Aaron Anderson - Director at San Francisco State University, Executive MBA Program

Me In Three

My ambition is to invert the paradigm and bring frame breaking change to higher education operations. Simply because it's been done this way for so long doesn't mean it should be done this way tomorrow.
I'm passionate about practicing what we research. In other words, I don't think it's enough to study change or innovation. We have a unique opportunity as thought leaders and managers to apply what we learn and experiment with our own operations
My academic role models start with Karl Weick and flow from there to those working (Jane Dutton, Kim Cameron, etc...) in the new branch of organizational studies called Positive Organizational Science because it bridges the gaps between disciplines.

myMIX

Exorbitant Executive Salaries = Resources Wasted On Those Who Don't Need Them

I've always admired CEOs who forgo multimillion dollar salary payments, like Jobs at Apple, but if you drill into the pay-scales at the top companies, you can see that executive compensation has,... Read more

Barrier by Aaron Anderson of San Francisco State University, Executive MBA Program on April 28, 2011 3 Comments

When Success Leads to Failure: Is the way we teach and shape leaders fundamentally broken?

Essentially, because the MBA industry has been teaching leadership and proclaiming to provide satisfactory leadership education and training for a great long while doesn't mean that what we do is... Read more

Barrier by Aaron Anderson of San Francisco State University, Executive MBA Program on October 26, 2010 12 Comments

Management By Inclusion: Which comes first, high quality leadership or high quality management?

Management as an occupation is a distraction to real leadership. Think of the one person you have had in your career that you admired most as a leader. What did she or he do that... Read more

Hack by Aaron Anderson of San Francisco State University, Executive MBA Program on June 22, 2011 0 Comments

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle - The Bureaucratic Tear-Down & Assembling the Infrastructure Anew

The trouble with instigating, supporting and empowering communities of passion (CoP) is that the bureaucracies we created to establish organizations and make them successful, particularly... Read more

Hack by Aaron Anderson of San Francisco State University, Executive MBA Program on June 22, 2011 3 Comments

Zero-sum budgeting leaves little incentive for colleges and university employees to create effective and efficient work flows

Zero-sum budgeting has long been the practice for university & college operations, particularly in the public sector. Essentially, when the city, county, and state governments are... Read more

Barrier by Aaron Anderson of San Francisco State University, Executive MBA Program on April 28, 2011 2 Comments

Dreaming for a Differing Form of Graduate Business Education - Learning The Theoretical Side of Business While Building One

My dream for the College of Business here at SF State University, is to develop a truly new format of graduate business education where we create businesses as a fundamental aspect of a cohort-based... Read more

Hack by Aaron Anderson of San Francisco State University, Executive MBA Program on October 1, 2010 22 Comments

The Way We Train Ph.D.s Drapes A Large, Cold, Wet Blanket Over Our Ability to Innovate Higher Education Infrastructure

Expecting a group of highly educated, culturally fixed Ph.Ds who are excellent researchers to run their own operation may have been fine 80 years ago when educational operations were run, staffed,... Read more

Barrier by Aaron Anderson of San Francisco State University, Executive MBA Program on September 3, 2010 6 Comments

Faculty Free Agency - Unhinging Learning From The Traditional Physical Campus

One of the challenges of faculty work is that, while there are large number of great faculty members out there, access to these faculty members is limited to physical presence in the classroom;... Read more

Hack by Aaron Anderson of San Francisco State University, Executive MBA Program on June 4, 2010 4 Comments

Fixing Tenure as it's clearly broken as a means of ensuring a high quality work force at many colleges

This is a very raw idea, but in my view, one of the things that is clearly holding academia back from a clear aggressive approach to developing new knowlege and advancing innovaion is this notion of... Read more

Hack by Aaron Anderson of San Francisco State University, Executive MBA Program on May 28, 2010 9 Comments

The Accidental Intersection of Industries = Where Organizational Change May Offer An Exponential ROI

I was meeting with a friend at a local company, discussing the clogged arteries of their relatively old operation. He was asking for some advice about how to foster real change that may envelop the... Read more

Hack by Aaron Anderson of San Francisco State University, Executive MBA Program on March 17, 2011 1 Comments