May 2013
3 posts
Busting Stereotypes: The Greatest Goods of Asia
I was in Bangkok, on the last night of a whirlwind 8-country/8-day book promoting tour in Asia. I had been meeting potential students for Hult International Business School when I was momentarily distracted. I looked up at numbers that had been projected on a screen, and I was carried away in a kind of analytical reverie. Maybe the numbers meant nothing—well, statistically I was sure they meant...
Good vs Good Amazon review: A great neoclassic !
Good vs Good is another of those intellectually radical works from John C Beck, who is not new to surprise us with the quality of his writing. This book stands out as having an apparently simple approach to the need of alignment and prioritization of those “goods” that would shape a more equitable world, but the core message I could read through the lines, is a fundamental hope of the...
“Why isn’t there a really good business school?”
A few years ago, I took a job as a dean of a business school in Japan. I did it for one reason: it seemed to me that there should be a really good business school in what was then the second largest economy on earth. I failed to transform that school. But in the ensuing five years, I have come to a conclusion that gives me some comfort: I don’t believe there is a really good business school...
April 2013
2 posts
Good vs Good Amazon review: Maslow's Hierarchy for...
“Maslow’s Hierarchy for the Social World” would be a more apt title for this book. Its a new and refreshing view that reflects classic tensions and conflicts of today’s socially driven globally connected world. The author’s level of analysis makes it easier to see the forest for the trees as to the forces that are at the heart of decision making. I like the...
Good vs Good Amazon review: A refreshingly new...
“Having been enthralled by this book, I now find myself testing its theories at dinner parties, in business meetings and even at the hair salon! I must confess, I’m not a great fan of life manuals or business guides, especially the ones that teach you how to fix your problems in 8 easy steps. Thankfully, Good vs Good is not of this ilk. It is a comprehensive, compelling and very...
March 2013
5 posts
Good vs Good Amazon review: The kind of book that...
“It’s one of those books that you gain a different appreciation for every time you read it because it gives you a new insight into understanding others, and yourself, in various situations and stages in life. The significance of this book lies in the fact that it offers readers another approach to dealing with decision-making. It is substantially relevant considering the known common...
Good vs Good Amazon review: A can't put down book...
“I read the back cover and I wasn’t sure what to expect. At first I thought it would be another self-help book, but it turned out to be a fascinating research book full of facts that provide solid support for the explanations of human behavior. Combined with very personal stories from the author’s closest friends and family, Good vs. Good enlightens you on the decision-making...
Good vs Good: Why the 8 Great Goods are behind...
Good vs Good is officially out now! Five years of my mental life has gone into this (So if I seem a little dumber these days, this book is why!). Amazon has a bunch of signed copies of the book for the first buyers. And if you like it, I would really appreciate a nice review on Amazon from you. Thanks to those of you who helped support me throughout this process … a lot of you will recognize...
MOOCs
Here is some data with respect to recent survey on MOOC’s
http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/22/72-of-professors-who-teach-online-courses-dont-think-their-students-deserve-credit/
Finally! A global award for great business school...
Teaching awards are not uncommon. We probably all know someone who’s won one, and several more who should. Excellent teachers are the reason why many of us have been inspired to stretch ourselves beyond our limits, only to find that we are capable of so much more than we ever imagined.
The reason we humans have accomplished amazing things is due to the teachers who imparted the foundational...
January 2013
1 post
From Student to Professional
A couple of weeks ago, I did not remind my students that an assignment was due. Until then, that was never the kind of professor I wanted to be. But I have changed.
After years of working with busy, stressed out MBAs, I know that many are likely to forget deadlines. Out of fairness to those who do observe them, I strictly enforce those deadlines. But rather than alienate half the class with a...
October 2012
1 post
How I looked like Obama
A week ago I watched in amazement as President Obama appeared lost and confused—bottled-up—in his debate with Mitt Romney. I didn’t understand the look on his face or his reaction until I found myself in a similar situation.
I was in a meeting with a group of corporate executives; I alone was opposing a particular proposal as really bad policy. My case was greeted with many nodding heads. The...
September 2012
2 posts
Can Wall Streeters be Self-Aware?
