Hotshots leave managers cold
There are not many management professors whose books squeeze past the get-rich-quick tipsters, motivational preachers and one-minute-solution merchants to reach the business bestsellers' lists.
In true academic style, two of those rare bestselling professors have just taken a swipe at one of the others. In the September issue of the Harvard Business Review, Clayton Christensen, a Harvard Business School professor, and Michael Raynor, director of Deloitte Research and a professor at the Ivey business school in Ontario, poured scorn on those who claimed "companies run by CEOs who are plain, ordinary people earn returns to shareholders that are superior to those of companies run by flashy CEOs".
Professors Christensen and Raynor did not name names, but anyone in the know will identify their target as Jim Collins, author of the bestselling Good to Great, which concluded that companies run by plain, ordinary chief executives earned better returns than those run by flashy chief executives.
Actually, Mr Collins is not a professor. He used to teach at Stanford business school but so successful were his writings (Built to Last, an earlier book he co-authored, sold more than 1m copies) that he quit academic life to work from his "management laboratory" in Boulder, Colorado.
Prof Christensen's and Prof Raynor's own book, The Innovator's Solution, has joined Good to Great on the bestsellers' list. I will return to the professors' work next week . A more immediate question is why people such as Prof Christensen and Mr Collins are so rare - and why most business school professors make so little impression on the managers they talk and write about.
In 1993 Donald Hambrick, then president of the Academy of Management, the business professors' organisation, described their world as "an incestuous, closed loop". The academy's summer conference was a desperately introverted affair. "Each August, we come to talk with each other; during the rest of the year we read each other's papers in our journals and write our own papers so that we may, in turn, have an audience the following August."
A decade later, little has changed. This year's Academy of Management conference in Seattle was crawling with management teachers. They came from the University of Oregon, the Stockholm School of Economics, the Auckland University of Technology and hundreds of schools in between. They presented papers on everything from the role of compensation committees to the influence of gender on career success.
But what was striking about this international festival of management was the almost complete absence of managers. Kevin Roberts, chief executive of Saatchi & Saatchi, gave a presentation but few other executives turned up.
Prof Hambrick says he detects some progress since his 1993 presidential address. Management ideas are more widely discussed outside business schools. But he concedes that even those managers who come to the conference to make speeches do not hang around to attend the other sessions.
The same goes for chief executives who come to talk to business schools. The schools believe they have much to learn from business leaders. The business leaders rarely return the compliment by asking to listen to the lectures.
There is no other group of academics that is as distant from the profession it talks and writes about. Imagine a medical conference without doctors or a legal seminar without lawyers.
The same applies to business school research. You invariably find the British Medical Journal or the New England Journal of Medicine in a doctor's magazine rack. How often do you see a management journal in a manager's office?
There are important differences between medicine and law, on the one hand, and management, on the other. Medicine and law are closed professions; you cannot become a doctor or lawyer without attending medical or law school. You do not have to attend business school to become a manager. Indeed, some managers claim that it is an advantage not to have done so.
Yet business schools have been hugely successful in attracting students. In the US, the number of MBA students grew from 5,000 in 1961 to more than 100,000 in 2000. So why are so few managers interested in the professors' writings?
Some believe the root of the problem is business schools' ambivalence about what they are. Throughout their history, they have wrestled with the conflicting demands of attracting students and winning the respect of the rest of the university. The students know what they want: degrees that will provide them with the knowledge and credentials to land lucrative jobs after graduation. And the professors know what they want: publication records that will allow them to look their colleagues in the faculties of law, philosophy and engineering in the eye.
The result is not necessarily bad work. There is some worthwhile business school research. The problem is that so much of it is rendered unreadable by what we can call "the spurious sigma".
A group of professors will be developing their thesis on, for example, the relationship between board structure and international political risk, when they will suddenly produce a formula, filled with sigmas and other letters, Greek and Latin, along with the explanation that "xi is the political risk rating, yi is the number of employees for the {I }i th country, and n is the number of countries in a firm's portfolio". These ideas can be described without the aid of formulae, so why use them? Because it makes the writers feel like proper professors.
The strange thing is that the rewards for turning research into readable, formula-free prose can be huge, as Mr Collins and Prof Christensen have shown. Why so few of their colleagues respond to the incentives on offer is worth a research project of its own.
