When, on November 29th 1990, the then Australian Treasurer Paul Keating faced a financial crisis that would severely damage major sections of the Australian economy he said “[t]his was the recession we had to have”.  Later, when queried about the […]

The recent accident involving Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo – and the tragic death of one pilot and critical injury of another – highlights the dangers inherent in any type of space flight. It has also brought up the inevitable discussion of […]

China and Growth: An interview where I discuss one of the missing issues in the limits to growth in China: The unwillingness to give people to freedom to do more than just make money by sharing ideas, no matter how […]

Business scholars constantly face criticism from the media and practitioners as to the “application value” of their research. Even many academics can be heard bemoaning the fact that our research is not just “ignored” by managers but is lacking in any “relevance” to management practice. Such viewpoints neither reflect the value that management scholarship plays in the daily operations of business schools nor does they account for the value that business academics play by be outsiders removed from the daily lives of managers. What is the role of scholarship in business schools?

The recent decline of the majority of Australian universities in the World University Rankings has university vice chancellors passing on the blame to the government and the system underlying the rankings. According to Prof Glyn Davis of The University of […]

According to many of my colleagues design thinking is all the rage and set to revolutionize the way we think about innovation.  However, despite hearing about it a various forums, attending a design thinking in education workshop, and seeing the […]

Larry Zicklin in an opinion piece in the Financial Times believes professors should focus far more on teaching and less on being published … and my commentary: It is interesting how over my 20 years as an academic I have heard […]

Last week the business and society twitterverse, and its older equivalent – the press – went into overdrive when Marissa Mayer’s announcement that Yahoo! was doing away with telecommuting and insisting that employees come into the office and work cheek […]

The rise of Massive Open On-line Courses (MOOCs) has been the subject of considerable media discussion of late.  The voices associated with this debate have generally be of two slightly conflicting types: (a) MOOCs are a threat to the current […]

Stephen Machett of the Australian made a fairly cogent commentary on the recent “Smart Manufacturing” report that was released in the last week by the Australian government.  The logic of this “independent” report was that Australia was losing the productivity […]