Research being done at Canadian business schools is not all dry-as-dust academic examinations of case studies, historical trends and economic theory. Lessons for managers can be learned from the movies, from sports and from TV shows. Here are some recent examples:
Dreamers, Plodders, Eccentrics, Heroes and Villains
This is the popular name given to Tony Dimnik's comprehensive look at how Hollywood treats accountants in the movies. The adjunct assistant professor at the Queen's School of Business in Kingston, Ont., started looking at how films portrayed accountants about 20 years ago.
"Then I realized they had an impact on perceptions and the ability to draw students to courses such as the ones I teach," he says. "In the early '90s I decided to take it on seriously as a research project."
Related Articles
The result was an academic study titled "Accountants Appearing in Movies Distributed in North America in the 20th Century." He divides movie accountants into five classes — the same ones that gave rise to the project's popular name. Accountants have been heroes in movies such as Local Hero and Midnight Run, eccentrics such as Rick Moranis's Louis Tully in Ghost Busters and villains such as Loren Phineas Shaw, played by Frederick March in Executive Suite.
Is it important work? Most certainly, says Prof. Dimnik. "Today all major accounting associations are heavily into recruiting drives and are creating lots of ads. They have to know what public perceptions are and how they were created," he says. "Those ads have to come up with ways to address those perceptions and change them."
Big international accounting firms also pay for product placement in movies, he adds. "It is all about using myth to shape reality."
Tracking role of gender in Canadian exporting
One of the mainstay B-school aphorisms is: "If you can not measure, you can not manage." Barbara Orser, Deloitte professor of management of small enterprises at the University of Ottawa's Telfer School of Management, has taken that principle to heart when it comes to gender bias in the export trade.
Along with Dr. Martine Spence, Dr. Alan Riding and Christine Carrington, she has taken a look at how women fare when it comes to exports. Their work, titled "Gender and Export Propensity," is part of a wide-ranging study of female entrepreneurs, sponsored by Industry Canada.
"What it showed is that there are still major differences between men and women entrepreneurs when it comes to exporting their businesses' goods and services," Dr. Orser says. "You need the hard data to then create policies to level the playing field.
The study found that while 17 per cent of Canadian small- and medium-sized enterprises are owned by women, only 12 per cent of SMEs involved in exports are owned by women. On average, companies owned by women are less likely to seek growth, reported less management and financial experience, were smaller, less profitable and were concentrated in the service sector.
"Gender in business goes on and off the radar," Dr. Orser says. "Right now it is off and I think it is time to get it back on again."
When to bench the CEO: a lesson from the NHL
When it comes to replacing a CEO, we can learn a lesson from the National Hockey League, says Glenn Rowe, the Paul MacPherson chair in strategic leadership at the University of Western Ontario's Ivey School of Business. Dr. Rowe has been studying management in professional sports since 1994, and hockey specifically for the past decade.
He found that teams who change the coach or general manager mid-season do better the following season than those who wait to make the move until the season is over. Why? Because the mid-season move gives the new leader time to understand the strengths and weakness of the team and its individual players. They can then make informed decisions, he says.
"There is a direct comparison with business," Dr. Rowe says. "If you are going to change the CEO, do it at the height of your busiest time of the year. That gives [the newcomer] time to understand the company, gain first-hand experience of the problems it faces, and then allows for changes to be made during slow periods so the company is ready to improve performance when the business heats up again."
And is there a parallel between running a sports team and a company? Dr. Rowe cites Sam Pollock, legendary Montreal Canadiens general manager: "He said that when he started as GM decades ago, you needed to know 50 per cent hockey and 50 per cent business but by the time he ended his career, a good GM needed 15 per cent hockey and 85 per cent business."
Chinese propaganda a case study in branding
China seems to have learned lessons about maintaining loyalty through effective corporate branding, according to research led by Dr. Stan Xiao Li, professor of policy and strategy at York University's Schulich School of Business.
He initiated a study of propaganda tactics used in China's biggest single annual television show, a Spring Festival Eve gala staged every year since 1983 that reaches hundreds of millions of viewers. Under his direction, Royston Greenwood of University of Alberta, Christine Oliver and Yanfei Zhao of University of Toronto and Liang Wang from Schulich looked at two forms of propaganda.
The first included ideological references in the songs, dances and comedy skits to revolutionary heroes, military victories and past and present leaders. The second type involved references to economic and social achievements and the success of Beijing in keeping the vast country united and on course towards a better future.
"The [television] program was used as a way for the government to legitimize itself," says Dr. Li. "In the West, governments can do that through elections; in China the process has to be through propaganda, such as shown in these broadcasts."
The study found that, over the years, there has been a marked swing away from ideological references — dances and songs celebrating heroes of the revolution — toward the more bread-and-butter issues of economic and social achievements.
Dr. Li sees similarities between the way the Chinese TV show has evolved and how corporations fine-tune branding messages to meet changing consumer attitudes. "The changes were quite significant and I think they do have that parallel."
Lessons for marketers from online critiques
Ashesh Mukherjee, an associate professor of marketing at McGill University's Desautels Faculty of Management, says he is proving that the Internet is turning human behaviour on its head, especially when it comes to seeking advice on things such as movies and restaurants. His research, which began in 2003, has become the basis for a trio of articles in learned publications.
In the real world, negatives — bad experiences — are the things we remember longest, he says. In the virtual realm, however, positive reinforcement holds sway. Agree with an online expert the first few times and even if you disagree later on, you will still trust advice from that expert more than from someone whose positions you initially disagreed with but agreed with frequently later on.
So far, Dr. Mukherjee's research has involved only online movie critics and classroom simulations but he says the findings can have a profound impact on companies seeking to create effective marketing campaigns.
"They would be well-advised to quickly get on side those online commentators who like their products. They are the ones people will most listen to when it comes to advice."
Special to The Globe and Mail
72
