Why should deans blog?

Santiago Iñiguez, Dean of Instituto de Empresa.

Zach Owens, a frequent commentator asked if we found blogging useful and motivating. Without hesitation, my answer is yes.

BizDeansTalk has been running for a few months and has become an open and respected platform for the discussion of management education issues. Many of my colleagues praised this blog at the recent EFMD and AACSB Deans meetings, which I attended at Rotterdam and San Diego, and expressed their interest in participating. I reiterate that BizDeansTalk is open to all of them. With a history of around 20,000 unique visits, and well over 40,000 pages viewed, the blog has become an amplifier of ideas and has the potential to be the neutral worldwide online network of the major stakeholders of management education.

Tags(clickable): Education, MBA, Business School, Weblog

Blogging has saved me time, made me more efficient and opened my eyes to a changing media, communication and management education landscape. It has been said that a complaint is worth its weight in gold and I could not afford to let this opportunity of having an open channel to customer feedback go past- you could say it is free CRM. (You might refer to an earlier post of mine) My mistake at the beginning was to set aside a certain amount of time each day. Now when going about my daily business and reflecting on the events of the day, I jot down potential ideas for posts, or sources of information, which helps me better shape and clarify my own ideas and hence makes them easier to communicate. In fact, I use many of the posts and comments published in the blog -and their background research- later in meetings, speeches or presentations.

Furthermore the discipline of finding newsworthy management education articles each morning means that I am more up-to-date with the sector and better able to react. I have become much more efficient in the search of information, now using rich panoply of Internet technologies, blogs being only one. Information is indeed power.

Blogging has also been an immense opportunity for networking. Interestingly, my experience is that most of the networking does not happen openly through participation in the blog but many of the readers contact me via email to address the discussed issues or to deal with other particular concerns. It is extremely interesting to be in contact with students, professors, managers and journalists from all continents and reassuring that many times we live similar situations and that our solutions to common problems, more often than not, coincide.

Blogging has also brought me many unexpected opportunities to speak at different conferences. It produces a sort of multiplier effect and as I attend more conferences and keep talking about BizDeansTalk the number of my participations at prospective events increases exponentially, something I am not entirely convinced is desirable though. Furthermore several companies have contacted me with their solutions to problems that I might have raised in the blog.

If I may say so my own school has committed itself more than others to uses of e-learning. I see it therefore as imperative that I use or refer to them myself in the blog, or at least become aware of trends and new developments. How can anyone who claims to teach business not be aware of technological trends?

My experience is that many deans are reluctant to expose themselves too much, and many shy away from the technological aspect, but blogging is a very healthy and productive experience. Over the last year I have seen that many more deans are writing their ideas on their own school websites, which is an intermediary step to blogging. I do definitely recommend all my colleagues to blog. As they are already in the public eye and in time most will be blogging in any case, they might as well embrace the times. I have the dream that more concerted efforts and increased exchanges of ideas will grow and improve the sector to everyone’s benefit.