I have always tried to make my research useful, as I think is consistent with the role of an applied field like business administration.  Even in my dissertation, I tried to illustrate that the then-famous Aston studies left a great deal unexplained (I think they should have examined processes rather than structure), and published some work in related areas. In the 1990’s I drew on my experience working in Central and Eastern Europe on a USAID grant the University won after the Fall of the Wall, and my presentations and publications focused mostly on that work. I became a proponent of business incubators from that experience, which I still am.

Also in the interest of utility, my biggest project (to date) was the 15-year-long study of avionics maintenance I did for the U.S. Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR).  This began as a Cold War study of the apparent failure of a major automatic tester the Navy had bought, which was critical to the maintenance of its carrier aircraft.  You can read a very detailed account of this study in my 1998 book, the Information Processing Theory of Organization.  The literal bottom line is that this work was a major contributor toward saving the Navy 200 to 400 million dollars (probably closer to a billion in today’s dollars), and the validation of the Navy’s automated maintenance system Fleet-wide.

This study led to the development of a method of mapping process workflows, which was published in my 2012/2016 book, Mapping Workflows and Managing Knowledge, published by Business Expert Press.  This is a short volume that provides both the theory and practice of mapping and analyzing business process workflows.  Unlike many other offerings in Business Process Mapping (BPM), this approach is simple, cheap, and applicable in any organization. The 2016 edition separated process mapping and process simulation into two volumes.

Both of these studies, like most of my work, are rooted in information processing theory, which is really the application of general systems theory to organizations.  Information is both the stuff of work and the connective tissue which holds it together, and studying these is very challenging and very rewarding.  I am currently involved in the next level of this work, which is the application of dynamic system modeling tools to workflows.  I was first exposed to dynamic modeling in the 1980s, again as part of my work with NAVAIR, and now that I’m retired, I finally have time to expand these skills.

The other area of my research, conducted fitfully over the past 30 years and periodically surfacing in relation to my international work, has been on the futility of most business-school research.  Are you skeptical of what you read in the academic journals, like me?  You should be—-read my Top 10 Reasons to be a Skeptic.  You can comment on this and other related issues on my weblog, Management Junk Science, see why our research is  has  accomplished almost nothing in the past 50 years (including being basically ignored by business book authors, even academic ones), and ultimately falls into a black hole.

The majority (over 90%) of business-school research is published through the methods of the soft social sciences based on Null Hypothesis Significance Testing (NHST), which I refer to as the Generally Accepted Soft Social Science Publishing Process, or GASSSPP.  These methods are not scientific, and in over 50 years have produced not one single strong theory (the usual justification for pursuing them), nor any guidance for practicing managers.

Unfortunately, the GASSSPP rot is rapidly spreading around the world.  American b-schools are now regarded as the model for global business education, and their methods are being emulated by many international scholars.  There are dynamics at work that make this model self-reinforcing, and they operate very slowly and most likely will not change in my lifetime.  Nevertheless, this is a battle worth fighting—the current cost increases of higher education are clearly unsustainable, and the amount of money wasted on GASSSPP research, directly and indirectly, contributes to these costs.  Moreover, the research itself is scientifically invalid, and not only unworthy of the effort that goes into it, but invites ridicule from the practitioners of real science.  It is time for this part of our academic enterprise to grow up and move on to better things.

Oh, and by the way, you don’t have to take my word for it on this–in late 2016 the American Statistical Association published its “Statement on p-values,” stimulated by (no surprise) criticism of reliance on p-values in medicine and other fields of science outside the social sciences. Everyone who does NHST should read this and take it to heart. Those interested in institutional reform might want to take a look at my March, 2019, article in The American Statistician, available online at https://tandfonline.com/toc/utas20/73/sup1.

Reference: Ronald L. Wasserstein & Nicole A. Lazar (2016) The ASA’s Statement on p-Values: Context, Process, and Purpose, The American Statistician, 70:2, 129-133, DOI: 10.1080/00031305.2016.1154108.