Teaching Evidence-Based Management. Help!

I am trying to teach evidence-based management in an upper division undergraduate course. I have assigned Pfeffer and Sutton's book, Evidence-Based Management. The students love it. I have also borrowed an assignment Sutton posted in his syllabus which he put up on the evidence-based management website.

ASSIGNMENT #1 DUE Provide an example not from the reading (or www.evidence-basedmanagement.com) where evidence-based management would improve decision-making.

However, I find my students are floundering. They don't know how to go about this assignment, and I'm sure exactly what to tell them.

If any of you out there are also trying to teach evidence-based management, I would greatly appreciate it if you could share any advice you give your students or different assignments you might have. Or if you would be willing to share some sample student papers, I would appreciate that as well.

I start by telling them to follow the recommendations already in the book–the ones summarized in Table 1.1 and Table 2.1. I have tried to develop some additional guidelines for the students, but they fall short of what my students need.

I told them to focus on a specific decision, not a case or situation.

I also told them to look at a decision where applicable research exists.

I also told them that although EBM applies equally to organizations that seem to be making good decisions on the surface (and I cited your example of the gaming industry here) as it does to to ones that are making poor decisions, it is probably easier for them to be able to demonstrate how EBM would help if they looked at examples of poor management decisions.

One team in my class was thinking about examining the FedEx-Kinkos merger. I suggested to them that they may want to instead look at an acquisition or merger that did not go well, such as the acquisition of Chrysler by Mercedes.

I pointed out that there is a lot of research on mergers and acquisitions they could look at to see if an evidence-based approach may have made a difference in the decision to acquire Chrysler.

That team took the route of choosing a topic by first finding a management decision that interested them. I told my class that they may want to instead start with research that might inform a management decision. In Sutton's blog, he made the suggestion of using the Research Digest Blog, and it was very helpful. I recommended the site to my students and explained to them that it had a section on occupational psychology and that one of the entries pointed out that brainstorming was not a particularly good way to come up with new ideas when compared to having people come up with ideas individually. They probably have experienced some situation in their work lives where brainstorming was used and it wouldn't be hard to show how an evidence-based approach might lead to a better decision.

I also suggested that they look for examples of decisions that are informed by the ideas of management gurus, by management fads, and by ideas in the HBR list of "breakthrough" ideas.

The drawback to starting with the research first and then finding the decision is that although this may be a good approach to this assignment, it isn't particularly transferable to their work lives. In their work lives they will need to start with a potential decision first.

It is interesting. As I write this I just realized that my suggestions are all focused on using existing research instead of creating experiments to test assumptions or try out new ideas in pilot projects. I guess I should probably talk more about pilot projects in class.

Nevertheless, the guidelines for students that I came up with are a start, but my students need more guidance than I have been able to come up so far. So if you have any suggestions (or sample papers) you'd be willing to share, I'd appreciate it a lot.

- Don

— Don McCormick
Department of Management
College of Business and Economics California State University
Northridge, Juniper Hall 4218
18111 Nordhoff St., Northridge CA 91330

http://www.csun.edu/~dmccormick

"The end of all education should surely be service to others." - Cesar E. Chavez

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