Coyote
June 17, 2009
Feeling pretty sure it was a coyote, I said to Nick, “Think I saw a dog,” not wanting to be misbelieved.
Nick said, “Must have been a coyote.”
Too early for a good image: Coggeshall Farm, Bristol, RI, 17 Jun, 2009, about 5 a.m., Saved at 1920 by 1200 pixels
Anti-quark
June 17, 2009
This is Ed, who walks the opposite way ’round from me in the morning. Like the two cartoon sheepdogs clocking out: “Mornin’ Ed.” “Mornin’ Ed.” Only twice, since we walk in overlapping loops.
We can tell ourselves apart because I’m the one with the faux hip, he’s the one with the pacemaker…or, wait a minute, is that right?
Photo: Poppasquash Road, Bristol, RI, June 17, 2009 around 5:30 a.m. Saved at 1920 by 1200 pixels.
Kick as kick can
June 3, 2009
For those of us who witnessed the appearance, grotesque growth and eventual death of the tail-fin and the disappearance of the Packard Motor Car Company in the 1950′s, General Motor’s current woes are brilliant irony.
Behind the scenes as the tail-fin craze initiated by the 1948 Cadillac reached its high-water mark with the 1957 Chrysler Corporation product line (“Suddenly, It’s 1960!”), Harley Earl and his GM design center created a monster. The monster appeared innocent enough and delivered handsome benefits to the corporation. GM’s divisions could share basic sheet metal and differentiate themselves with design variations that altered only a part of the car.
In 1954, my brother and I bought a 1949 fastback Chevrolet whose body – not counting trim and the tail fins on the rear fenders – was essentially the same as that year’s Cadillac fastback. It became the practice to create, say, a half-dozen body styles and then share them across the five GM brands. This (because of selective sharing) would result in perhaps 20 to 24 base models for GM, giving them plenty of variety to offer the public through the dealers of their five brands.
1949 Cadillac and Chevrolet fastback sedans Cadillac: http://www.flickr.com/photos/exfordy/2677732259/ Chevrolet: http://www.automotivehistoryonline.com/1949%20Chevrolet%20Fleetline.jpg
The Packard Motor Car Company, which (1) had never done their designing in-house, (2) was still preoccupied with making aircraft engines for the government, and (3) because of the pressures of the Depression had pushed the lower limits of their model prices below $1000 while trying to maintain a prestige, elitist image, suddenly had to compete with GM’s definition of automotive style. They reacted slowly, finally achieving a model that gained good consumer acceptance in the 1950 model year.
Unfortunately for them, the lack of integration between outside designers and Packard engineering caused considerable delay in getting the car bodies to “fit” properly. Leaks and rattles abounded and deliveries were disastrously slow. The following year, due to the Korean conflict, steel was put on rationing and car companies could make no more vehicles than they had in the previous year. With their output constrained, Packard went belly-up and into the waiting arms of Studebaker Motors, which coveted Packard’s defense contracts but not their automobiles.
The ’50′s were, nevertheless, heady times for the US auto industry. Horsepower became a competitive factor in consumer decisions and the industry tried hard to induce increased consumer purchasing by radically changing each car’s exterior sheet metal every year from 1955 through 1959. This practice gave credence to the notion that US car manufacturers were practicing planned obsolescence, a term coined in 1954 by industrial designer Brooks Stevens to describe a method for speeding up the repurchase cycle through non-functional design changes.
Tail-fins were re-absorbed by automobile bodies at the beginning of the 1960′s, although Cadillac retained vestigial fins until the mid-60′s. This may have been a recognition by automakers that style changes alone could not accelerate purchases and signalled a switch to what became a three-year cycle for major changes to body style.
But because they are production-oriented, all US automakers shared common bodies across their brands, diluting the meaning of the individual brand names. Fords could be the size of Lincolns, Plymouths were essentially identical with Dodges; GM tried to establish a Cadillac compact car, the Cimarron, in 1981 by embellishing the same compact body used by other GM divisions, and tried it again in 1997 by re-purposing a body produced by GM’s German Opel division to create the Catera. In both instances, GM discovered that people really didn’t want cheapness disguised as luxury. (A good overview of GM body types over the years is available at Wikipedia.)