冷眼旁观热门管理学
如今书市上大行其道的，是那些教人们快速发财的书，宣扬励志的书，鼓吹一分钟解决方案的书，而管理学教授的著作却很少脱颖而出，登上畅销排行榜。
但是，也有两位教授的管理类书比较畅销。最近，这两位教授用十足学术化的方式，对流行阵营的某位作者予以猛烈抨击。在今年九月的《哈佛商业评论》中，针对认为"普通、平民化的CEO会比花里胡哨的CEO带来更多股东收益"的人，哈佛商学院教授克莱顿o克里斯坦森（Clayton Christensen）和Deloitte研究中心主任、安大略的Ivey商学院教授迈克尔o雷诺（Michael Raynor）给予了辛辣的嘲讽。
克里斯坦森教授和雷诺教授并未指名道姓，但是明眼人都能看出，他们抨击的对象是畅销书《从优秀到卓越》（Good to Great）的作者吉姆o科林斯（Jim Collins）。就是在此书中，科林斯提出，朴实的公司总裁会比花里胡哨的公司总裁带来更好的股东回报。
事实上，科林斯先生并非教授。他在斯坦福商学院任过职，但是他的著作非常畅销，比如他与人合著的《基业长青》（Built to Last）就卖出了一百万册以上，所以他干脆辞去教职，在科罗拉多的博尔多开了家"管理实验室"，在那里专职工作。
克里斯坦森教授和雷诺教授的著作是《创新者的解决方案》（Innovator's Solution），它和《从优秀到卓越》一样，登上了畅销排行榜。下周我再来谈这本书。更迫切的问题是，为什么克里斯坦森教授和科林斯先生这样的人这么少，为什么他们说的是经理人，写的是经理人，而经理人却对如此无动于衷？
1993年，当时任管理学会（Academy of Management）会长的唐纳德o汉姆布瑞克（Donald Hambrick）将管理界形容为"近亲繁殖、封闭隔绝的圈子。"该学会的夏季学术会议就是异常封闭的活动。"每年八月，我们大家来互相交谈，在这一年的其余时间，我们互相拜读各自在期刊上发表的文章，然后自己写文章，以便在明年的八月又有人来跟自己交流。"
十年过去了，情况并没有什么改变。今年的管理学会在西雅图召开，管理学教师们济济一堂。他们来自于俄勒冈大学、斯德哥尔摩经济学院、奥克兰技术大学等上百所学府。他们宣读论文，题目从薪酬委员会的角色到性别对职业成功的影响，五花八门。
但是令人惊奇的是，这个管理界的国际盛会上，出席的经理人却几乎一个没有。盛世广告公司（Saatchi & Saatchi）总裁凯文o罗伯茨（Kevin Roberts）发表了演讲，但再没有什么其他总裁在会上露面。
汉姆布瑞克说，自从他1993年发表会长就职演说以来，他看到了一些进步。在商学院之外，管理思想被讨论的范围比以前更广了。但是他承认，即便是有经理人来年会上发表演说了，也没有几个留下来参加其它的会议活动。
来商学院发表演讲的公司总裁们也一样，通常是讲完就走。商学院觉得自己有很多向商界领袖请教的地方，而商界领袖却没有礼尚往来，主动要求来听商学院的课程。
没有哪一个学术领域像管理学这样脱离论述的对象。试想一下，没有医生出席的医学会议，或者没有律师出席的法学会议，能开得起来吗？
商学院的研究也一样。医生的杂志架上总能找到《英国医学期刊》（British Medical Journal）或者《新英格兰医学期刊》（New England Journal of Medicine）之类学术期刊。但大家有多少次在经理的办公室里看到管理学术期刊呢？
一方面，医学和法学之间大相径庭，但另一方面，他们又和管理大相径庭。医学和法学是封闭的领域，不上医学院和法学院，你就当不成医生或者律师。但是，如果不上管理学院，却照样能当经理。事实上，有些经理人甚至宣称，不上商学院反而更有优势。
但是商学院在吸引学生方面却非常成功。在美国，MBA的总人数在1961年仅有5000人，到了2000，总人数超过了10万。但是为什么经理人很少去拜读教授们的大作？
有些人认为，问题的根源在于商学院对自身的定位，模棱两可。在商学院的发展史上，商学院一直要面对两个相互矛盾的需求，一个是吸引学生，另一个是赢得大学中其它同仁的尊敬。学生们知道他们需要什么：他们需要学位，需要用知识，用资历来武装自己，毕业后找到赚钱的工作。教授们也知道他们想得到什么：发表文章，保证自己在法学、哲学、工程学的同行们面前毫不逊色。
这一矛盾并不一定让商学院的所作所为有失水准。有些商学院的研究是很值称道的。问题在于，他们的研究成果晦涩难懂，充斥着许多"没有任何意义的(。"
例如，有些教授的论文是谈董事会架构和国际政治风险之间的关系，文章中间会突然跳出一个公式，里面满是(等希腊的、拉丁的字母，还有如下这类解释："x代表政治风险评级，y代表第{I }国员工数量，n代表该公司有业务存在的国家数量。"这些观点并不是非得有公式才能讲清楚啊，为什么一定要用这些公式呢？因为这些公式让这些教授感觉更好，觉得自己是个真正的教授。
但是奇怪的是，如果把研究成果转化成可读的，没有公式的作品，其效果会非常好，正如克里斯坦森教授和科林斯先生所显示的那样。为什么这些教授不去追求这种好效果呢？这一现象本身可成为一个研究课题。
