Publish And Perish

Fascinating blog piece by Prof. Michael Watkins at Harvard Busines School.

On Not Getting Tenure/Academic Parasitism at HBS

Well I'm back after a long hiatus.

The reasons why I took a break from blogging are twofold. Family was one big factor. In early November we had our third child, a beautiful little boy named Niall. He is now 2 months old, and we are just now emerging from the fog of childbirth.

Career developments, the main subject of this posting, were the second big factor. Just before Thanksgiving, I learned that I would not be getting tenure at the Harvard Business School. Tenure is an up-or-out system, and so I needed to regroup and start thinking about what I wanted to do with my life after the end of the academic year. (more on this later).

Perhaps I am flattering myself, but I think my case raises some issues about the future of HBS and of business schools in general. In particular, I have been wondering for some time:

* To what extent are business schools producing insights of use to practicing managers?
* Is the investment that they are making in research justified in terms of results? - a straightforward ROI assessment

I believe that the answers to these questions are, respectively, little and no. I further believe that this is the result of the "capture" of business schools (including unfortunately and increasingly HBS) by discipline-oriented academics who consume more value from their institutions than they create for them. This is the parasitism to which I refer in the heading for this posting.

First here is what happened, as well as some details about the way the tenure process works at HBS.


On Not Getting Tenure

Not getting tenure was of course a big disappointment. It also came as somewhat of a surprise. (see my info) (I'm not trying to brag here, just give an indication of why getting tenure was plausible,)

Since coming to HBS in 1996, I have authored or co-authored five books and numerous articles and cases. My work has been received very well by my primary audiences - business professionals and educators (I'm admittedly not a traditional academic). My two negotiation books, Breakthrough International Negotiation and Breakthrough Business Negotiation, won the major practitioner-awarded book prize (from the CPR Institute for Dipute Resolution) in the negotiation/dispute resolution field in 2001 and 2002 respectively. My first, co-authored, book on accelerating oneself into a new leadership role, Right From the Start, has sold over 30,000 copies since 1999 and helped spawn a consulting/coaching industry focusing on executive "on-boarding " and "assimilation."

My most recent book, The First 90 Days, also on the subject of transition acceleration, extends the work that I did previously. It has sold 30,000 copies in just four months since publication, and hit the Businessweek best seller list last month. The companion interactive performance support tool that I developed, called "Leadership Transitions" is HBS Publishing's second best selling e-learning product. It has grossed over $1 million in revenue and has been licensed by 40 major corporations. Here too, I have helped launch a new movement in the Human Resources and Leadership Development communities to focus on helping managers get up to speed in their new roles. This is work, incidentally, that I was strongly advised by the head of my unit at HBS not to do, advice that I fortunately ignored.

Beyond this, I had developed a two-section elective course at HBS, called Corporate Diplomacy, from scratch to the point where 160 or so second year students sign up for it each year; developed and led the executive program HBS does for the World Bank; helped prepare Harvard to better deal with crises, etc. etc.

So I had reason to hope that HBS would recognize and reward my contributions, and I was a bit surprised when they didn't. Which gets me to how my tenure case fits into broader trends at HBS.

Academic Parasitism at HBS

Essentially there is a war going on at HBS between believers in the importance of managerial relevance and upholders of academic orthodoxy, and the former is losing. This balance is a hard one to strike in professional schools, especially those situated in leading research universities. Go too far in the direction of practice and you become a consulting/training company. Go too far in the direction of academic respectability and you become irrelevant. The latter has been the fate of many of the business schools at leading universities - they rarely produce cutting-edge thinking that impacts business practice (take a look at the top 250 books on management at Barnes and Noble and note how few are written by business school academics.) Jim Collins, the author of Good to Great, for example, was essentially fired by Stanford.