[Sharing bodies and other parts was so widely practiced that it came as a shock to me that Oldsmobile owners in the 1970's brought a lawsuit against GM because their vehicles had come with Chevrolet engines. GM then declared all engines as corporate rather than division "property."]
The GM brand in biggest disarray is Chevrolet. Chevrolet is the GM entry level brand, and to ensure that it keeps that position, GM has used its equity stake in the South Korean automaker Daewoo to obtain the car sold in the US as the Chevrolet Aveo (and, following the GM body-sharing model, the Pontiac G3) starting at $12,000. On the other end of the spectrum is the Corvette, selling for between $50,000 and slightly more than $100,000; the Corvette XR1 starts at $106,000.
[Some people might complain that Chevrolet is the name of a division, not a brand. But this ignores the fact that Chevrolet has always been quite (...wait for it,...wait for it...) cavalier* with respect to their model names, creating them, casting them away, and resuscitating them without regard to any possible "equity" attaching to them.]
[*Chevrolet Cavalier, 1982 - 2005; replaced Monza, replaced by Cobalt]
[If Chevrolet nurtured their models as brands I think I might have no argument. A quick review of Chevrolet's models gives an average age of 13 years; if the two oldest models - Corvette and Suburban - are removed from the list, the average age is something less than six years. When the average automobile repurchase cycle is somewhere around four years, a six-year model life suggests that few people will even have the opportunity to repurchase a satisfactory model. By contrast, the Chevrolet brand has been around for 98 years.]
In the spectrum of Chevrolet models, the large SUV entry is the Tahoe whose body is shared with the GMC Yukon and the Cadillac Escalade; the smaller large SUV is the Traverse whose body is shared with the Buick Enclave, the GMC Acadia, and the Saturn Outlook. In a class (“jumbo SUV,” according to Edmunds.com) almost by itself is the venerable Chevy Suburban (body shared with the GMC Denali X) with a price starting around $38,000. The fourth and smallest SUV entry for Chevrolet is the Equinox, also available as the Pontiac Torrent.
Chevy’s sedans come in many sizes, from the larger Impala down through Malibu, HHR and Cobalt, with the bodies shared with other GM divisions. Chevrolet has announced that the Cobalt model name – only about four years old – will be retired in favor of the Cruze model name in 2011.
Trucks, all duplicated in offerings by GMC, are the full line of Silverados and the compact Colorado (GMC Canyon). The “convertible” pickup/SUV Avalanche is echoed by the Cadillac Escalade EXT.
With minivans fading as a popular vehicle type, GM exited the US minivan market in 2009 after 20 years of relatively futile pursuit of the Chrysler market leaders. Models were shared by Chevrolet, Pontiac, and Oldsmobile; a Buick minivan (under the GL-8 model name) is currently available in China and apparently selling very well.
[Having owned one of the original GM "dust buster" minivans (the Oldsmobile Silhouette), it was my impression that GM stylists had never actually spent any time in or around the vehicle. A highly-touted feature, individually removable and re-configurable seats in the back two rows, required muscling around unwieldy 50-pound seats with claw-like feet. Access to the rear seats was awkward in the initial models, so when the snoutless revision to the body type was released in 1997 I was shocked to discover that the new models were just as difficult to enter as their predecessors. So I bought a Plymouth minivan...two moribund auto brands in a row.]
That leaves the 2010 Camaro as the final model on Chevy’s list, the re-introduction of the “personal” sports car that was GM’s initial response to Ford’s Mustang. The body is the GM Zeta body developed in Australia that in the US is only shared with the Pontiac G8 series (a sedan configuration). This time, however, there is no accompanying Pontiac Firebird, perhaps recognition that the more limited Pontiac distribution network would not deliver sufficient additional sales to warrant the design, execution and marketing expense of a variant for that brand.
On the horizon is GM’s electric car, the Volt, which will – at least in its initial incarnation – wear the Chevrolet bow tie. I would argue that this vehicle represents a unique branding opportunity, the establishment of a marque devoted to the best in green technology; an opportunity that will be squandered in order to leverage the Chevrolet dealership network and to leave open the possibility of a later Buick or Cadillac model. The fact that its entry-level price has crept all the way to $35,000+ before its actual introduction suggests a n0n-Chevrolet price point.
