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Please send comments, questions and suggestions to Nurete Brenner at nlb@case.edu
Sad News
It is with great sadness we relate the passing of Don Wolfe who passed away Saturday, November 27, 2004, just four weeks after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. The memorial took place on December 11th 2004 from 2 p.m—5:00 p.m. at the Wolfe residence, and their home was filled with the joy of sharing stories and remembering the ways in which Don has touched and gifted so many lives.
At the end of the evening David Cooperrider, Department Chair spoke with Annette and shared, on behalf of the whole OB group, that Don’s commitment to the art and science of becoming more fully human, and his commitment to the highest potentials in growth-promoting community will be carried forward in an inter-generational way. Danielle Zandee, a recent alum, declared that she felt both the inspiration and “the great responsibility” to courageously carry forward the best of what Don stood for.
In David Cooperrider's Words:
An Appreciation for the Spirit and Life of Don Wolfe in the
Department of Organizational Behavior
I spoke to Don a couple of times in the past few weeks and just a few days before he passed away. Each conversation I marveled: at Don’s grace; his dignity; his joy; and his other orientation—his focus on all of us, on me, on his department. Don Wolfe’s last words to me had to do with need to continuously regenerate the power of a growth-promoting community. He was currently on a task force, with five doctoral students, designed to foster the development of our culture, and he asked that we see it continue.
Don created a legacy here at Case—not all by himself but literally with the students. When I was a student, I loved sitting in his office, papers stacked high everywhere, listening to him share the story of the birth of the field and the first PhD in the world in Organizational Behavior. The story was fantastic…
It would be a field devoted to the development of the highest potentials of the human person; it would be a field committed to a kind of research that itself would be a human encounter—devoted to new knowledge that would have potential to advance the human condition and would always make an active contribution to the lives not of objectivized “subjects of research” but the real lives and potentials of those Don called co-inquirers. Every one of his major research projects—like his work on adult development—grew from a form of “inside out” knowledge often born in some of the most creative conversations and workshops marked by a spirit of caring, daring, and a profound faith in the positive potentials of persons. A major question throughout Dons’ career was: what are the characteristics of the growth promoting relationship—in groups, in conversations, in creative research methods, and in community. Two things Don gave to all of us: the art and science of becoming more fully human, and the commitment to the higher qualities of living community.
His impact on me was elevating. I loved Don’s courses, for example, his seminars on the personality theories of Jung and Rodgers and Abe Maslow. We learned tons because he made us the teachers. There were no passive syllabi but active engagement. Don always provided us encouragement and skillful, soft guidance. His lectures may have been pre-planned but more likely they were inspired by the here-and-now. They were organic and emergent lectures, with spontaneous and poetic qualities. To me Don’s insights were like songs; they carried me into magical reflections of who I was and what I might become.
It was his life-planning workshop—created by Don Wolfe and Herb Shepard—that had the most decisive impact on me. The other day, in fact, I was rummaging through my doctoral class notebooks and re-visited the deep explorations from Don’s Life Planning workshop. It was in 1982, at the Atwood Lake retreat center, during a brilliant autumn in October. The leaves on the oak trees were ablaze and all I can remember was Don’s joy—he was in heaven. Along with our sessions, we also played golf, and as many of you know Don was not much of a golfer. But his eyes twinkled on every shot, even the horrible ones! But on the very last hole that day Don almost fired a hole-in-one; it became an easy birdie. I will never forget the image of Don throwing his arms and his eight iron high into the sky. He danced like an elf. He often kidded us that the self is an elf, without the “S”—by which I think meant minus big ego and Self-centeredness.
After that golf outing we returned to the workshop, where Don’s inspirational questions and exercises created the space for me to envision the next twenty years of work. It’s true: it was in that session I envisioned the SIGMA program on human cooperation and global action, several key dimensions of a logic for appreciative inquiry, and the seeds for today’s work looking at new visions of business and society, of business as an agent of world benefit. Yes there was a utopian feel to it all…everything seemed possible! And in my notes recovered the other day from Don’s workshop there was, scribbled out, the wonderful text of George Bernard Shaw when he said:
“This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.
