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Continued from previous page
Why All Research Matters
In another situation, Z. John Zhang, associate professor of
marketing, consults with ExxonMobil on their retail pricing
strategy. His work is one factor in Exxon's outstanding recent
performance, including the second-largest quarterly profit
ever for a publicly traded company—$10.49 billion from
July to September 2006 announced on October 26.
"We have a different culture here at Wharton," he said.
"We not only have a passion for research, but we at Wharton
have a passion for making an impact on practice. Practice
infuses our research in terms of what questions you ask
and what directions you go in. A lot of companies look to
Wharton for new ideas and ways of looking at things, and
that includes consulting."
For Zhang, consulting with ExxonMobil is another way
to have a direct impact and see his ideas at work.
"The exchange of information isn't unidirectional," he explained,
"Most of the benefit of working with them is seeing
how complex the real world operations are, and how much
knowledge we still need to see clearly. In essence, it does inspire
a lot of new research questions that are not necessarily
closely related to retail gasoline market.
He continued, "As researchers, we're not really terribly interested
in a particular company doing a particular job—we
are looking for things that are true across industry. If you look
at individual customers, each one behaves in an odd way. But
if you look at an aggregate level, you see what matters to the
firm. There are regularities there."
While the generation of knowledge is itself part of
Wharton's mission in itself, it's also inseparable from the
main pillar: education.
"When you do research, it's like training to be a soldier.
When you do push-ups, will that train you to fight a
war? Probably not, but you build up your muscles, strength
and endurance, and that will help you survive," he said.
"Whenever you do research, it helps you see through complexity
in other settings to come up with better solutions.
Research is always relevant to practice no matter how abstract
it is. People often complain that their professors' research
has no relevance to what they know about business.
They've missed the point. You need the drills in impossible
thinking to push knowledge forward. Research helps you
think clearly."
He thinks that Wharton's MBA and undergraduate students
benefit directly. After all, the applications, metrics, and formulas
that are used in business every day aren't magic—they are the
results of complex research ideas making it into practice. And
those formulas provide only data points, not wisdom.
"Our students get it," he continues. "If you want to be a
leader, you need a grasp of the big picture and to have ideas.
You have to be able to see things differently than other people.
There's not a formula to follow—you have to know
how to think."
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