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Around last year-end, there were massive complaints about the TTC’s ham-handed management of its regular annual fare increase. Here’s another, more local, complaint. The TTC has shut down the York Mills commuter parking lot that I, and hundreds of other riders, use. All the TTC website says it that it will be closed from May 29 to September 6. When you pass by the parking lot, it appears that it is being used for bus driver training, because the TTC has put up pilons and a simulated bus stop, and you see buses driving in circles.

This is a lot that is almost always full, even in summer, by 9 am. So the drivers have to go somewhere else, and this creates inconvenience, and likely encourages some of them to drive downtown. Yesterday I parked on the street near the Lawrence subway station, the closest to York Mills, and received a $15 ticket for exceeding the 3 hour on-street parking limit.

In past years, the TTC shut down the York Mills parking lot for bus training in August. I assume that because they didn’t have more protests they shut it down longer this year. And of course this was done in typical TTC fashion, with no explanation. But couldn’t the TTC have found some alternative space for the activity that wouldn’t have disrupted hundreds of commuters for an entire summer?

This is typical of the TTC’s arrogant and unimaginative approach to service. It can establish a forum on public service, but whatever is said at the forum doesn’t seem to affect day-to-day operations.

I’ve sent a complaint through the website, but don’t expect a quick reaction.

Enlightened organizations have bots that scan the Internet for any comments about them in the blogosphere, and get back to the blogger. I’ve had such responses on several occasions, but again don’t expect this from the TTC.

Speaking of disruptions, I posted in mid-May about how disruptive and expensive the G20 summit would be, and, as more and more organizations are shutting their doors for that weekend, it’s clear I was right on the money about that one.

The only thing to do is escape, so I won’t be posting next week. I’ll be back after the summit, and hopefully in a better mood.

It is paradoxical that while so many books about management are being published, so few of them are by management professors. There are three mutually reinforcing reasons for this.

First, many fields within management have adopted a natural sciences research model that emphasizes publishing academic journal articles rather than books.

Second, the research component of the influential Financial Times global ranking of business schools is based on articles published in a list of 40 top-tier academic journals. Administrators attempting to improve a school’s rankings will therefore, as they say, incent faculty members to publish articles in those academic journals rather than books.

Third, business schools have been growing, which means hiring entry level faculty members. To get tenure, assistant professors need to publish quickly, and books take too long, so a business school with a young faculty – as most are – will concentrate on publishing academic journal articles.

Despite these reasons, there are a few management professors who continue to write books. I’ll suggest two important reasons why.

First, there are still some management professors, especially tenured full professors, who undertake big and ambitious research projects, and a book is the vehicle par excellance for publishing the results. A book is the place to publish a new theory, work out is implications and applications, and analyze the supporting evidence. A book is the place to synthesize a field or subfield. A book is the place to create a new field or subfield.

Here are a few examples at the Rotman School. Richard Florida wrote a book to explain and elaborate on his theory of the creative class. Andy Stark in a recent book addressed the complicated question of the shifting margin between public and private sector responsibilities in the US. In my own case, I found that a book was the best format for a comprehensive look at innovation in government, both in general and in a variety of different policy areas.

Books have the related advantage that they consolidate research in one place, rather than spread it around a number of different academic journals. A book is the place to go for the first word, last word, and the whole story in between.

The second reason for publishing a book is to reach a different and possibly larger audience. Journal articles are necessarily aimed exclusively at academic colleagues, who are the only people who read the journals. A book might also be read beyond one’s academic colleagues, possibly by practitioners and even the general public. Many academics aspire to write something that reaches out beyond his or her academic colleagues to a broader public, and a book is still the vehicle for doing that.

A three-part injunction for living a full life, attributed to the nineteenth century Cuban independence leader and writer Jose Marti, is to plant a tree, have a child, and write a book. I hope that more management professors, particularly those with the security of tenure, will embrace the third part.

Last week’s post discussed two anthems traditionally performed at the Last Night of the Proms, Land of Hope and Glory and Jerusalem. There is a third, “Rule, Britannia!” which celebrates the Royal Navy. And the idea of celebrating the Royal Navy takes me by the following logic to today’s blog, the last in the series dealing with the exam in my graduate narratives course.

