November 2004 Archives

Somewhat unexpectedly, the Dean, Barry Spicer sent out an email to the faculty about "Changes at the Graduate School of Business". I say unexpectedly, because tucked at the end of the email was the following:

Peter Smith, presently Lecturer in Strategy in the Department of Management and Employment Relations, will take over the role of Deputy Director of the MBA from 1 February 2005 as well as teaching in the MBA programme. Peter has had significant business experience in Europe and is himself a graduate of The Auckland MBA programme. He is also the recipient of a distinguished teaching award.

Whilst this is entirely true, I didn't think it would be announced for another week; and even then, I expected something more 'low key'.

Anyway, what Barry failed to mentioned was the "why" behind my decision. In essence, I am taking up a part-time role to allow me to devote more time to my PhD. From my point of view it seems like a good plan. Nevertheless, I do regret the work that others will have to pick up (and prepare) for MGMT 301 and MGMT 302. On the plus side, I get to spend more time (and do more teaching) with MBA students.

I don't feel that I am leaving my current department. It is more of a temporary auf wiedersehen until we are all united in the new building.

So, after teaching summer school (MGMT 101, Organisation & Management), I'll be off to the GSB. Between now and then, I suspect there is a fair bit of work to do.

Since I've just finished marking my share of the MGMT 101 Organisation & Management examination scripts, I thought I'd put my reflections down whilst they are fresh in my mind.

Overall, it was a disappointing experience. The quality of the handwriting (which made the scripts hard to read), the quality of the grammar (which made the scripts hard to understand), and the lack of logic (which failed to answer the question), depressed the average grade well below the B range.

In particular, the lack of care in answering the question had a big impact on the marks. In the prep for the examination we told all the students to "read the question carefully and make sure you answer the question that is asked".

Well, for example, one of the questions was:

If you ran a small business providing office cleaning, how would you ensure that a quality product was provided? In answering this question, you should define what is meant by quality.

The key phrases from this question that need to be addressed are:

• Define quality
• Small business
• Office cleaning
• Deliver a quality product

The question doesn't ask for any of the following (and generally they added no value):

• A history of quality management
• The importance of TQM/Quality management/etc in contemporary business
• The impact of Taylorism of quality
• How the responsibility for quality has shifted from the worker, to the foreman, to the manager, and so on.
• A shopping list of every idea / theorist that had anything to do with quality.

I was surprised how well students are able to memorise the text book. Many of the answers began by repeating the first paragraph of the relevant chapter. Alas, that doesn't actually answer the question.

So, thinking of those key phrases in the question, what else might go wrong.

Define quality: Many answers said things such as "it is a complicated to define" then gave a one sentence definition. Others, said it means giving the customers what they wanted. And, of course, many people didn't define it at all. Those who did define quality, rarely linked the definition into what they wanted to do. Some answers went wide and said "quality is many things to many people", and didn't try and operationalise the term, i.e. provide a defition that allows you to do something with it. Overall, the definitions were short/trivial, e.g. one sentence long.

Small business: So it is a small business, that probably means that setting up a quality department isn't going to be viable. Massive training campaigns may not be feasible either.

Office cleaning: So, it's a service (good point), where production takes place at the point of delivery (excellent point), and we are highly reliant on people more than machinery (another good point). Also, it probably involves working non-standard hours -- who wants to have their office cleaned whilst they are working in it? Whilst students aren't meant to have a detailed knowledge of office cleaning (although a few did), it is necessary to have some sense of what office cleaning is about. Other features of the business are, that is a price sensitive which typically pays very badly; minimum wage or less (bonus points), so managing/motivating the people can be tricky. Often there is a high turnover of staff. Finally, we are dealing with a business-to-business situation, and not a business-to-consumer situation.

Deliver a quality product: Many people weren't consistent in what they said. For example, one student said he was going to use Deming's 14 principles and if a employee didn't perform he would fire them -- what ever happened to Deming's idea of "Drive out fear"? Many answers said they would build in quality by having supervisors do random inspections -- surely that is inspecting in quality. The important thing to do was to link the approach to delivering quality with selected definition, in the given context (small business, service provider). Too many answers didn't connect the dots so to speak. This was the biggest problem; consequently, many answers ended up looking like a shopping list of everything the student knew about quality.

