If you've finished exams or are looking for a diversion...

...I thought you might be interested in these posts.  They are my take on what students do outside the classroom for a course.

This first one was written six years ago.  It represents an ideal I'd like to see approximated. It's called, How do students play at their schoolwork?

This second one was written just a few weeks ago.  It is grimmer in describing the environment, but more realistic.  It's called Measuring Attendance and Knowledge Transfer.

I hope you have a great summer.  If it occurs to you, in six months or a year drop me a note to let me known what you're up to and whether anything from our class stuck with you.

Prof. Arvan

Grades Posted in Moodle

If you go into the class Moodle site you will find a new discussion forum which has your course grade in it and a little summary remark.  Also, if you go to the Grades link on the left you will see all your component scores to show how your grade was determined.

I'll put the grades in Banner in a bit.  Good luck on the rest of this week.

A little video for tomorrow's class

From the movie The Paper Chase.

Tidbits for Tuesday

• I will bring donuts for our last class session/review of the semester.  If you want coffee or some other beverage, that's on you. 
• There are blog posts due in advance of the session (preferably by tomorrow evening, which is the scheduled time).  Comments are not required this week, since we don't have a Thursday class.  But if you read somebody else's post and want to react to it by all means do.  
• I will also go over how I will determine final course grades.  
• This is not required but you might find this piece on Stanford from the most recent issue of the New Yorker more than a little interesting, and perhaps quite a contrast to your own college experience.  

For Our Last Class Session Next Tuesday

I'd like to talk about the following piece in conjunction with a tiny bit on the organization as a culture and our wrap up.

The Creative Monopoly - NYTimes.com via kwout

Links/Issues for Tomorrow's Class session

"No one can earn a million dollars honestly."
       -- William Jennings Bryan

Historical Fortune 500
Kevin Hallock paper on Interlocking Directorates
David Larcker presentation on Executive Compensation

What is happening in the product market to enable a firm's stock to experience high growth rates?

When this happens was the stock undervalued earlier?

What about CEO risk aversion?
Disruptive Innovation

A couple of videos to watch before class on Tuesday

We're talking about Executive Compensation on Tuesday.  I encourage you to watch these videos to make the topic more real for you.  This first one is from Forbes.  It's about CEO pay in the 500 largest companies. The video is in the middle of the page.  One obvious fact that emerges from this is that the bulk of the pay is from the cashing in of prior accumulated stock or stock options.   Some of these CEOs take very little in salary.   Another interesting thing is how Forbes measures company performance - by growth rate in stock share value over an extended period.  This makes sense if the market evaluates the company's balance sheet accurately.

The other video is from the NewsHour last Wednesday, about Citigroup Shareholders rejecting a pay package for their CEO.  This is news worthy because of its novelty.  Indeed, M&R says this can't happen, that it's the Board that sets CEO compensation, the shareholders having no say in the matter.  But that has changed recently as a consequence of Dodd-Frank regulation.  It's certainly interesting to ask whether this new form of governance will have a retarding impact on CEO compensation, particularly at companies that don't perform well by the Forbes metric.

On the personification of power and what it means to be a good writer

This is a featured piece on Robert Caro, a Pulitzer Prize winning author and autobiographer of Lyndon Johnson.  Johnson, while in the Senate was the practitioner of power par excellence.  That's power as in "power over."  It's a good read for a slow Sunday.  And it makes one wonder whether the gridlock we see in Congress today is because there is nobody of Johnson's ilk anymore.

A current example of "strutting"

This one backfired, but the intent is clear enough.

Less Is More

During the middle of today's presentation, it occurred to me I should have given more guidance on how to conduct these sessions.  In today's session Big Bang "covered" the entire chapter in B&D,  with slides both on the examples and all the points in the chapter.  That approach gives breadth but not much depth.  It would be better for the subsequent presentations to focus on some key aspect of the chapter and then get into it deeper.  Try for examples not in the book.  See if you can hit a nerve with the other students in the class.  Also, if your team wants that, you can lead the discussion of the posts, if you think that will help you get into your topic.  Just let me know if you want to do that.

Other Views of Power

I'd like to spend some time tomorrow before the presentation discussing the contents of this post, meant as a reaction to the student posts this week, before we get into the presentation.  B&D are quite comprehensive in their views of power and its sources, but many other people, myself included, take a more limited view, in part because I distinguish "agency," the ability to do things for oneself including in a social context, from power, defined here as getting others to do things for you on your behalf.  Not everyone makes this distinction.  But I think it helps here.  In the process I'll mention some things to read, simply to be well read, not really for the course.

First, there is the animalistic view of aggression, as exemplified in On Aggression, by Konrad Lorenz, where he develops a notion called territoriality.  This is for intra-species competition.  As most of you are aware, I'm sure, there is a related concept called the alpha dog, which implies dominance in a social setting.  Much of this dominance works through intimidation qua posturing, rather than overt acts of violence.  So dogs growl and peacocks strut.

This view of power as aggression translates in a pretty straightforward way to thinking about military power.  Clausewitz, the well known military theorist, wrote On War, around the time of Napoleon.  He is known for having said, "War is the continuation of Politik by other means."  With that it, it is again straightforward to extend aggression into the political arena.  The TV show Hardball, on MSNBC, has its name to reflect that politics can be like baseball.  In baseball, sometimes the pitcher throws at the batter, to get the batter to back off the plate.  (Getting beaned, the batter having the baseball hit him in the head, can be quite dangerous.)  That type of pitching is an act of aggression.  There are analogous actions in the political sphere.  (Think about last summer before the Debt Ceiling limit was raised.)