The point of this litany is to serve as preface to the idea that if you were to ask someone what the Chevrolet brand represented there could be no clear reply. “All things to all people, usually a little cheaper and less prestigious” might do. A good contrast can be made with Toyota’s Camry brand. If you say to yourself, “I want a Camry,” you have a good picture of what it is you’re after. If you say to yourself, “I want a Chevrolet,” you haven’t specified anything except that sort of gnawing suspicion that you don’t really want the best.
The Chevrolet division people are proud of the breadth of their product line and are aware of the identity problem that that causes. Their response, however, has not been to consolidate models but rather to “unify” their offerings by increasing the size and prominence of the Chevrolet “bow tie” emblems on the front and rear of their offerings.
Branding by labelling is a valid concept. It works well for things like jams and jellies. The uniformity of labelling assures us that each variety of Smucker’s products is of the same quality as the others. But even Smucker’s runs into problems when their name goes on a ketchup label: Different product, different process, different end use.
Back to the Packard Motor Car Company. They made their reputation as a luxury brand building sixteen-cylinder motors to create smooth-running vehicles. From 1920 to 1930, they tried to capture a lower tier of the market by introducing cheaper vehicles but they just didn’t understand how to do that. The vehicles ended up being bigger than the competition’s and Packard ended up charging more. Ironically, GM hired Harley Earl to come to Detroit and design the LaSalle, a brand created to allow GM to compete for that same lower tier without sullying the Cadillac brand (“LaSalle by Cadillac”).
When the Depression hit, Packard had no choice. Hiring GM managers, they shifted from job shop to production line methods and completely shook up the dealer network. They learned how to build cars cheaply and sell them for lower and lower prices. They eliminated their largest vehicles from regular production. (In the language of the times, they eliminated the “senior” chassis and built the top-of-the-line production vehicles on the “junior” chassis along with the rest of the line.) They continued to use the Packard brand, and by 1936 they offered cars at prices from $795 to $8,510, an extremely broad price range.
[An interesting issue is the sustainable price difference that a single brand can present from its lowest-priced offering to its highest-priced. A corollary question might be what price difference would be sufficient to differentiate a quality product from a commonplace product. Smucker's grape jelly commands a 33% price superiority over Shop and Stop's store brand. A Cadillac Escalade XLT commands a 60% increase in base price over a Chevrolet Avalanche. In light of these numbers, sustaining more than a 100% price difference across models of the Packard brand seems to be stretching the limit.]
The Packard brand came to compete with Plymouth, Chevrolet, and Ford. By the time the first post-war models were released in 1948 and 1949 Packard was no longer a luxury brand, but they did try to restart their competition with Cadillac. As recounted earlier, that struggle died before it was fully undertaken.
Chevrolet today tries to offer a range of cars, trucks, and SUV’s with starting prices from $12,000 to $106,000 and to tie them all together with a golden bow tie on the grille and trunk. Virtually all of its models are available from the same company at higher finish levels so it cannot compete on a claim of superiority. It’s a tough marketing job to compete on a claim of modestly-priced mediocrity. But it was apparently doable as long as the economy was buoyant.
Max Warburton at Bernstein Research says, “GM has always resorted to aggressive pricing. GM has been the leading exponent of oversupply, cheap financing and deflationary strategies.” In this conceptualization of the market, GM focuses on production and pushes its products into the marketplace by sustaining price disadvantages vis-a-vis its foreign competitors. The GM brand divisions are merely outlets for their production facilities and sales are achieved largely through price strategies.
Continuing his argument, Warburton says, “…the massive price disadvantage that GM and Chrysler suffer – with their small cars selling at US$3,000 below Honda/Toyota levels, their midsize SUVs US$6,000 below and their large cars selling for US$10,000 less. GM and Chrysler have a price problem more than a cost problem. This is a brand issue – and the brands won’t be fixed by Chapter 11.”
In marketer’s terms this would be a statement that GM’s brands have a negative equity position when compared with Honda and Toyota. And if Honda and Toyota are the competition, then the Chevrolet division must be the primary offender.
Warburton goes on to contend that GM and Chrysler are primarily (from a profitability viewpoint) light truck manufacturers and that the two companies should merge to produce (1) a single small front-wheel drive model, (2) a single minivan model, (3) a single mid-sized crossover or SUV model, (4) a single pickup model, and (5) a single rear-wheel drive large sedan.
