Dr. Anita Blanchard

During the school year, when I’m working nights and weekends just to keep up with teaching and service duties, I always think the summer is going to be full of butterflies and kittens while works of brilliance shoot out of my fingers into my laptop.  I imagine high impact papers flowing quickly and easily from my brain to the editor’s desk to be met with tears of joy at the recognition of the brilliance I have shared.  I also imagine happy children in a clean house with chores and crafts all checked off my list.

Clearly, I am delusional and have had either too much or too little coffee/sleep/food/exercise/wine.

In fact, I already put together my work and home “To Do” list for the summer and freaked out during finals week about “how far behind I was” and the summer hadn’t even started.

Nonetheless, I’ve already checked a few things off my list despite grading 150 undergraduate papers, attending the Organizational Science Summer Institute, and, unfortunately, discovering Candy Crush. If I can keep this up, I think I might actually have a productive summer.

There is no real secret here, except aiming for regular, smaller amounts of work with regular, scheduled breaks in the day.  I’ve put together a combination of tricks/habits I’ve gathered from How To Write a Lot, the Pomodoro Technique, and this article on the importance of rest and breaks.

Practically, what it means for me is that I have a list of things I plan to do each week, which I put on Evernote.  I divide them up into what I plan to accomplish each day, along with  check boxes (control-C on Evernote) that represent  30 minute time periods I will use to accomplish this task.   For the big research projects, I put 3 boxes, representing both the Pomondoro breakdown in work units and the advice on working for 1 1/2 hours and then absolutely taking a break. (I also have Focus Booster app on my laptop set for 25 minutes of work and 5 minutes of break)  I plan for 3 one-and-a-half hour chunks of writing and research a day, with the rest of my time spent doing email/phone, administrative stuff, teaching prep, blogging, exercising and some gardening.

Doing that, one week into the summer, I am “two weeks ahead” on where I thought I’d be.  Of course, the process only works with my booty in the seat and a To Do list to guide me.  But I have a strategy and a plan and I am hoping to have a very productive summer. I’d love to hear what other folks do to keep themselves productive and sane over the summer.  We can all benefit from others’ experiences.

I am coming to the Yahoo Telecommuting brouhaha a little later than most, but I think it’s given me time to process others’ reactions as well as better formulate my own.

The gist of the story is that Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has decided to eliminate her employees’ ability to telecommute.  She proposes that elimination of telecommuting and the increase of face-time interactions will improve Yahoo’s creativity and productivity, serious issues currently facing their organization right now.

The blowback from this policy include: She’s a woman! She’s a MOTHER!! The good employees are going to leave because of how important telecommuting is!  People don’t need to be present to work well and be creative with each other!!

Since I am also a woman and a mother and I study virtual work and online interactions and I love telecommuting, I think most folks think I agree with these criticisms.  But, alas, I do not.

First, yes, she is a woman and a mother and that gives her insight into working mother issues.  However, she is also CEO of a company that is in dire straights. She took this job while pregnant, and I don’t think anyone expected her to take a long maternity leave to transition into motherhood and put Yahoo viability on hold. She has been criticized for having the ability to build a nursery near her office so she can be next to her baby during the workday.  My perception is that she is not taking time off during the day to play with her baby or rock her to sleep:  she’s probably still breastfeeding (or was at the time she built the office) and it’s a lot more efficient to have a direct delivery system than to pump.  I’m also more than sure she has a night nurse.  I don’t think she should be criticized for having more resources than other mothers have and making these choices work for her.  I also feel it’s sexist to assume that she is supposed to put her roles and woman and mother above her role of CEO.  When did we last criticize a male CEO for NOT putting his family (and other fathers) over his organization? Never.

Second, what about telecommuting and creativity, productivity, and connection?  That’s even murkier.  Yes, virtual teams can be very successful and telecommuters can be very productive.  But these is something to be  said about face-to-face interactions.  More information is exchanged more quickly.  More intellectual and social connections are made.  Since the beginning of telecommuting, we’ve been waiting for that “killer app” to be developed which can replace the water cooler for employees to have those important, informal social interactions and it hasn’t happened yet.  I think it’s reasonable to want employees to be on site together more often to increase those connections which *could* improve the organization’s performance.