At Hult Labs we’ve been asking CEOs around the world what they would like more from in their MBAs. And a common—actually, constant—theme from top executives is that they would like to hire more MBAs who are more self-aware.
What science is telling us, in a paper just published days ago (http://bit.ly/TnjzAp), is that those who are most involved in numbers are least able to reflect on their own...
Good leaders change things!
Maybe I always thought that change was an important component of leadership … I really can’t remember any more. But, I do remember the moment when my current appreciation for the link between the two became really clear to me. For four years as a graduate student, I was a research assistant to John Kotter at Harvard Business School. He was interested in what made leaders into leaders and wrote and...
August 2012
1 post
Can MBA programs handle ambiguity?
“Der Krieg ist das Gebiet der Ungewißheit; drei Vierteile derjenigen Dinge, worauf das Handeln im Kriege gebaut wird, liegen im Nebel einer mehr oder weniger großen Ungewißheit. Her ist es also zuerst, wo ein feiner, durchdringender Verstand in Anspruch genommen wird, um mit dem Takte seines Urteils die Wahrheit herauszufühlen.” - Von Clausewitz, On War
(War is a zone of uncertainty;...
July 2012
4 posts
The loyalty trap
I have few regrets in my life. But years ago, I did something that made me a much smaller person. There are good reasons for it: I had a young family and I really needed the job. But I’ve wished for almost fifteen years that I could have made a better decision.
I was working in a part of a company where the unit founder (I was his second in command) had been great in the early days of the...
Can business schools find a breadth of fresh air?
David Teece’s latest FT article (http://on.ft.com/LZ8zFw) makes the important point that B-schools cannot continue to get more and more and more specialized and narrow. But, there is one small problem with implementing his recommendation: everyone involved in academia likes to be narrow. Most faculty members want to teach and research in a well-practiced rut. Academic publishing requires deep...
The American dilemma of profitability vs....
In a recent survey of 1100 working age, employed Americans, 50.5% basically agree with the statement: “I would lay off an employee — even one with no prospect of finding another job — to keep my company profitable.”
But the other half disagree.
America: All for one and all for one
In honor of the Fourth of July, here is my chapter about America from the forthcoming Good vs Good book. Of the Eight Great Goods (Life, Relationships, Equality, Growth, Stability, Belief, Joy, and Individuality), America is the country in the world that most clearly places Individuality as the top Good. In my speeches and conversations about this topic, someone in the audience almost always...
June 2012
1 post
Passion in Professing
The best professors are passionate. Well, getting too passionate could land you in jail, but great teachers get excited, involved, and agitated about almost every part of the educational process.
I remember when I first started teaching—in a subject matter, Strategy, that was not my PhD field—my department chairman informed that I should use a particular textbook because that was the book that...
April 2012
1 post
Why I'm a Teacher
Preparing for the final day of teaching a business strategy course to my MBA students this year, I stopped—for what may have been the first time in my career—to really consider if there was any value in my class. Not only for my students … but also for me.
Over the last twenty years of teaching at all levels of higher education—undergraduate, graduate, and executive education—I have found that...
August 2011
1 post
Top five breakthroughs in business education
Twenty-five years ago, I was among a group of Harvard MBA students who presented a petition to the school’s faculty. The proposal which was almost unanimously supported by the students, had the distinction of being rejected by the faculty without a dissenting vote. We weren’t asking for easier grades, or more days off, or better teachers. We wanted more group projects. We all felt we learned...
July 2011
5 posts
Roger: uniquely individualistic
“I fought against my mother my entire life. I did not want to be – could not be – who she wanted me to be. She was a stunning woman – Miss Kingston Jamaica – and was accustomed to getting her way. Almost any man would do her bidding. Any man, except me. She had two problems on that front with me. First, I was her son – thus, fairly resistant to her charms. Second, I was gay – thus, fairly...
BoonLi wants equality
“My mother was never allowed to take the exams to go to college. She never got over that. I’m sure I bore the brunt of her disappointment. I would have never received a scholarship to Oxford without her. Many parents push their kids. But with her, there was a kind of desperation in the pressure. Everyday I felt that if I didn’t study harder, life would never be fair to me. That if...