For a long time, the main exception to this has been HBS, which was defined at its founding as a "delicate experiment" in bridging theory and practice. Since its founding, HBS has been a source of innovative business thinking, and there are faculty who are continue to turn out good stuff - e.g. Jay Lorsch, Clay Christensen, Robert Kaplan, and Joe Badaracco.

But my sense is that the pipeline for ideas that impact business is going dry at the school. Also the school is confronting troubling trends - in terms of increasingly "academization," reductions in the quality of executive program participants, and declining involvement of faculty in developing cases studies - the school's bread and butter - that I believe point to deeper problems


From its founding until the late 1970's, HBS operated according to its own idiosyncratic knowledge creation model. It focused on the case method and strongly valued teaching and connection with practice. Critically, it encouraged interdisciplinary research and trained many of its own faculty (including people with a lot of business experience) in the HBS Doctorate in Business Administration (DBA) program to conduct such research.



But the practice of training your own faculty is anathema at most academic institutions. Instead, the academy is organized into "disciplines" (economics, psychology). Most academics have primary allegiance to their disciplines and associated reference communities, and not the particular institutions in which they reside. They seek to publish in their discipline's leading referred journals, attend its conferences, etc.

But this means that they are not incented to make investments in "institution-specific capital" like developing courses and writing case studies. One important way you gain status in the academic disciplines is by having your Ph.D graduates "seeded" into other institutions. (In fact, if you view academic training to be a form of asexual reproduction, you won't go far wrong).

Beginning in the 1980's HBS's traditional model came under increasing attack. As I understand it, soon after John McArthur was appointed Dean, then Harvard President Derek Bok began pushing very hard to increase the academic respectability of HBS, using the club of the President's control of the tenure process. Unlike the Graduate School of Arts and Science at Harvard, HBS had not been subject to Harvard's "ad hoc" process - in which the President appoints an independent committee to review all tenure appointments and to treat each tenure decision as an open search for the best candidate in the world for that position.

The result of the ad hoc process has been very few internal promotions within Harvard's Graduate School of Arts and Science and the resulting "star" culture. (The standing joke is that young faculty are treated by their senior colleagues as if they were victims of a fatal childhood disease - kindly, but with the expectation that they will not be around for very long). This promotion system works reasonably well in the humanities and sciences, but is devastating in professional schools. (The Kennedy School, for example, is subject to the ad hoc process.)

The result of President Bok's pressure was that HBS began to hire more "outsiders," respected business scholars from leading research institutions. This set in motion a process of increasing "academization" of HBS that has continued through the administration of the current Dean, Kim Clark (himself an economist). It has accelerated recently because the school has reached a "tipping point" in terms of the declining influence of the old guard and the rise of the young academics.

The result has been increasing hiring of leading scholars into tenured positions from outside HBS, as well as much more hiring of newly minted Ph.D. from the disciplines (principally economics, psychology, and sociology) into tenure track positions rather than from inter-disciplinary business doctoral programs. [This also puts the young research faculty in the unenviable position of having to teach a very tough audience, HBS MBAs, without having accumulated much real-world experience.] The discipline-oriented academics also have "captured" HBS's doctoral programs, re-orienting them strongly to the training of young discipline-focused research stars.


The result is that HBS is looking more and more like all the other business schools with, I believe, associated negative results. The fundamental principle of business strategy, after all, is to cultivate and sustain distinctive competence. So it makes little sense to become like everyone else.


The academization trend is just one of several that I believe are taking HBS away from a sufficiently close connection to the practice of management. There also are issues concerning who comes to HBS's executive programs. In an HBS faculty meeting a year or so ago, the then Senior Associate Dean in charge of Executive Programs gave a sobering presentation on the state of HBS's open enrollment executive program offerings. The gist of the presentation, as I heard it, was that HBS was attracting fewer and fewer managers from leading US companies in growth industries and more from (1) non-leading companies in stagnant industries, and (2) international participants who continued to see the HBS brand as very attractive.

