By Philip A. Cola, PhD, Associate Director, Academic Affairs, DM Programs
What an interesting and challenging time for practitioner scholars and academic programs it has been in 2020. I have learned more about academic administration than I ever wanted to know over the last three semesters. During this same time, I have tried my best to keep up with the art and science of being a practitioner scholar.
For example, in the last two months, and all in collaboration with DM/PhD alumni or students, my research colleagues and I have received 3 revise and resubmit notices (preliminary reasons to celebrate in my mind), resubmitted 1 previous revise and resubmit manuscript, submitted 3 new manuscripts for review to high impact journals, and presented 1 paper at the Academy of Management (AOM), 1 paper at the Engaged Management Scholarship Conference, and was accepted to present another paper at the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS). By the way, we do not get to go to Hawaii in January to actually present because we picked this year to submit to that conference (ugh!).
Please understand that these accomplishments are not about me, but rather about the unparalleled strength of our DM/PhD programs. I am just fortunate to be able to work with so many wonderfully talented people with the only regret that there has not been enough time to work directly with many more of you (yet).
With those positive emotional attractors as a backdrop, the activity that I want to dedicate the rest of this piece to is the Engaged Management Scholarship (EMS) 2020 conference that was virtually hosted by CWRU in September. Kalle Lyytinen, Program Director and Distinguished University Professor at CWRU and Chris Laszlo, Professor of Organizational Behavior at Weatherhead, were the Conference and Program Chairs, respectively.
We spent months planning an in-person conference at CWRU to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the first ever EMS conference held at CWRU. This is the annual international conference held on behalf of the Executive Doctor of Business Administration Council (EDBAC). The EDBAC is currently made up of 65 DBA degree-offering institutions worldwide. We were excited to bring the conference back to Cleveland then all of a sudden we had to shift our thinking to plan a virtual conference. This really took us out of our comfort zones. I was anxious and skeptical of how this would play out on the international virtual stage.
However, the team of administrators, faculty, alumni, students at CWRU provided one of the best examples of the formation and execution of high-impact teamwork that I have ever experienced in my life. We had 331 people globally register for our virtual conference (the previous high over the first 10 years of EMS was approximately 225 registrations). The doctoral consortium invited 56 students and 52 of those students (from across 14 institutions) were able to present their thesis ideas in 9 virtual groups with support of 21 faculty mentors from the ranks of EDBAC institutions. Our own Jagdip Singh, Professor of Design & Innovation gave an amazing keynote address for the doctoral consortium and Alexis Rittenberger, a current PhD student at CWRU was the backbone of organizing the consortium. John Mooney from Pepperdine and I were co-chairs. Current CWRU students, Jeff Driver, Ivory Simms, Pamela Robinson, Joe Miller, and Ali Raja participated.
EMS 2020 had 65 virtual poster presentations (that was an experience) and the poster session was co-chaired by Joann Quinn (CWRU alumna) and me. Jeff Driver was a finalist for the best poster award, and Ezekiel Bonillas (CWRU student), Dale Hartz (CWRU alumni); along with the aforementioned doctoral consortium students from CWRU all presented posters.
There were 8 paper sessions throughout the conference and 23 papers presented in total out of 36 received for consideration. Chris Laszlo and Josh Gerlick (current third-year DM/PhD student who also expertly managed the virtual technology along with Ivory Simms who managed the conference application with precision) oversaw the paper submission, review and session organization process. Susan Johnson, Bart Morrison, Jennifer Bishop, Aldine Bell, Ellen Schmidt-Devlin and Alison Battaglia from CWRU all presented papers. Susan’s paper (co-authored along with Yunmei Wang, CWRU alumna, Dick Boland, Dave Aron and me) won the best practice paper award for the conference! CWRU faculty Ellen Van Oosten and Peter Whitehouse chaired paper sessions.
There were 9 workshops/panels with alumni including Tony Scardillo, Arron Fraser, Justin Ames, Joann Quinn, Adrian Wolfberg and Rachel Talton all participating related to CWRU. The alumni consortium was co-chaired by Ekin Pelligrini, University of Missouri-St. Louis, Jeanette Miller, Georgia State University alumna, and James Hemsath, CWRU. Dr. Kim Cameron of the University of Michigan gave a keynote address for the 46 people that registered for the alumni consortium.
New to EMS 2020 (and the invention of the high performing team that organized and managed the conference) were special research sessions. These were end of day sessions led by Kalle Lyytinen (mixed methods), Chris Laszlo (positive organizational scholarship) and Dave Aron (complex systems). More than 100 conference participants attended each. These were overwhelming success stories in the new era of virtual global conferences.
Finally, Diana Bilimoria, Chair of Organizational Behavior and David Cooperrider, Distinguished University Professor gave the opening and closing conference keynote addresses, respectively. Michael Tushman of Harvard University gave a third keynote address. One thing that really stood out to me was that each of the three conference keynote addresses all pointed to the idea that “now was the best time to be a practitioner scholar or to be practicing engaged management”. Their unifying message was not pre-planned, but rather emerged organically for the benefit of conference attendees and ultimately to society as well.
