Thoughts After Getting Coffee With My Wife

My adviser, who is well-published, tells me that one of the keys to publishing is to have a 2x2 matrix. Management academics love 2x2 matrices, where we show the interaction of two orthogonal (i.e., independent; the level of one doesn't tell you anything about the level of the other) constructs. At the moment, behavior v. attitude matrices are all the rage.

Having gone out for coffee and a danish this morning, my wife and I were discussing the interaction of "friendly" and "competent," illustrated by this 2x2 matrix.

Obviously, we prefer our counter-help to be competent and friendly, and least prefer incompetent and unfriendly. But how would you rank second and third? It does depend on context -- this is what we would call a contingent model. My car mechanic can be unfriendly if competent. What we couldn't decide is, at the coffee shop, is it better to be friendly but incompetent or competent and unfriendly.

For those wondering, what we got this morning was an order-taker who as unfriendly and incompetent and a barista (used generically, as we weren't at Starbucks) who was friendly but incompetent.

Randy "VRIN" Moss And Bill "Dynamic Capability" Belichick

There are a good number of strategy papers that use sports as a context. This isn't so much because strategy academics like sports or that sports are more interesting than other contexts, though both statements are true. It's mostly because sports (at least insofar as on-field activities are concerned) are more transparent than other businesses. Players are a resource, there are lots of performance metrics available, there's a relatively efficient market for players, and information about their cost is usually available. Sports can be a natural experiment for various theories in strategy.

They are also useful in explaining what it means to have a valuable, rare, inimitable and nonsubstitutable resource, and what it means to have a dynamic capability.

Throughout his career, Randy Moss has been a VRIN resource. Players like Moss (one of the top five wide receivers in NFL history) are not easy to find, nor can you just go to the Patriots and buy him out if you think he'd be more valuable to you than to them. But Moss's role doesn't really change over time. He runs faster and jumps higher than most defensive corners covering him, so he can gather in long passes in or near the end zone. Over the last three years, he's done so more often than anyone else in football. In 2007, he did that more than anyone ever has in a single season, and except for one bitter exception, the Pats outperformed everyone else in the league.

There can't be much doubt that, as a player, Randy Moss is valuable, rare, inimitable and nonsubstitutable, and that this led the Pats to outperform other NFL teams. But athletes are wasting resources; Moss only has so many years left until he no longer outperforms. Nor do athletes, as a rule, reinvent themselves in ways that add to their ability to outperform the competition.

Bill Belichick, on the other hand, is a capability rather than a resource. A capability uses resources, and Belichick, and any head coach, is in the business of deploying resources as best as possible. If Belichick is special as a head coach -- and how can anyone doubt it -- it is because he is dynamic in his capability. That is, he doesn't simply deploy his resources in the same way over time. Rather, he is good at changing how his resources act depending upon that year's team and that week's opponent.

But Belichick's dynamic capability has an odd effect -- it reduces the value of his resources. With one (exceptional) exception, Belichick doesn't seem to much care about the identity or skills of his athletes. Randy Moss is a valuable resource (he's VRIN) but is value to the Patriots seems to be less than his value to other NFL teams. This is consistent with the Patriots' general approach to highly skilled players (with, again, that one exception).

This implies something interesting about management. Value in organizations may not be cumulative or even additive. Adding one VRIN resource to another, or to a dynamic capability, does not necessarily result in performance equal to the sum of the performance boost that each would add alone. In fact, in sports it's easy to see that the result can be negative. Adding one superstar to another, or giving a great coach another great player might lower performance. This implies, in turn, that management is not simply mechanical.

Professing Professionally

Daniel Drezner (a tenured professor at Tufts) and Megan McArdle (economics editor/blogger at The Atlantic) talk about why elite schools don't care about teaching. I think that Megan overstates the extent to which even the best schools don't care about teaching. Over the summer, I was speaking with a professor at one of the top business schools who protested vigorously that although research drove tenure decisions, a really bad teacher would not get tenure no matter how good his or her research.

The real question, as Dan suggests at the end, is how we tell the good teachers from the bad. There is a lot of attention being paid right now -- particularly at teaching schools -- to student evaluations and, I promise, grad students and new faculty care about their evaluations. But, if learning is the point, then student evaluations are problematic; as Dan says, most students value easy grading without too much work over disciplined learning.

Of course, how any particular school approaches this question is a matter of strategy. How does that school go to market and how does it differentiate itself from its competitors? UMass has a murky strategy, and murky is never good. UMass will never be the high quality competitor in the University industry in Massachusetts, nor is it clear how UMass can differentiate its classroom product. That leaves it with being the low cost competitor, which is good for a state school but not how UMass wants to see itself, or with focusing on campus life. As a large state school campus in the middle of cornfields, UMass has a party school reputation (just Google ZooMass). On the one hand, this is a good market positioning if your target market is underachieving high schoolers (which is exactly UMass's market). On the other hand, the Administration hates this image with the white hot passion of a thousand nuns.

One way for UMass to square this circle is to lobby against partying, which it does, while putting a lot of emphasis on teaching evaluations, which it doesn't do. This leaves UMass with a murky image and an emphasis on the school as the economical alternative for Massachusetts high school students.