Oin a theeratishun now!

The ANZMAC conference in Dunedin, New Zealand, was a lot better than expected. I arrived a couple of days earlier to attend the Doctoral Colloquium with one of my PhD students, Jannie Adamsen. Jannie found it all really helpful to meet with other Doctoral candidates, potential examiners and professors who may be able to offer advise. It was fun for me too. Good to see how other candidates tackle their problems and how other supervisors manage. Some students were doing trivial rubbish, some were trying to solve all ultimate questions at once, and some were doing stuff that could be really useful.

And It was really gratifying to not hear a single mention of the "five chapters model" for a PhD - a rigid template approach that seems to me is designed for witless students, and supervisors with zero abstract thinking skills.

The good people at CENGAGE (was Thomson Learning) had set up a big display featuring the new Marketing Research text book I've written with Steve Ward (Lead) and Ben Lowe. It looks like we've succeeded in gaining quite a few new adoptions for the text too.

My two papers were well received. One even won the Best Paper award in the Marketing Theory stream. That was quite a surprise and quite a buzz. The paper was on the application of Chaos/Complexity theory in modelling Word of Mouth processes - evidence perhaps that time-wasting and fiddling about on a computer can come of something.