I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community, and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can.
I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no "brief candle" for me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations”.
--George Bernard Shaw
Don lived his life exactly this way. He gave more to the relationships, the department and the life of its community than anybody I know. He burned as brightly for all of us as he could…now handing it off to us, and future generations.
May two of the most precious things that Don gave us continue to breathe life into who we are and what we are all about: the art and science of becoming more fully human, and the commitment to the highest qualities of living, growth-promoting community.
David Cooperrider
Saturday, December 11, 2004
The recipient of this year's Don Wolfe Scholarship is Latha Poonamallee
Latha has shown clear evidence of her contribution to the field through her current work in India, and her dissertation research about the experience of sacredness and its impact on the creation, sustainability, and reverberation of whole systems change promises to be an outstanding contribution to the field of Organizational Behavior.
Congratulations are also due to Latha for her case study co-authored with Anita Howard. Their work, "The Dark Side of Water: A case study" has been selected as one of the five best cases (finalists) in the Dark Side Case Study Competition conducted by Critical Management Studies Interest Group, AOM this year.
Latha’s submission "Learning From the Margins: A comparative case study of two social experiments in India" has been accepted for presentation in the International Critical Management Studies Conference to be held in July '05 in Cambridge University, UK.
Department Events
SAGES
The Organizational Behavior Department has been working with the SAGES program as their Research Learning Team over the past few years. As part of this work, OB participated in the Research ShowCase on campus, Thursday April 7th, 2005.
What is SAGES?
In Fall 2002, CWRU introduced a new pilot program for undergraduate students called the Seminar Approach to General Education and Scholarship (SAGES). The SAGES committee commissioned the Learning and Research Team in May 2002 to design and implement a study to investigate the effectiveness of the SAGES program as a new model for undergraduate education that builds the foundation for a multidisciplinary academic inquiry in small class sizes. Using a multi-method approach that included both qualitative and quantitative techniques, the Learning Team of organizational researchers tracked the SAGES program in an effort to research the elements of an effective seminar space and to provide feedback from the program participants to the program administration as the program unfolded.
The overall objective was to understand the relationship between students’ learning experiences and the learning environment fostered by the SAGES initiative, and to assess the impact of the SAGES program on student performance, development, and overall satisfaction. The study had a longitudinal mixed method design meant to last the three years of SAGES pilot. The qualitative techniques of non-participatory observation and semi-structured interviews were employed to explore the nature of the learning environment created and assess overall satisfaction. The quantitative part of the study made use of established psychometric instruments, custom designed evaluation instruments and secondary data sources in order to track student characteristics, performance and satisfaction and their interrelationships.
To find out more about SAGES, please contact the OB SAGES team: Alice Kolb, Duncan Coombe, Linda Ghazal, Lindsey Godwin, Simy Joy, Tony Lingham, Verena Murphy, Mauricio Puerta, Yoshitaka Yamazaki
BAWB News
2nd International Conference for Business as Agent for World Benefit
Convened to explore the bold topic, Shaping Tomorrow's Business Leaders Today: Changing Society by Changing Management Education, the 2nd International Online Conference for BAWB was held February 24-25, 2005 and brought together over 530 voices from over 30 countries. Using the Center’s existent networks to promote the conference, through e-mail invitations to postings on sites such as the AI Commons and CasePlace.org, our participants ranged from academics and practitioners, to business students and interested individuals around the world.
Held entirely on-line through collaboration with Center's technology partner iCohere, Inc., the event offered a unique virtual environment with participants attending from their homes or offices around the world as their schedules permitted. Even with the convenience of being able to join the conference at any time, we noticed that there were around 50-120 people online at any given time throughout the day. The collaborative nature of the iCohere technology supported participants both in contributing reactions to presentations, as well as beginning their own discussions on topics of their choice, and sharing files and resources with each other. The magnitude of participation this year and open collaboration opportunities helped to make the site an especially lively space with continuous new posts and conversations emerging; in fact participants made over 1000 posts to the site during the two day event.
