I have created a number blogs to publish useful information. One is a Teaching Blog dedicated to providing past, present and future students useful information.
My Research Blog is dedicated to disseminating useful information to other researchers and scholars.
A new blog is focused on how to improve forecasts, which is a key strategic skill: forecasting-strategy.ch
To track progress in machine learning, I also run an AI blog.
There is also a blog that has collected all of Charles Tilly’s Writings on Methodology.
Below you find every entry across all my Blogs.
Posted by Johann Peter Murmann
Project on the Competitiveness of Firms in the Global Paper & Pulp Industry, 1805-2005
Together with two Finish scholars, Juha-Anti Lamberg and Jari Ojala, I started a comparative study of the paper and pulp industry. Human beings have been making paper from various raw materials for thousands of years. But in 1804 a Frenchman invented a continous paper machine revolutionized the manufacturing and started the modern paper making industry.
The goal of our project is to study shifts in competitive advantage from one country to the next and from firm to firm during the last 200 years. We are starting our comparative analysis looking at Britain, Germany, Finland and Sweden. Our long-term plan is to study all the major paper producing countries in the word. If you are interested in participating in this study, contact us.
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Posted on Jul 15, 05
The Freedom Tower Case: Why is group decision making not better individual decisions
Individual human beings have limited skills, knowledge, and expertise can get carried away by emotions when making decisions. One would think that involving multiple people in a decision could overcome the limitations of individual decision making but social psycholgoists have long known that groups have their own limitations. The New York Times published a pertinent article on how a comittee came up with the redesigned Freedom Tower that architectual critics find dissappointing given the grandeur of the originial proposal.
Categories: Psychology |
Posted on Jul 03, 05
Five Tips for Strategies for Organizational Change courtesy of Motorola’s New CEO
Tip 1: Don’t go too fast. Recognize it can take several years to build a high-performance company.
Tip 2: Get back to putting the customer first. As simple as that sounds, companies take it for granted.
Tip 3: Don’t let your sales force take no for an answer. They should tell clients: ‘Talk to my boss because I am not authorized to lose this deal.’
Tip 4: Whack yourself before somebody wacks you.
Tip 5: Beware of ‘clogged arteries’ in corporations—like too many vice presidents.
The full articles can be read at WSJ.com
Categories: Management |
Posted on Jun 23, 05
How Business Schools Lost their Way
Warren Bennis and James O’Toole just published an article in the Harvard Business Review that I wholeheartedly agree with. It is very fun to read because they are well-informed and don’t shy away from stating some unpleasant truths. Good business schools have room for theoreticians, scientific empiricists, and practice oriented scholars.
Categories: Management |
Posted on May 22, 05
Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy
Rarely have I seen such a powerful documentary about how ideas shape the world. The film traces the ideas that shaped macro-economic policy making over the course of the 20th century. The film will be eye-opening for people who know very little how economic policy powerfully effects the welfare of societies all over the world. Even if you are a scholar familiar with the history of the 20 century, you will enjoy this fantastic piece of work. One word of clarification. Sophisticated scholars who believe in “free” markets believe in a need for laws. (The film originally aired on PBS and is now available on DVD.)
Categories: Economics |
Posted on Apr 07, 05
The Stanley Reiter Lecture 2005
On January 26, 2005 I delivered the Stanley Reiter Award Lecture. The Reiter award is named for Stanley Reiter, Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor of Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences at Kellogg. It is presented to a Kellogg faculty member whose paper is judged by a panel of Kellogg professors across disciplines to be the best paper written in the preceding four calendar years. I received the award for my book Knowledge and Competitive Advantage: The Coevolution of Firms, Technology and National Institutions. You can also read the text of the lecture by clicking on “More” button or by downloading it as a Word file. Alternatively, you can watch a video (58 minutes) of the lecture with Real Player here: Lecture Video. If you watch the video, you should download the Slides that I presented during the lecture but which are not visible in the video.
Categories: Lectures |
Posted on Apr 01, 05
What Companies do to Make Life Easier for Their Employees
The WSJ in today’s report on leadership published an interesting article on what kind of perks companies provide to boost the morale of people and to make work life easier. “Fun perks didn’t end with the dot-com bust. They just changed,” reports Jennifer Saranow.
Read the full article on WSJ.com.
Categories: Management |
Posted on Jan 24, 05
Harvard pychology professor Daniel Gilbert predicts that most democrats will not be depressed during the next four years of George Bush. Here is the rationale that he offers in today’s New York Times: Research suggests that human beings have a remarkable ability to manufacture happiness. For example, when people in experiments are randomly awarded one of two equally valuable prizes, they quickly come to believe that the prize they won was more valuable than the prize they lost. They are often so surprised by their apparent good fortune that they refuse to believe the prize was awarded randomly, and they are generally unwilling to swap their prizes even when the experimenter offers to sweeten the deal with a little extra cash.
Categories: Psychology |
Posted on Jan 20, 05
The Power of Richness: The Why, When, Where and How of Qualitative Research Methods
Participate in the workshop on Qualitative Methods the Academy of Management in Hawaii, Friday afternoon from 1:00 to 4:00, August 5, 2005. The Panelists are: Robert Burgelman, Diana Day, Deborah Dougherty, Charles Galunic, Johann Peter Murmann, Gabriel Szulanski, and Klaus Weber.
