Elio Vera interviews Oren Kaplan

Elio Vera interviews Oren Kaplan

Article Type: Executive corner From: Cross Cultural Management, Volume 20, Issue 4

Oren Kaplan worked for many years as a Senior Consultant in areas of decision making, management development, organizational behaviour, marketing research, and some additional aspects that relate between management and business to psychology. He is currently the Dean of the School of Business Administration at the College of Management, Israel, which is the largest in Israel with about 5,000 both undergraduate and graduate MBA students. Oren is a Professor of Psychology and Business Administration, a licensed clinical psychologist and an expert in Marketing and Economics. He has graduated five academic degrees in these fields. His professional experience was always divided between academia, business, and psychotherapy. In education – he has joint the College of Management in 1990 and fulfilled several managerial roles in the School of Business Administration. His teaching expertise is in management and business psychology, which is also a title of a MBA program that he developed and managed in the last ten years. His main scientific research area is learning, attention, and cognition.

In psychology he practiced in Tel Aviv Central Hospital for five years in a Psychiatric Department, expertized in anxiety disorders and especially in PTSD. In the last few years his research and interest focused on resilience and stress management. Some of his publications:

An edited book in marketing research: Kaplan, O. and Editor (2003), “Investigators Speak”: Market Research and Its Applications in the Israeli Market, Globes, Rishon LeZion (a second extended edition: 2008), (in Hebrew).

Kaplan, O., Nutkevitch, A., Tzadok, M. and Judith, L. (2012), “Learning from experience and the experience of learning in an academic setting”, in Aram, E., Nutkevitch, A. and Baxter, R. (Eds.), Adaptation and Innovation: Theory, Design and Role-Taking in Group Relations Conferences and their Applications, Karnac Books, London.

Kaplan, O. (2011), “Authentic happiness – version 2.0”, Odyssey, Vol. 13, pp. 30-37 (in Hebrew).

Kaplan, O. and Lubow, R.E. (2011), “Ignoring irrelevant stimuli in latent inhibition and Stroop paradigms: the effects of schizotypy and gender”, Psychiatry Research, Vol. 186, pp. 40-45.

Lubow, E.R., Kaplan, O. and Manor, I. (2012), “Latent inhibition in ADHD adults on and off medication: a preliminary study”, Journal of Attention Disorders (published online before print, June).

Elio Vera: which was your experience to maintain the global culture in your role of leader, to whom people look at for guidance on behaviours and norms?

Oren Kaplan: as a new Dean of a business school it was my role to explore and define a vision about the future of the academia and its necessity to adjust its traditional individualistic culture to the interactive sharing culture of the twenty-first century. This is crucial especially in our days in which we all still pay the price of the 2008 global crisis that was stem mainly from a global managerial attitude and culture that were biased extremely and greedily towards the benefit of the individual with blindness to sustainability and the benefit of the society, or at least to the organization as a whole.

Naturally there are still obstacles and resistance to these transformation processes, especially because we are not yet sure whether we have found the correct model and path. However, I do feel that most of our stake holders, especially students, faculty, and industry partners, are now deeper engaged with this vision and are willing to explore it with us.

The whole process is dependent on leadership and modeling of the good citizenship in of our organization. In any department of the school where managers were determined to push things forward, changes were launched and affected immediately academic performance and satisfaction rates, for example, social learning projects which reduced significantly students’ course failure. However, as in any organizational change process, it is a matter of both, top-down leadership, and bottom-up commitment and engagement. Our learning center was titled “Learning HUB” and we feel now that it is becoming the heart and core of the school. It is located physically in the center of the school building, thus infusing energy and spread around our perception of the “academy of the future”. We would like it to be advanced and technological, but also humanistic and strives for relationships between people, which is the base for any business, so much the more for an educational business school.

Elio Vera: which are the intercultural gaps in your context that created a problem that you are now affording?

Oren Kaplan: as a local Israeli academic institute the issue of language and nationality is less prominent. We are developing now our international center, so I assume that these issues would become much more relevant to us in the near future.

I think that the academic world, including ourselves at the College of Management of course, is currently facing tremendous cross-culture challenges that have to do with the core of its existence – the “school learning culture”, and its relations to the “internet culture”. We observe and recognize big gaps between skills of individual students and faculty regarding the internet, which create a new source of diversity in the organization. For instance, in a recent blog-system based distance learning course that I gave in the college I was surprised to find out that less students than I have expected were experienced in using web 2.0 applications. For example, some of them experienced difficulties in writing a blog and in understanding its differential nature compared to the class’s paper submission system and to traditional in-class discussions culture, especially regarding its open publicity nature which creates and affected by social network. In one case, for example, one of the participant students asked us to remove his post from the course blog because when people searched him on http://google.com, this was the first results they got. He could not predict such an impact on his social and professional life when he has originally wrote the post (as neither we could have imagined), but this is part of the internet “facebook-like” culture that should be taught and be considered today. Maybe this was the best lesson this student got from his studies in the academia, certainly not less than his formal theoretical studies.

Elio Vera: how the forms and ways of interaction and communication between the different cultural groups are currently developing?

