PhD Confidential

I have added a page to document my first research project.

These are the potential research questions I am considering for dissertation – - – Yes, I’m being asked to identify them very early in the process! So, please feel free to post comments on these topics. I’d like to know if you think they’re worthwhile questions, whether they’ve already garnered too much research attention, and any thoughts you have on the particular topics…….

Update (10/11/2007): I have now gone through my new student orientation and had two weeks of my Doctoral Competencies (DOCS) class and have had an opportunity to revise a few of my questions. I’ll put my revisions and comments in this blue color to highlight the changes.

Topic Area: Spirituality in the Organization

Do organizations have a soul? I find this question of interest because if organizations do have a soul or spiritual identity, we can find out if companies who have “soul-aligned” their strategies perform better than those that do not. Do companies that soul-align their strategies treat their employees better and engage them more? If the answers to these questions are “yes,” we can then discover ways to help organizations align their spiritual identity with their mission, products, services, ethics, employment practices, etc. My faculty advisor suggested I also explore the impact of the legal structure of corporations based on governmental regulations and how that affects the organization’s soul. For example, in the EU, there are laws that mandate 6 weeks of vacation per year. In the US, each state has different laws regarding Worker’s Compensation…

• Can organizations have self-awareness? If the answer to this question “yes,” then the next questions are:a) Which organizations have self-awareness (explore corporations, non-profits, governments and other organization types)?

• Does anything distinguish self-aware organizations from non-self-aware organizations (profitability, market penetration, best practices, best place to be an employee, large endowments, or the largest socio-political impact),

• Is there a difference between a self-aware organization and self-aware leaders of the organization? What is the “tipping point” for numbers of self-aware leaders within an organization to create a self-aware organization?

With the answer to these questions, we can help C-level executives and other types of organization leaders find ways, through self-awareness, to transform their organizations and achieve their missions

I would like to study corporate senior executives who are experiencing a spiritual void because they have somehow ‘lost themselves’ along the road to success. I want to find out when this occurs during people’s careers, why this happens, and the impact of this state of being on people’s lives (health, family, career, happiness). Then I would look at people who do have a strong spiritual life (I would want to study people of a wide variety of spiritual paths) and ask the same questions, compare and make some conclusions that would add to leadership development theories and disciplines. I used this topic for my first DOCS paper. I reframed the question to the following: Why do executives lose a part of themselves along the road to success and how does this experience impact the lives and careers of their employees? I would like to explore this to find out why this happens and how it impacts the lives and careers of their employees in order to raise leaders to a new level of leadership. (3/7/2008) This topic is related to “executive derailment” – see my blog post on this topic.

Balance between head and heart in musicians – what can business and government leaders learn from musicians?

Topic Area: Leadership

I would like to explore the topic of building leadership teams; taking into account balancing talents, competencies, and styles and answer the question: what really makes a team “gel?” There may be many other factors in making a team gel and I would like to explore current theories, test them and prove/disprove them or add one of my own. The answer to this question can benefit teams of all types. The key would be to look at this question from a multi-dimensional perspective in terms of psychological and organizational theories and frameworks). I don’t believe there is any one model that completely answers this question, though a lot of work has already been done in this field.

Can we learn about organizational dynamics and leadership from ensembles of musicians?

The intimacy between members of a string quartet – moving together in perfect synchronization

Brain function during music making in small ensembles – is there an alignment of brain energy patterns when playing music together? How does this translate to high functioning teams?

Ken Wilbur’s “lower left quadrant” characteristics of his AQAL (All Quadrants, All Levels) Integral Theory (see the Integral Institute website) as applied to leadership competencies would be an interesting study to find out:

• Do these types of leaders exist and what are they doing?
• What impact do these leaders have on the world, the organizations they lead and the people who they lead?
• How do we encourage development of these characteristics in adolescents?

Studying Spiral Dynamics (see one of these two websites http://www.spiraldynamics.org/ or http://www.spiraldynamics.net/ ) – “Tier 2” leaders’ characteristics as applied to leadership competencies to find out if:

• What are these types of leaders are doing?
• What impact do these leaders have on the world, the organizations they lead and the people who they lead?
• How do we encourage development of these characteristics in adolescents?

Topic Area: Communication methods and dynamics

What is the impact of “Web 2.0” technologies on communication? Email, bulletin boards, and forums are passé. My daughter, who is in middle school does her homework while five IM sessions are going on simultaneously, using Bebo (a young-age alternative to MySpace), text messaging on her cell phone, and talking on our land line. Yet, she gets her homework done and gets good grades. I lead a teen group whose members never read the emails I send to them about the activity schedule. I need to send a text message if I want to reach them. How will children growing up now and using these technologies, communication channels and techniques adapt to the work world in five to ten years? A better question is how will organizations adapt to this generation of workers? The answers to these questions will help individuals with their career choices and will help companies with models and methods to attract and retain talent.

How are organizations incorporating these technologies today? Will these technologies change the operating models of current companies? How will established organizations compete with totally new types of organizations and operating models that are born from Web 2.0?

Topic Area: Workforce Dynamics

What will be the values, perspective and culture in the work-force of the future? How will that affect the way organizations of the future function? How will organizations of the future recruit, reward and retain talent? The answer to this question will help us understand how organizations need to adapt to these characteristics and what practices organizations need to eliminate or implement.

Topic Area: Women’s Impact on the world

Do women have the answer to solving the challenges of the third world? Are there specific competencies that are either culturally or intrinsically part of women’s psyche that provide easier progress toward solving the types of challenges faced by the third world? I would like to investigate programs such as The Hunger Project, which focus on empowering people (and especially women) to be self-reliant. With the answers to these questions, we can improve the success and increase the global impact of these programs.