media

Misreading the Environment, Part II

Nearly four years ago, I wrote this blog post about how the Globe and Mail newspaper responsed to allegations that columnist Margaret Wente had used uncredited sources in some of her writing. In that post, I talked about the model of population ecology, from organizational theory. The model suggests that if an organization wants to be considered legitimate, and to gain benefits of legitimacy such as resources and power, then it needs to monitor cues in its external environment, and respond to those cues in ways that the environment considers appropriate.

Wente was briefly suspended after those 2012 allegations, but returned to her job. This past week, the same blogger that found problems with Wente’s work in 2012 found uncredited material from other sources in Wente’s most recent column. The Globe‘s response to these findings was to publish a column by its public editor.  The column quoted the Globe‘s editor-in-chief as saying the paper would “work with Peggy to ensure this cannot happen again”, and that there would be apologies and corrections to the uncredited material.

After that, in Lewis Carroll’s words, “answer came there none” – despite (more…)

Book Publishing and False Economies

The North American book publishing industry has been disrupted in the last couple of years. Publishers’ revenues are dropping for a number of reasons:  different publishing formats, the increased ease of self-publishing, and upheavals in distribution and sales channels. And in any business, when revenues decrease, one of the first strategic responses is usually to reduce production costs. For book publishers, that can mean reducing the costs of editing or proofreading in the book production process. But cutbacks in those areas can be a false economy, if those cutbacks significantly affect the quality of the finished product. And this week I received a review copy of a book that perfectly illustrates that dilemma.
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“Follow Your Heart”: An Interview with Jim Pons

The start of a new year, along with all the “New Year, New You” encouragement, usually leads people into thinking about making changes. One kind of change that’s often considered is a new job or a new occupation – but that can be a pretty scary leap into the unknown, especially when there’s cutbacks and downsizing going on at many formerly prosperous companies.

I thought that it would be interesting to interview someone who made that big leap and had it work out for them. After some asking around, my friend John Cody offered to connect me to Jim Pons, who is a wonderful example of this kind of career transition. Jim is a bass player and vocalist, and was part of three major bands in the 1960s and early 1970s – the Leaves, the Turtles,  and the Mothers of Invention. But he quit the music industry in 1973, and embarked on a career in video production with the National Football League, first with the New York Jets team and then with the Jacksonville Jaguars. Jim has recently written his autobiography, and generously agreed to be interviewed via email about his experiences in changing careers. (more…)

Employee Engagement Surveys (And Doing Them Well)

2015 was a really bad year for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). At the start of the year, business correspondent Amanda Lang was accused of being in a conflict of interest for her reporting on an issue involving the Royal Bank of Canada while having a personal relationship with a RBC executive. (Lang later left the CBC for a new job with Bloomberg TV.) Then radio host Jian Ghomeshi lost his job because of incidents that resulted in him being charged with one count of choking and five counts of sexual assault – and CBC management’s awkward handling of that situation led to the firing of two top executives. And then TV host Evan Solomon was fired after allegations that he exploited his work-related connections to sell high-priced artworks. (He found a new job on satellite radio and as a magazine columnist.)

There was one bright spot for the CBC in October when the decidedly anti-CBC Conservative party was defeated in the Canadian federal election. The potential for change in the CBC’s relationship with Canada’s federal government, which funds the CBC’s operations, was characterized by retired CBC journalist Linden MacIntyre as “the people that are the custodians of this publicly owned institution no longer seem[ing] to hate it” – but the CBC is still struggling with the fallout from the traumatic events that marred its reputation in the past year.

An external review of the CBC workplace was commissioned after (more…)

This is What We Lose

The new film Spotlight tells the story of an investigation by a team of reporters at the Boston Globe newspaper in the early 2000s. The reporters documented extensive child abuse by priests and brothers in the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston. Their investigation also exposed a cover-up by church officials, who knew that widespread abuse had been happening for several decades but failed to do anything meaningful to stop it.

I saw Spotlight this week, and I highly recommend it. It’s a fascinating and engaging film. And as a former newspaper reporter, I thought the film very realistically depicted the work of reporting, especially in showing the amount of legwork and detailed research that goes into writing a major news story. It also illustrated the often-overlooked contexts within which news stories develop – in this case, the elites in Boston society that helped to keep the abuse hidden, and that also discouraged the Globe from pursuing the story.

However, as much as I enjoyed Spotlight, it also made me feel very sad – because (more…)

Business Professors and Activism: An Interview with Scott Behson

Being neutral in academic work is something that I think many academics struggle with. I came to academia from journalism, so my experiences in journalism might have given me a heightened sensitivity of the importance of neutrality in writing and research. But research can never be entirely neutral or unbiased – if only for the simple reason that we tend to focus on topics that we personally find interesting or important.

