Guest Blogger: Lynne Andersson, Associate Director of Enrollment for the Executive DBA Program at the Fox School of Business at Temple University in Philadelphia. She teaches ‘Problem Solving Using Qualitative Research Methods’ to first-year DBA students and has mentored and served on the dissertation committees of over 30 DBA students.
I have to admit, I was an entirely unlikely recruit back in 2014 when one of my colleagues at the Fox School of Business came courting me to teach in our newly formed DBA program. With the large bulk of my 20-plus year career spent trying to rabble rouse in the business school as a theoretical and critical organization scholar (my publication record is a testament to impracticality), I felt gravely unqualified to stand up in front of a room full of highly accomplished executives. What could I possibly impart to these captains of industry that would help them solve the looming business problems of our time?
Ten years and seven graduated cohorts later, I’m still not convinced that I actually have anything much to offer these astounding human beings. Sure, as their qualitative methods instructor, I can attempt to convince them that watching and listening to people counts as scholarly activity, that phenomenology and hermeneutics aren’t just for philosophers, and that coding text in NVivo can be as rigorous as wrangling with statistics in SPSS.
I can say with shameless conviction that I LOVE our DBA students, and that working with them has forced me to let go of my blinders about who are ‘corporate executives’ and what they believe, understand, and can change about the world. Rather than being a group of self-aggrandizing, money-centric, quantitative-revering conventionalists (my admitted biases as a critical organizational scholar!), they’re rather an amazing collection of polymaths broadly diverse in values and experiences who live rich, multi-faceted, and intriguing lives. They are intensely curious and driven, in ways that aren’t self-serving but surprisingly thoughtful and caring of the world around them. They’ve taken enough risks, and lived with enough vigor, to have been humbled by what life brings. And they’re pursuing this intensive and challenging next step, the DBA, with open minds and hearts.
With this openness comes unforeseen rewards: the DBA can become a vehicle for transformation—professional, personal, and/or purposeful, toward a common good. It’s been a delight to accompany students on this transformative journey, dropping them tidbits of theory, methodologies, concepts, and alternative paradigms to prod and provoke. And then to witness what they make of these droppings, drawing them into their tremendous orbits and then reconfiguring them into new worldviews and life opportunities.
Take DJ. His road as a professional and parent had been fruitful, but rocky. Feeling spiritually bereft, he questioned his identity and place as a black male in corporate America and wondered, how to live and work with an authentic self. Now armed with his completed dissertation on authentic leadership, he’s an emerging star on the corporate speaker circuit and an exemplar of the construct he invigorated. MD, too, struggled with her racial as well as her gender identity in a Fortune 100 company. Poised to break into the C-suite, she instead surprised even herself and stepped down. Questioning her motives, her company, and the broader culture, she’s turned her self-examination into a dissertation and book prospectus on why black women opt out before reaching the inner circles in corporate America. Perhaps in juxtaposition is LB, who, after traveling across the Atlantic dozens of times during her DBA to study the facilitators of and barriers to female career success in Francophone African countries, has conjured her research into actuality: she’s currently the first female head of a bank in Mauritania.
Even those students already nearing the pinnacle of their careers have experienced the transformative nature of the research undertaking. KM, who entered the DBA program within the leadership circle of one of the largest university health care centers in the country, evaluated the cost and impact of novel healthcare delivery systems for his dissertation, and not long after was elevated to CEO of the entire system. Likewise, MC was already a high-flying global advertising executive and clinical professor at a top-10 US business school when he managed to pull off a fabulous dissertation merging his passion (hip hop) with his deep knowledge of the consumer. He ultimately expanded his research into a best-selling and award-winning book that bridges cultural theory and marketing practice, winning dozens of accolades as one of the top young minds in the field of marketing today.
These tales of transformation may be more dramatic, but within every graduating cohort of our DBA program are research questions asked, methodological pursuits advanced, and problems uncovered and solved that have deeply altered the lives of the scholars receiving their hoods, their families, and their organizations. And most of all, the world.
