The Practitioner Scholar

I cannot begin to count the number of time people, from close friends to new acquaintances, have asked me this question. When I went back to school for my MBA, with a decade of work experience behind me, I was often asked this question, and found no issue in quickly responding. I often explained that as I moved into leadership, I often wondered if what I was doing in my own role corresponded with what ‘I should be doing.’ I was hoping that getting an advanced degree, specifically the MBA, would help me in clarifying what best practices were and how I could be most effective.

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Scholars point toward the importance of creating networks as a noteworthy element for entrepreneurial success. But, may this be the missing link without which we cannot be successful in our entrepreneurial endeavors?

In fact, most of the experts in the field highlight the positive effect of networking for a business’s start-up and sustainability. However, others question this by stating these relationships may destroy the likelihood for success of a business, instead of helping it.

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Albert "Jack" Stanley, the 65-year-old chairman and CEO of KKR, a senior executive at Halliburton, was legendary for winning billion-dollar contracts in emerging countries; he seemed to possess a magic wand for dealing with government officials and winning their trust in countries like Egypt, Malaysia, Nigeria and Yemen. Those who know Stanley well describe him as a smart and fearsome competitor, intent on winning big deals and getting rewarded for his contributions. His dedication to Halliburton was unquestionable and he was considered a global rainmaker. He had it all. But all that changed on one private trip to Abuja, Nigeria.

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We live in exciting times. We hold in our hands phones that allow us to communicate freely, access data and plan our schedules. We partner with companies and workers halfway around the world, and do so in real time. We have immediate access to information that can change outcomes, even lives. Our understanding of “business” is changing. True, most students leaving business school will have in mind careers in corporations making considerable salaries, perhaps traveling widely or relocating to other countries. However, students also now have the option to choose “social entrepreneurship” – that is, to use the tools and strategies of business development to make socially conscious enterprises succeed.

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This past week kicked off the last semester of my classroom work in the DM/PhD program. This made me think back on the past two and a half years to when this journey started and I realized that I had written several reflection papers that first semester. Reading these papers again, I had a few observations that I thought note worthy.

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Go to any nearly geographic location in the US where there’s a high density of medium and larger sized businesses and you’ll find at least one small business focused on helping these corporations with “team building events”.  There’s a good chance that you are familiar with such businesses; they usually have some outdoor space dedicated to an obstacle course and have “camp counselors” who both help teams negotiate the obstacles and spark debate over various challenges the team is expected to accomplish.  The courses are typically fun, the events challenging and the results for the team in the long term… well… inconsequential.

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Pricing is a complex process (Monroe, 1990; Nagle & Holden, 2002). Many industry managers consider pricing a headache and many firms have “thrown in the towel” on pricing. They complain that they have no control over prices since “the market sets the price and (they) have to figure out how to cope with it” (Dolan & Simon, 1996). Lancioni et al. (2005) proposed that pricing strategy has implications for stakeholders both within and outside the firm. For them, pricing is a difficult and complex process due to the plethora of internal and external economic and political influences that shape the firm’s pricing decisions. The tasks of price setting and implementation have numerous implications throughout the organization. These tasks involve “multidimensional processes affecting customers, products, cost recovery efforts, produce margin levels, customer retention, market share, and domestic and international sales” (Lancioni, et al., 2005, p. 125).

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The ultimate test of any scholarly program involves the way that the program impacts the thinking of its students... Without exception, alumni indicated that the program changed their thinking... “I view the world differently now, I think about it differently, I process input differently, I speak about it differently, I write about it differently.”

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I learned something new about myself after the fifth residency. One of my classmates suggested that since we were ahead of others in our cohort in completing the research work that we should reach out to our cohort and see how they are doing and help them in whatever way we could. I learned two things. One is emotional and the other is intellectual.

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With the first semester now over, I thought I would reflect upon the non-academic part of the Doctor of Management experience. I had come into the program not knowing exactly how the transition from work to academia would take. Everything I read and everyone I talked with provided me with knowledge but since I did not have the experience of a doctorate program under my belt, there was no ability for me to absorb what I was reading and hearing prior to the start of the program. This phenomenon is called “absorptive capacity,” the ability a person has of internalizing something new is dependent upon prior experience that lets one grab the newness and make it concrete.

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