Three
Kellogg School professors on the relationship between their
teaching and research
By
Aubrey Henretty
Truth
in advertising
“There
are a lot of misconceptions — even in big companies
— about what marketers are supposed to do,” says
Kent
Grayson, an associate professor who teaches the core marketing
course at the Kellogg School. Some people — including
new MBA students — still think it’s a marketer’s
job to convince people to buy things they don’t want
or need, he says. On the contrary, Grayson holds that successful
marketers are people who research and understand consumer
needs, then find a mutually beneficial way to meet those needs.
Grayson’s
own
research concerns the question, “How do people in
general and consumers in particular sort out the deception
from the truth?” We are all deceived constantly, he
observes, by people we trust, by acquaintances, by total strangers,
by people trying to sell us things or win our votes in the
next election. “I think it’s just incredible that
human society continues on despite these deceptions,”
he adds.
While Grayson doesn’t
talk much about his research in the classroom, he says this
pursuit is rather like the “flipside of the same coin”
of the coursework. He teaches students to be vigilant about
understanding what consumers need, and through his research
hopes to show how consumers resist what they don’t need.
Learning
(and discarding) the model
Assistant
Professor of Finance Camelia
Kuhnen also teaches the mirror image of her research to
her beginning finance students.
“I
teach them in theory how they should make optimal decisions,”
says Kuhnen, whose studies include neurofinance — an
emerging field that links neuroscience with economics. The
operative term here is “in theory.” The finance
models Kuhnen teaches in class all hinge on the classical
economic assumption that people act rationally in business
transactions, an assumption Kuhnen’s own
research undermines to some extent.
The strict
curriculum requirements do not leave much time for Kuhnen
to discuss neurofinance with students, but she says she does
try to sneak in a few “puzzles” toward the end
of the term. Once students have mastered the patterns that
govern more mainstream economic theory, it’s easier
for them to spot deviations from those patterns and discern
why they appear.
To develop
these ideas fully, Kuhnen says she would need the space of
an entire course. She imagines such an offering might explore
“behavioral
finance” — a mélange of finance, negotiations
and psychology. When entering into a contract with a new partner,
“you have to figure something out about their background
and their preferences,” she says. The goal of behavioral
finance might be to help students “understand that others
break the rules and how you should respond.”
Order
out of chaos
For other
faculty members, the relationship between research and teaching
is more direct.
“The
interaction between what I research and what I teach has always
been great,” says Linda
Vincent, associate professor of accounting information
and management. She regards teaching and research as fluid,
or at least as extremes on the same continuum. “Usually
what happens is that some question arises [in class] and you
think, ‘That’s a research question.’”
Similarly, a great research insight demands to be shared with
students.
“This
information — what we’re doing — really
permeates the business world,” says Vincent, who earned
a PhD from the Kellogg School in 1994. “If you don’t
have a theory underlying what you’re doing, the world
is chaos.”
If research
and teaching are just two variations on a theme, says Vincent,
so are teaching and learning — especially with a group
of very bright Kellogg students who are prepared to demand
the best from themselves and from their teachers.
“To
ensure that you really know something, you teach it. And if
you don’t really know it, that’s totally exposed,”
she says. “As a Kellogg professor, you’re learning
all the time. It’s like being in school yourself.” |
