Karim R. Lakhani’s Infrequent Musings

Harbus, the HBS student newspaper, is reporting on a sekret investigation of the TOM RC (required curriculum) faculty as we were discussing today’s midterm. The headline:

Sky Falls As Tom Midterm Approaches

RCs Seen Wallowing in Pool of Hate and Self-Loathing as TOM Faculty Crack Out the Champagne

All I can say is that the caviar in our private dining room in the faculty club was quite yummy. As for the exam - well we will know soon enough if the cracking sound I heard during the exam was that of a student or a Benihana chopstick.

Yes we have now slipped into Fall.  I begin teaching on this coming Friday 9/7.  A warm welcome to all the incoming students at HBS, especially sections A & D.  We have forty sessions ahead of us in the Technology and Operations Management core class.  We go from Japanese restaurants to cranberry factories to pasta distributors to the Americas Cup and stop at Threadless.  Its going to be quite a ride!

A common reaction after reading an HBS case is: “So what happened? How come there are no conclusions and recommendations?”  Welcome to the world of case-based teaching! A good overview of the case-based teaching method is here. Here are few excerpts about what we tell our new students about case-based teaching: (If there are some MBA 2008 - Section E students reading my blog - instead of their assigned cases - they may also want to pipe in on the comments about the case method and their experience with it):

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Yesterday, my colleague Andrew McAfee and I just published a Harvard Business School Case on Wikipedia. In the spirit of Wikipedia we have released this under a GFDL license. Andrew and I will teach it in his second year MBA course on Managing in the Information Age this coming April. At HBS, all courses are taught via the case method, which means no lecturing by professors. HBS cases are designed to have a “managerial” decision point - which forces students to choose between several alternatives and come prepared to class to discuss their rationale for their choices. A case discussion is typically 80 minutes long with the goal of having the students engage in discussion with each other and the professor to develop a particular point of view about the case facts. In a case discussion, “there are no RIGHT answers - but there are WRONG answers!” My role as a professor is to make sure that the main teaching points in the case come out via the discussion with the students.

The case aims to get students familiar with the inner workings of a distributed community and to grapple with issues related to authority, decision making, expertise and norms of behavior in a community setting. The MBA curriculum at most business schools does a decent job of exposing students to managerial issues inside of hierarchical organizations. However, there is very little as it pertains to the emerging paradigm of distributed innovation. We just don’t know enough about what it takes to “manage” an innovation community. Can you even manage one? How do you build one? How do you sustain it? What kills a community?

I think there is a lot of wisdom about it in practice, i.e. people that are going about seeding, building and sustaining community and know how difficult it is to build communities. Our hope with this case (and others to come) is to engage our students to think seriously about communities inside and outside of firms and how they themselves can be participants in them.

I welcome your feedback on the case.

Andrew’s blog post about the case is here.

I also posted this on the Future of Communities Blog.

So I am in the middle of grading all the exams. Its hard work! I thought some of you might enjoy this. Enjoy your holidays Section E! While I keep dreaming of Gelatin, NPV assumptions, Art vs Science, and Go/No Go decisions.

It looks like some of my students have discovered my blog. Welcome to my random musings! Hey do you have time to be reading my blog - now get back to reading your cases! See you in class.

I am very pleased to announce that the fine folks at MIT Press (Bob Prior rocks as an editor!) have now made a “free” version of my coedited volume Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software available online. All the articles are now available for download as PDF. Enjoy. This “best selling” book will be out in paperback as of March 2007. In the meantime I encourage you to buy a copy for yourself and one for everyone of your dear and close friends and relatives

Face it, you just love 80’s Music. Your iPod is filled with oldies like Depche Mode, New Order and Duran Duran. Or music from whatever decade you went to university as an undergrad - that era’s music sticks with you forever and it is tough right now to get excited about the latest bling bling krunk hip hop. Well Robert Sapolsky - Professor of Neurology and Neurological Sciences at Stanford University has thought about the same thing. And being the certified genius that he is - came up with a study to figure out why this is so. He wrote about in 1998 in the New Yorker and then had it publised as an essay in his excellent new book called Monkeyluv.

Finally there is now a interview with him - just on this topic. Robert Krulwich from NPR had a wonderfull conversation with him about this topic. It ranges from Music to Sushi to Piercing. I won’t tell you the punch line but do listen, enjoy and wonder.

Oh yeah - what new music have you listened to lately?

Some of you may know that for the past 3 months I have been engaged in an academic job search. MIT Sloan in all its wisdom does not hire its own students and thus we are sent out into the academic wilds to forage for ourselves. Just as I was starting the interview process I came across this wisdom in a fortune cookie:

The taste of patience is bitter but the reward is sweet.

Well sweet it is! As of July 2006 - I will be moving up the river Charles and across to Boston. I am joining the Technology and Operations Management Unit of Harvard Business School as an assistant professor. I will be teaching the core Technology and Operations Management course to Harvard MBAs and continuing my research on distributed innovation systems.

Overall I applied to 7 schools and had 4 invitations for job interviews. The interview entailed about 8 to 10, 30 min meetings with faculty members and a 90 minute seminar on my research. The day of the job talk at the various schools ended up being quite intense. However I found the faculty at each of the schools (Wharton, HBS, NYU-IS, UC Berkeley SIMS) to be amazingly nice and very receptive to my research. The feedback in the seminars was also quite good and very constructive. In the end I was very glad to have a few options in front of me.

It feels great to be done! Phew!