Alex Burns

Generating a range of different grant and funding ideas for a client's 'program of research'.

Tony Boyd in today's Australian Financial Review ('How Myer float sprang a leak', p. 64):

The joint managers of the Myer IPO, Goldman Sachs JBWere, Macquarie Group and Credit Suisse, did a masterful job in locking up just about every broker in Australia.

Were there no 'contrarian' views or Monte Carlo testing of Myer's post-IPO valuation price?

Creating a survey using Qualtrics software.

Attended a great panel session on 'clarity of thought' and decision-making, run by The Churchill Club Melbourne, in which part of the meeting was held under the Chatham House rule. I had previously met Dr. Paul Monk of Austhink who explained to the audience how analysts avoid decision traps. Detective Senior Sergeant Ron Iddles of Victoria Police gave some very grounded, practical advice on investigative judgment and how to manage small teams. Dr. Amantha Imber of Inventium explained how she uses evidence-based research and findings from academic journal studies in a commercial environment. Lots of 'actionable' ideas from senior practitioners, and good audience questions.

For the PhD research design, trying to get my head around the event studies coding, logistic analysis, time-series trend estimation, and ordinary least squares analyses in Matthew Baum and Tim Groeling's academic study War Stories: The Causes and Consequences of Public Views of War (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).

Follow-up emails with internal clients on various projects. Publication Syndicate written feedback.

Three chapters into the audiobook edition of Andrew Ross Sorkin's book Too Big To Fail (New York: Viking, 2009). Sorkin did over 500 interviews and looked at primary and forensic evidence. Already, this book has loads of succinct, nuanced details of decisions, meetings, and organisational politics. Maybe Sorkin can be on CNBC 'Squawk on the Street' as a regular guest co-anchor.

In contrast, Gillian Tett's book Fool's Gold (New York: The Free Press, 2009), which I wrote about here, is focussed on the J.P. Morgan team, its peers, and anthropological visits to securitisation fora.

It will be interesting to contrast how Tett and Sorkin portray decision-makers such as J.P. Morgan banker Jamie Dimon.

Tett and Sorkin's books on the 2007-09 global financial crisis also illustrate two key points I made in November 2009 academic conference paper and presentation on journalists cowritten with Barry Saunders:

(i) Journalists are adopting methodological practices and innovations from areas outside media, such as anthropology, investment banking and criminology.

(ii) Business and financial journalists will conduct an average 250+ interviews for their investigations, which will take an average 9 months to 2 years to research and write. Some of the most influential investigations will have 300 to 500 interviews, which will include with key decision-makers.

Compare (ii) with many PhDs that can take 4 to 6.5 years to research and write instead of the allotted 3 years, and that may have only 20 to 40 interviews. Sorkin's journalistic and non-fiction craft leads him to create a strong narrative, to condense the key facts and details, and to use 'deep background' interviews to cross-check and verify meeting accounts.

Two separate meetings on career directions: Where do you want to be in 3-to-5 years? What actions can you take to move toward these goals?

Collaborator Ben Eltham has written a piece on how the 2010 final rankings for Excellence for Research in Australia (ERA) has affected his academic publishing record: 'When Your Publication Record Disappears'. A title reminiscent of Nine Inch Nails' song 'The Day The Whole World Went Away.'

For the past year I have been dealing, professionally, with issues that Ben raises. Whilst outside academia, journal publications are often viewed as irrelevant, they are crucial to the academic promotions game, and to getting external competitive grants. A personal view:

ERA is the Rudd Government's evaluation framework for research excellence, developed by the Australian Research Council, to include a ranked list of academic journals and discipline-specific conferences. The ARC released the final ranked list in February 2010. It may be revised and updated in the future, but not this year.

The ARC's goal for this ranked list was to ensure it was comprehensive, peer-reviewed, would stand up to international scrutiny, and would provide guidance to administrators, managers and researchers on quality research outputs.

In the near-term ERA's 2010 final rankings will require adjustments to our academic publication records. Some of the journals we have published in such as M/C were revised down or excluded, probably because of perceived issues with their peer review process. More starkly, ERA's guidelines for academic publications filters out most of my writings over the past 15 years: magazines and journals that no longer exist (21C, Artbyte), websites (Disinformation), magazine articles with original research (Desktop, Marketing, Internet.au), unrefereed conference papers, technical reports, and contract research. It also does not usually include textbooks, research monographs, and working papers. The 'disappearance' effect that Ben describes also happens elsewhere: when Disinformation upgraded its site to new servers, we sometimes lost several articles during the transition that writers had no back-ups of.

Others are in a tougher position: mid-career academics who have taught and not published or applied for external competitive grants, or who understandably focussed on quantity of articles for DEST points rather than ERA's focus on quality ranked journals and 'field of research' codes. ERA has caused a dramatic re-evaluation for some mid-career and senior academics of their publication record, impact factors, and other esteem measures.