Here, though, is where I think Ms. Mayer is wrong:  there is absolutely no need for employees to be on site 5 days a week.  And indeed, one or two days a week of working at home will likely improve performance and satisfaction.  That’s where her mistake is.  I think the benefits of being FtF will accrue with three or four days of being on site and the performance benefits won’t diminish if people still have one or two days to work in a quiet environment at home.  That is where she is going to have unnecessary morale and turnover problems and probably what she is either going to regret her policy or going to change it.

It will be interesting to see how this all plays out.  If Yahoo turns around, telecommuting may be jeopardized for many employees.  If she hastens the organization’s demise because all the good employees leave, telecommuting may become even more the norm of some jobs.  We shall wait and see.

When I went back to school after working in the “real world” for 4 years, one of the differences that struck me was differences in time in the organization.  I have not studied time in organizations, which is an important area of research.  What I want to talk about is differences in the time perspective/horizons of the different constituencies in academia and how I see it playing out, now that I’ve been a professor for, ahem, a few years.

One interesting difference in academia versus other organizations as far as time goes is how long constituencies stay in the organization and how that affects their organizational reality.  As a student, the organization appears, essentially, to be a stable fixture while one is there.  Through students’ eyes, there are a cohort of students before and after them, there are professors who teach the classes and conduct particular research, and there are stable policies about the degree and the program that follow them through their degree.

As a professor, though, the organization changes with each cohort.  And in fact, we (as professors) see a relatively quickly changing organization every year.  Further, we’ve been able to make radical policy changes in our program knowing that in a few years no students will remember the “way it used to be.”

I think that’s an interesting way to think of organizational change in academic institutions, and ironic since colleges and universities take forever to change many of their faculty policies (e.g., tenure).  It is also, I believe, quite different from how corporations operate and I think that makes in “time” as an organizational construct even more interesting.

As I have become a mid-career academic, I am noticing a new dimension to this time issue that I had not fully anticipated.  I started graduate school 20 years ago.  I have a daily reminder of this number because  I adopted a cat the same month I started graduate school.  She is still alive.  Indeed, it is time for her to “go to college” on her own.  Yet she is healthy and lively though operating with a clear case of kitty dementia.  So when I think of how old she is (every morning when she howls at the shower), I think of when I started graduate school.

I have about 13  years experience as a professor.  But my students are all still coming in as novices.  The disparity between what I know and have experienced and what my students know and want to experience grows every year–as it does with all established professors and new students.  Things that seem obvious to me are still being figured out by my students.  And I think this is a good thing:  for me and I hope my students.

I still have to go back in my own experience and remember what it was like to be confused and stressed about learning new material and starting projects and writing my first big papers.  I have to trust that my students can help each other with some of that day to day growth because they are just now figuring out how to do it for themselves.  But I also hope that I can share some of the lessons I’ve learned in how to get through what feels like these overwhelming, ambiguous projects we have to do.

Two related maxims I’ve recently given my students are: 1) If you don’t know what the next step is in your project, the steps you’re thinking about are too big and 2) Today, you need to do the next right thing.  The students all know where they want to go: submit the paper for publication, defend the thesis, get a job.  But the steps to take to get there can be overwhelming.  So we’ve been working this semester on having the students get more and more concrete about the steps they are going to take today to get to the ultimate goal  months from now.  The next right thing to do should be obvious and doable today.  If it’s not, the path is still too abstract and unrealistically ambitious. I try to break down the steps to something concrete and easy to do today.  I think it’s reducing their stress on how to get where they want to be.

And it helps me.  It helps focus me, too, on what I am doing and reminds me to be fresh and excited about research.  I recognize the growing difference between my level of experience and my students.  And I hope that by continually traversing that gulf, we all gain and we all find our projects to be rewarding and fun.

I told you so.

In case you missed it, Sam Wang at Princeton Election Consortium and Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight among others  correctly predicted the outcome of Tuesday’s presidential election.  And not only “correctly predicted” but predicted to a highly accurate degree the final electoral counts (and how FLA was a coin toss, statistically) and the popular votes.

In case you’re wondering, those screams you’ve heard around Charlotte, NC for the last two weeks have been me every time I’ve heard or read some media report going into the election that it was a close race, a toss up, and we had no idea what was going to happen.  When the statistical analysts are coming back with 90% (Nate Silver) to  99 to 100% (Sam Wang) chance of the president winning, we have a pretty freaking good idea of what the data are saying.

