The first person who came to mind was
Moss Kanter, whose Men and
Women of Corporation is one of the most influential business books ever
written, and who has had a huge impact over the years with her writing,
speaking, and consulting on innovation – as well as in a host of other
areas. Rosabeth’s 2006 Harvard
Business Review article, “Innovation:
The Classic Traps,” is perhaps the best thing I have ever read in the huge
pile of writing on this subject.
I
also thought of my Stanford colleague, Kathleen
Eisenhardt, a strategy professor in my department, whose work has
affected the direction taken by numerous major corporations and
start-ups. Moreover, a recent Fortune magazine cover story described the
book that Kathy wrote with Google’s Shona Brown (who is also
Kathy’s former doctoral student), “Competing
on the Edge,” as providing the blueprint for Google’s approach to business
strategy –- see Chaos
By Design. These are just two
examples of women who qualify as “B School Stars,” I could go on and on. And
there are also plenty non-white males that I could nominate as well, starting,
for example with Stanford Business School’s brilliant Hau
Lee, who has had a huge effect on the supply of numerous companies of all
sizes, and has been involved in the founding of multiple companies.
Perhaps
I shouldn’t complain about an article that puts me in such nice company and that
says such nice things about me. Perhaps I
am being ungrateful and obnoxious. But I’ve
always felt that, as a tenured professor who claims to do fact-based research,
I have an obligation to say what I believe is true. Or, as I’ve written before
(stealing a phrase from Michigan’s
Karl Weick), to “argue as if I am right, and to listen as if I am wrong.” It sometimes gets me trouble, and there are
people who wish I would keep my mouth shut and quietly gather the golden crumbs
that come with such press attention.
In
this case, I felt compelled to complain because I believe that there are a lot
of woman (and non-white men) all star business school professors out there, and
that the BusinessWeek writers should have
listed some of them, as it could fuel the inaccurate impression that only
professors who have a penis and a white face are having big impacts outside of
academia. I hope they provide a broader list next time that
they list B school all stars.
P.S.
Also, it is a small thing, but I am not exactly a business school professor. My
primary appointment is in the Department of Management Science &
Engineering, which is in the Stanford Engineering School. I do have a courtesy appointment in the Graduate
School of Business, so I guess calling me a B School professor is technically accurate.
Plus I do profess and write about
management, and I have had quite a few Stanford Business School students in my
classes over the years. I also think
that Steve Levitt has his primary appointment in the economics department, not
the business school, at Chicago. I don’t consider this exactly a flaw in the
story, however, as people from many different disciplines – economics, sociology,
psychology, anthropology, and engineering – produce knowledge that is relevant
to business, and the exact place that they work in academia often doesn’t
matter much.
Leave a Reply