To me, this was a clear warning sign of creeping erosion of the HBS brand. I also think it has potentially dire consequences for innovation and knowledge creation at the school - if professors don't connect with the best practitioners, it becomes hard for them to learn, develop and test new ideas that influence practice.


The other primary way that HBS faculty has kept its faculty abreast of real-world practice is through the writing of case studies on companies. Here too I believe there are major problems. Many of the discipline-oriented tenure-track faculty don't appear to invest much time in writing cases. Why? Because it's an institution-specific investment (and a very time consuming one) that takes them away from their research and ability to publish in leading journals. Journal publishing is what they rightly care about, because it will get them promoted within their disciplines and give them options should things not work out at HBS.

The result is, I believe, a vicious cycle of increasing isolation of the school from practice. HBS has compensated, to some degree, by hiring professional case writers, allowing tenure track faculty to increasingly delegate the field research to others. But this simply enables the isolation of faculty from practice to continue and grow.

[These are concerns that I have had for some time, predating my tenure decision. For example, I wrote an article called The End of Executive Education as We Know it? that was published in BizEd, a trade magazine for the executive education industry. I posted an earlier version of that article just before posting this one.]



More recently, President Summers has, I think with the best of intentions, added to the pressure on the school to become more academic in its orientation.. I have it on good authority that he made it clear more than a year ago that he would no longer accept letters in support of tenure cases from faculty in non-first tier schools. This is a big problem for those at HBS who come up for tenure on the basis of interdisciplinary research, course development, and practitioner-oriented work. The people in other top-tier schools are essentially always discipline-centric research scholars. I also have it on good authority that President Summers convened the first "quasi-ad hoc" committee to look at the only tenure case that HBS put forward. [This year there were four people up for tenure at HBS myself, Stefan Thomke, Das Narayandas, and V.G. Narayanan. The other three made it.]

Certain species of birds practice what is known as "brood parasitism" by laying their eggs in the nests of birds of other species. As I see it, the academization of HBS is the equivalent of brood parastism - the academics feeding on the brand that the practitioner-oriented people in the school labored so hard to build. The HBS brand is very strong and it can be fed on for a long time before getting tarnished. The discipline-oriented academics who are hired at business schools probably benefit from the higher salaries and research support that they get compared to their colleagues in Economics and Psychology Departments. But I have to believe that the "capture" of HBS and other business schools is a negative development in terms of the creation of new knowledge about the theory and practice of management.

I also think there is an interesting governance story here, especially given that other major institutions, corporations and government, are confronting governance crises. The faculty is really not subject to much oversight concerning these major changes in direction. I suspect that HBS's alumni are unaware of the profound changes that are going on at the school. Yet they are currently the subject of a $500 million capital campaign. But my sense is that the alumni little more than superficial collective oversight or voice in the institution.



The Tenure Process at HBS

My tenure case occurred in the context of these changes. After doing my Ph.D at HBS, I went to the Kennedy School in 1991. I was hired back by HBS in 1996 into what was then a small Negotiation Unit that had developed an innovative new required course in negotiation. In 1999 this unit was merged with a larger unit, Organizations and Markets, led by Professor George Baker, one of the leading "young academics"at HBS. [Professor Baker also has led the charge to increase the academic respectability of HBS Doctoral programs. He is a fine economist who, I believe, belongs in a fine economics department, and not a business school. (see his info, click on "publications" to get a sense of his contributions)] This unit then hired two leading scholars in economics and psychology from the outside, focused on hiring young research stars, and the ascendency of discipline-oriented academics within the combined unit was complete. [The required negotiation course, incidentally, progressively fell in student ratings to very low levels, and I saw some of the young faculty in my unit suffer terribly by trying to teach it without the requisite training and experience.]

It was in this context that I came up for tenure.


The way the tenure process works is an important factor here. It works like this:


The candidate submits a personal statement outlining his or her accomplishments and plans, along with a supporting package of written materials. The Dean appoints a subcommittee of three tenured faculty to review the case and make recommendations to the tenured faculty as a whole. The candidate being evaluated does not get to know who is chosen for this subcommittee.

