Interview to the founders of Elastix in 2008, interesting reflections on starting up a company (technology based) and working in Silicon Valley and Barcelona.
http://www10.edacafe.com/nbc/articles/view_weekly.php?articleid=541321&page_no=1
dijous, 14 d’octubre del 2010
dimecres, 6 d’octubre del 2010
IG Nobel Prize in Management
Extracted from Wired Magazine:
[v1] Thu, 2 Jul 2009 18:02:48 GMT (151kb)
[v2] Fri, 4 Sep 2009 12:44:50 GMT (151kb)
[v3] Thu, 29 Oct 2009 14:10:40 GMT (154kb)
" Management Prize
Those who've recently been passed over for a promotion might not be pleased to hear about the winner of the management prize. Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda, and Cesare Garofalo of the University of Catania, Italy demonstrated that organisations can become more efficient by randomly promoting people.
Their paper: "The Peter Principle Revisited: A Computational Study", was published in the Italian journal, Physica A, and took a mathematical look at how people are promoted. They found that appointing people to higher roles at random could increase most companies' efficiency."
Article Information - from http://arxiv.org/abs/0907.0455
The Peter Principle Revisited: A Computational Study
(Submitted on 2 Jul 2009 (v1), last revised 29 Oct 2009 (this version, v3))
Abstract: In the late sixties the Canadian psychologist Laurence J. Peter advanced an apparently paradoxical principle, named since then after him, which can be summarized as follows: {\it 'Every new member in a hierarchical organization climbs the hierarchy until he/she reaches his/her level of maximum incompetence'}. Despite its apparent unreasonableness, such a principle would realistically act in any organization where the mechanism of promotion rewards the best members and where the mechanism at their new level in the hierarchical structure does not depend on the competence they had at the previous level, usually because the tasks of the levels are very different to each other. Here we show, by means of agent based simulations, that if the latter two features actually hold in a given model of an organization with a hierarchical structure, then not only is the Peter principle unavoidable, but also it yields in turn a significant reduction of the global efficiency of the organization. Within a game theory-like approach, we explore different promotion strategies and we find, counterintuitively, that in order to avoid such an effect the best ways for improving the efficiency of a given organization are either to promote each time an agent at random or to promote randomly the best and the worst members in terms of competence.
Submission history
From: Alessandro Pluchino [view email][v1] Thu, 2 Jul 2009 18:02:48 GMT (151kb)
[v2] Fri, 4 Sep 2009 12:44:50 GMT (151kb)
[v3] Thu, 29 Oct 2009 14:10:40 GMT (154kb)
dijous, 30 de setembre del 2010
How to Review a Literature
How to Review a Literature
September 7, 2010
| Gabriel |
Following the reader service model of O&M's recent "How to Read an Academic Article" and OT's long running grad skool rulz, I figured I'd describe the proper way to review a literature for a research paper. I should start with a lawyer's joke/parable.
Eugene Volokh recently puzzled his blawgosphere audience with the term "red cow." As commenter "James E." explained:
A country practitioner was retained one day by a client whose red cow had broken into his neighbor's grain field, and litigation ensued. The practitioner went carefully over the details of the facts in the case with a student in his office, and assigned to the student the duty of "looking up the law" on the subject. Some time after he asked the student what success he had had with the authorities bearing on the case. The student replied: "'Squire, I have searched diligently through every law book in the library, and there isn't a red cow case in them."
Central Law Journal, Vol. 79, p. 299 (1914)
The joke of course is that this lawyer thought the issue was red cows rather than trespassing, negligence, and other abstract legal concepts. This was a lot less funny when I realized that when I was in college and my first year or two of grad school, this kind of substantively-focused literalism was exactly how I would approach doing a lit review for a research paper. I would open up Sociofile (now called "Sociological Abstracts") and search for substantive key terms, something like "social movements AND television." That is, I was searching for prior literature on my substantive issue.
A substantive search is worth doing to a certain extent, but it's not nearly as important as getting (and understanding) theory. A single theory often involves wildly disparate empirical issues. For instance, Status Signals has chapters on banking, wine, and patents, as well as more fleeting references to things like jewelry. So how do you do the theoretical aspect of the review? Well, to a large extent it's just an issue of learning a large body of literature inside out, but that takes a very long time. In the meantime, here's the advice I give to my grad students.
1. Use Sociological Abstracts, Google Scholar, etc. for substantive queries but realize that this will only be about a quarter of the work. These databases aren't very good at queries by theory.
2. Figure out what theoretical problems are at issue in your work. Bounce your empirical issues of your friends and mentors to see what theoretical issues they see. They may suggest theories you've never heard of. Also ask them for specific citations that they recommend.
