Or at least it felt that way. I apologize to everyone for the late postings. I have had NO time to get my reading done for the last two weeks, so I am way behind in my postings. I will not bore you with all of travails, but it certainly brougt me back to Rosemary's earlier posting on work/family/school/sanity balance. I will be catching up as quickly as I can, and if you can put yourself back into last week's article long enough to give me a comment or two, I would appreciate it.

I wish you and your families the happiest of Thanksgivings!

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I think the Swanson team did a good job of explaining the concept of mindfulness and mindlessness, but not innovation.  Is it an I T artifact or a management philosopy?  Are these software products that serve a large organization or are they styles or templates for home-grown software?  Different definitions imply different ways of being mindful and innovative.  I think that at least a couple of real-world examles would have been very helpful.

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This is the same feeling that I got after I attended my first week of classes at CGU.  All of a sudden, I realized that I was on the verge of a journey that very few people take.  I going to be trained to contribute to the discipline.  That thought is as inspirational, and scary, as the granite façades of the buildings of the great Universities of the world.  I sure know what you mean!

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I wonder if it is the nature of exploratory research to not have much empirical or qualitative evidence.  At least the authors qualified their paper as "preliminary" theory development, which implies that probably had a lot more to say but could not fit it all in the page length they were given.  Good thing for us, because we probably would have been more lost and tired from the extra reading.  However, all in all, I think I got their gist and actually appreciated that it does take a lot of work to develop new theories.

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Agree. Organizational behavior or religion research would be the next logical stepping stone.  People tend to act and behave with much more religious values when they get older. 

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As you all know, I was in Chicago this week. I was driving through downtown and passed Northwestern University. It reminded me of my trip this past summer to Oxford. The architecture was incredible. Of particular note were the enormous stone buildings of Northwestern that had "School of Law" and "School of Commerce" carved into the arches of the doorways of these impressive schools. Just as the history I felt when observing the Oxford University buildings, Northwestern reminded me of the responsibility and excitement of contributing to our fields and our societies. It was inspirational, a little scary, and very motivating for me.

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Swanson and friend (I am feeling a bit non-PC today) give us this week a exploratory paper that is very theoretical and conceptual. The authors seem to be well-meaning, but this material seems to be in the ether for me. I am very skeptical of their evidence, or could I be mindlessly critical, jumping on a bandwagon?

I do think Swanson is onto something; it seems that this will make a good stepping stone into other research endeavors, particularly in org behavior or IT in the DSS realm. This paper seems to point to mindless decision-making as group think or lack of internal innovation. I agree with much of what they imply. I believe that the authors could have had more qualitative and/or empirical material to help support their theory and models.

I did find their analysis of innovation to be interesting. I am not sure that they have a comprehensive model for the interplay between innovation and the organization, but it is an interesting concept. I would be curios to see if other fiends have developed similar or conflicting models compared to Swanson et al's. I would assume that mangement and org behavior researchers have taken a swag at how innovation is integrated and accepted within the organization. This is a very important topic though and I would be interested in looking for a further expansion of this research. It even has the potential to be useful in my 360 paper.

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I don’t know Hofstede but I think that this paper is closely related to organizational behavior and culture. Nowadays outsourcing plays an important role in globalization era. It brings people from different cultures and countries to work together. Thus, in my opinion, it depends on project manager who leads team members to work together and blends their differences to produce a harmonious work.

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I have also been through classroom discussions regarding Hofstede and his theories.  I reviewed his work by Googling him.  The guy who wrote his Wikipedia entry seems to have lost his fondness for Hofstede's Power-Distance cultural dimension.  There apparently are theories that supercede good ol' Geert and kind of flesh out the dimensions a bit.  Interesting reading about someone I keep running into in my "new" academic career (kinda like Maslow & the Hierarchy of Needs!).

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I have also been through classroom discussions regarding Hofstede and his theories.  I reviewed his work by Googling him.  The guy who wrote his Wikipedia entry seems to have lost his fondness for Hofstede's Power-Distance cultural dimension.  There apparently are theories that supercede good ol' Geert and kind of flesh out the dimensions a bit.  Interesting reading about someone I keep running into in my "new" academic career (kinda like Maslow & the Hierarchy of Needs!).

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