Respect

Teaching frenzy continues. I have been blessed with very smart and motivated students this autumn. A group at the Helsinki University is doing work on reputation management, Pekka and I continue to be impressed and invigorated by the students' insight as we read the cases they prepare. My strategic management course at Hanken consists of a bunch of hard working and smart students who work like hell to make sense of the incredibly tangled thicket of strategy discourse.

For me, the most important job of a teacher is to work towards an atmosphere of respect on one's courses: respect for the work of the other students, to the work of the teacher, and of course to one's own work. The teacher needs to show his/her respect to the work of the students. I certainly have no problems doing that this semester.

A privileged meeting

Last week, I was invited to give a talk to a group of psychiatrists. The topic was knowledge interest, that is, why the practitioners of different branches of science seek knowledge. More specifically, I was looking at the tensions, experienced by psychiatric practitioners, between the technical interest of biological psychiatry, and the hermeneutical/dialogical views of therapeutical views. In my mind, this tension is not that different from that experienced by a management scholar, trying to tackle with the always-popular interest of organizational performance on one hand, and more interpretive approaches on the other.

The meeting was a privileged one for me, as it struck me how lucky I was to be invited to be sharing views with practitioners from such a worthwhile pursuit. There is an intense pleasure involved in the meeting of minds across genres and scientific discourses. It is also very touching to be invited, requested. This is a key notion to keep in mind in times of intense stress (read: November). The feeling of doing something worthwhile and being wanted should be the basic human right of everybody. I was reminded of this when I saw a poster on a Metro train station with the information that every other day a lonely elderly person commits suicide in Finland (see http://www.vanhuusilmanyksinaisyytta.fi/).

On the musical front: Brad Mehldau trio, Art of the trio, vol 3. He seems to play chess with himself. There is such an sense of invention and adventure in Mehldau's playing: a sense of an open road that can lead anywhere. And the fact that he is a virtuoso with amazing command of polyphonic lines does not hurt either.

Good morning!

This morning, walking yet again through the graveyard to work, the iPod favorites playlist provided me with a delicious contrast between two views on female adolescence. First, Norah Jones sang:

"My heart is drenched in wine
you'll be on my mind
forever."

Whereas Tori Amos had a slightly different angle

"And if I die today I'll be the happy phantom
And I'll go chassin' the nuns out in the yard
And I'll run naked through the streets without my mask on
And I will never need umbrellas in the rain
I'll wake up in strawberry fields every day
And the atrocities of school I can forgive
The happy phantom has no right to bitch
oo who
The time is getting closer
oo who
Time to be a ghost
oo who
Every day we're getting closer
The sun is geting dim
Will we pay for who we been"

These two brilliant insights into the adolescent female psyche, which so often alludes us males approaching middle age, was confidently buffered by Wes Montgomery, a shy, big, virtuoso male playing a subdued and tasteful version of The Days of Wine and Roses. What a way to start the morning!
Yippee! I was first to arrive at work, got to turn the lights on. Oh, what a glorious feeling. Call me weird... and you're probably on to something.

Two early morning tidbits of information which I found from the book The Corrosion of Character by Richard Sennet, one of my favorite social theorists:

""Career" [...], in its English origins meant a road for carriages, and as eventually applied to labor meant a lifelong channel for one's economic pursuits. [...] The word "job" in English of the fourteenth century meant a lump or piece to be carted around. Flexibility today brings back this arcane sense of the job, as people do lumps of labor, pieces of work, over the course of a lifetime."

And now.. time for some more teaching frenzy.

Teaching frenzy

"Frenzy" seems to be the buzzword for this autumn. Getting a new job, then a second child, a new apartment. This was coupled with an academic writing frenzy, completing a load of demanding revisions during September and October to meet deadlines. And now, it's time for some teaching frenzy.

What person in his right mind would organize seven hours of teaching for the same day. I had that on tuesday: three hours at the Helsinki University and four at Hanken. Whine Whine. On the other hand, that is what high school teachers do each day. But us academics, we've come accustomed to such a carefree existence...

I haven't taught either course before. I get to teach the course at the Helsinki University, Reputation theories and organizational meaning environments with Pekka Aula, a good friend and colleague. It's extra interesting, because I get to teach at my old Alma Mater, where I studied philosophy so many years ago. And we get to dicuss the results of our book with students. There seems to be a critical and attentive group taking the course. Indeed, the last lecture was done in a discussion, revolving around one slide. I'm really looking forward to the student case works where they look at different cases of organizational reputation strategy.

The second thing at Hanken is part of my regular teaching load, an advanced course on strategic management. The introduction lecture was a great experience. We tried out a working method from high school Finnish, as the students got short excerpts from key strategy texts ( Chandler, Mintzberg, Porter, Hamel & Prahalad - I even threw in a little Taylor to show what a pre-strategy view of the organization looks like) to read at the classroom. We read each text, followed by a reflection discussion about what the text regarded as strategy, and why it was strategic.

Another interesting event during the week was when I got to see external evaluations of my academic work, which were ordered for a job I was competing to get (which I did not get). Boy, this job is good for maintaining one's humility. :-)