Let’s put it this way, the next time, it calls for a 99% chance of rain, and you don’t carry an umbrella because you really, really want for it to be sunny?  I will have a similar reaction.

So what are the takeaways?

1)  Feelings are not facts.  I got this from a friend who is a therapist when we were discussing what the pundits were predicting versus what the data were predicting.  Somewhere along the way, American society has equated opinions with data.  They are not the same. And in cases, of oh, I don’t know, smoking and health outcomes, climate change, or evolution, you can hold on to your deeply held beliefs, but if they don’t match the preponderance of the data, your beliefs are wrong.

2) Combined data is better than single data sources. Any one data source can have problems.  Indeed, Gallup was off.  WAY off.  Why? Because they significantly overestimated the white turnout.  That does not mean one should ignore data that doesn’t agree with your opinions or even the rest of the data.  The cool thing about data aggregation is that it includes all the data and lets the errors/assumptions/sampling quirks statistically cancel each other out.

3) Learn how to trust and doubt at the same time.  This is an advanced smarty pants move, and something I want to credit the writings and theorizing of Karl Weick.  I also credit Public Image Limited for the same sentiment, but Weick is cited more academically.  What it means is that you should believe your beliefs and be open to them being wrong.  You should use your data, but it may have errors that haven’t been accounted for.  You should, essentially, not believe much as being 100% true and should be open to, if not looking for, information to adjust your beliefs and improve your data.  And if you don’t?  If you are someone who only wants to hear about data that supports your beliefs and purposefully ignore the rest the data?  You scare the crap out of me.  Or, actually, it’s makes it harder to gain the respect of others.

So, there you go.  Data, once again, remain neutral. Science/statistics/math can help us uncover the truth.  We should all try to find some data that don’t support our beliefs and cogitate on them for a while.

One of the first concepts I learned in graduate school, from Dr. Dale Berger, is “The data are what the data are.”

What this means is that the results of your study are neutral and objective.  If they support your hypotheses, they aren’t “good,” and if they don’t support your hypotheses, they aren’t “bad.”  The data simply are essentially an objective snapshot of the world and, as such, they are value neutral.

That doesn’t mean data can’t be wrong.  The sample in your study could be “off” (although this is a rare event) and there is always some systematic (question wording) and random (person didn’t understand the question) error in every study.  So, one of the advantages of meta-analyses (and other methods which combine study results) is their ability to combine the results of similar studies allowing the possible sampling, systemic, and random errors in individual studies to cancel each other out giving a very, very good estimate of the truth of the relationship one is examining.

Which brings me to this year’s presidential election.  There are several sites available that are combining poll data in ways that ought to account for individual poll errors and should give us a good idea of what the current “truth” about voting is out there.  I prefer the Princeton Election Consortium because it uses nothing but recent poll data (either the last 3 state polls or polls from the last week).  Other people like FiveThirtyEight, although I am less enthusiastic about that data because it includes economic data which are probably antecedents (“causes”) along with the polls, which I consider to be the outcomes (“effects”), i.e., the dependent behavior we’re watching. (NB:  Yes, I KNOW those are not really causes and effects, but not everyone got an A in Research Methods.)

Now, I better understand why the 24 hour news sites don’t want to refer to the meta-analysis of the polls.  The latest poll result (singular) allows them to work their readers or viewers up into an emotional state (Despair!  Joy!  Romentum! Anger!  FEAR!!!!!), which simply isn’t the case if you look at the meta-analyses–a more stable and valid assessment of *all* the state polls.

And now I also think I understand why some folks who don’t know stats that well pay more attention to individual polls than the meta-analyses.  From their perspective, I am recommending that they should try and prefer this “chocolate ice cream” as opposed the “vanilla ice cream” they’ve been eating all along.  But that’s the wrong food analogy.  The meta-analyses are more like a vegetable soup (all cooked and combined together) and I want to say “You’re eating a raw onion.  Spit it out and have a sip of vegetable soup.”

What is frustrating to me, though, is people who ought to know better, who have had advanced statistics, and who are still “crossing their fingers” that a standardized combination of polls is more accurate than the last poll they just saw, and which has also been incorporated into the meta-analyses.  I don’t get that.

