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I can relate to this discussion. I have been in both worlds--academia and business. Let me share one of my experience as a CEO of a bank. After serving a few years in academia, I was appointed to a CEO of a commercial bank. And after teaching the benefits of participative management, I wanted to delegate some of my decision making authority to my division heads to speed up the decision making  and  develop divisional managers. However, I realized that my division heads did not want to have more decision making authority because it brings along more responsibilities, which they wanted to avoid. Then I had to prepare and convince them the benefits of delegation of authority and change the reward system accordingly to motivate them to assume more responsibilities. After returning to the academia, I felt my business experience was a second PhD for me.
The bottom of the story is that it will be useful to have our doctoral students have some sort of practical business/management experience to bridge the gap between academia and business world. I think such a practicum should be be a part of the schools' curriculum.

Best wishes for the new year,
Refik Culpan
Penn State University at Harrisburg

On Fri, Jan 11, 2008 10:42 AM, "Ruth H. Axelrod" <RAxelrod@GWU.EDU> wrote:

 Colleagues,  Good article!  It  reminds me of a statement by the American  psychologist, Harold Kelly, who lamented in the 1950's that, in  psychology, "there are the questions that one can research and then  there are the really interesting questions."  In my experience, most academic research in organizational studies is  founded on the issues that we can research using experimental designs  derived from the hard sciences, so that isi the driving force in  selecting research questions, *not* the needs of practitioners.  It is  hardly surprising, then, that our work often does not address the  questions and problems that *really* plague practitioners.  Furthermore, if you look at the history of management theory in the  context of social changes in a wide variety of domains (which I am  currently working on), what you see is that theory *follows*  practice--that is, in the vast majority of cases, a practitioner who  faces real problems that threaten his/her job and/or organization  conceives of a new way of doing things and tries it out.  Then,  academics come along and study it, create an abstract model to describe  it, and publish the model (note, IMO, most of what we publish is not  theory--which explains the why of things--but simply descriptive models  which we often call theories).  Rarely do academics actually innovate.  We're not under pressure to do so.  (Rremember that Peter Drucker  observed that the organizations that most need out help are governments  and nonprofits because they don't have "the discipline of the bottom  line," which drives innovation in businesses; we academics don't  either.)  What we are under pressure to do is to publish research that  has been conducted within the current paradigms of our fields and--for  the most part--according to the restrictive tenets of "the scientific  method" (as opposed to qualitative methods which, historically, have  been responsible for almost all of the break-through thinking.)  Ruth  Kenneth Amaeshi wrote: > You may find this FT article on "why business ignores the business  > schools" helpful:  > http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/215022b8-bd2c-11dc-b7e6-0000779fd2ac.html >   > Best wishes, >   > Kenneth Amaeshi >   > Lecturer, CSR & Sustainable Finance > Cranfield School of Management > Cranfield University, UK >   > Email: kenneth.amaeshi@cranfield.ac.uk  > <mailto:kenneth.amaeshi@cranfield.ac.uk> >  > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > Looking for last minute shopping deals? Find them fast with Yahoo!  > Search.  > <http://us.rd.yahoo.com/evt=51734/*http://tools.search.yahoo.com/newsearch/category.php?category=shopping>  >   --  Ruth H. Axelrod (H/O) 301-593-4938   

Prof. Refik Culpan