The idea that GM (much less a merged GM-Chrysler company) should reduce itself to only five models is radical in the extreme. Cadillac would produce the large sedan, GMC would produce light trucks, Buick would produce the crossover/SUV, and Chevrolet would produce the small car: Since GM has given up minivans, that model would disappear from GM’s repetoire.
Given GM’s penchant for body sharing, perhaps the following lineup would be more realistic:
- Cadillac – Luxury large sedan, luxury SUV/crossover
- Buick – Value large sedan, value SUV/crossover
- Chevrolet – Small car (value through luxury), specialty cars (personal sports, sports, electric)
- GMC – Light trucks (pickups, vans, commercial use vehicles)
As Warburton points out, the deep problem at GM is a brand problem, and the solution to that problem requires a turning away from production and pricing as a basis for strategy and the adoption of strong branding. It is not likely that the current GM division hierarchy can adapt to this model.
It is, however, interesting to reflect on the lasting impact of Harley Earl’s centralized GM design center that hastened the demise of the Packard Motor Car Company (and other independent producers) and allowed GM to practice its production mentality right up until the day they filed for bankruptcy.
(Kick as kick can is obviously an oblique reference to “kick (him) while (he’s) down,” which – I guess – signifies that I recognize that I’m taking unfair advantage of a venerable US institution. But that Oldsmobile Silhouette really was a POS no matter how I tried to love it.)
David Letterman’s demographic problem
May 16, 2009
For many years I’ve taught a computer-based strategy simulation game, Markstrat, and I have required my students to prepare a presentation at the end of the course to demonstrate what they learned from the simulation. For many years I used a ponderous description of what I wanted from the presentation, suggesting all kinds of concepts that they might want to draw on for their ideas.
Probably ten or twelve years ago I felt that (1) the students weren’t having any fun because what they produced was so dry and drab that (2) I was bored out of my skull by the monotony of the presentations. I set out to correct the situation.
A new set of presentation instructions was issued, this one requesting that the students prepare a “Top Ten” list of things they learned from Markstrat, illustrated with whatever charts and graphs were appropriate, and that they make sure to balance humor and content. The presentation instructions include a link to David Letterman’s most recent “Top Ten” list and his “Top Ten” archive. For ten or twelve years, now, I’ve found it much more interesting to watch the presentations. And I think it gave me another dimension of the group’s performance to measure – something like “aptness of thought.”
Thoroughly unsuspecting, I sat down this year to receive the presentations. The first group went through an entirely humorless presentation with ten major slides detailing what they thought were the ten elements of the simulation that they had learned (“Understanding forecasting for production estimates”). Wow, I thought, I’m surprised that none of the other students in the room are muttering about how far off the mark this is.
As you can guess, the following five (!) groups all followed the same pattern as the first. No humor, no “Number 6 – Find out which side of his mouth the instructor is speaking from when he gives you advice.”
What makes this a little more difficult to understand is that I had six groups undertake the same assignment last December and all of them produced the intended tongue-in-cheek performance review. I am left to conclude that David Letterman has fallen off a demographic cliff, that the graduating class of this year’s college crop is clueless about his monolog and schtick.
Relative to newspapers announcing closings and TV networks scrambling to find revenue streams to keep their news organizations going this may be small potatos. But it doesn’t sound good for Mr. Letterman.
*****
The fog was thick on the harbor this morning. Formatted 1920 pixels by 1200 pixels.
Bristol RI harbor in morning fog
Case in Point
May 8, 2009
No one has actually asked my why I go out to walk (or, in the old days, run) at 5 a.m. Today provided plenty of reasons.
The soft pre-dawn light lit the low ground mist around the Mill Gut, and I walked through a cascade of mist that flowed past the Coggeshall farmhouse, the ice house, and dissipated at the edge of the Gut.
At the top of Surprise Hill (runners find out why it’s called that, a seemingly innocuous rise that is actually a three to one ascent over 150 yards) I turn towards Narragansett Bay. In the half-light, a broad shallow vee of 90 to 100 geese approach from my left flying about three feet above the surface of the bay, heading towards Providence.