The Royal Navy is an institution with a long and proud history. The narratologist would ask if its history is anywhere to be found on its rubric in cyberspace, www.royalnavy.mod.uk. It turns out that the Royal Navy’s banner headlines are “modern and relevant” and “capable and resilient” and it prominently displays a new blog. There is, however, a link to its history on a banner at the top of the site, and the history is organized by periods, ships, leaders, and battles.

Looking a bit farther afield, both the Number 10 Downing St. (www.number10,gov.uk) and White House (www.whitehouse.gov) websites have links to a history of the place and its occupants.

In one of the exam questions, I asked students to provide a rationale and organizational role for a Chief Narrative Officer, using as an example any organization of their choosing. One of the roles of the CNO would be stewardship of the organization’s official history, as described above.

A broader position description would be to model, encourage, and champion the effective use of narrative throughout the organization. Some of the ways narrative could be used would include narratives about the organization’s clients or customers and how they benefit from the organization’s products or services, narratives about the organization’s employees and how they do valuable and meaningful work, and narratives about the organization itself, including its history and achievements.

The CNO should encourage the use of narratives on the website, in speeches, annual reports, and advertising. She should also advise people about how to develop convincing and persuasive narratives.

The most important thing to realize about the role of CNO is that it is a classic staff role, intended to support both the organization’s executive leaders and its line managers. The key questions about staff roles are where they fit in organization’s structure and whom they report to. The CNO’s natural allies would be in corporate communications, high-level (as opposed to brand) marketing, and strategic planning.

One thing few of the MBA students who took the exam mentioned was that people in staff roles, particularly if the role is new, need a high level patron. So a particularly important question is whom the CNO would report to, and the answer would be someone at the senior level with clout over the long run.

Recruiting a CNO might be a challenge. There aren’t any obvious producers of CNO’s as there are obvious producers of accountants or marketers. So I would suggest advertising the position and recruiting widely and seeing who applies. This would also imply recruiting beyond business schools and thus looking to cultural institutions, places as outside-the-box as graduate programs in literature or cultural studies. Who knows, perhaps in the future one of the graduates on the course will actually describe her position as CNO.

Last week, improbably, I attended the Toronto Symphony Orchestra’s Last Night of the Proms concert. This came about because my older son had come to enjoy Elgar’s 1st and 4th Pomp and Circumstance marches, which led to a conversation about the 1st march being traditionally played at the Last Night of the Proms, which led us to attend the TSO’s version of that concert.

It was my son’s first evening concert, and he enthusiastically enjoyed it, despite the late hour. I was amused to see a graying fair-skinned audience carrying their Union Jacks, a demographic that characterized the Toronto of my youth, not its current multicultural reality.

The program included the lyrics to “Land of Hope and Glory” and Jerusalem, with which I admit to being unfamiliar. Riding home on the subway with a tired son, I tried to explain the dramatic difference between the two anthems. The words have stuck with me, just as a tune will sometimes, involuntary, persist in one’s consciousness.

The nationalist jingoism of Land of Hope and Glory is unmistakable. “Wider still and wider shall thy bounds be set.” A global land grab. “God, who made thee mighty, make thee mightier yet.” More wealth. A bigger navy.

If this was the world view of the British at the turn of the twentieth century, it was also the attitude of the Germans, Americans, Japanese, French, Austro-Hungarians, Turks, and even Belgians. In retrospect, it is obvious how this attitude set the stage for the First World War.

In his poem, “And did those feet in ancient time,” William Blake used Jerusalem as a metaphor for a better, more compassionate and caring world than that which he inhabited. As a liberal Jew, I refer to this vision as the messianic age. Blake asked whether, as legend had it, Jesus ever briefly visited England and then referred to the “dark Satanic Mills” of the industrial revolution. Those mills, paradoxically, are what those who would have fervently sung Land of Hope and Glory would have embraced as a key engine of economic growth that created the Empire.

Blake’s conclusion was that he “will not cease from Mental Fight” until “we have built Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant Land.” The dominant interpretation of his poem is that building Jerusalem means overcoming the inequities of economic growth to build a more just and compassionate society.

The conflict between “Land of Hope and Glory” and Jerusalem remains at the center of politics and policy today. “Land of Hope and Glory” is an expression of the view that puts a priority on economic growth with considerations of externalities, equitable distribution, and values that cannot readily be measured by the yardstick of GDP subordinated. Jerusalem speaks to the concerns of externalities, limited resources, equity, and community. These issues were recently discussed in Joe Gertner’s thoughtful article in the Sunday New York Times on May 10, 2010 entitled “The Rise and Fall of the GDP.”