However, I’ve noticed that business professors generally seem to interpret being neutral as staying away from any kind of activism – unless it’s something “safe” like joining the local chamber of commerce. I have to admit that when I first started spending time with professors from other academic disciplines, I was slightly shocked that some of them did things like testify at legislative hearings in support of or against proposed legislation, or serving as board members for advocacy groups. I thought, isn’t showing your opinion that strongly going to affect your credibility? But I gradually realized that academics can, and should, use their expertise to benefit society – especially if they can help those in society that struggle to be heard or to be treated fairly.

My frustration about the relative lack of advocacy in my own academic discipline made me especially excited to discover Scott Behson’s work. Scott is an activist who works to promote more family-friendly workplace practices, especially those that affect fathers – and he is also a professor of management in the Silberman College of Business at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey. Scott is the author of the book The Working Dad’s Survival Guide: How to Succeed at Work and at Home, which is an Amazon #1 best-seller in its categories, and which he describes as “the first book of its kind to provide advice and encouragement for working fathers, helping them to achieve success in their careers while also being the involved, loving dads they always wanted to be.” Scott is also a very active blogger, and has written for the Harvard Business Review Online, the Huffington Post, TIME, and The Wall Street Journal. He frequently appears in media, including MSNBC, NPR and Fox News; has worked with Fortune 500 companies as a consultant; and has been a keynote speaker at major events. Scott kindly agreed to let me interview him via email about his experiences as a business professor and an activist, and how he balances those two roles. (more…)

Newspapers, Endorsements, and Legitimacy

When a newspaper endorses a political party or a candidate during an election, the public assessment of the endorsement tends to turn on two factors: the reasoning leading to the endorsement, and the perceived legitimacy of the newspaper itself. But, as in any kind of legitimacy judgement of an organization, the perception of a newspaper’s legitimacy isn’t based on a single event or piece of information. It’s based on multiple factors, including the perceiver’s beliefs about whether the organization’s actions “are desirable, proper, [or] appropriate within some socially constructed system of norms, values, beliefs, and definitions”. And that is where the Postmedia newspapers in Canada went so spectacularly wrong with their endorsement of the incumbent Conservative Party in the upcoming federal election. (more…)

Overflow and Too Much Research

 

Can there be such a thing as too much research? And if there is, is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Two recent studies suggest that a lot of research is essential to the development of reliable knowledge. Replicating the results of other research studies is an important type of research, because that helps us figure out whether the original studies truly discovered something new, or whether those results were a fluke. And research studies that are variations on other studies – studies that change something from the original study, like an ingredient, or part of the study’s methodology – help us understand whether the results of the original study might apply in other settings or situations. So more research is definitely better than less research.

But another recent study has some very interesting observations on the effect of too much research on the researchers themselves. (more…)

“Why I F***ing Hate Unicorns and the Culture They Breed”

Short cuts are one path to success, but they’re a very perilous path. And when a short-cut mentality starts to dominate an industry like tech startups, it not only threatens the stability of the entire industry – it also downplays the reality of the day-to-day gruntwork that builds a sustainable, solid product. In the words of venture capitalist Mark Suster,

I blame unicorns. Not the successful companies themselves but the entire bullshit culture of swash-buckling startups who define themselves by hitting some magical $1 billion valuation number and the financiers who back them irrespective of metrics that justify it. Unicorn has become part of our lexicon in a sickening way and will no doubt become part of the history we tell about how things got so out of control again….

Victory on the field is more often a result of three yards and a cloud of dust. I like that. So, too, startups. It’s not about being on stage at a Demo Day or featured in an article in TechCrunch or closing a $20 million round. It’s about continually shipping code. It’s about putting out menacing bugs. It’s about a 6:15am flight to a customer in Detroit in Winter for a $200k deal to hit your budget for the quarter….

It’s really about love. And sacrifice. And hard work. And putting in the daily things that it takes to achieve great things. And how in the daily routine of being yourself, committing to goals and just living life, you realize that goals were easier to obtain than you had imagined.

Suster expresses his frustration in this brilliant blog post. Please read the whole thing – it’s worth your time.

(H/t Allison Manley)

The Dark Side of Workplace Wellness

The Report on Business section of the Globe and Mail newspaper recently ran an interview with the authors of a provocative new book, The Wellness Syndrome. The authors, Carl Cederstrom and Andre Spicer,  argue that the ideal of “wellness” has become distorted into a “dangerous ideology”. Promoting “wellness” as a virtue, they suggest, implicitly promotes discrimination against those who have difficulty being “well”, such as people with chronic weight or health issues. And framing “wellness” as an individual issue deflects attention from larger societal conditions, such as poverty, that have much more impact on an individual’s health than their individual choices. (For example, it’s hard to get regular outdoor exercise if you live in an unsafe neighbourhood, or to eat well if the stores in your area don’t stock healthy, affordable food.)

The authors’ perspectives make a lot of sense. And, I would argue, their take on the misuse of “wellness” is also applicable to many “workplace wellness” initiatives.  There are good employers with sincere intentions who run “workplace wellness” programs because they genuinely care about their employees’ well-being. But there are other, less admirable aspects to some of these programs. (more…)