Other boo-boos:

• Adopting statistical process control by surveying customers (the point of process control is that you are controlling the process as it happens and not at the end).
• Ignoring the cost of the service (bonus to those who brought that into their definitions).
• Choosing a technique that was different to the definition of quality. For example, if the definition was "zero defects" saying that the method is going to be based on surveying the customers needs and then doing what they want doesn't quite fit,
• Saying that TQM was the answer to everything without explaining why.

Having read the question, I always asked myself, "Could my mother have written this?" My mother has no training in management, and hasn't been to university. If my mother could have written the answer I have to wonder what "value" the student has taken from their time here.

Some of the nice answers came from a slightly different angle, e.g.:

• Control - pre/concurrent/post
• Leadership

Some of the more off-tack answers drew in ideas from the other questions, such as:

• Teams and centralisation
• Motivation (with out connecting it to quality, other than by having people work harder)

Anyway, that's it until next year. I do wonder if an essay based question (as a form of summative assessment) is a good choice in this course. Would some other type of examination, e.g. short answer or multiple-choice, be better (and still achieve the same result)?

I think the students sit their final examination tomorrow. And so Friday and Monday will be taken up with exam marking. The team will be 'locked up' and not allowed out until it is finished.

But we have already begun planning for next year. I'll be teaching this course at summer school. Since summer school only lasts six weeks, we pack in twice the number of lectures into each week.

Anyway, there are some changes in the pipeline. Perhaps the biggest is the shift to a new text book by Samson & Daft called Management. It will be replacing Management: A New Zealand perspective by Inkson & Kolb. The old book has served us well, but a new edition isn't available yet. So, it is onto Samson & Daft.

This means we need to re-work the lectures (and the tutorials) so they match the emphasis (and the structure) of the book. After all, trying to do things in a different sequence to the book can often be confusing because the book has its own internal logic.

I'm spending tonight working out some sample assignments for the course. Because of the tight timeframe, assignments need to be well crafted so that they can be turned-around quickly enough -- the students do need to get their feedback before each assignment.

Anyway, enough chat. I've questions to write.

One of the more difficult things to do when carrying out research is to negotiate entry into a research site (especially when carrying out case research, which is what I hope to do).

Fortunately, Nigel Haworth provided me with an introduction to the Chairman of my 'ideal' participant organisation.

So today, I met with the Chairman and we had an interesting dicussion about the firm and my interests and how those my intersect. I'm really keen to do research with this firm as they would be a rich source of data -- and they are large enough to be interesting to an international audience.

What's more, I think I might be able to provide them with some value too. So we could all win from this.

Anyway, I'm back their next week as we continue the process of 'entry'.

Most of the marking of the Case and Annotated Bibliographies are done. We, DPE, will meet next week to review the marks before releasing them. Unsurprisingly some are very good, and some are not.

What is surprising is the patterns that we've seen occurring in the cases and bibliographies.

Firstly, the members of each team seem to write about the same thing. E.g. Zoom and takeovers.

Secondly, the pattern of the case and the bibliography amongst the poorer cases often the same. The case goes along the lines of "We didn't do [planning], and so we had problems". The bibliography then often the consists of article saying "[Planning] is good" and the link that gets made is "We should have done more [planning]". You can substitute what you like instead of planning, be it leadership, sensemaking, strategy, etc. My question tends to be, where is the insight that the article generates about the case?

Finally, the issue that gets chosen is often very broad, i.e. "Things didn't work out for company X, I wonder what they could have done differently". This results in bibliographies that are they general (covering everything from strategy to leadership, etc). There is a variation on this where the case that is just a history of the company with a rather general issue bolted on the end. The better cases ended with a very specific question "i.e. Should company X try to takeover company Y", the bibliography is then focused on the pros and cons of takeovers ... which is much more interesting.

It's been another three months since I last saw the doctor, so it was time for a check up today.

My blood pressure is better, only 120/86. I'd like the second figure should be lower, say 70, but it continues to head in the right direction.

I?ve only lost 3Kg in the last three months. I think I've plateaued-off a little bit. Maybe it's time to revisit what (well, how much) I eat.

I've been working at improving my cholesterol. My HDL was too low last time, so I've been eating Brazil nuts, a lot more fish, and taking a little more olive oil. And it seems to have had an effect. Overall, it's gone up from 3.4 to 4.2 (which is still good), and my LDL is up from 2.0 to 2.4 (< 3), but the good news is my HDL (the good stuff) is up from 1.0 to 1.2 (They like it to be over 1.0). Overall the Total/HDL ration is pretty static at 3.5 (was 3.4). They like it below 4.5.

So, I think my cholesterol is still pretty good.