The subcommittee solicits written evaluations from (1) all the tenured faculty in the candidates unit (the unit's opinion is critical), (2) from others inside the school, and (3) from selected outsiders. The candidate can make recommendations about who should evaluate their case, but the decision is up to the subcommittee. The subcommittee also decides which pieces of the candidates written materials are sent to reviewers. The candidate does not get to know who wrote letters, what materials they evaluated, or what their criticisms were.

The subcommittee reviews the letters and comes to a conclusion about the candidate. If positive, it goes on to the full tenured faculty for debate and ratification, and then to the Dean who has the final say over who gets recommended to the President to be granted tenure. If negative, the candidate is informed, and advised to withdraw..

In my case, most of the senior faculty in my unit, the discipline-oriented academics, were not supportive of my case. My understanding is that my work on negotiation was sent to several leading research scholars in the field outside of HBS. In the field of negotiation, the leading scholars are psychologists who study negotiation by doing experiments with highly simplified situations. My work in negotiation, which focuses on a systems view, is a critique of theirs, so unsurprisingly they hated it.

Within HBS, select tenured faculty from outside my unit were also asked to evaluate aspects of my case. But I was told by one tenured faculty member that the choice of who was asked to read my material in their unit was "not an obvious one," the implication being that the person was not the best equipped to evaluate my case.

This is an example of how the tenure process is subject to a great deal discretion on the part of members of the subcommittee (who are themselves selected by the Dean). The process also is influenced by factional politics within the school. I've concluded that you have to have a very strong patron in your unit supporting your case, or you are fighting an uphill battle. And I wonder if this is a system that truly fosters excellence.

I also know that the letters that came back from non-psychologists in the field of negotiation and from practitioners and educators were outstandingly supportive. But my case was finished.


At this point, I was told by the Senior Associate Dean who manages the promotions process, Srikant Datar that the subcommittee had recommended that my case not go forward. He also sketched out the main criticisms of my case. Candidates in this situation are offered the chance to withdraw their case, in part to save them the embarrassment of being formally denied tenure (although many outside Harvard would consider such a denial a badge of honor) but, I think more importantly, so the school can avoid having to take contentious cases to the full tenured faculty.

Concluding I had little to lose, I did something I'm sure they haven't seen done before. Not only did I not withdraw (candidates have a right to a hearing before the full tenured faculty), I wrote a detailed rebuttal and asked that it be appended to the report that the subcommittee would send to the full tenured faculty. This request was denied by Professor Datar, and I was told by another tenured faculty member that the subcommittee would now write a "brief" that would highlight the negative aspects of my case to support their recommendation to the full tenured faculty.

I of course have no idea what actually went on the full faculty meeting concerning my case, but just before Thanksgiving, I got the call from the Dean indicating that he would not recommend me to President Summers. And that was that.

Moving Forward

Having been at Harvard since 1985, first as a doctoral student, then as faculty, it is of course quite wrenching to be leaving Harvard. But I also increasingly see it as a opportunity for some self renewal. Fortunately there is a lot of interest in my leadership transitions work (and also in my next book, Predictable Surprises, which will be published by HBS Press next year) and so I've got interesting options. I'm quite glad that I decided to push on with this work, which I think will help a lot of practicing managers. I'm probably not going to look for a full time academic appointment for now. But I will certainly seek a part-time affiliation with a good school - I would miss the students too much.

What I will not miss is the culture of management-by-and-for-insecurity that pervades Harvard. The sad truth is that few people at Harvard are allowed, or allow themselves, to enjoy their accomplishments. The institution attracts driven, insecure people who then tend to reinforce each other. The result is productivity, albeit of a narrow form. I was able to isolate myself from its effects to a large degree, but I'm certainly not going to miss it.