Several months ago I wrote Don Webb about a documentary I had just seen at the Melbourne Internationa Film Festival: the eco-thriller The Cove. We talked about Arkte, Runa, the scientist John C. Lilly, the media's power to construct and shape social realities, and exchanged anecdotes about dolphins and other cetaceans.

Tonight, The Cove won the Best Documentary Oscar at the 82nd Academy Awards, beating out Food, Inc and Burma VJ, which are also worth seeing. National Geographic photographer Louie Psihoyos and dolphin activist Ric O'Barry attended the Academy Awards ceremony (Psihoyos' acceptance speech was cut short). To learn more, visit the sites for the Oceanic Preservation Society (Psihoyos), and the Earth Island Institute and Save Dolphins Japan (O'Barry).

Facebook message to my sister: What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.

Rosie returns to Hobart.

Afternoon watching the Oscars live telecast: one of the worst Oscars ever, with production mishaps, missed cues, and barely audible announcers over the orchestra. Tom Hanks messes up the Best Picture Oscar, or were the producers demanding to stay on-schedule for their cable affiliates? Deadline Hollywood's Nikki Finke blogs here on the debacle.

The Cove wins an Oscar for Best Documentary.My thoughts here.

Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker triumphs over James Cameron's Avatar. I expected the Oscars for editing and scriptwriting: Mark Boal's shooting script will be studied by many up-and-coming scriptwriters for years to come. Will Boal write his next script using Final Draft for Apple iPad?

Morning: Rosie and I go to see Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland reboot at IMAX Melbourne. The car park is overcrowded with parents and cars, due to a baby expo next door. Rosie talks her way into a car space. Our consensus is that Burton watered down his vision for Disney: Alice has a couple of good sequences, but it's a 2D film marketed on Avatar's 3D hype, Depp's performance blurs into his other collaborations with Burton, and we would have preferred to learn more about the (reunited) family of bloodhound dogs.

Burton, his wife Helena Bonham-Carter and Depp: how long can a team maintain its high performance, across multiple projects, before it becomes derivative of earlier work?

Lunch at a Vietnamese restaurant in Richmond's Victoria St precinct: amazing food, confusion amongst the waiters.

Evening: half-watching Paul McGuigan's Push (2009): the Hong Kong scenes remind Rosie of Kar Wai Wong's superior 2046 (2004). The film's opening sequence creates a narrative that combines several memes: Cold War paranoia, the early 1970s Nazi Occult cycle, the 1990s disclosure of government funding into remote viewing psychics in which the money went up in smoke, and David Cronenberg's early films. Push's one genuinely interesting idea was to have a taxonomy of different human capabilities that interact in a simple rules-based system.

House cleaning, gardening, and article writing.

Working through the assessment exercises from Timothy Baldwin, William Bommer and Robert Rubin's textbook Developing Management Skills: What Great Managers Know and Do (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2008), book site here.

Watched Stanford entrepreneurship lecture on Adding Value to Companies.

Martin Van Creveld on a 1998 television interview: soft-spoken, dismisses claims that the 'future of war' will be dominated by 'cyberterrorism' and other Revolution in Military Affairs trends.

A colleague told me this week of how a professor used the Australian Research Council's national competitive grants program as a bootstrap process for promotion to dean. First, they established their expertise, publication track record, and created a cross-institutional and collaborative research team. Second, they split the ARC grant proposal into different components, delegated each to different team members, and then reassembled them into a completed proposal. Third, they ramped up the number of applications to 15-to-20 per year, with a 50% success rate. The grant revenues made a significant contribution to the department funding. The professor was soon promoted to dean.

'Pair of hands' project finishes: debriefs for process improvements and advice provision.

Tonight, I attended a Melbourne Business School (MBS) talk on the changing investment landscape. In reality, it was a case study and walkthrough of Macquarie Group's online retail trading platform Macquarie Edge, with speaker James Leplaw, head of Direct Investing at Macquarie Direct. The talk was far more than a sales pitch though, due to the Leplaw''s candour and willingness to talk about the decision traps and execution mistakes.

'Pair of hands' work continues.

Subjects during tonight's dumpling dinner at Market St with Ben Eltham and partner Sarah-Jane Woulahan: how Everett M. Rogers' diffusion of innovation theory can be applied to customer demand for dumplings; Pavement's much-anticipated set at the 2010 Golden Plains Festival; what qualities empower an office space to support a team's creativity; if underground emo band Forlorn Gaze would do a hospital tour like Johnny Cash At Folsom Prison (1968); how Ben manages to keep up-to-date on current issues for Crikey and New Matilda; and current projects. Thanks, Ben and SJ, for dinner.