Is business school research relevant?

In the world of SSENIUB,  there were islands known as U.N.I.V. ("Univ"s) , short for (largely) Unknown Neighborhood Institutions with Verdant structures.

These leafy islands primarily housed adolescent lives - mostly starry-eyed, 18 - 22 year old saplings that dreamed of becoming trees and 'taking on' the real world. But to grow into grand famous trees, saplings needed watering.

And that, was the most important reason they came to the Univs.

Naturally, given how important watering was at univ's, the wooded campuses started to advertize for the position of Plant-Waterer - to hire humans who could water saplings really well. In fact, adolescents paid a lot of money to find the right Univ's where they could receive water from the right Plant Waterers.

With a touch of pomposity, univ's gave an official title to the job of the Plant Waterer - T.E.A.C.H, short for Tree Enhancers Adept at Circulating H2O.

So, T.E.A.C.H was a very important function at any U.N.I.V.

One day, for some inexplicable reason (plausibly linked to how rich and famous saplings eventually became), these T.E.A.C.H jobs started paying off handsomely.  Suddenly, a lot of people wanted to become Plant Waterers. For the money. Why not? You could make a killing just by watering plants.

Thousands of people claimed, and rightly so, that they could perform T.E.A.C.H jobs at U.N.I.Vs. After all, unless you were egregiously bad, watering plants was not that hard. More importantly, a sincere hard-working person could improve his T.E.A.C.H abilities with a few years of practice. Also, minute differences in T.E.A.C.H abilities did not really matter - everyone agreed that much of sapling growth had to come from within.

That was a period known in U.N.I.V history as the Great Big Dilemma: How do you differentiate one "job candidate" from another, when the actual job (of watering plants) is not rocket science?


Someone came up with a brilliant suggestion. Since watering plants is (obviously) connected to water, why don't we select applicants based on how good they were at swimming in the water!
Never mind that swimming, while related to water, had nothing to do with watering plants. But the univ's were full of clever people. They could always come up with a convoluted justification why good swimmers could also be good at watering plants.

This eureka moment prompted univ's to come up with another officious title for swimming - R.E.S.E.A.R.C., short for Reputational Swimming for Reputational Capital.

Clearly, R.E.S.E.A.R.C. was entirely a reputation game.

The univ's themselves started training programs for the reputation game, solely focused on producing the best divers (Ph.D - Perennially High ranked Diver). Again, never mind that the best swimmers or divers were not necessarily the best at watering plants.

But the lure of swimming, was that, unlike watering plants, it was a skillful activity. Swimming was a differentiator that univ's could use !!

So, even if thousands apply for the job of watering plants , selecting (and more importantly, quantifying) applications based on swimming ability was nice and easy.

This somewhat halted the mad rush of applicants. But the ones eventually hired had exactly a coin-flip's chance of simultaneously being good at T.E.A.C.H, because of its utter lack of correlation with R.E.S.E.A.R.C.

Some smart individuals recognized this problem and started different hiring processes - for the "low skilled" T.E.A.C.H track (where you "deserved" to be paid less) and the "high skilled" R.E.S.E.A.R.C track (where you just had to be paid more).

But that led to another problem! Swimming was inherently not a very useful activity for the trees of the real world. Trees in the real world cared about water and how they could access it. But what wisdom did they receive from the divers and swimmers instead? Sophisticated and mathematically precise ways to do multiple somersaults.

Somehow, it never occured to the swimmers that, maybe, trees didn't care too much about learning how to do a somersault. That was the origin of the now famous phrase in tree language - "yes, but that's only of academic interest".


Some jaded trees that cared about saplings and society cried  "irrelevance!" .

Their voices remain strangulated.