However,  I do understand that people do not like the results of the data analyses.  As someone who has voted for the losing candidate over 50% of the time (yes, I did just calculate that!), I get being frustrated and angry that the data aren’t going my way.  And good cow, I can’t even possibly calculate how many times that has happened in my research!  HA!  No, I mean.  Wait. ((cough, cough)) My data always supports my hypotheses.  ((Ducking the lightening from the research gods and goddesses))

But remember:  the data are what the data are.  Could these analyses be completely wrong?  Yes, of course!  But the problem would not be in their statistical calculations. The problem would be that the polls are completely inaccurate assessments of people’s statement of what their behavior will be on voting day.  And that would mean we have NO IDEA what is going to happen on November 6.  And more importantly, that the trends up for Obama after the DNC and sharply down after the first debate are simply flukes  of data collection and no reflection at all about people’s opinions about, preferences for or potential voting behavior for the president.  If that’s the case, pollsters are going to have to seriously revise how they collect data. Hello, President Dewey!

At this point, I think it’s more accurate to believe that the data are what the data are.  That’s a hard thing to do.  It involves a controlled emotional response to ignore the hype, the interpretation, and the spin and to form your own opinion.  The data are what the data are.  And we’ll know if they are representative of the actual behavioral “truth” in one week.

This summer, while teaching my Introduction to I/O Psychology course, we had a discussion on different leadership theories.  When we discuss these theories, it helps for me to have examples of different well known leaders so that the kids can see the strengths and weaknesses of each theoretical perspective.  Some observations:  MLK, JFK, and Ghandi have all been useful examples over the years.  Oprah has aged out as a well-known leader for the students.  With a little bit of prodding, students get the idea of Jim Jones.  Certainly, Steve Jobs was quite appropriate for the last year.

This summer, one of my students, in trying to relate to a leader who changed society or started a social movement declared that Katniss Everdeen, from the Hunger Games Trilogy was a transformational leader.  Since I had not read the books at the time, I could not say Yay or Nay.  So I read them, thinking I might be able to use her as another example that Kids These Days could relate to.

Wait.  I did not read the trilogy.  I devoured it. I read the entire trilogy in 10 days.  Then I but them down for 48 hours.  And then I read the entire trilogy again.  I LOVE these books.  Indeed, I spent most of July in Panem.

But here’s the thing:  Katniss Everdeen is NOT a transformational leader.  Yes, she was the inspiration for an entire movement or rebellion, but it seems to me that she inspired based on what people projected upon her.  She is charismatic, but she no rhetorical skills.  Peeta did, but you know, in the third book, EVENTS OCCURRED and he was not so much on the leadership train.

In fact, although I admired Katniss’ physical skills, hunting prowess and ability to quickly analyze a social situation, she annoyed me mightily.  It took me until I was halfway through the third book the second time to figure out why:  she didn’t act; she reacted.  (Well, there was that one big act at the end, but otherwise?  Reacting)  I like my heroines on more of the feminist side (i.e., Buffy).   And yes, with Katniss’ physicality and not being boycrazy (Bella, we are all looking at you, bless your heart), she is a good role model for girls. But I perceive that real transformational leaders have a positive goal for the group that is not imposed upon them and  that they are more active in creating and projecting themselves as the leaders to help their followers reach these goals.

But hey.  I’m open.  What do you think?  I certainly think this could be a great conversation in a class where folks know who Katness Everdeen is.

Last week, for the first week of the first semester for our first year PhD students, I assigned a reading that made my students cry.  Or at least whimper.  Or perhaps merely curse my name.  The article was Feldman and Orlikowski’s (2011) Theorizing Practice and Practicing Theory in the journal Organization Science.  I must admit that it produced a bit of mental pain on my part knowing that the students would understand this paper a boatload better in their third year than in their first, but we were reading it now.

My objective in assigning the paper was to demonstrate the outcome of transdisciplinary research, which is an overarching goal of our Organization Science PhD program.  The problem is that it’s difficult to understand the ins and outs of a particular research problem if you have not yet been “in” or “out” of a couple of them.

