Fox professor publishes new book that provides career guidance for new business academics
Starting a new job can pose a myriad of challenges. From learning to navigate the workplace to understanding expectations and goals, settling in a new place often takes some time. For those new to the world of academia, this rings true as well.
Anthony Di Benedetto, professor of marketing at the Fox School, wants to help.
His new book, “How to Fast-Track Your Academic Career: A Guide for Mid-Career Scholars,” co-authored by Adam Lindgreen, John Nicholson and Joëlle Vanhamme, provides guidance to tackle challenges faced by new professors as they start and advance in their careers.
“Our book addresses topics relating to generating high-potential ideas, working in research groups, collaborating with colleagues from other departments or industries, writing and revising research papers that editors and reviewers like and transforming research results into classroom experiences for students,” says Di Benedetto.
In conversation, Di Benedetto discusses how his book came to be.
“As a doctoral student, I learned so much about the writing and reviewing process from my supervisor, Roger Calantone, with whom I worked extensively for many years after graduation,” he says. “I then gained years of experience as a journal editor, first at the Journal of Product Innovation Management, then at Industrial Marketing Management.”
While teaching a course on creating and disseminating business knowledge for the Executive DBA program at the Fox School, Di Benedetto had the idea to create a set of editorials that would provide junior faculty information about what to do and which mistakes to avoid when writing and publishing journal articles.
“The book started as a series of editorials in Industrial Marketing Management (IMM) by Adam Lindgreen and myself – we are the co-editors of the journal,” says Di Benedetto. “Our original idea was to publish editorials offering guidance in writing and revising manuscripts and writing grant proposals for early or mid-career business academics. ”
He explains that their vision for the book expanded when they started working with collaborators, like Peter LaPlaca, former editor of IMM, and other leading IMM authors.
“We identified more career challenges faced by business academics, such as undertaking cross-disciplinary research, collaborating with industry practitioners, supervising doctoral students, transforming research into teaching and finding a work-life balance,” notes Di Benedetto.
They then collected these editorials, added more topics and invited leading colleagues to collaborate. The result was a book that addressed challenges faced by business academics presently.
It was important for Di Benedetto and his co-authors to consult with a multitude of experts.
He explains, “For the book to have such a wide scope, and to cover so many different career-related topics, finding the best-contributing partners was essential. For example, for the chapter on grant writing, I worked with Vinod Venkatraman of the marketing department here at the Fox School who had recently been awarded a sizable research grant.”
He also credits his colleagues from the Industrial Marketing and Purchasing Group for contributing to the chapter about building research groups.
Di Benedetto says that one important lesson he learned as he worked on his book was to pay it forward.
“I was fortunate that (my mentor) Roger had so much experience in writing and publishing, which I learned very early in my career,” he says. “I realize I was lucky to have had this exposure.
“This book passes this information on to the next generation of business academics.”