Are practitioners consulting business research to improve their businesses?
(Perhaps a better question: are they even reading it? More on this soon.) The answer, according to the few studies that ask this question, is a resounding “No” along with a clear implication: “But they should be!”
It’s true, there is much that “real” businesses could learn from business research if they could only overcome the massive obstacle that is academic writing. But there’s also so much that business academics can learn from “real” business. Despite the fact that many business academics are also business practitioners, academic norms and schemas can dominate these researchers’ thinking—with detrimental outcomes for their careers.
Above all, I’d love to see more academics embrace these three principles of good business for greater success in their careers:
Choose action over ideation
Allocate resources to what matters (“moves the needle”)
Target the right customer
All three are skills that academia doesn’t foster, which makes them extra important for those researchers with minimal business experience.
1. Choose action over ideation
Traditional academic contexts reward the quality of the outcome and nothing about the process of producing it. They also convince us that the outcome of any task can, in theory, be “perfect”; after all, 100% is a possible grade, even if it’s one that no student has ever achieved. In this way, school teaches us to ideate and iterate almost indefinitely, with the only limit on this ideation phase being the externally imposed deadline when something must be turned in or we will fail. Cue the last-minute frenzy that too many of us know all too well. You have no idea how many accomplished academics I work with who are still stuck in this exhausting cycle, relying on those same externally imposed deadlines to produce any work at all.
Eventually, your worth, on a very personal level, starts to feel like it's based on your intellectual ability, which is based on never making a mistake in your output... which is impossible. So you find yourself stuck. You find yourself procrastinating, delaying, and wondering why it feels like so many things are so hard for you.
The solution to this “wheels spinning in the mud” feeling? Action.
The tendency to act, speak up, put yourself out there, try, fail, and try again is something that business practitioners value and cultivate—but it may not come naturally to academics.
Try this:
Celebrate action, not outcomes. Rather than think about impressing anyone (including yourself), act like starting the paper is the outcome. Act like writing one page is the outcome. Act like submitting is the outcome. Write those desired outcomes down on a list, check them off, and celebrate. Questions of quality can come later. For now, just get used to acting—identifying the things you want to achieve, and achieving them so that they’re done, submitted, crossed off, whatever (NOT perfect or even good).
Make no mistake: this “done is better than perfect” approach is terrifying if you’ve spent a lot of your life in school. At first, you’re sure that everything you produce will bring eternal shame to your whole family. And then you realize… it’s actually not that bad? Some people even thought it was good? Even though it took you 2 hours instead of the usual 12? And even when it is bad, it turns out that’s not so bad! Because as every business owner knows, you will learn far more from taking action and failing once than you will from planning out 100 “perfect” ideas. That’s why this approach is vital if you want to start racking up accomplishments and building a competitive CV.
2. Allocate resources to what matters (moves the needle)
No business owner has the means to do everything that could be done, let alone to a high standard. The same is true for today’s increasingly overworked academics. The difference is that in school, we’re conditioned to prioritize things by due date, not importance or value. In contrast, the business world rewards the effective use of resources, meaning practitioners must quickly learn how to identify and prioritize needle-moving activities.
As an academic, your main resources are your time, energy, and money. Are you investing those three things in activities that either (a) delight, fulfill, and energize you or (b) tangibly advance your career and goals?
If not, consider borrowing from the world of business to create a clarifying mission statement for your work. This academic mission statement will help you decide what to focus on, what to decline, what to write and publish, what to underdeliver on, and what to really polish. When something feels like a great opportunity but it doesn’t align with your academic mission? It’s a no. When a job must be done to check a box but contributes nothing to your academic mission? It’s a “set a 10-minute timer and get this done, not done well” type of task. Creating and adhering to this framework ensures that your goals and success don’t get swept away in the perpetual grind of being asked to do way more than you can feasibly accomplish in a semester. This is doubly important for female academics, who are shouldering a far bigger portion of the “academic housework” than their male colleagues.
Try this:
Concretize your academic mission in 1–3 sentences by answering these questions:
What do you study (your area/field)?
How do you study it (your approach and methods)?
Why do you study this and why this way (your motive/how this work will change the world)?
Speaking of needle-moving activities, how much of your resources currently go toward improving your writing? Are you in a writing program or group? Are you using an editor for your most important documents? Are you following a consistent writing practice? Distasteful as the phrase may be, “publish or perish” rings truer than ever, so make sure writing is one of your top priorities.
3. Target the right customer
Academics, consider this: if you were a business, you’d be selling your ideas. Who do you want to “buy” those ideas? That’s your customer.
In other words, given what we just established about the importance of writing up your research, your customers are your readers: journal editors, reviewers, funding bodies, your tenure and promotions committee, and so on. What are you doing to target those “customers”? Are you holding them in mind as you write? Are you making sure they understand what you’re “selling”? Are you thinking about how to describe your ideas in ways that engage and persuade them to “buy”?
I think a lot of academics see their “customer” (reader) as a kind of generic fellow academic, one who knows virtually as much as they do about all the same things. And this is their fatal mistake. When you only talk to your fellow experts, you drastically limit your audience.
Try this:
Write for an intelligent, educated reader who knows nothing at all about business research. Pretend you’re talking to them at a party and trying to make them understand what you do and why. Define terms at first use. State the main point of each paragraph up front. Make abstract ideas easier to understand with simple, straightforward sentence structure. Sell them on the importance of your work from the first page with a stellar introduction.
Just because your “ideal customer” probably is another academic doesn’t mean they’ll know exactly the same things you do. Moreover, they’re first and foremost a human being, which means they don’t like to read (most) academic writing. They don’t like searching for explanations or definitions that aren’t there, wading through thousands of zombie nouns, or trying to digest clunky sentences and disjointed paragraphs. In fact, they’re probably even more frustrated than the average reader by murky, self-focused writing because they see so darn much of it!
So make their work a lot less work. Sell your ideas well. Make your writing a genuine pleasure to read. You’ll be amazed at the reach and impact your ideas suddenly have with this new “target customer” in mind.
Many articles have outlined the dangers of thinking that work is anything like school. The ideation, perfectionism, due-date-focused planning, and styles of communication that are regularly rewarded among students will hold you back in the workplace—even when that workplace is academia. So take a page out of business practitioners’ book and apply these three principles for better, more meaningful results in your academic career.
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