NONETHELESS, the students and I were able to get excited about the paper by discussing the authors’ call to reject dualisms.  The example the students and I were able to coalesce around the common duality of agency vs. structure.  The students have agency (“choice”) in where they sit in the class along with what and how they respond to the discussion questions.  However, we also discussed the (possibly unacknowledged) structure in the classroom in that no one was sitting in the chairs in the corner of the room, that I sat at the head of the table, and that discussions and topics tended to be generated around the ones I thought were most interesting from the readings.  The authors rejection of duality (as we interpreted it) means that to understand what is actually happening in the class (or in “education”), we need to understand how WE actually live (ENACT) the CLASS within our space/time/culture.  The rejection of dualism means that agency and structure cannot be separated from each other to understand human behavior. Mind-body, objective-subjective, individual-institutional, and free will-determinism dualities should not be separated, either.  (Yes, practice theory extends structuration theory and you should read Feldman and Orlikowski’s article to learn more about it, if you are so inclined.)

Our discussion became lively, light bulbs went off over students’ heads (always a goal in class), and I think we all developed an understanding of this article as moving the discipline forward by challenging old ways of theorizing and presenting new ways to understand human and organizational behavior.

Imagine, then, my surprise when I picked up a theology book I had put down a few months before and started reading about this author’s call to reject dualistic thinking.  ((cue the spit take))  I then recalled a talk I heard by Gary Alan Fine at the last INGroup conference in which he discussed his new book Tiny Publics, in which he proposed that we can understand organization as well as society by understanding the routine small group interactions in situ (i.e., not unrelated to the rejection of dualistic thinking).  Dr. Fine is a sociologist quite apart from Feldman and Orlikowski as well as the theologian I was reading.

I may be going out on a limb here (or I may not!), but I think we are in the midst of a revolutionary new way of thinking about human (and organizational) behavior: one that is more holistic and difficult than before.  We’ve got to stop thinking in dualities (i.e., opposites) and realize that “both” sides are necessary, equal, and essential in understanding What Is Going On.

This is the part of the essay in which I am supposed to explain how we do that, how we stop thinking in dualities and start researching and theorizing non-dualistically.  HA! The best the students and I came up with was that we should take Fine’s approach and study repetitive small group behavior, checking our biases for dualities, and extrapolating to the research question from there.  We also decided this was going to be a lot easier for researchers 50 years from now (when we’ve already worked through these issues) than it is for us now.

Sometimes, I get a little freaked out when the New York Times has stories that seem to be focused all towards issues and interests in my own life.  (I’m sure that’s what all the paranoids say, but I’m way too optimistic to be a paranoid.  I just think how lucky I am the NY Times caters to me!!)

In any case, this Sunday’s New York Times had a very interesting article on open cubicle floor plans that have become popular with some organizations.  What I find so interesting about this topic is not the use of pink noise to drown out one’s co-workers’ conversations, but that organizational scientists have neglected the importance of the built environment in understanding employees and organizations.  I know that some I/O psychologists think this is the realm of human factors, but it is not.  This is the issue that Wanda Orlikowski has been trying to raise: we who study organizations need to look beyond just the social processes and incorporate the physical, built environment into our theories and research.

I don’t know what the answer is here.  Though I am so interested in environmental psychology, even I don’t know what the obvious theoretical approaches would be here much less easy solutions.

Nonetheless, I would approach the study of open cubicles from the perspective of behavior setting theories.  Behavior settings are a unit of analysis (bigger than a group, smaller than an organization) that can be used to understand behavior and cognitions as people interact within each other and the environment. Two other key components I think are relevant here are that behavior settings have boundaries and they have setting programs (i.e., patterns of behavior that accomplish some goal of the setting).

An accessible example would be a coffee shop.   The setting program is the ordering, preparing and consumption of coffee and perhaps some food.  The boundaries are the both real and psychological:  the walls around the space, the coffee counter, the door to the back room.  The physical objects (tables, chairs, counters, coffee makers, doors, cash registers, etc) can facilitate or hinder the setting program.  It’s more complicated than that, but that’s a good introduction.

I think one issue with open cubicle floor plans is that there are there are likely multiple behavior settings in one space that do not have clear physical boundaries between them which affects the psychological boundaries and disrupts the enactment of the necessary setting programs for the employees to accomplish their work. I would imagine some organizations have worked to solve these problems, but others haven’t.  The resulting employee frustration or work facilitation likely has to do with how much the organization has allowed or encouraged employees to modify the environment–and the work processes–to enact the setting program.

I know I do a lot of virtual research, but this would be such a fun and interesting and important study to do.  Any takers!?

The final papers for my writing and thinking class are starting to arrive.  I don’t know whose bright idea it was for the due date for the papers to be two weeks after the last class because I am already feeling the summer schedule.  Oh, yeah.  That was me.  Well, it seemed like a good idea in December.