Sally does Stability
“Running a farm is a constant cycle of financial ups and downs – fertilizer, equipment and better bulls are very expensive – everything depends on weather and markets. Overlay that with my parents’ natural emotional mood swings and you can understand how I never knew, when I woke up in the morning as a child, if it was going to be a good day or a bad day. It all culminated when my father and...
Dave relies on Belief
“I suppose all of my priorities in life are actually based on my belief in God. I make my decisions based on what my religion teaches me. WWJD – “what would Jesus do?” is my guiding principle in life. It is the basis of everything.”
“Sure, I was in the business world for 30 years and you can get sidetracked a lot during your career. I was a salesman, and a darn good one. In my line of work,...
Roy and Joy
“Why would I go to work every day if I wasn’t having fun on the job? Wouldn’t I look for something else to do? I’m even busier now that I’m retired than I ever was when I was working, so I need to make sure what I’m doing is more fun than ever. Why wouldn’t I do that?”
Sometimes Roy’s questions sound like the careful rhetoric of a preacher. At other times, they come across slightly defensive. ...
June 2011
4 posts
Faye: The Good of Society
“There is nothing in the world that is as important to me as my family. I believe that family will last forever and that kinship bonds that we create on this earth will last with us forever throughout the eternities.”
“It would be wrong for me to say that my Heavenly Father isn’t the most important being in my life… of course He is. But I don’t know where I’d be without my husband and my family...
Chanthol: The Good of Growth
“Why do you keep saying the house is so big?” Chanthol asks with an air of exasperation. “There are much bigger houses in America. Yes, this is big in Cambodia, but nothing like the houses that you have in your country.”
“When we have guests or family visiting it is nice to have so much room. But at night, my wife and I often sleep in our daughter’s room. So we can all be close to each other. ...
Lynn: a life lived for the Good of Life
One of Lynn’s earliest memories is of a casket. Her brother Jimmy had been such an exciting playmate for the three older girls in the family. Then one day with no warning, there was a little tiny casket. Lynn can’t remember Jimmy being sick, but he had been, and she and her sisters ended up all dressed in black. Their playmate was gone.
As she grew up, Lynn put that trauma behind her. She...
Introduction to Eight Great
Good people disagree often — and sometimes violently.
This fact bothers me … and not just because of the “violently” part. At a very deep level, it seems irrational that people who are trying to be good would be disagreeing in the first place.
In the middle of a disagreement — where I firmly and fundamentally believe that only one option is clearly “correct” — it’s a lot easier to believe that...
April 2011
1 post
The End of Perfect?
While I was living in arguably the best hotel in Singapore for a year, I mustered my courage, approached the manager and finally told him that I thought there were some things that this hotel and staff could learn from Japanese hoteliers. I expected anger, but I got resignation. He told me: “My friends who own and manage hotels around the world accept that we will never match Japanese hotels in...
March 2011
1 post
Japan's greatest good: Life
It is hard to say there is one country that necessarily epitomizes a focus on “life” as its Greatest Good. Every country is about the protection and lives of its people. Every society comes into being – at least in part – as a haven where the strong can protect the weak and everyone looks out for each other. So why would I go and choose Japan as a place where the emphasis is more on Life than on...
February 2011
3 posts
The 8 Great and Change (how do we become something...
Maybe I always thought that change was an important component of leadership … I really can’t remember any more. But, I do remember the moment when my current appreciation for the link between the two became really clear to me. For four years as a graduate student, I was a research assistant to John Kotter at Harvard Business School. He was interested in what made leaders into leaders and wrote and...
What will Egypt become?
For thirty years, the greatest Good of the government of Egypt has been Stability. To preserve the safety and well-being of the country and the region, Hosni Mubarak and his top team have argued against change in these last weeks as they have for decades previously.
My research has shown that there are Eight Great Goods that any nation bases its top-level decisions on. There is nuance in every...
Decisions and the 8 Great Goods
If you examine studies done on organizational culture and decisions, the two are highly correlated. From corporations to government organizations to hospitals to fire fighters, study after study shows that culture has a huge impact on decisions in organizations.
Decision-making is the clear realm of the leader in any human group. It is the most explicit role of leadership. Attention will focus on...
