ABSTRACT
For the first 20 years of my academic career, I was repeatedly discouraged from engaging with practitioners and from doing research that might be relevant to them. When I started at London Business School I was told by my fellow PhD students that I was ‘just a consultant’. When I joined the faculty at Oxford I learnt to stay quiet about my ‘external work’. When I became Professor at Bayes (then Cass) Business School, my line manager told me to “stop wasting your time” engaging with practitioners, and to focus exclusively on producing publications in topquality academic journals.
