08/12/2021
I just had an amazing call with Jim Stoner. If that name sounds familiar, he might be sitting on your bookshelf: he’s written eight thousand and eleven books and articles on management. Well, not that many, but he certainly knows his stuff.
Jim and I met at the Academy of Management’s 2021 conference, and I was lucky enough to get paired with him for 15 minutes of mentoring over my dissertation. Turns out he really liked my topic and reached out afterward to continue the conversation! Jim! Motherfucking! Stoner! OH MY GOD!!!
We started the conversation with some small talk – he was on vacation with his family, I was on business in San Francisco – before pivoting into the good stuff: research!
Jim asked me to restate my research topic because he wanted to make sure he was on the same page. I did: what is the lived experience of the internal change agent (or organizational transformationist) who has either been asked by their company – or has taken it upon themselves within their company – to move the company from a current state to a new, ideal state. I’m not talking about executive leaders here, but those at director and lower VP levels. The folks within the system. Jim said yes, that’s why “I’m very enthusiastic about your topic!”
Jim Motherfucking Stoner is “very enthusiastic” about my topic!!!
Either way the existing literature falls, he says, you can win! If there’s no literature out there, no worries! Lots of literature there? Rich stuff!
The internal experience of these folks is juicy, and my topic is “potentially such a grabber because we all have internal journeys and we don’t look at them as closely as we do other things with our research in this field.”
Jim Motherfucking Stoner thinks my topic has the potential to be a real grabber!!!
He sees a macro overarching story being told with lots of micro-stories along the way.
Jim also admitted that my topic fits his bias about teaching management: that it focuses too much on what managers are doing and not enough on who managers are being.
How interesting would it be to examine the successes and failures people have, the pains and rewards, through the lens of their internal personal journeys.
I asked Jim about my methodology and what he thought about using it for organizational research. Jim encouraged me to keep Laslo’s Prospective Research “tucked behind my right ear”. He also encouraged me to consider how my dissertation will handle my story and those stories I’ll be telling through my research. He gave Isabelle Rimanoczy (author of Big Bang Being) as an example dissertation to check out, as “in many ways her thesis was like yours.” She looked at sustainability champions in their organizations – when it wasn’t part of their job description but they were doing it. He suggested some potential interview questions, such as “what do you do”, “what does it feel like”, “what was a turning point for you”, “have you read anything that was pivotal for you,” etc.
If I were in your shoes, Jim said, I’d interview myself first. What questions am I asking? Establish my protocol from that, and be careful to hold my protocol with just enough structure to support it but not make it too rigid.
My dependent variable, to Jim, sounded like the transformation of an organization in an area. Lots of variables could tempt me. Keep them, and the number of interviewees, manageable.
Jim also recommend a sort of pilot study, where I would do a bunch of interviews I could throw away (not with my key research populations), and just muck around a bit. Just listen. “This is a listening dissertation at its core,” Jim declared. Schein’s “Humble Leadership” would be good to remember.
So, get my feet wet early, define in collaboration with my committee my evolving methodology, and ask myself what do I really want to say about the appropriateness of my methodological approach.
This led to a conversation around the basis of resisting change and flipping it to embracing change. Jim recommended a classic article from HBR – Google search “resistance to change.”
Jim asked me about my committee and said it sounds like the right people are on there, so that was good.
Jim gave me two things to write tonight:
- Write the abstract for the article that comes from my dissertation (which of course will ultimately be irrelevant because research evolves but still)
- Write 2-3 paragraphs on what I want the reader to get out of that article.
Smart exercise for sure!! It pushes me to think about what scholarly article I want to see come from my dissertation work.
OH! And then – some majorly good stuff! I was asking Jim about my use of “change agent” or “organizational transformationist” and he said that what we’re really talking about are people who see the possibilities others don’t see. How do these folks deal with the Cassandra problem, Jim asked. How do they deal with the pain and the possibility? I launched into my thinking after hearing Sandra Waddock speak, and JIM launched into this hysterical bit about how ridiculously brilliant she is. We found ourselves wondering if there was a label for the flip side of being an internal Cassandra – not the person who sees all the horrors and nobody listens, but the person who sees all the possibilities and nobody listens. There’s really something juicy wanting to be had there. Good stuff.
After a few words on journal selection and staying organized/disciplined to stay for the course with my dissertation, our 55-minute conversation came to an end. What a true gift and pleasure Jim is! I am SO grateful that Judi Neal paired us together at the AoM Mentoring session!