I was going to ask Ed, the teacher who is the anti-quark to my quark, walking my route the opposite way, if they had passed him as he rounded the end of the park. I saw him coming from about 3/8ths of a mile away, something not possible a month ago in the dark. Then I saw a big group of birds floating about 150 yards offshore and decided not to ask. Which, as it turned out, was too bad, because the birds on the water were gulls, not geese. Where the geese ended up remains unknown.
As I walk along the water, the sun is coloring the sky in the east, shining through the trees on the ridge line, oranges and yellows against the purples and mauves of the clouds and the light blue of the morning sky. A handful of small clouds above the sunrise shines with an intense yellow.
On the way up the hill to the defunct toll gates that mark the entry to the park I pass the five or six varieties of fruit trees that are blooming, each variety to its own drummer.
Joe, one of the other local geezers, has just broken into an easy jog as he approaches from the other direction. He stops and waits and we descend towards the head of Bristol Bay, congratulating each other on our good fortune to be out on such a glorious day. He breaks off and heads for town as I turn towards Poppasquash Point to return to where I parked the truck.
The salt marsh is greening now, and across from the Bristol Marina the weeping cherry I photographed a year ago is again lit by the rising sun. Nick, my former running buddy and now occasional walking partner, passes by in his Harley Davidson Edition Ford 250 and pauses long enough on his way to his spinning class to remark on the beauty of the morning.
Ed, the anti-quark, passes, each of us now headed in the opposite direction. Today our fifteen-word conversation remarks on the appearance of the sun after a week of clouds and rain. The conversation window is too short to adequately frame a question about the geese, so I let that go. The two donkeys are in the pasture across the road from the Bristol Yacht Club but the sheep haven’t made it out of the barn yet.
In the truck, I pass the Goose Lady on the way to Sip ‘n’ Dip. She’s the Goose Lady because for the last two years she’s chronicled geese in the early morning hours all around the top end of Bristol Bay. In the last six months she appears to have finally gotten enough goose pictures because she’s broadening her photographic interests to other fowl. The low, bright light of the sun makes the boat hulls on the harbor shine and sparkle, giving her a great background for whatever bird is in her sights this morning.
At Sip ‘n’ Dip the wait staff are carrying on patchy conversations in Portuguese. I draw an unfamiliar waitress and for the first time in months I have to repeat my order; medium black, no sugar. A medium coffee ordered without other qualifiers comes heavy on the cream and sugar. That and the ProJo (Providence Journal, now quite skinny) come to $2.97, up from yesterday’s $2.86. Next week I’ll find out if it’s a price increase or simply the new waitress.
* * * * *
I park the truck just the other side of this stone fence. The yellow blossoms of the weeds seem to float above the surface of the pasture. Taken Sunday, May 3rd and formatted 1920 pixels by 1200 pixels. Click for full view and download.
Coggeshall pasture
Ah, priceless wisdom
April 29, 2009
What is the importance of market share to a public relations campaign?
Can you please explain this to me.
Thanks!
A***** *********
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry (Student technology > faculty technology)
I almost forgot…Easter scenes
April 14, 2009
Dunkin’ Donuts is to Rhode Island what La Boulangerie or Leidenheimer’s is to New Orleans. New Orleans is probably the French bread capital of the United States; Rhode Island is most definitely the fried dough capital of the United States and – by cholesterol-laden extension – of the universe. New Orleanians remember the drawn-out demise of Tastee Donuts in New Orleans which preceded the brief success and decline of the Krispy-Kreme presence. Alongside these two chains, the Northeast’s champ, Dunkin’, put up a pretty good showing; at last count there were still two Dunkin’ Donuts outlets in New Orleans (the Metro area, not Orleans Parish).
But here in Rhode Island (there are statistics, by the way, that substantiate the claim about fried-dough consumption), the road to anywhere is paved with Dunkin Donuts, Honey Dew Donuts, Sip ‘n’ Dip Donuts, even the Canadian upstart Horton’s trying to invade this paradise of saturated fat. The eight-mile trip from our condo to Laurie’s former place of work afforded us at least ten different donut opportunities directly on the route of travel, including four Dunkin’ outlets.
