Professors make great executives - FT

Opening paragraphs of an article of Financial Times, by Della Bradshaw, October 29, 2007.

Companies that employ former professors at executive level perform better than their corporate peers, according to the latest research from two professors at DePaul University, in Chicago. The research flies in the face of the growing perception that business school professors live in ivory towers and have very little connection with the practice of business.

The research, by professors Bin Jiang and Patrick Murphy, investigated the success of some 215 companies which employed business academics, all with doctoral degrees, as executive managers. These companies did significantly better than nearly identical companies with no former academics in their top ranks...

Comments

[John]

the AMP article in question has the following powerful passage:

"The scientific method, academia’s basic paradigm for developing theory, is emphatically more than experiments and trials and errors. The paradigm also promotes constructive attitudes toward uncertainty because it helps professors identify mistakes and, more importantly, learn from those mistakes. It is how professors examine and eliminate flawed concepts before they lead to bad ideas. Because its logic is critical of new ideas, it leads to higher understanding of the problems those ideas are intended to resolve. Business school professors with doctorates usually have a world view that reflects this orientation on a deep level. As such, they discard bad ideas with shrewdness. Executives benefit from this orientation because misguided business concepts make for lost company resources and poor organizational performance. Like their counterparts in academia, executives must also identify and discard bad ideas in their organizations, which are sometimes entrenched, and replace them with new and better ones. They must also effectively communicate such ideas to all members of the organization."

[Der Chao Chen]

In my blog, I also made a short comments as follows

What’s next is whether their findings and arguments could be supported in different contexts, that arise a lots of interesting topics in the field of comparative management.