Many of you may recall the DM
course assignment called “Reflection Paper”.
Continuing that theme, we will regularly feature a Q&A with members
of the DM community. The spring/summer edition of the DM Digest features a
conversation with Bo Carlsson.
What was it like to be part of the innovation team
that created the first-in-market Doctor of Management Program?
It was exciting! The idea of
creating a new type of program for practicing executives was both innovative
and stimulating. My own research had always been based in my home field of
economics but often crossing the boundaries of sub-disciplines within economics
as well as drawing on knowledge in other fields like engineering, management,
and economic history. I had always found it regrettable that macroeconomics,
microeconomics, and management had evolved into separate disciplines without
much boundary-spanning research and without much interest in practical
application. In the early 1990s the Economics Department had just moved from
the College of Arts and Sciences into the Weatherhead School of Management, and
I welcomed the opportunity to work with people in management in designing the
new program. The program team was hand-picked to include leading scholars in
each sub-discipline – people with tenure and broad experience, willing and able
to take a broad interdisciplinary view and who were not forced by the tenure
clock to produce more publications in their particular sub-discipline.
It was clear from the
beginning that in order to create value for organizational leaders with many
years of experience and practice in a management field who are at an inflection
point in their careers at which they have to decide whether to advance to the
next level (often requiring new skills) or consider other career options, we
needed to create an entirely new type of program. As our discussions evolved,
it became increasingly clear that the new program would need to be
research-intensive, rigorous, and oriented to management practice at the
doctoral-level. The program requirements would include:
- Providing state-of-the art knowledge in a rapidly changing global environment. This would require new courses with both interdisciplinary and integrative content; standard courses in conventional management sub-disciplines would not be sufficient; and
- Building on each student’s experience and complement it with practical and rigorous research skills; the research questions would be derived from problems of practice identified by the students, not by standard theory.
A program like this had never
been done before. It was an exciting challenge!
Tell us about how you help experienced managers change
their thinking and approach through empirical research.
Students are asked to think
about a problem of practice based on their own management experience. Sometimes
the problem falls neatly into the domain of a particular sub-discipline, but
most of the time it does not, at least in my own experience as an advisor in
the program. The relevant domain may be
in the intersection between several sub-disciplines – which means a significant
challenge for the student but also for the academic advisor whose expertise is
typically in only a narrow sub-discipline. The students are asked to find out
and summarize what is written about the problem and then articulate a research
question. The real challenge lies in framing the research question.
In a discipline-based
doctoral program the research questions typically fall within well-defined
disciplinary boundaries. But in a truly cross-disciplinary program the research
domain is much broader and less well-defined. The challenge for the advisor is
to determine where his or her expertise can help and then learn, along with the
student, where to seek new knowledge and make sense of it. It is truly a
journey of discovery – exciting!
The program is designed to
help students in the process of framing and articulating their research
questions – through the conceptual paper, grounded theory-based qualitative
inquiry, and quantitative and mixed-method analysis. The academic advisor is
the coach, while the student becomes the real expert on the topic at hand.
After all, that is the true meaning of a doctoral education.
How has the program evolved over the years?
The basic structure of the
program has remained largely the same: 3-year, residency-based program.
The overall aims of DM
inquiry have also remained constant: (1) to develop capabilities for creating
new knowledge and insights into problems of practice using a coherent framework
and language that bridges theory and practice through diverse methodologies;
and (2) through the process of building capabilities for knowledge creation, to
provide transformative experiences for thoughtful practitioners to foster a
community of practitioner-scholars engaged in life-long scholarship and
actively leading the practitioner and academic discourse on policy, practice and
public issues of management.
The main features of the
program have also remained largely the same:
- Transdisciplinary curriculum (including humanities and social sciences); Management in a broad sense; not Business Administration
- Integrative inquiry courses
- Both qualitative and quantitative methods required
- Heavy research emphasis: the Scholarly Practitioner
- Broad global perspective and participation
- Transformational, globally oriented, cross-disciplinary research-intensive program for organizational leaders…
The balance between
integrative (interdisciplinary) and methods courses has shifted slightly over
the years toward more methods courses. The inquiry methods have also shifted
toward more emphasis on quantitative research and introduction of mixed methods
(using both qualitative and quantitative analysis).
In the early years of the
program students were required to write Reflection Papers following each
residency in which they were asked to integrate and reflect on the learnings
from each seminar as well as on the residency as a whole.
In the beginning each student
was required to complete an Applied Research Project (ARP) based on the
portfolio papers (summarizing the takeaways from each year) and an integrative
summary – essentially similar to a doctoral dissertation. Later the degree
requirement was changed to a sequence of papers (a conceptual paper in year 1,
a qualitative research paper in year 2, a quantitative research paper and an
integrative paper in year 3).
From your perspective, what is the importance or
practical application of DM training?
The importance lies in the
application of new integrative, transdisciplinary knowledge to management
practice.
DM research has both academic
rigor in terms of methodology and substantive relevance in terms of practical
application. As Kurt Lewin, the founder of social psychology, once said, “There
is nothing more practical than a good theory.”
In the DM Program we start
with a problem of practice, develop a theory to solve the problem, test the
theory empirically, and then apply it to management practice. As the journey
progresses, the researcher often winds up with a much better, more penetrating,
and more sharply focused question than he or she started with. That is the
nature of research.
If resources were unlimited, what would you recommend
to help DM students through their transformative journey?
I would allow more time to do a
more thorough literature review of the problem of practice in the first year.
Identifying the relevant literature is more difficult in transdisciplinary
research than in intra-disciplinary research, and it is not always clear what
lenses or theories to apply. I have
often found it frustrating that once the domain of the problem of practice has
been determined, there is too little time to explore the relevant literature
more deeply. As a consequence, the results of the research are not perceived by
academic scholars as being as solid and convincing as they could be, and
therefore have less impact on both academic and practitioner scholarship than
they could have. But at the same time, it needs to be kept in mind that the DM
research is just the beginning of the journey; the knowledge and research
skills gained should equip the student to continue the research at a higher
level.
