For some Harvard professors, the blogosphere is new terrain
CEOs blog. So do baseball and tennis players. Not to mention magicians, comedians, rappers, supermodels, and wrestlers.
So why not Harvard Business School professors?
While tens of millions of Americans in other fields have joined in the din of the blogosphere, buttoned-down faculty members at the nation's most prestigious business school have watched from the sidelines, content to dispense their management wisdom in the classroom, case studies, or peer-reviewed academic papers.
Not anymore. Several business professors at Harvard have jumped into the Internet fray recently, opting for immediacy over considered analysis and wrestling with some of the passions and anonymous sniping that are the daily bread of cyberspace. All insist they are experimenting on the new frontier of idea dissemination and reaching out to a wider audience beyond the ivory tower.
"It feels much freer to write a blog," said Nancy F. Koehn, an HBS professor of business administration and one of those who recently took the plunge. "You can be more colloquial in how you choose your words and your voice. But the speed to market and the power of this new medium is such that we might not be doing enough yoga breathing or taking enough care with what we're putting up."
Koehn accepted invitations to contribute to the Creative Capitalism blog, started by journalist Michael Kinsley to discuss philanthropy and global development, and a blog hosted by Fortune magazine. She said she's "following my historical instincts" in embracing the medium. "This is comparable to hanging out with Gutenberg (inventor of movable type printing) in the 14th century," Koehn said.
John A. Quelch, senior associate dean at HBS, started blogging last year on the Harvard Business Publishing website, where he is one of only two HBS faculty member bloggers. One motive was to promote his new book, "Greater Good: How Good Marketing Makes for Better Democracy." Another was to engage in market research on the audience for his ideas and on which ideas most resonated.
It has been an education. While some of his feedback has come from marketers trying to promote their own books or clients (comments that HBS Publishing filters out), Quelch said he has also received some thoughtful responses from people with whom a Harvard business professor might not normally engage. "One in 10 comments probably has some insight I would regard as added value," he said. "Given that I have to invest about 60 seconds to scan 10 comments to get that insight, that's a good return on my investment."
The first, and likely the most prolific, Harvard business blogger is Andrew P. McAfee, associate professor of technology and operations management. McAfee started his own blog in 2006 on HBS's website - which had been, and still is, virtually devoid of blogging - and has used it to launch a dialogue about the rise of Enterprise 2.0, the use of interactive Internet technologies in the business world. (Among the early debates on McAfee's blog was the meaning of Enterprise 2.0 and who had coined the term; McAfee acknowledged that, while he popularized it, he was not the first to use it.)
"It's the most fun writing that I do because I can write about anything that interests me at the moment," McAfee said. "And I find I adopt a looser style than I would in my more academic writing."
While he is considered a leading thinker on the role of technology in business, McAfee freely confesses on his blog some of his bafflement at consumer technology. Last month, for example, he wrote about his experience with the Facebook social networking site:
"My FB friends have installed lots of apps and used them to reach out to me. I now have 3 (lil) green patch requests, 2 buy your friends requests, and one valentine kiss request. I have no idea what any of these are. I also have invitations for status competitions, speed racing, mob wars, zombies AND zombie, starcraft, wikimoto, and 'i'm a masher!,' among many others. Again, I have no clue what most of these are invitations to, and I haven't bothered to find out."
Quelch, for his part, weighed in last month on the retrenchment at Starbucks Corp., which had just announced it would close 600 stores across the United States. "None of this need have happened if Starbucks had stayed private and grown at a more controlled pace," Quelch wrote. "To continue to be a premium-priced brand while trading as a public company is very challenging."
And on the Creative Capitalism blog last month, Koehn gave her take on Microsoft Corp. founder Bill Gates in his new role as a philanthropist: "Gates has earned our ear (and for many of us, our respect) largely because he succeeded so convincingly playing the game of market capitalism. . . . Given Gates' achievements, it is interesting that he is throwing down a gauntlet to have global capitalism direct itself toward social contribution as well as financial gain. It is also important."
While the HBS bloggers have gotten a few pats on the back from their colleagues, other professors haven't been quick to join them. No one's sure exactly why. Among the theories are that the holdouts fear embarrassing themselves writing off the cuff, or worry that spouting off in the blogosphere will distract them from long-form research.
"Academics aren't always interested in being on the cutting edge because newness isn't something most of them study," Koehn said. "And we still don't know how this medium will affect academic rigor."
Robert Weisman can be reached at weisman@globe.com. 