So it was not unusual that Sunday saw me visit the closest Dunkin’ outlet (two blocks…it is just barely closer than the Sip ‘n’ Dip which is three blocks away) on the way back from my walk and getting the Sunday papers at Pik ‘n’ Pay. As I headed for the condo, swinging off State Street onto Thames, two substantial wild turkeys came right down the middle of Thames street towards me. They were walking on the yellow centerline, so I decided the best thing was to yield (I don’t know if Rhode Island has rules of the road applicable to turkeys). Striding confidently down the road, the two veered to their left without signaling and entered the parking lot belonging to the US Post Office, their black feathers glistening with a green and purple sheen. Oddly triangular bodies, propelled on substantial drumsticks.
I drove on without finding out what business brought them to town on Easter morning. Perhaps it was simply flaunting their presence on a holiday that they could feel confident about surviving.
And to think that I saw it on Mulberry Thames Street!
The image below is from a walk through Providence’s College Hill on Palm Sunday.
Compensation
March 14, 2009
Right. I know. 2163 words is too long a post (see below). As penance, here’s Waiting, a picture taken on March 7th (formatted as widescreen desktop wallpaper, 1920 by 1200 pixels if you click on it).
My Approach to Pedagogy
March 14, 2009
In the fall of 2008 I applied for a tenure-track position at the university where I currently teach as a full-time visiting professor. As I observed to a friend, that would mean that I would be eligible for tenure when I reach 75…just when I’d really be able to enjoy it.
Part of the application process was to prepare a statement about my teaching philosophy. I figure about three people might have read it during that process. So I offer it here.
Oh, and the tenure-track position? Hiring freeze; I’m reappointed as a visitor.
Prologue
My initial years in grade school were spent in a warm, nurturing, progressive school district on the north side of Chicago. In the third grade, I was transferred to a traditional, conservative school system in a small city in southern Wisconsin. My second grade teacher had had me “tutoring” other kids in spelling: My third grade teacher had me copying Spencerian script into a copy book. When I graduated from that school system, I went to college in northern California, arriving the year after Jack Kerouac published “On the Road,” encountering the “beat” generation’s North Beach coffee-house culture, Mort Sahl at the hungry i, and the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley. After finishing my undergraduate degree in psychology, I joined the US Army, spending three of my five years teaching (in the military style) Latin American military personnel in Panama and on-site in Honduras, Colombia, Venezuela and Brazil. I returned to Stanford for my MBA and Ph.D. degrees, then spent my first two years of university teaching at INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France.
An Eclectic Approach
My education and teaching experiences have given me an exposure to a broad spectrum of approaches to teaching, and I believe that all of them have had an influence on how I understand the educational process and how I try to prepare myself and my materials.
In the military, an instructor is expected to “script” his class, and the day’s lesson plan includes the equivalent of a transcript which is placed in the back of the classroom so that a visiting inspector can pick it up and find the current place in the class and be able to check the instructor’s execution. The military operates on the belief that no more than three teaching points can be retained from each hour of instruction, so these teaching points are carefully elaborated and presented with particular emphasis. A favorite mantra is “If the student failed to learn, the instructor failed to teach.”
From the Stanford Business School, where cases are used as vehicles to illustrate analytic techniques, I went to INSEAD, founded by a Harvard Business School professor, and worked alongside a professor whose DBA was from Harvard and had spent five years on the HBS faculty. We used the Harvard approach to cases, using them as opportunities for students to practice decision-making, and he taught me HBS-style extensive individual instructor preparation and the shared preparation by people teaching the same course, the non-directive but fully-scripted instructional style, as well as the expectation that we would visit one another’s classes.
Finally, I spent 34 years at Tulane, a school whose culture held that the instructor was – once the classroom doors were closed – answerable to no one for what went on in the classroom. Student evaluations were used as measures of classroom performance, but there was no guidance, no review and no peer observation of the courses and their content, other than the guidance sought by the individual instructor. It was a vacuum into which the instructor was required to inject his own structure.
The Raw Material
While I was at Tulane, I regularly taught undergraduates, graduates and executive students, in semester-long courses and short courses. I was fortunate enough to be able to teach in Latin America and in China for the school. Students are the raw material that we work with and making sure that the “student can learn” means understanding the capabilities and the backgrounds of the students in a course.
In the last 15 years, I have observed a marked change in the undergraduate students that I teach; the coming-of-age of the first “Sesame Street” generation was quickly followed by the arrival of the first “MTV” generation, the “Nintendo” generation, and now the “Internet” generation. It is such a cliché that attention spans have dwindled that students in my classrooms now perceive themselves to have short attention spans, and this provides them with an excuse for their lack of concentration.
