Jeffrey Savage and Dr. Peter Madsen, Organizational Leadership and Strategy
My ORCA project is primarily focused on organizational learning. I am working closely with Peter Madsen, my mentor, to gather data and find supporting literature. Our hypothesis is that strategic focus will increase the rate at which organizations learn. In a nuclear power plant, this can be measured by the number of delays for maintenance that occur in a plant. We hypothesize that organizations that operate in a narrowly defined domain will learn faster than other companies in that domain, even if they have the same level of aggregate experience. This topic is currently under debate in the management literature; we are trying to see which is better—to be a big conglomerate, or to be a more narrowly focused firm.
Unfortunately, we have not yet been able to finish our research. The real hang-up on our project was in our data gathering. The main source of data comes from the Nuclear Engineering International, a monthly publication that tracks the productivity and load factor of nuclear power plants across the world. Much of the publication appeared to be digitalized, but about half-way through our data collection process, we realized that the agency changed the formatting and even some of the data analyzed to such an extent that we had to start over using a different and we lost one of our key exogenous variables. The only way to gather the data was to go back to the original magazines and take the data one month at a time. To help speed the long process, Peter hired 2 more research assistants. As it stands, we currently only have this last decade to complete (it has taken more than 6 months to gather the previous 5 decades). Our plan is to finish the last dataset, and start sending in our research to publishers, before my graduation in April 2010.
Thus far, our results are looking positive. As a background to what that means, research has demonstrated that operational focus, which is dedicated attention to a small set of linked tasks, improves organizational performance. Specifically, focused firms have been demonstrated to be more productive than more diversified firms in performing manufacturing and knowledgegeneration tasks. This is what we hope to establish. There is a dearth, however, of research with respect to why more focused firms outperform unfocused firms, and much debate is centered on why that is so. If our work is significant, it will contribute to the solution of that debate by testing whether focused firms learn more rapidly from their operating experience than do unfocused firms.
This experience has helped me grow tremendously. I have been able to feel the academic hardship of having a dataset not work out. More importantly, I have been able to rise above the challenge and learn patience. In the world of academia, where it can take over 2 years to publish an article, I am glad to learn this lesson so early in my career. Additionally, I have learned more about myself; I love to learn and to explore new ideas, and this project has proven to me that being a research-active professor will be a good fit.