Grokking the case method of business education

The Case Method. HBS teaches exclusively by case method- which goes well beyond just the teaching method at the school, but down to… [I have a brain cloud]

Adam does an excellent job of capturing the essence of the case method at HBS. I didn’t figure it out as quickly as he did, although I also chose to go there because of it. I didn’t really begin to grasp the case method until I began writing cases for use in the classroom while I was doing my doctoral work. Actually, I had to spend a year writing cases before they would even let me into the doctoral program. Something to do with some courses I managed to fail while I was getting my MBA–some people seemed to think this raised a question about whether I was qualified for the program.

Anyway, the key to the case method is that the goal is to help students develop a lasting skill, not pass an exam at the end of the semester. That skill is about finding and defining a problem, deciding on an appropriate goal, and then building a plan for moving from the problem toward the goal.

On paper that looks like a trivial process. Certainly not something clever enough to build a lot of fancy theory around that can get published in the right academic journals. But it does focus on the place where a manager or leader can have the greatest potential impact – defining the agenda. Moreover, because it is seen as a skill, it’s also clear that it needs to be developed and internalized with a lot of practice.

Sure, the place can seem like a collection of arrogant SOBs, especially from the outside. But it is one of the few places I know of that is absolutely clear that it’s central mission is to create an environment where the learner, not the teached, is the center of attention.

Activewords press

ActiveWords gets good press.

Great press for ActiveWords in USA Today: Information springs from your fingertips.

Like Tivo, Active Words is one of those things that doesn’t seem to make much sense until you try it – at which point you can’t imagine why others don’t use it. Check it out.

[tins ::: Rick Klau’s weblog]

ActiveWords is one of those tricky products to market. I originally downloaded it on the recommendation of Ernie the Attorney, played with it a bit, and let it languish, after mentioning it on my blog. Shortly after, I got a call from the indefatigable Buzz Bruggeman, ActiveWords’s driving force. With some demoing and coaching from Buzz, ActiveWords is now one of the tools that sits quietly in the background and, over time, lets me tailor my computing environment to my own needs and work habits.

Let me give you a really simple example. I talk about knowledge management and knowledge sharing a lot. But I never type those words out anymore. Instead I type “km” and “ks” and ActiveWords does the rest for me. Better yet, ActiveWords (“aw” BTW) does it anywhere and everywhere I might want to use those terms. That alone is enough to justify the tool, but you can get a lot more clever than that over time.

New gig in the private sector

I’ve been following the discussion and insight over at Invisible Adjunct with more than casual interest lately. There’s been some passionate and articulate discussion on the essential folly of getting a Ph.D. in the humanities (and many other disciplines for that matter). The problem being the huge imbalance between supply and demand for Ph.D.s in academic settings.

This discussion comes too late for me, since I already did the “piled higher and deeper” game (although to be technically correct my degree is not a Ph.D., but a D.B.A. – doctor of business administration, which has more to do with the academic politics of different graduate schools at Harvard than with anything else). I also went into the process with a clear notion of what the job market was likely to be.

I’ve actually spent the bulk of my post-doctoral career on the non-academic side of the fence and I’m headed back there again. You can see the details here, although I try to avoid wearing a tie whenever possible. I find that I’m happiest working in rapidly growing environments. Kellogg has been great fun and it was particularly rewarding to be able to develop a course on knowledge management, but what I’m interested in isn’t at the heart of what Kellogg does best. Time for a new adventure.

I’ve been at Huron now for a couple of months so I can say that I expect the blogging to continue. Managing knowledge work hasn’t gotten any easier and I expect I’ll continue to write down my questions, observations, and suggestions about how we can design our way into some useful answers. I just think of it as a participating in this colllective action research program from a slightly different location.

The power of grassroots in knowledge management

THE INCONCEIVABILITY OF GOOGLE, and the lessons to be drawn from that, are the subjects of my TechCentralStation column today, which carries the somewhat racy-sounding title Horizontal Knowledge: Just try this thought experiment: Imagine that it’s 1993. The Web is just appearing. And imagine that you – an unusually prescient… [Instapundit.com]

A great column from Glenn Reynolds over at TechCentralStation. Here’s the punch line:

The Web, Wi-Fi, and Google didn’t develop and spread because somebody at the Bureau of Central Knowledge Planning planned them. They developed, in large part, from the uncoordinated activities of individuals. [Reynold’s Wrap-TechCentralStation]

Glenn’s in one more voice in the growing realization that top-down planning and control strategies are relatively weak when set against the grassroots ingenuity of large groups. These are insights that have to be brought back inside organizations and put to use.