I have not yet encountered this change in my executive classes, although I think it has started to affect graduate classes. What this has meant to me is an increasing concentration on pre-identifying the important concepts of an undergraduate course and giving them sufficient emphasis so that the students can identify them readily. Today’s textbooks do not make this easy with their ever-increasing quantity of “extras” embedded in the text.
Course Content
I believe that the initial responsibility of the instructor is the establishment of the teaching points to be covered in the course, both overall and hour-by-hour. While the military insists that three teaching points per hour are as much as can be comprehended by a student, the number is probably not much greater than three.
The next problem facing the instructor is fitting his concept of the course content to that of the text and ancillary materials being used. While I have used (mostly) my own materials in teaching the Marketing Seminar over the past years, my other courses have used 0ff-the-shelf texts, and I have not used the same text for more than two consecutive semesters over the past twelve years. This has allowed me to conclude two things: First, that there is so much material in current texts that almost any text can be adapted for use in a particular course, and, second, that current texts are very poorly organized with respect to a coherent internal structure that gives emphasis to the important material and removes less important material. It is probably the all-inclusiveness of standard texts that keeps us from making the effort to organize our own material; have the students buy a standard text, then use a syllabus to trim the material into shape.
Almost inevitably, however, there will be discrepancies between what a text makes available and what the instructor feels must be covered. Sometimes these are major points, and sometimes they are a matter of adding emphasis to available material. In these cases, the instructor is faced with the need to find a way to provide the additional material. This has presented me with opportunities for the development of supplemental web-based and multimedia content that I find to be the most enjoyable challenge of preparing a course.
For the principles courses that I teach, I feel there is sufficient substantive material to be covered that I limit “activities” to short exercises used to illustrate specific course teaching points. While in-class activities may be pleasing to students who feel attention-challenged, they frequently interfere with the time required to cover essential materials. Where there is a trade-off involved between activities and substantive material, I will tend to err on the side of substantive material. For my Advertising Principles course, however, I do include a creative exercise, a page-layout exercise, and a Google ad-writing exercise in addition to a few in-class exercises.
For advanced courses such as the Marketing Seminar, I find that the use of a fully-featured simulation as a vehicle to illustrate strategic concepts is a useful tool. It is my view that various activities – simulations, competitions, internships, and projects – serve an extremely useful purpose as vehicles to test the application of learned concepts, but that they require that, first, the student learn the concepts and, second, that the activities be strongly supervised.
Gradual evolution
As part of this shift in teaching styles that I feel drives my work, I produced the following note and distributed it to my Advertising Principles classes in the Fall of 2008. I will be trying to extend its applicability in coming semesters:
The New Teaching
I started teaching in the military. The Army had developed a technique for teaching the materials that were essential for a soldier’s survival and success (not always the same thing). The instructor had to produce a lesson plan that included a verbatim script which was to be placed in the back of the room for the head of the department to use to check how the lesson was going. Even the jokes to be used were to be included in the script; everything was planned ahead and laid out.
Included in the lesson plan were the Teaching Points to be covered. There were never more than three teaching points in a 50-minute class. The teaching points were what the student was to retain after the class and would be the basis for examinations. The teaching point might encompass more than one factoid. For example, a teaching point might be to know how to name the parts of one of the assemblies making up the M1 rifle, in which case all of the names of the parts would have to be memorized. For example, the Feeding and Operation Assembly of the Garand M1 Rifle has 11 individual parts. That teaching point might be the only teaching point in a 50-minute class on the functioning of the M1 rifle.
This kind of training produces people who know the names of the parts of their weapon. As the Army discovered, however, it does not produce people who use their weapons. In studies following the Korean Conflict, the Army found that less than two-thirds of infantrymen fired their weapons in battle, and that the number of those who directed their fire effectively in the direction of the enemy was even less.
This is the clearest example I know of that shows the importance of using outcomes as the measure of effective learning. It seems obvious that the reason for soldiers to learn about their weapons is so that they can be effectively used, yet the teaching methodology and course content had been designed to teach people how to take apart and put together their weapons. Knowing what the name of the follower arm pin is and what it contributes to the functioning of an M1 is useful, but does little to improve effective fire.
