Global Strategy - blog

In recent times, there has been a lot of discussion about the questionable practices of scholars, universities and publishers. In a related fashion, the economist Ronald Coase once said that "if you torture the data long enough, Nature will confess." He referred to a common research practice of flexibly changing one's model, collecting more data and using different measures until you find interesting and publishable results; it is likely that at some point you will find statistically significant results purely by chance. For a qualitative researcher, flexibility is a good thing. In fact, going back and forth between data and theory is the primary mode of doing qualitative research. However, in quantitative research, flexibility is somewhat counter-intuitively considered a bad thing. Let me explain.

An interesting dimension in management science is that the science part is largely in marginal role as a source of management ideas. In comparison, think about medical doctors who would use TV series as a source of knowledge, or engineers who would read science-fiction when designing a bridge? Does not sound good?

Frederick V (1723-1766), King of Denmark, financed the first Western expedition to Arabia in 1761-1767. This is what Thorkild Hansen's (1962) account of the project taught me about the social dynamics of the 18th century academia.

After watching the London School of Economics and Gaddafi family case (see e.g. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/lse-embroiled-in-row-over-authorship-of-gaddafis-sons-phd-thesis-and-a-15m-gift-to-universitys-coffers-2226894.html) someone may question the objectiveness and scientific independence of universities at more general level too. And for good reasons.

While backpacking through Thailand I read Doris Lessing's debut novel The Grass Is Singing published in 1950. It is about the interaction of white farmers and their black workforce in colonial Africa. I realised that there are striking similarities between colonial farming and the Thai tourism business.

When Nokia and Microsoft announced their alliance in software development business the first impression was that this is ugly as incest. Nokia would abandon some its core assets and Microsoft would provide its so far marginal Windows Phone 7 as the main platform for Nokia’a smart phones? What is more, the MEEGO operating system or at least the MAEMO was almost functional when it was sidelined from Nokia’s strategy? The blog scene offers much better technological and managerial analyses of the pact so it does not make sense to compete in that front. Couple of interesting notions from organizational theory may still be warranted. Let’s see how Glostra’s basic assumptions correspond with the deal:

It is slightly depressing that Philip K. Dick as a pulp fiction writer and drug addict consistently beats any (at least many) management scholar when it comes to insightfulness in how organizations actually work. Take for instance ‘Clans of the Alphane Moon' published in 1975. Besides the usual PKD themes (divorce, overall panopticon features of the society etc.) the novel focuses on a moon inhabited by pathological psychopaths. Due to a war between terra and Alphanes the moon has been largely isolated for over twenty years. Over the years the different mental disorders have bifurcated to several clans which largely live separated yet collaborate through an informal council. The clans are:

After spending considerable time inside in the company of books and mostly theoretical articles, one may easily become a bit of a book-worm. That is, lose the 'touch' on things. The world (I said it, uh) becomes something not only seen through theoretical glasses, but one in which theory really matters, almost all the time. Therefore it was a real delight to actually do something, for once (articulated in structuralist-mythological language this 'doing' could be expressed as something like a series of utterances in a zero-order language). The task was to take part in this year's vendimia.

Aalto University’s (www.aalto.fi) aim to be a ’top university’ or a ’leading university’ has created a fair amount of anxiety among current faculty. That is, the goals are clear yet the means are either unrealistic or obscure. E.g. to reach University of Turku (www.utu.fi) in Shanghai rankings we should publish at least three times more ISI listed articles than we do today. Anyone can make judgments of how probable this is.