Thought leaders: forget this at your peril

Remember that old saying: if a tree were to fall in a forest with no one around would there be any sound?

Makes me wonder.

If a thought leader were to make a momentous discovery without telling anyone would there be any thought leadership?

It’s clear that thought leaders must not only capture unique and valuable research.

They must also teach their life’s work in a way that is itself unique and valuable. 

Thought leaders should teach not tell people what to think.

This column appeared in the Financial Times 20 years ago when I first realized the significance of teaching.

Turning a Career into a Calling

Paul van Fenema summed it up well on day one. Being a business school academic was like being a five-legged sheep, he said. Paul, a doctoral student at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, was one of 30 academics around the world nominated by their business schools for a place on the prestigious International Teachers Program. And his concept of a sheep with too many legs seemed an appropriate metaphor for the increasing complexity of our role as academics.

As well as becoming active and high-profile academic researchers, or conducting increasingly complex consulting projects with partners from industry, we are also expected to teach a wide range of business executives as well as full-time and part-time MBA students. Of all the challenges facing us, it was on this particular sheep’s leg – on the role and skills of academic teaching – that the ITP was to concentrate.

The ITP currently hosted by New York University’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business was launched in 1973 by a consortium of nine international business schools. Its purpose is to work with outstanding business educators to increase participants’ awareness of their approaches to teaching and learning.

I was there earlier this year (1999-2000) representing Cranfield School of Management with a colleague, Michael Dickmann. We met faculty from a range of institutions, including Goizueta Business School (Atlanta), IMD (Lausanne), Insead (Fontainebleau) London Business School and NYU. Our fellow participants represented a cross section of disciplines and there was a wide range of teaching experience. There were several professors on the programme, for example, and while walking up Fifth Avenue I asked one of them, Piero Tedeschi, from the Escola de Adminstra??o de Empresas de S?o Paulo, Brazil, why he had attended the programme. 

“We can all still learn, my friend,” he said, slapping me on the back. “And to be honest, I like to give myself a kick up the butt from time to time.”

From talking to colleagues who knew the programme in the past, it seems to me that the ITP grew out of a desire to coach faculty in the particular skills of teaching case studies, the staple diet of many MBA programmes. The ITP 1999-2000 programme focused a great deal of attention on this, allowing us to work with a number of experts in the case method.

Professor Kamran Kashani from IMD took us through his award-winning Sony Europe case, in which he used video clips and newspaper cuttings to bring the story up to date. Professor Kashani said that updating is significant, as it brings home to students the relevance of the lessons that can be gleaned from old cases.

The Art of Leading Discussions

In contrast to Professor Kashani's energetic, entertaining style of teaching, Professor By Barnes from Harvard Business School used case studies of only a page or two to explore the art of leading discussions. We sat in a circle and Professor Barnes asked simple questions, forcing us to articulate our thoughts and clarify our decisions about possible courses of action. The session reinforced my belief that the responsibility for a discussion is vested in the class, not necessarily in the professor. This collaborative, facilitative approach is very powerful, I believe, although it can be frustrating for class members who simply want The Answer.  

The ITP then helped us to explore participative and active learning techniques with Mel Silberman from Temple University, New Jersey, who demonstrated a range of techniques for breaking up discussions and actively engaging students in the learning process.

We also took part in short teaching sessions, which were videotaped and later reviewed privately with educational counsellors.

While these provided valuable time to reflect on our skills, it was the subsequent sessions we took with the Actors Institute off Broadway that stirred the greatest debate in the group and had the profoundest impact on me.

The Power of Experiential Learning

Over two or three days we took part in a series of exercises, ostensibly based on aspects of creativity, that included communicating without words, making giant collages and constructing buildings from polystyrene shapes. Some of the group could not see the point of the exercises and suggested that the staff at the Institute could have helped us more effectively by focusing on working with an audience, voice projection, acting a role, or self-confidence. 

I took a different view. On reflection, I realized that I had immersed myself so whole-heartedly in the progression of exercises that I had relied less and less on words to understand the meaning and mood that the leaders of the exercises were trying to convey.

At a gut level I suddenly appreciated that in teaching my whole person was involved. I knew this intellectually, but this seemed a different insight. I already had a sense of “grounding” and of my body as a powerful visual aid, but this insight was something more.

At another level, my experience captured the idea that teaching was not a job, a set of specific behaviours that I bolted on. It was a vocation, a state of mind and a state of body. It occurred to me that in teaching I am not acting or pretending (although these are skills of teaching), I am being a teacher, I exist as a teacher.

This was such an “aha!” moment for me that it prompted a question. Can teaching always be this powerful? I concluded that it must be and it has forced me to ask how I can constantly create such an atmosphere of engagement. Is the key simply to create self-awareness in students?

I hope the ITP directors retain this element of experiential teaching and learning in the programme. I believe it offers an insight into the spirit of teaching.

On returning to the UK I tried to encapsulate for Murray Steele, Head of the Strategic Management Group at Cranfield, why the ITP had been so valuable for me.

I believe that simply watching and working with world-class tutors and participants offered many practical techniques for improving teaching skills. But, more importantly, sharing the experience and beliefs of people who cared so deeply about teaching and learning helped me realize how much of a vocation we are engaged in.

I do not believe I will ever forget this lesson. And, turning again to the sheep, I can’t help feeling that I now know which leg is the most significant for me.

__________

Are teachers born or made?

It seems like 20 minutes, but it’s 20 years since I attended the International Teachers Program at NYU Stern School of Business. The program directors were Professor Chris Kelly, now at MIT Sloan School of Management, and Professor Tom Pugel, now Vice Dean of Executive Programs at NYU Stern.

I owe them and my fellow participants on the program a lifetime of gratitude.

__________

Here's a link to the International Teachers Program for my faculty colleagues. If you haven't been, go.