Case Study
I have four guest lecturers for my ethics class this semester that I am teaching and I find the story around them interesting. My quandaries have to do with how I chose them, how they responded and how they are handling the task at hand. To begin with one of my friends, Michael the Mad Welshman, who lectured in my Advanced Corporate Finance course last semester, took note of the fact (mostly just for fun), that I was doing what I had always done my whole career, which was to get other people to do my work and then get paid on the back of their labor. As someone who worked for me, learned under me, was well paid by me, did well for himself and for me as a manager, was promoted by me and then succeeded tremendously in his career, I sense elements (but only shards) of truth in that. How much of someone’s success is inherent in them and how much it relates to the guidance and leadership they enjoy along the way is a subject of endless conjecture and debate. Bullies on either side of the equation assume it is all about them and what they have done, but enlightened people understand the complexity of the equation and the vagaries of risk and good fortune and how much they play in success. Most will not assume that success is a total random walk, but the arrogant feel their success is far less attributable to luck or even good tutelage. The more modest among us are prepared to say that mentorship and good fortune are critical elements, but that we ourselves must have the raw ingredients for success and the drive to deeply them. This complex consideration is not so different when thinking about guest lecturers in a class.
Someone has to put the framework of the course together and choose an overall rubric for teaching which includes degree of student-to-teacher and student-to-student interaction in the process, as well as how one will evaluate the students and their performance and degree of effort and ultimate learning in the course. And all of that needs to have some degree of consistency across all the guest lecturers as well as be communicated early and evenly with the students. All of that is important because one course needs to be understood to be only part of the educational quilt covering those students in any given semester and they, like we, need to plan their semester and its work load accordingly. They are responsible for allocating their time to their courses based on the rhythms of that course and their other courses, not to mention their outside work and their general lives. With graduate business students, they are generally older and therefore mostly have full-time jobs and real, engaged lives underway. Since a professor’s evaluation by the students is all-important, as it should be when students are paying for their own educational betterment, thinking about how my course and my communication of the requirements and the workload fits with their overall semester requirements is quite important. Much of this is irrelevant to a guest lecturer. They are there to say something and impart a specific lesson or tell a specific story from which students can learn. The context and format are mine to guide and mold to fit the rubric I am crafting.
I am often criticized for not adequately connecting the readings of my courses with the lectures. I find this both valid and invalid criticism. It is my job to be targeted in my reading requirements, but these are adults and I don’t believe is quizzing them about their reading. They need to believe that it is relevant to their learning experience, so referencing them during the lectures has value, but to a certain extent, they must find value in broadening their horizons on the topic and if not, so be it. With case studies, reading or watching (I am using several movies for background) are all-important to a student’s ability to engage in a debate on a case study. The world has enough uniformed people who blindly opine based on little or not underlying knowledge and one of my tasks is to make sure that they cannot get away with that misconception in this class. That is not only for the benefit of the quality of the class dialogue and learning, but also as part of the fabric of life lessons that skating by and faking it is a bad strategy for success and equally annoying to the world at large. The cases will help with this key lesson.
I originally asked four friends to be guest lecturers. One I was certain would do a good job in that he began life as a student of religious studies, a theologian of sorts, who then went on to a marketing career in the early predecessor businesses of the internet. He became a serial entrepreneur who managed a number of companies during the start-up phase with an emphasis on internet and touching on social media businesses. This sort of Silicon Valley connection is especially interesting to students who are here in California especially. I knew he would take the assignment seriously, as he most certainly has. I also asked a friend who grew up in the construction business and who owns a toll bridge (built by his father). Who owns a bridge in this day and age? I am politically opposite this friend and yet I find him quite wam and interesting. I thought it would be valuable for students to hear from a very different political thought perspective, so I asked him to lecture. I don’t image he has dome that too much but he jumped at the chance and was immediately engaged, much to my pleasure. He has decided to do his car about the bridge and the toll pricing, which is a fascinating and very real-world topic that contrasts nicely with the Silicon Valley world (this bridge is in New Jersey and leads into Atlantic City). I am VERY pleased with what he is gathering and the degree to which he is seeing this as an important public service (probably so that the younger generation can hear from someone more sensible than me).
I also asked a friend who I went to college with and she agreed to do the class since she is both very much into ethic and her field is Human Resources and the topic of the business ethics of employee management is a major topic that needs covering. She agreed easily and we rolled forward with me notifying her as often as I did all the guest speakers so that they all started to prepare in advance. I got a lot of cricket sounds from her, which didn’t completely surprise me since she has a lot going on in her life. But this is a person I had hired on at least three occasion over the past fifteen years to work with me on various job assignments. We worked well together and were very friendly. That seems to have faded a bit as we left this most recent gig (she actually stayed with it longer than I did). Suddenly she emailed me and said she was unable to do this anymore and that I should not try to dissuade her from that decision. It was a rather stark and rude message in my opinion, but I graciously said that I would adjust and that she should be well. I have not heard from her since.
I had already sent out the syllabus with her name and lecture on it (of which she was aware), so I made one call to another college friend who was speaking on another date. He immediately jumped in and said that he and his brother could do two weeks of cases on ESG (environmental) and on a case of women in the military (which is exactly the sort of human resource issue I want to explore ethically). So as one old friend flaked off for her own reasons, another stepped in to save the day for me and the students.
Anyone who says that organizing a class like this and orchestrating the lectures (ten without a guest and four with) needs to rethink how case study happens. Now that itself is a case study worth thinking about.