What I Didn't Learn in Business School

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We have known each other for over fifteen years. During much of that time, we wanted to write something together—something that combined Jay’s largely academic career with Trish’s academic, consulting, and practice interests. Over the years, we came up with several proposals. Colleagues and publishers were encouraging, but we were never satisfied with our ideas, and nothing developed.

Until Vienna.

At a Strategic Management Society meeting in Vienna, we began talking about why we weren’t satisfied with the book ideas we had tossed around. It wasn’t, we concluded, that they were bad. Most of them could probably have been turned into reasonable books. But we weren’t satisfied with them for at least two reasons.

First, we felt constrained ...