Putting the Heart Back into Publishing

We have all been there – at times wondering if the reason we chose academia was getting lost with the publishing pressure.  You look at top scholars and think, were they born with some silver spoon to help them keep going? In this panel we asked the top scholars: Prof. Ram Mudambi, Prof. Timothy Devinney, Prof. Rosalie Tung, Prof. Elizabeth Rose, Prof. Lilac Nachum and Prof. Arie Lewin. While the background stories were deeply personal and we had a wonderful glimpse of how these wonderful role models got to where they were, I would like to focus on the key take-aways from their talks.

1. Whatever your journey, it is uniquely yours - so own it.

Each of the panellists shared stories from their life of how they got to their present positions – and in all cases, it was not easy, often with some serendipity involved. They made choices faced by their circumstances, many out of their control, which in hindsight seemed like opportunities. Some migrated to other countries, some switched from a corporate career, and others were the first in their families to pursue a PhD, while some pursued an academic career despite not wanting to do one. To own your journey means not trying to copy others. To be confident that your path and the person you are – are meant to be unique. Tim quoted  Oscar Wilde, “Be yourself.  Everyone else is already taken.” In fact, his career and subjects were not conventional international management or international business ones – his BSc was in Psychology and Applied Mathematics, MA in Public policy and eventually he completed another Masters and a PhD in Economics. Arie also had a varied background starting in engineering, Ops Research and moving to Economics and Organization Science (a field he is credited with founding).

2. Your experiences matter, take them and leverage them in your academic journey

Each speaker highlighted how their experiences were a reflection point that eventually led to paper publications. For example, Lilac spoke about her life and how she viewed foreignness being a foreigner in one country and having family that were perceived foreign. She observed that it could be an asset and a liability. She saw the paper by Sri Zaheer on Liability of Foreignness and then continued work on that topic. Rosalie spoke about her experiences as an expatriate child and the encounters she had with cultures – both positive and negative and how that made her realize there was a whole field of studies waiting to be explored in international business.  Tim highlighted the need to be disruptive and surprise yourself and others, to keep the excitement in research going. To not be predictive and boring was important for him – but what he was challenging us to do was to step out of our comfort zone. Beth highlighted that in this journey we should be comfortable with the choices we make. Rosalie told us about some early advice her supervisor gave her – he said start with something that gives you competency, and then go and do something dangerous – and this is exactly what she did -  start with conventional and immediately after blazing her own path – choosing the topics that were not conventional.

3. Keep the curiosity and love for learning. This needs to be your passion.  

Ram spoke about curiosity and the love of learning that brought him back to academia. The need to know more. He said, “Feed the child in you”.  He remembers teaching Porter in class and thinking, something does not add up, and then asking the question Why – which is the starting point of the research journey. Many of the scholars on the panel looked for topics at the cusp of disciplines.

I have seen how top scholars consume the latest articles being released, keep up with current affairs, and just want to learn more because it feeds their hunger. Rather than looking for a publishing topic for the sake of publishing, they centre on their passion for the topic. Tim said that he does not care if a topic he is deeply passionate about does not get published or cited as much, as it matters more to him that he was passionate about what he wrote about.

Here is a quote from Rosalie, “Many people have asked me how I have been able to sustain an active research agenda that spanned four decades over two millennia, and some have probed me about my almost uncanny ability to identify research topics that have subsequently become very popular.  The short answer to these dual queries is passion.  Because I am truly passionate about my research topics, work becomes play!  This passion has enabled me to work long hours, year after year, and weather frustrations and setbacks which are part and parcel of our profession. In fact, I have publicly stated on many occasions that even if my research on topics that I am truly passionate about were rejected for publication, I am still pleased for having undertaken them because I have learned something useful.  Each and every piece of research is a personal voyage of discovery for me; thus, this in itself represents adequate reward for all my hard work and effort” (Tung, 2009:12)”.

4. Context matters

Beth highlighted the need to understand the context of research and she explained the work behind the paper, “Africa rising, opportunities for advancing theory on people, institutions, and the nation state in international business”. While it was hard work as all the authors were deeply passionate about the topic, they would have different nuances on how they wanted to express themselves. This was the challenge but eventually after finding alignment and publishing, she felt when scholars from Africa expressed how much the paper resonated with them, this was validation of a job well done. She highlighted the importance of understanding the context – especially for emerging markets: “Western frameworks need to be pushed in term of relevance of time and contexts”. She worried about generalization highlighting that the boundaries of countries we now use for our research were all artificial and did not reflect people, cultures or history.  The panellists highlighted the many ways to understand context:  bottom-up,  collaboration, understanding history, or  other discipline’s perceptions of the topic. This they stressed gave you a better grounding in the topic. They were quick to emphasize it was not about having 200 citations – citations in a  good paper were more about why you chose that specific paper and what was being cited.

5. Test your work in the real world

Ram highlighted how you knew your research was valuable – he said  “Take your ideas and put it in the fire of the real world”. He recommends to  take your work to the classroom or use it in consultancy and if the students of practice or clients appreciated it – it was valuable. He showed us an example of how it could lead to publishing. He gave the example of a case study he wrote on a company Suzlon, that was published in 2016 that eventually led to two journal publications one of them JIBS and the other HBR! After all if we are academics in the field of business or management which are applied fields, then the research should have relevance to the real-world. Tim highlighted that though much of our research was backward looking the real challenges was how could we reflect on the past to create a path for the future. And many of the panel members thought an academic’s job in this avatar, a future looking scholar would not be redundant as AI could only look backward, not creatively think of the future, or between the gaps, or explain phenomena that had never been explained before.

6. Take time to refresh

Arie mentioned a great example – when he took over as Dean, many of the 300 academics were bogged down in committees and had never taken their sabbatical. He said, “If you don't take time to recharge, you dry up, no new ideas and you become afraid to publish”. For an academic, he explained, this time to refresh was the key to stoke the fire of academic writing. Ram highlighted that it allowed you time to reenergize - he writes novels in his free time. Tim spoke about his love for travel and photography. For others it was networking. Others read for the love of reading. By immersing yourself in another environment, you are able to sustain an academics career for 40-50 years.

7. Keep ideating

Tim spoke about his early years in academia and when people shared ideas and were excited of them. This was a time, when there was rarely a conversation about publishing.  He said the spice of academia was the ability to shock people with ideas. The ability to come up with new ideas or to recognize ideas and collaborate on them is an important part of writing. I remember years back, listening to Gary Hamel say why he loved working with C K. Prahalad for the same reason. I also remember my childhood when my father would take me to all theses scientific talks in physics, chemistry, biology – all cutting-edge research and he would say – its OK if you don't understand everything, but listen and try to ask an intelligent question at the end of it. And that has led to so many ideas.

Why are ideas important? Rosalie spoke about the pipeline for research and ensuring you were working on enough projects to keep the pipeline busy for at least three years. And not all ideas end up as papers, some are conversation topics, some are blogs, some are cases, some are thought pieces, chapters, books and some will be papers. It is OK. Lilac said “Every paper I write, I feel like it is going to change the world” – highlighting her passion.

Thanks to AoM IM group for this amazing opportunity.