Visit the Discussion Forum for the Event where much additional information will be posted.
Categories: Conferences | Methodology |
Posted on Jan 16, 05
Malcom Gladwell’s Book “Blink” is out!
In my introductory management class I discuss the how cognitive heuristics (rules of thump) help us navigate our complex daily lives and make decisions before it is too late. Malcom Glawell new book describes this quick decision-making capability with many examples. I will review the book during the next couple of months, but in the meantime you can read excerpts from the book on Gladwell’s website. David Brooks has written a very thoughtful review of the book in the New York Times that you can read here.
Categories: Bookshelf |
Posted on Jan 16, 05
Gladwell and Surowiecki Debate How Good Decisions are made
Galdwell and Surowiecki have a new books coming out concerned with good decision making. I am presently reading Surowieki’s The Wisdom of Crowds and have Blink on my reading list. You can read a debate they both had about their books in Slate
Categories: Psychology |
Posted on Jan 10, 05
Social Mechanisms: An Analytical Approach to Social Theory
I am a big fan of explanations of social phenomena that set forth the precise causal mechanisms that produce them. This book edited by Peter Hedstroem and Richard Swedberg provides a very good introduction to the approach. The only think I don’t like about the piece its believe that all mechanisms in sociology need to refer to individuals. You can download the overview chapter here: Social-mechanism.pdf Click on “More…” for a Table of Contents.
Categories: Bookshelf |
Posted on Jan 07, 05
Review of Jared Diamond’s New Book “Collapse”
The author of Guns, Germs, and Steel considers why some societies collapse when faced with environmental or political catastrophe, while others soldier on. Malcom Galdwell has published a useful review of the book in the New Yorker .
Categories: Economics |
Posted on Jan 04, 05
My former student John Tsau forwarded me some other examples of pictures that can be seen in different ways. What we can see is to a large extent conditioned what we expect to see in the world in the first place…
Categories: Psychology |
Posted on Dec 21, 04
Personality Plus: Employers love personality tests. But what do they really reveal?
A hefty percentage of American corporations use personality tests as part of the hiring and promotion process. The tests figure in custody battles and in sentencing and parole decisions. “Yet despite their prevalence-and the importance of the matters they are called upon to decide-personality tests have received surprisingly little scrutiny,” Paul writes. We can call in the psychologists. We can give [people] a battery of tests. But will any of it help? Read more of Malcom Gladwell’s revealing New Yorker Article.
Categories: Psychology |
Posted on Nov 20, 04
The Construction of Social Reality
John Searle’s book is a must-read for every social scientist. Searle makes the important distinction between observer independent facts (the sun exists independently of any human being observing it) and oberserver dependent facts (money does not exist unless people agree that a sheet of paper is worth a particular amount). This distinction, in my view, lies at the core of what makes natural sciences different from the social sciences.
Categories: Bookshelf |
Posted on Nov 17, 04
Defining that precise moment when a trend becomes a trend, Malcolm Gladwell probes the surface of everyday occurrences to reveal some surprising dynamics behind explosive social changes. He examines the power of word-of-mouth and explores how very small changes can directly affect popularity. Perceptive and imaginative, The Tipping Point is a groundbreaking book destined to overturn conventional thinking in business, sociological, and policy-making arenas.
Overall judgement: This is a superb book and should be read by every student of the social world.
Categories: Bookshelf |
Posted on Nov 13, 04
Click here to be taken to the elearning login page
Categories: Strategic Management 1 | eLearning |
Posted on Jul 21, 04
Adaptation vs. Selection in Industry Change: Toward a Contingency View
Important Workshop at AOM ‘04: Participate in the workshop on Adaptation vs. Selection in Industry Change organized by Jan Rivkin and myself. Panelists are: Bill Barnett, Clayton Christensen, Anita McGahan and Will Mitchell.
Categories: Conferences |
Posted on Jun 18, 04
Economist Paul Romer on Innovation, Instutitions and Economics growth
Paul Romer gave an interesting interview in Reason Magazine describing in non-technical terms on how ecnomic growth comes about.
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Posted on May 16, 04
Evolutionary Economics—The State of the Science
This is a talk I gave at a conference New Perspectives on Telecommunications and Pharmaceuticals in Europe and the United States: Conference on Evolutionary Economics:
Conference Program
Good morning. Let me give you a quick road map of my presentation. First, I will discuss where we are in terms of evolutionary economics, beginning with Nelson and Winter, 1982, the key book in this literature. Then I’ll provide a quick review of the ideas behind evolutionary accounts, laying out the requirements for a valid evolutionary explanation. I’ll follow this with a discussion of recent trends in the literature over the last six or seven years, addressing what I believe to be some of the key outstanding issues that should be addressed by the evolutionary perspective. Finally, time-permitting I’ll speculate a little bit about how one can make economics more an evolutionary science, and about what can be done to make evolutionary ideas more accepted.
Evolutionary Theories of Organization
Categories: Evolutionary Theory |
Posted on Jul 17, 00