Punting the SAT

Scholastic Aptitude Test: Answering All Questions Incorrectly. This is a knee-slapping account of one person’s attempt to achive the lowest possible score on a SAT examination. The project is fully documented, with lavish illustrations, from the original application to take the test to the white-knuckle stress of finding the wrong answer in a testing environment. Some biting commentary – and from the examples provided I see that the tests are still very culturally biased. Every person planning to take a SAT should read this article. By Colin P. Fahey, May, 2003 [Refer][Research][Reflect] [OLDaily]

Don’t know how many of you caught this elsewhere around the net. It demonstrates just what you can accomplish if you have a goal.

Lessig petition on reclaiming the public domain

reclaiming the public domain. We have launched a petition to build support for the Public Domain Enhancement Act. That act would require American copyright holders to pay $1 fifty years after a work was published. If they pay the $1, the copyright continues. If they don’t, the work passes into the public domain. Historical estimates would suggest 98% of works would pass into the pubilc domain after 50 years. The Act would do a great deal to reclaim a public domain. This proposal has received a great deal of support. It is now facing some important lobbyists’ opposition. We need a public way to begin to demonstrate who the lobbyists don’t speak for. This is the first step. If you are an ally in at least this cause, please sign the petition. Please blog it, please email it, please spam it, please buy billboards about it — please do whatever you can. And most importantly, please help us explain its importance. There is a chance to do something significant here. But it will take a clearer, simpler voice than mine. [Lessig Blog]

The pendulum has swung too far in the direction of control over intellectual property rights. This is one sensible thing you can do to help push it back in the direction of balance between public and private interests.

Software testing resources

Eradicating bugs & software testing. I’m the kind of guy that software vendors either love or hate: I dive into software to figure out how best to use it for me or my organization. But that also means that I turn up bugs and usability… [Knowledge Jolt with Jack]

Jack Vinson provides some great pointers here to some great resources on software testing.

On a side note it’s good to welcome Jack to the blogging world. He’s been lurking for a while and we’ve finally got him adding his own voice to the mix. Welcome!

Getting up to speed on wikis, part 2

Last Thursday’s post on wikis generated quite a bit of good feedback. Comments from a number of readers offered pointers to more wiki related materials.

Doug Holton, a graduate student at Vanderbilt, offers these three wiki-specific entries from his blog (which looks to be a useful reference in general):

Here are some more thoughts (and actual research) on wikis: http://edtechdev.org/blog/archives/001181.html http://edtechdev.org/blog/archives/001172.html http://edtechdev.org/blog/archives/001173.html

Bill Seitz is experimenting with a cross between a wiki and a weblog he calls a WikiWeblog. He points to his notes there on self-organizing aspects of wikis at Wikis for Collaboration Ware.

Denham Gray gently reminded me of his KmWiki which was the first wiki I ever posted anything to and is a wonderful resource of KM related materials. Denham is a zealous advocate of the collaborative opportunities found in knowledge work.

Jonathan Smith points to Joi Ito’s wiki experiments and an evolving section on Wikis vs. Blogs

Jenny Levine at Shifted Librarian posts a pointer to Blogging, RSS, and Wikis – Presentations, Papers, and a Pathfinder

Elwyn Jenkins at MicroDocBlogger throws his 0.02 in with Blogs, Wikis, and Knowledge Building. He offers the interesting notion that “blogs turn people into webpages” and “wikis turn communities into webpages.”

And finally Ross Mayfield reminds me of the work he is doing at socialText.com which is both a source of great info on wikis and social software in general and an ongoing experiment in the same.

Obviously blogs and wikis are not an either/or proposition. I see them both as examples of grassroots, bottoms up approaches to making knowledge work and knowledge workers more effective. If you lower the barriers to participation and make it easier for individuals and teams to narrate their work, then you start to get the possibility of getting knowledge management as a desirable side effect.

Instead of trying to cram a centralized knowledge management system down everyone’s throat, you focus on helping individuals and teams do their own work more easily and more effectively. If you give some thought to how you design and shape the environment, the benefits of knowledge management sought by vendors of solutions in search of problems will emerge from the work itself.