In Canadian politics, the Conservative Party sings to the tune of Land of Hope and Glory, with its emphasis on a strong military, economic growth, northern sovereignty, “useful” science, and limited government. My regret is that those who would sing to the tune of Jerusalem – particularly the Liberal Party – have not articulated their program with comparable force or clarity.

In this post I will discuss two of the questions on the exam in the graduate narratives course. The first question, noting that some movies about managers are filmed almost entirely in indoor settings while others often use public spaces and outdoor settings, asked students to give two examples of each and discuss the advantages of both narrative approaches.

The second question asked students to discuss the significance of social class in four movies: Twelve Angry Men, North Country, The Class, and Remains of the Day.

The dramatic advantage of the prolonged use of an indoor setting, especially one room, is that it turns up the emotional heat of the narrative by focusing it on the interaction among the characters occupying the room. If that interaction is intense, confining it to one room makes it more intense. Facial close-up shots are often used and the audience is forced to zero in on dialogue, gesture, and body language. The two prototypical “small room” narratives we watched were Twelve Angry Men, where the entire movie takes place in a sweaty and claustrophobic jury room, and The Class, where most of the movie takes place in Monsieur Marin’s crowded classroom.

In contrast, the dramatic advantage of filming outdoors and in public spaces is that the movie incorporates panorama and spectacle. The narrative itself can be large, encompassing many places and many people. And the variety of settings should hold the interest of the audience. The two classic examples we watched were Charlie Wilson’s War, which moved between Washington and exotic Middle East locales (Afghan deserts, Pakistani palaces, and Egyptian belly dance lounges) with occasional stops in Houston, and The Insider, which after an opening scene in Beirut, wandered all over America. Some students noted that outdoor and public settings are better places to hold secret discussions than rooms which are being watched and possibly bugged, an observation which is correct, but misses the bigger point.

One advantage of using small rooms that, surprisingly, none of the MBA students discussed, is that filming in a studio is a lot less expensive than filming on location, especially if there are several locations, as well as hundreds or thousands of extras, involved.

Now, the second question about social class. The four movies treat social class in a variety of ways. In Twelve Angry Men, ethnicity and social class are markers that precondition the jury’s initial presumption that the accused is guilty. The jury deliberations, however, do not split along class lines. Starting with the upper middle class, the architect thinks the accused is innocent, the stockbroker that he is guilty, and the advertising man can’t decide. The working class jurors also split, with the ethnic and working man soon joining those favouring acquittal, while the salesman, garage owner, and messenger service owner hold out until the end for a conviction. Had the jury split along class lines, a deadlock and hence a hung jury would have been more likely.

North Country really is about sexism, and we find that all the men in the mining company, whether middle class executives or lower class miners, are sexists, with the difference being that the former were more subtle and less physical in their expressions of sexism. Thus class was not really at the core of this movie (call it a trick question).

In The Class, it is immediately evident that most of the students are lower class and of colour. But what struck me was the nature of their teacher Marin’s enterprise, which was to teach them “correct” grammar, usage, spelling, and accent. In effect, he was teaching them how to conform, linguistically, to middle class expectations. But the students were often resisting. This makes a for sharp contrast with other transformational teacher movies, most notably Stand and Deliver, in which Jaime Escalante was teaching his Latino students calculus because it would enable them to get ahead in Anglo middle class America, without necessarily buying in to the culture.

Finally, I see The Remains of the Day as a cautionary fable about class deference. The butler Stevens is deferential to his master and ultimately comes to realize he has drastically and unnecessarily limited his own life as a result. Mr. Benn, who ultimately weds Miss Kenton, is of the same class background as Stevens, but more assertive in every way: sexually, occupationally, and politically, and while his life was far from perfect, he had much more of a life than did Stevens. This contrast presents one of the main themes of the narrative, and Ishiguro’s novel can be read as a critique of deference and defense of a democracy in which the common-sense instincts of ordinary people are of equal value to the articulate but misguided musings of well-educated aristocrats.

Business schools are populated by students who are striving for wealth and ignore the existence of status gradations (and sometimes barriers) in society, and narratives are effective at pointing out this reality.