CDO? That's OCD, in the correct alphabetical order, dammit. So, it's been an interesting couple of weeks. Quite stressful. And one of the ways I cope with stress (a displacement activity, perhaps) is to try to categorise information. It somehow soothes me. Go figure. Here are five glossaries that I've worked on (some I started quite a... Continue Reading →
Deliberate Learning and the Evolution of Dynamic Capabilities
Ooh yeah!!! Academia that is useful!! Zollo, M and Winter, S. 2002. Deliberate learning and the Evolution of Dynamic Capabilities. Organization Science, Vol. 13, (3), pp.339-351. This fantastic article talks about "the role of (1) experience accumulation, (2) knowledge articulation, and (3) knowledge codification processes in the evolution of dynamic, as well as operational, routines." (Zollo... Continue Reading →
Barriers to learning – good article
Just read this - Elliot, D., Smith. D. and McGuinness, M. 2000. Exploring the failure to learn: crises and the barriers to learning. Review of Business, 21, 3/4 pp.17-24. Dead useful for something I am investigating at the moment. There are lots of juicy bits. Though the authors don't use the term, they are basically... Continue Reading →
Dangerous(ly seductive) curves ahead – of life cycles and hype
or "smacking your (rule of) thumb with the hammer marked 'brain'". Narratives are great. They help you arrange (or even create) facts that fit in a nice orderly view of the world. If there is a graph to go along with the narrative, they're even more comforting. I mean, it's science, right? Sadly, no. So,... Continue Reading →
Pathways, Publications and … Panda Penises. #Manchester PhD careers advice
University of Manchester’s Careers Service have just put on their tenth “Pathways” day for PhD students. There was free food (good), free entertainment (better) and free advice (best of all). There were 500 of us, and if there'd been a medical emergency, it would have been easier to shout out "“Is there someone who ISN’T a... Continue Reading →
My “Three Minute Thesis” effort on #climate
Here's my performance in the University of Manchester final of "Three Minute Thesis." (Thank you very much to the organisers - and the training we received was fab). I did okay but on reflection, I tried to do too much - a history of climate science and policy, an explanation of issue lifecycle models, AND the Australian... Continue Reading →
Whoop! My first academic conference invite
UPDATE - a reply below. Wow! All that work writing for The Conversation and reviewing books (and writing my thesis, natch) has paid off! I have been sent an email"to deliver an invited talk" at a conference to be held at the end of the year in Hong Kong. Not smelling a rat at all, I... Continue Reading →
From “The Wire” to “Heresthetics” – the game is rigged….
The game is rigged, you feel me? (At this point the wife will point out that I am not, in actual fact, a black man from B'more... Sorry "Baltimore"). Anyway, back to game rigging- the word for the day is "Heresthetics" William Riker was one of the leading scholars "positive political theory," or the Rational... Continue Reading →
The Smugosphere – an academic citation
So, I have been writing cynically about the "smugosphere" - that place where normal rules of performance assessment to not apply because people are Doing Good For The Cause. And I just kind of stumbled on a very very interesting paper by one Wolfgang Seibel; Seibel, W. 1996. Successful Failure: An Alternative View on Organizational... Continue Reading →
Nothing like the sun – of (macho) theory and parsimony
"...An explanation becomes more parsimonious than another when it uses a smaller number of explanatory variable while explaining at least as much as its opponent. For example, it is more parsimonious to model the solar system as heliocentric than terracentric, because the former uses far simpler mathematics to account for at least as many planetary... Continue Reading →