Alan M. Glassman

Academic Entrepreneurship Views on Balancing the Acropolis and the Agora

Given the disquieting changes in higher education worldwide, universities need new directions and ways of thinking about how to operate.In this article, we propose the notion of academic entrepreneurship, in which each employee pursues or supports those who pursue opportunities to build and improve their units, colleges, or universities.W e present ways that individual faculty members, program managers, department chairs, deans, and provosts can support academic entrepreneurship through helping to create opportunities, nurturing people who recognize and act on them, garnering resources to support opportunities, and creating a culture that supports the entrepreneurial activities of universities.

Enhancing Human Systems Change Learning from an NTL® Workshop and Field Applications

It has become commonplace to examine the externalities of leadership development, emphasizing the need for new skills and abilities such as establishing strategic vision, developing collaborative teams, and managing conflict. This article proceeds from the premise that leadership effectiveness also requires a deeper understanding of self—the inner dimension of leadership. Specifically, the authors (1) trace the evolutionary design of an NTL Institute workshop and the learning from facilitating individual self-awareness and the resolution of behavioral patterns blocking personal leadership effectiveness and (2) provide exemplars of how self-awareness can be incorporated into leadership development programs. However, the authors also raise questions about the willingness of organizations to invest in the integration of externally focused skill development with personal introspection and change.

Custom Needs Assessment for Strategic HR Training: The Los Angeles County Experience

Like many local governments, Los Angeles County has been re-shaped profoundly in recent years by a series of external forces such as economic downturns and technological advances. At the same time, the value of strategic human resources management has been increasingly recognized by practitioners and management researchers. Partly to help respond to the external forces, the Los Angeles County Training Academy instituted a “Building a Strategic Human Resources Partnership” program designed to build the competencies needed for HR managers to serve as true strategic partners. This article (a) reports on the decision to build a strategic human resources competency model — rather than to modify or adopt an existing competency model — as a basis for the design of the training program, (b) details the methodologies used to build a reliable, customized list of strategic HR competencies and a categorization structure, (c) describes the outcomes and (d) reports on implications for other local government agencies.

Enhancing the chances of successful OR/MS implementation: the role of the advocate

This paper extends understanding of the role of the advocate in the implementation of Operations Research/Management Science models in governmental agencies. The first part of this paper presents and analyzes the data resulting from interviews with 39 criminal justice agencies regarding the model implementation process. The interview data indicated that the advocate performed important problem-solving and mediation functions needed to introduce the technology. The second part of this paper provides a case study describing an advocates successful introduction of a Patrol Car Allocation Model (PCAM) in the Los Angeles County Sheriffs Department. To assess the overall effectiveness of their implementation strategy, the project team conducted a questionnaire attitudinal survey of lieutenants, sergeants and officers in two of the pilot stations prior to PCAM implementation and after staffing changes. Overall, the attitude of the respondents was more favorable at the time of the second survey. The analysis of the interviews and the PCAM case study suggests a simple normative model for enhancing the chances of successful implementation of Operations Research/Management Science models.

The Wilderness Years at JMI

We reflect on JMI’s creation and first five years of publication. This “wilderness” period was marked with a good deal of ambiguity, challenge, and delight. We discuss JMI’s genesis in the innovative and collegial culture of the Western Academy of Management. We identify key founding events that fortuitously pushed the idea of a “nontraditional” journal towards reality. We describe critical decisions that shaped the journal’s initial structure and operations, and reveal our own thoughts and feelings in dealing with those thorny, start-up issues. We highlight how JMI’s practices challenged conventional thinking about management journals at the time. We discuss letting go of JMI and transitioning to a new leadership team.

The Informant Panel: A Retrospective Methodology for Guiding Organizational Change.

Conventional field methods utilized for organizational diagnoses and interventional guidance are relatively inefficient, typically contain multiple meanings, and overly rely on the investigators interpretations. The In formant Panel was invented to overcome these difficulties. Combining features of the Nominal Group and Delphi techniques, the Informant Panel is an inexpensive, time-efficient, retrospective method for obtaining the consen sually meaningful information needed to guide change projects. This article describes the Informant Panel, its origins, a major illustrative application, and its developmental requirements.

Role-Playing Organizational Theorists: a Dialectical Approach

During the past decade, and seemingly with increasing frequency, educators have adopted &dquo;behaviorally-oriented&dquo; teaching methodologies for a wide-variety of business subjects. For instance, it has become commonplace to use experiential exercises, role-playing incidents, and simulations in the organizational behavior, personnel, and labor relations areas and to convert the policy, small business, and managerial process classrooms into formal organizations designed to accomplish specific missions. The primary focus of these approaches has been the student as practitioner, emphasizing the application of management/ organization concepts to actual circumstances. Many academicians have suggested that this active classroom participation by students creates a more positive learning environment and increased self-awareness (Glassman and Kennedy, 1975; Cohen, 1976; Mezoff, Cohen, and Bradford, 1979). These methodologies, however, rarely concentrate on the individual theorist, specifically, the role of historical antecedents (e.g., social, political, economic, and technical environments) in the development of the theorist’s ideas. This paper describes a first-person role-play methodology that can be utilized in any class where it is considered worthwhile to involve the students in the &dquo;thoughts&dquo; and &dquo;times&dquo; of the theorist. The paper also includes a brief description and student evaluations of a graduate seminar designed exclusively around this methodology.

Making Experience Work: The Grid Approach to CritiqueBlakeRobert R.MoutonJane Srygley. Making Experience Work: The Grid Approach to Critique (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978) 117 pp.,

This article presents a review of the book “Making Experience Work: The Grid Approach to Critique,” by Robert R. Blake and Jane Srygley Mouton.