3. Search for essays on the previously flagged theories in Annual Review of Sociology (and possibly Annual Reviews for adjacent disciplines or Journal of Economic Perspectives) to find a review of this literature, preferably one from the last ten years. (If you're lucky, you've recently taken a graduate seminar on your target literature, which is effectively ARS as live theater.) You can also use a few empirical publications that you've read or which are recommended to you as providing particularly good theoretical syntheses.
4. Use these to snowball sample, both backwards and forwards in time. To snowball backwards, read the articles and whenever they mention a citation that sounds interesting, add it to your shopping list. To snowball forward, use Google Scholar to do a cited reference search of your key citations and again, take the stuff that looks good. I prefer GScholar for this over Web of Science because it includes working papers and such, giving you more of the "invisible college." As you read these things you'll find still more good cites.
5. Actually read all this stuff and pull out the theoretical problems involved and how they hang together. Try to find one to three important theoretical problems and use each of them to derive a proposition that can be operationalized into an empirically-testable hypothesis. Read empirical articles that you admire and note how they structure their lit review / theory section.
Note that this step is as much imposing structure on the literature as about recognizing the structure that pre-exists because, frankly, the literature is often muddled. For instance, in writing the lit review for my Oscars article, I noticed that a lot of people simply confuse different spillover models — citing Kremer QJE 1993 when what they seem to have in mind is a much better fit with Saint-Paul JPE 2001 or Stinchcombe ASR 1963.
6. Get back to me in about two years when you've finished doing all of this and we can talk about actually doing the empirical part of the project.
Entry Filed under: Uncategorized. .
3 Comments Add your own
Writing in academics
Reposting - from Organizations and Markets
More Academic Advice
10 September 2010
| Peter Klein |
- "How to Review a Literature" by Gabriel Rossman (nice blog template BTW)
- "Writing 'One Pagers'" by Anthony Evans
- "How to Write Less Badly" by Mike Munger (via Pete Boettke)
- "How to Be Awesome" by Fabio Rojas
Of course there are the classics like Ezra Zuckerman's "Tips to Article Writers," Eric Rasmusen's "Aphorisms on Writing, Speaking, and Listening," Simon Jones's "How to Write a Good Research Paper and Give a Good Research Talk," Kwan Choi's "How to Publish in Top Journals," Dan Hamermesh's "The Young Economist's Guide to Professional Etiquette," Richard Hamming's "You and Your Research," and George Ladd's "Artistic Research Tools for Scientific Minds."
dilluns, 27 de setembre del 2010
Can You Measure the ROI of Your Social Media Marketing? - The Magazine - MIT Sloan Management Review
Interesting contribution by the MIT Sloan management Review on how to measure impact created by social network through different indicators and dimensions
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dijous, 23 de setembre del 2010
Review on current research on Business Models
It has already been a few years since business models gradually re-entered the academic arena. After the dot.com bust, it was often confusing to make references to solid or grounded business models, in contrast, last years academic research is conslidating the basis for consistent advances using this tool as research linchpin.
Zott & Amit have done several contributions in this research line, they have recently made an additional step by summarizing the actual perspectives in an IESE Working Paper
Zott & Amit have done several contributions in this research line, they have recently made an additional step by summarizing the actual perspectives in an IESE Working Paper
divendres, 17 de setembre del 2010
Politics in the US - Insights / Knowledge
It's been a while I've been trying to find a good piece of work to summarize current political situation in the US, the piece of work from Truthdig might have been close to it. In Chris Hedges column: Do not pity the democrats there is an interesting review of the ongoing turmoil.
dimecres, 15 de setembre del 2010
dimarts, 7 de setembre del 2010
What has been the latest innovation in the Business School industry?
While preparing materials about innovation and how entrepreneur’s need to embrace innovation to stay competitive, a question came out, what has been the last innovation introduced in business schools?
From the discussion, some ideas came out: online education, experiential-project based education, case-study education…all of them teaching methodologies. Other ideas focused in curriculum contents, such as CSR, Ethics, Green energy. But hardly anyone came out with a radical or disruptive innovation in the industry, maybe it’s time to reorganize non-core assets and see if anybody comes out with a new concept in the industry.
diumenge, 5 de setembre del 2010
Opening up Knowldege Logisglobal
This will be our reference blog for innovation, entrepreneurship and other ideas worth spreading.
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Peter Klein | September 7, 2010 at 5:18 am
This is excellent. Another point pertains to the writing of literature reviews. Bad ones are organized by paper or author or year. Good ones are organized by theoretical issue or controversy, with different methods, authors, schools of thought, etc. integrated within each major section. The only way I've found to teach this is to have students read a sample of really excellent literature reviews.