Anyhoo, I’ve been using the word “aspirational” when I think about this class.  Aspirational is usually used in the context of Pinterest. It suggests a lifestyle that is inspirational to us and that we aspire to (e.g., a clean house, organic cleaning products, densely growing organic garden, yummy food, crafts, knitting projects, and chickens). Or maybe those are just my boards on Pinterest.

This class is  aspirational because we’ve spent the entire semester stressing the importance of in depth thinking and creativity in regards to our research.  We’ve critiqued and supported each other’s research.  We’ve plumbed the depths of the meanings of their constructs and played with all sorts of thought analyses of their research problems. The students have been validated in the importance of their approach to their research.  We’ve read editors from top journals discuss the importance of developmental reviews and why 13 pages of single space comments from a journal editor and three reviewers is a Good Thing.  I feel like every student has expanded their capacity to Think About  Research.  That’s pretty cool, and it goes way, way, way beyond looking for ways to “fill a gap in the research” when making a research contribution.

That’s the good part.  The reason I worry that what I’ve taught them is aspirational and not always “real life”  is that sometimes the pressure to get a publication out the door  interferes with thinking.  Sometimes it’s easier to just claim you’re filling in a hole in the research instead of re-conceptualizing previously problematic constructs  (affective organizational commitment, I am looking at you).  Sometimes reviewers don’t take a developmental approach and just say “this paper needs more theorizing” in a one paragraph journal submission review.

But that’s ok.  To continue the Pinterest analogy, if they have pinned to their Good Research Board ways to think, conceptualize, critique, and review research that is better than they would have done otherwise, how is that bad?  The thing about Pinterest (for me) is that occasionally, I do go back and pick out a craft or recipe I’d like to try or a chicken hint I’d forgotten about and I do it.  Maybe there will be a ripple effect for these students and for other academics who read these articles, so that eventually it becomes the norm and not the cutting edge. Crafts and foods show up in my life that I’ve seen get passed around on Pinterest.  I think the more attention we pay to creativity and clarity in thinking and research, the more likely we will to see projects we recognize as reflecting this principles start showing up to review or read in journals, too.

I hope.

But right now I have to go grade those (brilliantly written and conceptualized!) papers.  And then summer can start.

It has taken me forever to get this post up on my blog!  I am finally being shamed into finishing up this post after drinks, snacks, and dinner with my students last night.  Why so hard to write?  I think it’s because one becomes very self-conscious about writing when one is teaching about writing and thinking.

So, the scoop:  I am teaching a course this semester for our PhD students called “Writing in the Organizational Sciences”.  Although the title says “writing,” what it’s really about is writing and THINKING about research in the organizational sciences. And, as one of my students pointed out last night, critical thinking about research.  I’d also add creative thinking about research.

This course builds off a course I had with Allan Wicker called “Conceptual Framing” and from the philosophy of my main graduate school mentor, M. Lynne Markus who believed that you aren’t actually thinking until you are actually writing.*  In this class, we talk about everything involved in writing and thinking about research from incredibly mundane but fundamental parts of writing research like grammar (Barzun’s Simple and Direct) and scheduling (Pomodoro Technique) to pretty heady activities like having the students analyze their research problems using concept,  process, and  facet analyses, among other conceptual framing techniques.

We’ve read some classics like Davis’ essay on what make research interesting to and Sutton and Staw’s essay on  “What Theory is Not, to my new favorite article by Suddaby on  why construct clarity is lacking in organization science and why it is so important. Along the way, we’ve read some great papers that put creativity and thoughtfulness into writing and thinking about important research  topics like Orlikowski’s article on social materialism (2007) and the brand new article by Klein et al in AMR reconceptualizing organizational commitment.

So, that’s what we did in the class.  What I love is what the students became:  open to sharing their research ideas and taking constructive criticism; able to see the interesting components of others’ research and coaching them on how to develop it; creative thinkers of new ideas and approaches grounded in previous research.

I’d love for this to be a course that is offered in other PhD programs.  I don’t think it needs to be limited to organizational sciences; I think all social science PhD folks could get a lot out of it.  We teach our PhD students a lot about research methods.  I think it’s also useful to teach them how to theorize and to really think about their research.

*How bizarre to link to my  mentors’ wikipedia pages!