There is a related source of power that you might call Judo, which uses the strength of the other person to achieve your own ends.  One example to illustrate, after the birth of their first child new parents are anxious about the baby's welfare.  The baby, almost helpless but not fully so, can have power over the parents in certain situations.   Can you figure out how that works?  Incidentally, some of my Facebook friends are moms with pre-teen children so I get to see their posts about older kids trying to play the same game and the parents steely resolve (I don't really believe that) not to let the kids do that.

Let me switch gears and talk about power in a collaborative setting.  Though B&D mention it, it's not really their focus.  For my own edification, I'm now reading a rather old book called Creative Experience, by Mary Parker Follett.  It is freely available online (as page images).  Chapter X is on power, and when that is a legitimate concept.   Follett distinguishes between "power over," which is what we've been talking about above, and "power with" which she believes is integrative, accounting for the welfare of all parties and identifying a solution that incorporates their interests.  She distinguishes such solutions from "compromise," which she treats as a type of surrender.  Some of the posts this week were in the spirit of Follett, though in the examples I don't believe the preferences of the participants were opposed.  If we all agree at the outset, then it is not possible to identify from the example who has the power.  By the way, Follett denigrates power over and refers to it as pseudo power, because the solution it generates tends to fracture eventually.  The Arab spring is an obvious example to make her point.  So she views power with as the only true power.

On a normative plane (how things should work) I agree with Follett.  But from a positive perspective (how things actually work) I have to say much of the exercise of power is power over.  It remains prevalent.  Though Follett's book was originally published in 1924, not everyone has learned their lessons from her.  Alternatively, power over can endure quite a while until the fracture happens.  Many of us have a rather short time horizon to consider our behavior, so power over can seem quite effective.

Thursday's Class/Today's low attendance

On Thursday we will cover B&D Chapter 8 on interpersonal conflict.  I believe it will have the highest take away for you of any class this semester.  However, among the blog posts I read for this weak, you mainly avoided the issue by talking about group projects where other members of the group want to shirk, and you ended up doing most/all of the work. This may not be a pleasing outcome from your point of view, but it might very well be the efficient solution under the circumstances.  So I hope you can think about other examples, where shirking isn't the problem but rather where the problem is disagreement about the goals for the group and/or disagreement about the best way to achieve those goals.  Further the disagreement have had led to some members of the group being angry, in an overt way, or passive-aggressive in a less overt way.  That's what we want to talk about.  It's not fun.  But it's real.

- - -

Today attendance was less than 50% for the first time this semester.  Among the students who didn't show up, I've heard from one.  What's the story with the rest of you?

Conflict so bizarre it's funny

I normally don't take course content from the ESPN Web site, but since next week we will be talking about managing conflict within organizations, I thought this one appropriate.   It shows blood is thicker than water.

Second Set of Team Presentations

We should allocated these tomorrow, or Thursday at the latest.  These are each from B&D, on the Politics Frame.  They are:

4/12  B&D Chapter 9 on Power, Conflict, and Coalition

4/19  B&D Chapter 10 on The Manager as Politician

4/26  B&D Chapter 11 - Organizations as Political Arenas

Note that we will have discussion of blog posts before the presentations.  The prompts will be relevant for these topics.

Instead of evaluation of comments....

...I constructed this comment matrix.  This is only measuring who commented on posts.  It doesn't say anything at all about comment quality.  We'll discuss this briefly tomorrow.

The Write Stuff

Since the class has been blogging for a while, you can all consider yourselves writers.  Writing is both about the ideas and about how well the ideas are expressed.  On the latter, you might get some insight from this post, the first in a new blog from the NY Times.

Follow up to previous post

This Joe Nocera column is a good read and it is a nice way to tie the Goldman issue to our course, since it point out two distinct ways, with Starbucks the emblem of the alternative approach to Goldman.

Whistle Blowing on Goldman Sachs

This piece is astounding for the frank accusations regarding the corporate culture within Goldman Sachs.  And it's quite relevant to our discussion about moral hazard in organizations.

Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs - NYTimes.com via kwout

Asset Equations and Moral Hazard

We didn't fully cover the last slide in the PowerPoint from today.  So I will start with that on Thursday.  It is a puzzle.  Let me see if I can explain the issue here.

The asset equation that I briefly showed is from this document, on page 3.  The important point to note is how we typically interpret such an equation.  The asset value, "A," is measured in current time, that is the value of the asset today.  The return "a₁" happens 1 period into the future.  Similarly, the return "a_t" happens t periods into the future.  In other words, the asset value is the sum of the appropriately discounted future returns.

On the other hand, in assessing the reputation of an individual, we typically look at past performance.   Typically, the rule of thumb is to trust somebody who has had strong past performance and to distrust somebody else who has had weak past performance.

The puzzle is how in one case can the reputational asset be forward looking only while in the the other case where we assess the assess we are backward looking only.  Can that make sense?  If so, how?

Assessment of your work in Moodle

I've now set up two different discussion groups in Moodle.  One is for your individual work.  The other is for your team work.  Each student should now have a written assessment of their individual work called Blog Posts - First Half.  If this functions the way it is supposed to, you should be able to read your own assessment but not see the assessment of any other student.  Please let me know if that is the case.

I've also done an assessment of the Cool Kids' presentation from last Tuesday.  From here on out, I will try to do team assessments a day or so after the presentation has occurred.

Later this week I'll provide some assessments of the comments you've done so far.

The week after break I'll assign the second presentations, which will be from B&D.