Summer Time

This is the last post of the spring 16-week challenge. Tomorrow is the last day of my Jogging and Blogging discipline. What happens now?

Well, the whole idea behind the 16-week challenge is to establish two periods a year when you are working in a disciplined way, committed to making real progress on your writing projects. At the end of each period, you should pause and reflect. Did you accomplish as much as you had hoped? How well did you stick to your plan? How orderly is your process? The period between runs of the challenge should be marked by a different pattern of activity, even no pattern (if you choose). It should have a different focus.

You will notice the change here on the blog. My posts will be more impulsive, less developed. They will not appear just before seven in the morning on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but whenever I feel like it. Readers of Jonathan's blog, Stupid Motivational Tricks, will hear from me a bit more often. (Mainly I'm going to be reposting some of my best work from RSL over there.) You won't notice it, but I'm going to start jogging in the afternoons. I will be writing in the mornings before breakfast.

I'm going to be planning my return to research. This means writing a research plan that I can use both in job applications and grant applications. I will still have to edit other people's work every day, but the focus from now until I go on vacation (in July) will be on the longer term: What am I going to do for the next three years? Where do I want to be at the end of that? I have a rough sense of the answers to these questions in my mind. What I need to do is to articulate them.

First, for most of those three years I intend to work as an associate professor. This could happen in a few different ways (and various countries), but my preference right now is to find a permanent position here in Denmark where I can teach the history and philosophy of management (and management studies). Most of my research is in that area.

Second, before the three years are up I want to have written (and published) a book about the foundations of organizational sensemaking. This summer will be spent writing up the book proposal to send to publishers. Developing the outline of the book will very much be part of working out my research plan.

Third, I want to attend the major summer conferences (SCOS, EGOS, AoM, and possibly CMS) in 2011, 2012, and 2013. I also want to attend, and help develop, the Conference of Practical Criticism in the Managerial Social Sciences.

This means that I will have to, fourth, submit at least four conference papers a year. And these papers will of course be developed into journal articles. I intend to submit six times a year and hope to publish two paper annually (in journals like Culture and Organization, Organization, Organization Studies, Organizational Research Methods, JOB, JMI, AMR, AMJ, ASQ ... and even JMS!).

Fifth, I want to remain actively involved in doctoral training, but now as a member of the faculty rather than the support staff. I hope to be able develop my relationship with other institutions as a well (hello Corvinus! hello St. Andrews! hello Leicester!)

Sixth, I have been getting increasingly involved in undergraduate composition. Jonathan has expressed concern about the writing skills of business students. Well, I'm going to see if we can't do something about that.

Finally, I want to do all of these things (steady does it!) while still supporting the attempts of others (now colleagues) to get their work published. I want to continue to read and edit other people's work, and to discuss strategies for organizing and discipline the writing process. (This experience will no doubt also one day be the subject of a book.)

I'm looking forward to it. Real change comes slowly. But you can't just wait for things to happen. You have to get organized.