The events of the past few weeks have given us a glimpse into what the future of life in the Anthropocene might look like. The global community has been faced with a collective crisis, one that requires that we work together to address a problem that we have globally created. When the Spanish flu killed…
First and foremost, the Covid-19 pandemic is a human tragedy. At the same time, it leads individuals, organizations, and states around the globe to adopt unprecedented measures at breathtaking speed. While all the attention is focused on the crisis, the situation is at the same time highly paradoxical. States such as the UK that have…
The coronavirus, or COVID-19, and climate change are very different problems. But the global response to the coronavirus gives me hope that we can tackle other global threats. It is hard to see the positive in the novel coronavirus and its associated disease, COVID-19. Not only has COVID-19 made people very sick, it has…
“And outside, the silent wilderness surrounding this cleared speck on the earth struck me as something great and invincible, like evil or truth, waiting patiently for the passing away of this fantastic [human] invasion.” Joseph Conrad, Hearth of Darkness, 1899 Hope & cooperation or fear & despair: how does humanity respond to…
In the last week you’ve probably had the capacity of your e-mail Inbox tested with communication from dozens of businesses, each telling you about their response to the COVID-19 outbreak. The majority of those messages will have told you to “Stay Home, Stay Safe.” A very small minority will have told you what…
Social media extravaganza To stay productive these days I try not to spend too much time on social media…I’m failing miserably of course. On Twitter many people are worrying about the Coronavirus (COVID-19), blaming others for not doing enough to flatten the curve, or sharing videos of epic Zoom blunders. LinkedIn is used to praise…
One of my most significant childhood memories is seeing my parents, who were Christian missionary doctors in India, providing medical care to the poor. This had a profound impact on me, shaping my world view and my career goals. In 2014, I developed a new unit of study for the University of Sydney’s Business School…
In most languages there is a phrase like ‘the children of cobblers have the worst shoes’ or ‘doctors don’t take their own medicine‘. Whichever the phrase, the message is that experts are either too busy or too expert to take their own advice and practice what they preach. Can we say the same about business schools not…
More and more papers in management studies are badly written, use dubious methods (such as p-hacking) to achieve spuriously positive results, and avoid the really big issues facing our discipline and our world. Why is this? My new book offers some explanations and identifies some tentative solutions. Above all, the ‘publish or perish’ mantra is…
In 2003, I published my first medical journal article, and it couldn’t have come at a better time for me. To explain, I need to revisit the 1980s when I teamed with my Texas A&M University colleagues A. Parasuraman and Valarie Zeithaml to conduct and publish the earliest research conceptualizing and measuring service quality. I…