January 2011
4 posts
Organizational Culture and the Eight Great Goods
As you can see from the stories about Harvey and Ivan in the post on Attention and Leadership, the focus of a CEO and the organization quickly morphs into culture. But culture is even longer lasting than attention. An individual or an organization can decide to pay attention to something new or different. It is not easy to switch at first because our “attention synapses” have learned to focus...
Political rhetoric: why we can never be nice, but...
Every tragedy in every society leaves calls for changes in it’s wake: 9-11 changed air travel forever; Kennedy’s assassination changed the way that US presidents interact with the public; the Columbia space shuttle disaster changed the protocol for every subsequent space launch.
Congresswoman Gabrielle Gifford’s shooting has everyone asking if there needs to be a change in our national discourse....
Attention (where we focus)
The Eight Great Goods is all about where we (and our organizations) put attention. This article will make you a better, more focused leader.
A good organization is a focused organization — one composed of people who know what they want to achieve and how to get there. A good leader is someone who can help the organization get that focus.
Mission statements and Values statements are two tools that...
ACDC Leadership
We’ve always been pretty damn proud of ourselves for our ability to organize big groups of people to complete a shared task. It is partly what separates us from the animal kingdom. The outputs of our most ambitious big projects have come to be known as the Wonders of the World. Rome ruled the Western World because of its ability to control large armies. Britain dominated the seas and maintained...
December 2010
1 post
When Old Guys Tell Young Guys What To Do…
There is something to wisdom — and probably some very good reasons for old people to be in charge and expound on their hard-earned age-old learning. But sometimes we old guys are just wrong. A bunch of old guys in the US Senate right now are trying to block a change in the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy with that same age-old wisdom. (I use the term “guys” advisedly: all the...
November 2010
9 posts
Eight Great Goods - the movie.... →
Want to understand why we misunderstand each other so often and so well? Watch….
Fun for the whole family this Thanksgiving...... →
Try out this site with family and friends: www.great8it.com My hope is that it will help allay tensions and lead to some really cool discussions. Mostly have fun … and Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
Where higher education HAS to go... →
Why Obama’s Cool Makes Blood Boil →
Seems like in a crisis we’d all want a leader who keeps a cool head and doesn’t get flustered. We’d want someone who is stoic, strong and can convince us that everything is going to be all right, right? Well… maybe not.
In a really interesting study published in 2003 by Emily Butler and her colleagues, a test subject watching gruesome war films was asked to suppress her emotions so that a...
My ten year old vision for a "phone wallet"... →
Ten years ago I coined the term “phone wallet.” I figured we’d all be paying for everything (in addition to storing family photos, keeping our address books and IDs) with our cell phones. A few attempts have been made at this payment system in Japan, but with a new Android operating system, we may actually see the phone wallet in the US!
Data show more economic growth when top tax rate...
I was wondering if there is any statistical data to support the notion that the really rich need a lower tax rate to help get economic growth kick started. I found data for both top tax rates and GDP growth at http://www.truthandpolitics.org/top-rates.php and http://www.bea.gov/national/nipaweb respectively.
I ran a simple correlation analysis between the highest tax rate and the highest tax...
True Confessions of an Online Professor
I confess: I believe that online courses may actually be better than those in a classroom. This is not an easy conclusion for someone who has twenty years of classroom teaching experience. The online courses that I’ve led in the last few years take what would normally be a multiple-hour in-class business case discussions and turn them into a week-long online discussion board. I’ve been...
Oh, for the Privacy of the Old Days ...
People seem really shocked that, what they believe to be, their “private activities and interests” on the internet are being tracked. There is a pretty widely held notion that our inalienable rights to privacy are being trashed by modern technology.
What we forget is that for most of human history, a lack of personal privacy was actually the norm. In ancestral villages, if someone was a...
How can a country composed of individualists be a...
As I’ve been studying the Eight Great Goods for more than a year now, I’ve discovered that not only are there examples of individuals around the world who put each of these eight great goods at the top of their personal lists of priorities in making a decision, but there are good national exemplars of each of the Goods.
A nation’s greatest Good
A nation’s culture is, of course, a major factor in...
