Mission Statement
Executive Summary
- The goal of this blog is to provide its readers with the best and most useful information on management skills possible.
- This blog will not focus on finances, gadgets, world events, leisure and lifestyle, or anything else that cannot be used by every-day managers.
- This blog will have weekly “main feature” posts and more frequent “link to another blog” posts.
Why I started this blog
I’ve been thinking about doing this blog for quite a while. When I was in my PhD program I hated writing academic articles (which is why I did not finish said program), but always thought it would be interesting to communicate what is going on in management research to the people who could actually use it. Hence this.
I couldn’t find a management/business blog devoted to what has been discovered/is being discovered by researchers. Most of what’s out there in regards to improving management skills ranges from anecdotal to conjecture. I think that there is an audience for the tips, tricks and tactics that have been vetted by academic researchers, but which tend not to get out into the mainstream. It is possible that there isn’t a blog like this out there already because no one wants this knowledge, but I suspect otherwise. My guess is that it is a question of supply rather than demand, that there are plenty out there who want to know what science and academia have to say about managing, but that the people who know the most about it are busy writing esoteric journal articles for each other, and most people like myself are plenty happy to find a place in industry, make their six-figures and call it a day.
Six-figures sounds fine with me, and there is a lot about academia I will miss (teaching, mostly), but no matter what I do to make a living, I also want to learn about the cutting edge of management research, and its parent disciplines psychology and sociology. I want to communicate what is known to those who can use it most, maybe even start a dialogue.
What this blog isn’t
I believe that saying what something is not can be just as, if not more, important than saying what it is. This is not a blog about finance, personal or global. Nor is it about politics, gadgets, leisure and lifestyle, though any of those may be touched on tangentially in a post. Those other things are all very (very) interesting and I’m glad there are a number of other places that you can go to learn about them. But here is not that place. I want this to be a place for information that every-day managers can use. I would prefer that information to be academically rigorous, but that won’t always be the case. Not every idea has gone through the wringer of social science, but on the whole I put more faith in that which has been researched than that which has not.
Why I’m writing this post
This post probably won’t get any links, or be read by many. But it is important for me. There will be plenty of times that I will deviate from my original intentions for this blog, and need some sort of map to follow so that I do not get lost. I also want something to be able to change and augment if I find a better path in my journey. People, businesses and blogs all need to have some sense of their purpose and direction, otherwise how would anyone know if they were going in the right direction?
How this blog will work
The main part of this blog, I think, will be my weekly posts. In these I will either take a single recent article from an academic business journal and unpack it, explaining what it means and how it can help you, or I will look into a general management subject and report what the research literature has to say on it.
More frequently I will post a link to another article or blog post that I think could be helpful to a manager. These will be much shorter – an executive summary, a link, and a few statements from me – and will range a bit wider than the weekly posts.
I’ve never done this before, but everything good started somewhere, and fear of failure should never trump the fear of doing nothing.
