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Shockingly, the business schools very much discourage the profs from having significant contact with real business. This was not my experience at UMass Lowell'

Shockingly, the business schools very much discourage the profs from having significant contact with real business. This was not my experience at UMass Lowell's undergraduate College of Management program (graduated 04). One of my professors was CEO of a manufacturing company in South Korea, teaching at the same time because he loved to teach. Another one came directly from Gillette (now P&G) and shared tons of personal experiences which were extremely insightful. A third professor was a consultant to numerous companies. I can go on and on, but virtually all of my professors had strong ties to the business world, and that made them extremely good teachers. While I can't speak of their MBA program specifically, many of my professors taught those courses too. There were some academic professors, but they were the exception rather than the rule. In fact, come to think of it, I can't name one of the top of my head. In other departments, sure, but not in their management program. I think it's safe to say that every college is different, and you'll get a unique mix of backgrounds and experiences from Professors pending on where you go. There very well may be academic-only business schools, but that's not everywhere. Some schools are terrible, while others are great. -------------------- One thing that I wish I had more exposure to in college was working directly with businesses. There were internship programs, but during my Junior/Senior year the economy was utter crap, and opportunities were virtually non-existant. As you pointed out this is something you see in medical and legal education, and I wish I saw more of it in business school. I agree with you that it's an area that needs improvement if it hasn't been universally implemented yet. -------------------- (A) The prof's idea is to set up a business "from the ground" up "with a 30,000 square foot facility" and an "efficient administrative and executive structure". Uh, generally that's a lot of money spent and likely at risk before any revenue. So, it is more common in practice to start small and, if successful, then grow. This touches on the "level of abstraction" that some business types fall into. It's basic South Park Underpants Gnomes logic: Phase 1: Collect Underpants. Phase 2: ???. Phase 3: Profit! (http://cart.mn/aYOY1h http://cart.mn/aYOY1h - maybe NSFW) Basically, skip over the most difficult parts and focus on the easy ones. It's "easy" to walk out with a business degree and not understand Phase 2. Real world experience hopefully fills in that gap. Definitely another opportunity for business school improvement. When it comes to web-startups though, I can't say this loud enough: LEARN HOW TO HACK! Otherwise you're nerfed because you can't do Phase 2.

HilbertSpace 16y ago
Well put. Yes, in the Dangerfield clip, it's possible to argue that the prof was being appropriately general and abstract. But, then, to what end for the costs for the plant? Is this to test ability to add some numbers? No. Is the detail enough actually to help someone work with an architect and general contractor to get the building constructed? No. Is it useful in business to address business planning in such an abstract way, that is, so distant from actual details such as Dangerfield was mentioning? No. There is a role for some abstract work in business, but the lecture in the clip was not an example. E.g., long in some schools of agriculture, e.g., Iowa, a question was, say, for growing corn, what corn variety, planted when, with what density, with what soil chemistry, with what fertilizer would be best? Broadly the key was the special case of the general linear model called experimental design and/or analysis of variance. It's powerful stuff, a nice tool to have, broadly applicable, and can be presented quite abstractly. In the end, the corresponding software knows nothing about the real problem, from an ag school, P&G, some ad agency, etc. Still, real examples are important. The B-school where I was a prof had rule: No more than one day a week consulting. And any outside contact with business was a black mark as in evidence that the prof didn't really care about research. To the best of my knowledge, no one on the faculty had any significant on-going contact with business, and only a tiny fraction of the faculty had any significant business experience at all. I wanted the B-school to be like a research-teaching hospital where the halls were full of people from real businesses with problems looking for solutions. So, I wanted to look at the problems and assign them to, say, undergrads, grad students, grad student research, faculty research, or maybe hand them off to profs in, say, engineering. For the student projects, have faculty supervise the work. Hopefully have the problem presented in class, maybe by the person with the problem, and later, by the students, also the solution. The students would make some real business contacts and get some internship experience. The usual standards for peer-reviewed research are "new, correct, and significant". Well, if the business person is doing something new and significant, then any "correct" solution for the business problem likely also satisfies "new and significant"! Also, once have a solution for one real problem, the chances that the solution applies to another real problem are increased! If find a third problem the solution solves, then are on the way to some progress. So, for research, starting with a real problem can be one heck of an advantage in several ways. Fees? Med schools have worked all that out, along with professional peer review, ethics, etc.; so borrow that. The work I did for the school in computing helped the school a lot, and the deans knew that I was really interested in real business and not research in the form of generalized abstract nonsense; I was relatively well qualified to do such research but just wanted contact with real business instead or at least first as in the recipe for rabbit stew that starts, "First catch a rabbit.". So, to thank me for the computing work I did, the deans passed lots of consulting to me, and I doubled my income. Yes, lots of business people do have problems and do contact B-schools; it's just that mostly the B-schools tell the business people to go away. I very much wanted to bring the consulting into the school for the students, in classes, etc, but made only partial progress: After I did the computing work, I gave a grad course on it. The first half of the course I lectured on speeds, capacities, costs, and principles of operation and other overview topics in computing. The second half of the course was all presentations from vendors! The class was well attended by grad students, faculty, and staff! Everyone got current on a lot in computing! The final was to write a paper. A few students got together, formed a team, went off campus, dug into some deep stuff, and got close to some significant business opportunities! The first lecture in the course was to pop the covers off the computing I'd had the college buy and show people the main pieces. Students were thrilled. Seeing what the school, profs, chairs, deans felt they wanted in research, I, uh, did them a favor! We needed to do some faculty recruiting, and resumes came across my desk. So I saw and picked one with some rare and powerful qualifications and led the recruiting effort, and the person was hired! They quickly wrote a lot of highly regarded papers in applied math and became famous, not so much in B-schools but in some parts of applied math. Their work was novel and curious applied math, actually at times close to the question P versus NP in computer science. But the work was done with no contact with actual business, and it will be a very long time until that work actually impacts business. Still, just as research, that person totally knocked the socks off everyone else in the school. The points, I'm saying, about B-school being professional with good contact with real business is no secret at all; it is widely, thoroughly understood. The problem for the B-schools isn't understanding the points but liking them. To like them, have to give up on physics envy, etc. And with the contact with business, have to be vulnerable to accusations, say, from elsewhere on campus, that the school is just being used for something crass that has nothing to do with contributions to knowledge for progress in business. People who so criticize contact with real business and have a child with a really big tummy ache should take them to a research prof in biochemistry instead of a gastroenterologist! But just contact with business is not enough: Instead it is important to identify important principles, test and confirm them, organize the knowledge, and teach it. So it's research analogous to mapping out new geography and finding the main features. This work is actually not easy to do; problem is, it's important. Medicine did it, with a lot of hard work, bloody hands, horror stories, but finally some of the best progress in civilization. It can be done, but B-schools are not much trying to do it.

