2002 Presidential Address: A Dream for the Academy

Abstract

president of the Academy and to invite me to run for the position. I told him I would make a decision about whether or not to accept the nomination the same way I make most serious decisions. That is, I would have a dream about it and work with the dream, and then, depending on how the work with the dream came out, either accept the nomination or not. I realize that working with dreams probably is not the primary way many of us in the Academy make decisions. However, this approach had worked effectively for me in the past, so it seemed worth trying. Sure enough, a couple of nights later I dreamed that I went shopping for shoes with Deborah Ancona (Figure 1), who is a professor of management at MIT's Sloan School of Management. The shoe store we were going to was up on the roof of a tall apartment building (Figure 2). And this apartment building, in turn, was next to an even larger warehouse owned by the parents of some of my students (Figure 3). I was sure this shoe store would not have shoes that