Dear OMT Colleagues,
The U.S. Congress recently appropriated 3 million dollars for the Project
on National Security Reform. See
www.pnsr.org
The final report, which will be about 700 pages long and will contain
wording for a proposed National Security Act of 2008, has been
extraordinarily open to scholarly input from outside the U.S. national
security system.
As the Project's senior organization and management theorist, I have
started recruiting doctoral students to serve as volunteer outside
experts. We need 240 doctoral students, most of whom we expect to come
from the ranks of the Academy of Management.
We have divided the analysis into eight core organizational processes, each
with three levels of complexity -- first-order perspectives, second-order
perspectives, and third-order perspectives. These processes are
leadership, structure, culture, strategy, decision, learning, sensemaking,
and change.
We'd like to focus attention for the next couple of weeks on recruiting 60
doctoral students from the OMT Division to provide intellectual firepower
to our Structure Working Group. We are using Perrow's 1979 distinction
between first-order control, second-order control, and third-order control
to differentiate the three perspectives. Another way to think about those
distinctions might be to talk about Tightly Coupled Firms, Moderately
Coupled Bureaucracies, and Loosely Coupled Networks.
Rubens Pessanha is a doctoral student who has been asked to master the
wikispace technology for us, and can help your doctoral students get their
own "wikispace sandbox" on the project -- a space that they can use to
create links to other sites, to post PDFs and Word Documents, and even to
post Youtube videos in which they can present their research. Rubens can
be reached at
rubens@gwu.edu to help sign up doctoral students.
The wikispace project is associated with an August 10, 2008, PDW in
Anaheim, from 9:00-12:00 p.m. Although the PDW is targeted for the entire
Academy of Management, you will find it housed within the MOC Division on
the Academy program.
During the first half-hour, the Project's Director of Research & Analysis,
Dr. Christopher Lamb, will talk about the bridge that we have tried to
build between the national security practice community and the Academy of
Management research community, and present the latest news about the
Project, and perhaps ask for our help on a few more puzzles just before the
report goes to the U.S. Congress.
During the two-hour middle of the PDW, which will allow outside experts to
meet face-to-face at 24 tables that correspond to the 24 analyses embedded
in the Project, each of the 10 doctoral students will have 12 minutes to
present their dissertation research.
During the last half hour of the PDW, Dr. Karl E. Weick will be our
concluding keynote speaker and share his insights on the topic of national
security reform.
We plan to repeat the PDW as an All-Academy PDW in 2009, in order to give
doctoral students a chance to present dissertation proposals in 2008 and
dissertation defenses in 2009.
Please encourage your doctoral students to register early on the wikispace,
register early for the PDW on the Academy of Management registration
website, and then start checking the wikispace site for questions.
Thanks for forwarding this call for assistance to doctoral students asking
them to help us fill the 30 slots we have available on structure research.
Please ask them to contact Rubens Pessanha at
rubens@gwu.edu to get
registered on the wikispace: pnsr.wikispaces.com
Appreciatively,
Doug Orton
Executive Leadership Doctoral Program
The George Washington University
jamesdouglasorton@gmail.com
Rubens Pessanha
Doctoral Program in Human and Organizational Learning
The George Washington University
rubens@gwu.edu