PowerBlog Review: Management Professor Notes

Editor's note: This is the eighteenth in our popular weekly series of PowerBlog Reviews of other weblogs...





The Management Professor Notes weblog is published by Sandy Piderit.



Want to guess what Sandy does for a living?



She is a management professor, at the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University. As she notes on her blog, she works in the Frank Gehry-designed Peter B. Lewis Building on the Case campus in Cleveland, Ohio, USA. (Watch the video of this astounding building here).



Sandy teaches organizational behavior at Weatherhead to undergraduate, MBA and PhD level students.



Sandy started her blog as a way "to share information with current and former students and as a way for former students to keep me up to date about what they're doing." In her blog she often speaks directly to her students, sometimes about course assignments, sometimes about University affairs, sometimes about business and life.



Using her blog as a teaching tool is a worthy objective in its own right. I find the teaching aspect unique and quite interesting in its own right, even though I am not one of Sandy's students.



But there's far more to this blog than a teaching tool.



One of the things I like best about it is the way it pushes the envelope of new ideas for balancing work and life -- and new ideas for shaping how we work. These are issues of great importance to entrepreneurs, small businesses and large corporations. Take, for instance, a recent post in which Sandy speaks about the universality of the life/work balance issue, but points out how people just don't seem to connect their own circumstances with the issue:

I'm so frustrated with the response I get when I say that I'm interested in talking about work-family issues. The young and mid-career women with children are interested, but it's rare for anyone else to stay engaged with me for long. And I want to do more than address people in the same life situation as me -- I also want to do something that's relevant for and helpful to baby boomers who are taking care of their aging parents, and seasoned employees who want to gradually shift into a new career (rather than quitting their full-time job immediately and then struggling to build a new career), and artists who want to work more than 40 hours a week for 8 months, and then not at all for 4.... but those people don't hear themselves when I talk about work-family or work-life issues.

I first learned about Management Professor Notes sometime last year. I started visiting regularly and came to appreciate Sandy's insights and her very personalized way of speaking directly to her readers.



The Power: The Power of the Management Professor Notes weblog is in the unique way it is being used as a teaching tool for business students (both those in Sandy's classes and those of us, like me, who are lifelong students). And in the way it confronts and addresses life/work issues that affect us all, including small business owners and entrepreneurs -- all in a very personalized way, speaking directly to readers.