In addition to the collaborative asynchronous areas, we also had 8 scheduled live chat sessions, which proved to be quite popular. With up to 70 people participating in some of these chats, we began to experiment with various types of chat facilitation and moderation to help keep discussion flowing. All the chat sessions were well attended, and seem to be a key feature of the online conference forum, in that they provide a way for people to connect in ‘real time’ with each other and to gain access to our presenters in a way that they never would be able to at a typical conference.
We were especially pleased by the amount of participation from students (some management professors brought their entire class to participate), which showed us first hand the promise of this kind of forum as an innovative pedagogical tool. The volume of participation was only one indicator of the success of this event. In addition to level of participation and anecdotal feedback we have individually received indicating that the conference was a success, we also had 95 respondents for our official conference feedback survey. From this survey, we found that of these respondents:
- 73 (77%) indicated that their overall experience was either “excellent” or “very good”
- 84 (88%) indicated that the online environment provided by iCohere was either “excellent” or “very good”
- 77 (81%) indicated that they were either “very satisfied” or “satisfied” with the keynote presentations
- 72 (75%) indicated that they were either “very satisfied” or “satisfied” with the workshop presentations
- 55 (58%) indicated that they were either “very satisfied” or “satisfied” with the live chats
We also asked participants to share with us qualitative feedback, and in their own words, participants commented:
- This was the most positive and rewarding experience I've had attending an on-line conference. Thank you for organizing it, for your generous sharing of resources, clear instructions and frequent communication. The opportunity to attend from my home at any hour is appreciated. As an adjunct faculty, I plan to incorporate many of the suggestions I learned from the conference.
- This whole online conference was an amazing experience. I can't wait until the next one.
- Making sign-up easy and free are important - and were done well. Thanks for a great job!
- The synchronized audio to the visual presentations was flawless. This seamless use of technology enabled attendees to get much more from the presentations than the typical in person conference experience.
- I enjoyed reading people's postings. It's interesting to read what people have to say all around the globe and how much they are similar and different all at the same time.
For more information on BAWB, please contact Lindsey Godwin.
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The Don Wolfe Scholarship Fund was initiated last year as one way to celebrate Don’s life, as well as his commitment to the Department of Organizational Behavior. The first recipient of the scholarship was Anastasia White. Her dissertation research on peace-building in high conflict zones has now taken her to Nigeria and South Africa where she is currently building an Institute for Peace. Her work was supported and advanced as a result of the Don Wolfe Scholarship. The generous funding allowed Anastasia to literally hide away to write, reflect, and create.
In the spirit of continuing to celebrate Don’s legacy I want to invite you to help us grow the Don Wolfe Scholarship Fund.
Thanks to several generous, but anonymous contributions from alumni, the fund began accepting gifts in 2002. Alumni, faculty, and staff have been contributing since
The overall objective of the fund is to help a current PhD student graduate by the end of the Spring term. The scholarship endowment currently allows of a one-time award of $7,500 once per year to an eligible PhD candidate.
If you would like to participate, please send your contribution made payable to “The Don Wolfe Scholarship Fund” , to Pat Petty, Department of Organizational Behavior, CASE Weatherhead School of Management,
10900 Euclid Ave., Cleveland, OH 44106-7235.
Congratulations to Qualifiers and Graduates:
Qualified
Lindsey Godwin
(January, 2005)
Nurete Brenner
(January, 2005)
Seeing Only Shadows:
A Theory of Gender-Blindness Among Executive Women
Guy Hutt
(November, 2004)
Emotionally Charged Ideas in the Learning Cycle of Engineers:
Implications for Learning and Development
Nigel Strafford
(July, 2004)
Qualities of Conversational Learning in Transformative Cooperation
Graduates
Tony Lingham
(August, 2004)
Elizabeth Stubbs
(January, 2005)
Emotional Intelligence Competencies in the Team and Team Leader:
A multi-level examination of the impact of Emotional Intelligences as Group Performance
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