HilbertSpace 16y ago

Well put. Yes, in the Dangerfield clip, it's possible to argue that the prof was being appropriately general and abstract. But, then, to what end for the costs for the plant? Is this to test ability to add some numbers? No. Is the detail enough actually to help someone work with an architect and general contractor to get the building constructed? No. Is it useful in business to address business planning in such an abstract way, that is, so distant from actual details such as Dangerfield was mentioning? No. There is a role for some abstract work in business, but the lecture in the clip was not an example. E.g., long in some schools of agriculture, e.g., Iowa, a question was, say, for growing corn, what corn variety, planted when, with what density, with what soil chemistry, with what fertilizer would be best? Broadly the key was the special case of the general linear model called experimental design and/or analysis of variance. It's powerful stuff, a nice tool to have, broadly applicable, and can be presented quite abstractly. In the end, the corresponding software knows nothing about the real problem, from an ag school, P&G, some ad agency, etc. Still, real examples are important. The B-school where I was a prof had rule: No more than one day a week consulting. And any outside contact with business was a black mark as in evidence that the prof didn't really care about research. To the best of my knowledge, no one on the faculty had any significant on-going contact with business, and only a tiny fraction of the faculty had any significant business experience at all. I wanted the B-school to be like a research-teaching hospital where the halls were full of people from real businesses with problems looking for solutions. So, I wanted to look at the problems and assign them to, say, undergrads, grad students, grad student research, faculty research, or maybe hand them off to profs in, say, engineering. For the student projects, have faculty supervise the work. Hopefully have the problem presented in class, maybe by the person with the problem, and later, by the students, also the solution. The students would make some real business contacts and get some internship experience. The usual standards for peer-reviewed research are "new, correct, and significant". Well, if the business person is doing something new and significant, then any "correct" solution for the business problem likely also satisfies "new and significant"! Also, once have a solution for one real problem, the chances that the solution applies to another real problem are increased! If find a third problem the solution solves, then are on the way to some progress. So, for research, starting with a real problem can be one heck of an advantage in several ways. Fees? Med schools have worked all that out, along with professional peer review, ethics, etc.; so borrow that. The work I did for the school in computing helped the school a lot, and the deans knew that I was really interested in real business and not research in the form of generalized abstract nonsense; I was relatively well qualified to do such research but just wanted contact with real business instead or at least first as in the recipe for rabbit stew that starts, "First catch a rabbit.". So, to thank me for the computing work I did, the deans passed lots of consulting to me, and I doubled my income. Yes, lots of business people do have problems and do contact B-schools; it's just that mostly the B-schools tell the business people to go away. I very much wanted to bring the consulting into the school for the students, in classes, etc, but made only partial progress: After I did the computing work, I gave a grad course on it. The first half of the course I lectured on speeds, capacities, costs, and principles of operation and other overview topics in computing. The second half of the course was all presentations from vendors! The class was well attended by grad students, faculty, and staff! Everyone got current on a lot in computing! The final was to write a paper. A few students got together, formed a team, went off campus, dug into some deep stuff, and got close to some significant business opportunities! The first lecture in the course was to pop the covers off the computing I'd had the college buy and show people the main pieces. Students were thrilled. Seeing what the school, profs, chairs, deans felt they wanted in research, I, uh, did them a favor! We needed to do some faculty recruiting, and resumes came across my desk. So I saw and picked one with some rare and powerful qualifications and led the recruiting effort, and the person was hired! They quickly wrote a lot of highly regarded papers in applied math and became famous, not so much in B-schools but in some parts of applied math. Their work was novel and curious applied math, actually at times close to the question P versus NP in computer science. But the work was done with no contact with actual business, and it will be a very long time until that work actually impacts business. Still, just as research, that person totally knocked the socks off everyone else in the school. The points, I'm saying, about B-school being professional with good contact with real business is no secret at all; it is widely, thoroughly understood. The problem for the B-schools isn't understanding the points but liking them. To like them, have to give up on physics envy, etc. And with the contact with business, have to be vulnerable to accusations, say, from elsewhere on campus, that the school is just being used for something crass that has nothing to do with contributions to knowledge for progress in business. People who so criticize contact with real business and have a child with a really big tummy ache should take them to a research prof in biochemistry instead of a gastroenterologist! But just contact with business is not enough: Instead it is important to identify important principles, test and confirm them, organize the knowledge, and teach it. So it's research analogous to mapping out new geography and finding the main features. This work is actually not easy to do; problem is, it's important. Medicine did it, with a lot of hard work, bloody hands, horror stories, but finally some of the best progress in civilization. It can be done, but B-schools are not much trying to do it.