Oren Kaplan: the internet broke the multinational boundaries that ruled the traditional world. Therefore, we experience today virtual teams that collaborate from distance places, but we pay also some prices for using this form of communication between people, that previously would interface through face2face discussions and meetings. Recently I drove two children to a party. They sat in the back seat of the car and communicated between them in silence by texting each through their smartphones. Such new forms of communication have costs and benefits. From the positive side, writing a text to someone, as well as receiving personal letters, messages, and texts in general, may generate intimacy – we can think about the “snail mail” and how happy we were in the old days to receive a letter. Today it contains mainly bills and advertisements, because personal correspondence is done mainly by digital methods. However, traditional communication was mainly oral, and the current email culture creates also splitting and alienation between people. For example; imagine a member of a virtual team that gets upset and write something nasty to his/her partners. In such circumstances there are currently less opportunities for dialogue. If they were sitting in the same local place they would probably meet, see each other’s body language and find ways to reduce the conflict. Unfortunately the current email system is like the old walkie-talkies – you can either talk or hear, but fail to switch quickly between these modalities. I see today much and too much e-mail conflicts in my organization and in general. Future virtual team communication would probably be more mutual, either by chat modes or video conference. However, at the present time most people still have difficulties in engaging such modules – people fear of losing control and ownership on knowledge, and even phobic and suspicious regarding of the unfamiliar exposure mode, especially regarding video conference which raises “stage fright”.

Elio Vera: does in your institution exist an intercultural reality that has a significant impact in determining its performance and the achievement of the desired results?

Oren Kaplan: I would like to refer to the most prominent current global cross-cultural challenge in my view, that has to do with culture of the “real” world versus the culture of the virtual cyberspace – the internet, both in its practical aspect and in its value and social aspect. As mentioned above, our core business as an academic institute is “learning”. We are currently facing a transition from traditional “individualistic learning” of class-teacher-pencil, to the internet interactive and sharing type of learning which is very different.

Traditional educational practice favours an individualistic, objectivist approach in which learning is viewed as the student’s “acquisition” of ownership of knowledge and capabilities. Even when students work in teams, their final goal focuses mainly on them as individuals and on their personal achievements, which consequently turns into an anti-team learning process. It happens because the individual must compete on its personal rating in the distribution of grades against the other members of the class. The “internet learning” is characterised by an opposite culture – by cooperation. The winner is not the one who gets the highest grade because he/she could keep the cards close to the chest, but actually the one who shares materials and is “liked” by others. For achieving rates in Google you must be unique but also should have relationships with others – exactly the opposite way around compared to the traditional class setting where sharing homework is actually forbidden.

Elio Vera: has this new situation generated new kinds of conflicts?

Oren Kaplan: one of the strongest conflicts which I experience in our organization, both with students and faculty, is manifested strongly in distance learning courses. There you can see how the traditional culture takes over the internet culture and inhibits learning. For example, in a Facebook class system, people would share their knowledge with a sense of generosity, it is a socialist or at least a community state of mind system in which people are urged to contributing and interacting with each other as much as they can, and taking for themselves as much as they need, but most importantly, in a win-win situation where no-one is lacked from this give and take culture. The Wikipedia, for example, is such a project where people, including many of our students and faculty, contribute their time in order to create a common intellectual database of knowledge. Unfortunately, when it comes to their-own formal learning in class, everything is changed. We try to encourage our faculty and students to use Wiki systems in their courses, but we see that it is the competition culture of zero-sum-game that rules their behaviour. Their generosity in sharing is shrinking significantly and they would strive to receiving knowledge in order to gain comparative and competitive advantage within the class.

Elio Vera: and what about the reactions of the faculty?

Oren Kaplan: the faculty share similar dilemmas, for example in their willingness to share their class computerized presentations, on which they worked so hard own their copy-rights. “Why should they share it with no rewards”? In the same manner, they have a limited readiness for being recorded in class and broadcast their knowledge in http://youtube.com and other massive media channels where we share today our “Learning-HUB” classes. It is quite clear that sharing of such materials could enrich students and society, but what is there for the individual lecturer?

Base on my personal and organizational experience I know that as much as the lecturers share more of their presentations and clips, they become more famous and appreciated by their environment and stake holders. This is of course an important reward. Nevertheless, there are also prices and threats. Such an open system requires constant and augmented effort for renewal course material; it results in enhanced exposure, which may raise their own anxiety and “stage fright” as well as criticism from outside about their content and lecturing skills. However, from our experience up to now the benefit of shared learning was incredible both for students and faculty.

In the last year we have been developing an open free4use portal for students that included an open source library of filmed classes, an extensive section for publishing class notes, team learning in both virtual and physical frameworks, and a “News Agency” blog system that keeps everyone updated about the events in the school.

The filmed lectures are distributed online in http://youtube.com so students can watch classes that they miss or in which they find some difficulties and would like to watch them again. Two students from each class type their class-notes and upload them to the blog. The name of the blog is “Bizi”, which has a double meaning of being busy and studying Business. Many of our materials appear now on the first result pages of Google, so students from other institutes can locate and see them and use them freely for their own learning. As a business person I am also aware for the benefits that the above processes have on our reputation and on applicants’ decision to choose our institute for study. This is, of course, the win-win CSR and sustainability vision that we try to implement both in our educational role in a business school and in our internal-managerial role of the school itself.

Elio Vera: finally, which is the main issue concerning organization and team work?

Oren Kaplan: I see this cross-culture conflict between individualistic and social learning as the main challenge of the future, in our institute and in the education system as a whole, and not only in the context of the internet and the implementation of new technologies.

The key for success in business is team work. A main difficulty in organizations today is how to preserve organizational learning. But how can we expect “team work”, “learning organization”, and “sharing”, from employees that were educated, from an early stage, in schools that asked them to avoid any sharing of learning in order to compete with their classmates on ranking, and even punished them on sharing knowledge, if they did so, in the final exam?

The internet sharing culture is therefore an opportunity for transformation in students’ attitude which may enhance social and sustainability awareness in the business world and in general.

Some links to the above mentioned portals (in Hebrew):

• Bizi – the school’s “news agency” – http://bizi.colman.ac.il

• Bizlearn – a blog for class notes and broadcasted classes – http://bizlearn.colman.ac.il

• Biznovate – the blog of the Entrepreneurship Center – http://biznovate.colman.ac.il