Anyhow, I am trying to think about the desired outcomes of this particular class. During the semester there will be many factoids and a lot of examinable information covered but what I want all of them to point towards are the desired outcomes, not just measurable hurdles for you to clear. While that sounds easy, it’s not the way that I’ve taught for the past 44 years. So here goes:
Desired outcomes, Advertising Principles MRKT 301
1. Actively perceive and evaluate advertising as a part of your environment.
2. Understand how advertising is created, works and is evaluated
Rationale: While few of you will ever work for an advertising agency, many of you will have the occasion to create or participate in the creation of persuasive messages. This course should provide you with the tools to make your efforts effective.
Professor Ed Strong
Advertising Principles
Fall 2008
Measurement
At INSEAD (in 1971) we undertook a major review of the school’s grading scheme. As a result of that experience, I became and remain an advocate of classifying people into three groups: The upper sixth, the middle two-thirds, and the lower sixth. The upper sixth become candidates for honors, the lower sixth become candidates for possible probation or termination, and the middle two-thirds are in no difficulty. For honors or probation/termination, the number of different classes in which you are in the top or bottom sixth becomes the critical determinant. Beyond this, it is my belief that grades are not useful.
I’ve never been at a school willing to undertake this scheme, and I doubt I ever will. And my practical experience has indicated that exams and graded exercises are motivators that have become extremely necessary to get students to do the required reading in a timely fashion. As a result, over the past five years, I have increased the number and frequency of examinations so that there are now a minimum of four in my principles courses, and I can see this number increasing in the future.
Epilogue
My approach to pedagogy has been to evolve in response to the demands of the course content and the course audience. I think this is taking my work in interesting and challenging directions, relying far less on the printed word and far more on internet distribution of digital content, and that digital content becoming increasingly rich in terms of sound, graphics and video.
On one hand, it pleases me to be able to keep moving forward with teaching technology, having been blessed with a technical inclination that probably stems from having been raised working at a family newspaper. On the other hand, it is a little sad that it is accelerating now that I am reaching the end of my teaching career. I would guess that there’s plenty of excitement down the road for younger professors.
Walkin’, yes indeed, and I’m talkin’…
February 7, 2009
Last time, I was about to get a new right hip; it was supposed to happen on the 9th of December but due to an unusual set of circumstances, Laurie and I ended up being told, at 6 p.m., that the surgery wasn’t going to happen that day.
(The day of fasting and prep was part of the annoyance…the fact that we’d come over to Boston and checked Laurie into a guest house at the hospital and would have to extract her from that was another…and since Laurie isn’t a great Interstate driver in the winter, the fact that we’d taken the train from Providence made it a late night getting home.)
Best face on disaster: We were called on Wednesday and told that the surgery would happen on Saturday morning, so Friday night we spent the night in Boston at the Omni Parker House, having supper in their wonderful paneled dining room and having – surprise! – Parker House rolls to accompany dinner. Growing up I never realised that Parker House rolls were anything but some euphemistic brand name (like Catherine Clarke Brownberry Bread – which mother always called Helen Gates bread).
Surgery on a Saturday morning when no other surgeries are going on is kind of intimate. Laurie sat by me during the preparations, watching me disappear down the hall as they administered the IV tranquilizers. The long and the short of it is that by Tuesday afternoon I was out of the hospital and home; three and a half weeks later, I was told I could shed the crutches and cane and drive again.
This week I’ve gone back out to walk through Colt State Park (I was a little leery of trying it before because we’ve had plenty of ice and a good bit of snow, so I was using the treadmill in the condo). This morning the fragmites along the Mill Gut looked sparkly in the early morning sun….
Western edge of the Mill Gut, 7:30 a.m. and 14 degrees F.
So the hip is a great success. Betty Brito (who’s had both hips replaced) told me that the most impressive thing about the surgery would be that I would suddenly have no pain. At all. And she was right. There are sorenesses and little tweaks, but they have to do with the surgery, not the hip.
And, if I have a recommendation for anyone facing hip replacement surgery it would be that you should keep exercising as much as possible before the surgery. The (former) runner in me kept me trying to be as balanced and symmetrical as possible in my gait and to ignore – as much as I could – the pain. I think that the fact that my muscles were in balance and in good tone was what made the difference in coming back from the surgery quickly.
