Sitting at a darkened gate in Denver’s International Airport, the late midnight hour did not deter my review of another revision of my PhD proposal. My eyes were blurry, but I resolved to do another read before catching yet another hop to a generic city destination. I would be on the road all week before going to the university. I was tired already, yet it was only Saturday.

Proposal defenses are no laughing matter; it seemed paperwork was required, and presence must be assured. Planning a defense is also quite the setup. The proposal paper should be sent to your committee at least two weeks before the two-hour block is set up. If you haven’t spoken to your committee about your approach, you’re probably in for a rough go. Even if you have, don’t expect a cakewalk.

I had been working on this proposal for the better part of the last year, refining what my third study would entail (parallel mixed methods QUAN-QUAL, but I’m leaving out the juicy problem of practice here and related research questions), tightening the logic and literature, making the case why it matters (if you haven’t answered “so what,” you’ve been lead astray). I did not take chances on this proposal; I worked extensively with my chair, Kalle Lyytinen, on revisions for the better part of six months and then began putting it in front of my committee through small pieces and more targeted reviews.

This was by design: I didn’t just want to pass the proposal. I want to write a good, relevant, and impassioned dissertation. I had read many proposals and many a thesis and they lacked the sort of practitioner-scholar insights that many folks in my cohort and I have. I wanted to do something that offered more than three stitched-together studies with a poor intro and an even thinner conclusion. I wanted to write something with guts and heart, if you will.

My resolve in this regard was reignited after attending the Academy of Management in Chicago a few weeks before. I presented my work at the Management Consulting Division’s Doctoral Consortium, but the experience left me feeling rather dull. In a few cases, the conference had some exciting research and ideas. Still, sadly, the conference was more heavily interspersed with passionless and disconnected-from-reality (let alone theory, honestly) conversations and presentations. I did not want to lose my passion for what I wrote, so I re-wrote my entire proposal motivations on the plane back home.

Once sent out to the committee, the feedback came in various forms, such as paper edits and email comments. I cannot thank my committee enough for that diligence; it improved my dissertation’s overall vision and theory backing.

But that’s not all you have to do.

***

I was coming off a three-flight hop, having met with clients the previous days. My mind was foggy as I hit the ground in Cleveland a little after 7 a.m. I grabbed a car and started the sprint through the mild traffic to the unvisited, where my defense was scheduled for 10 a.m.

Depending on who your committee is, there’s usually a general framework they’ll want you to follow; cheers to my committee member and all around great guy James Gaskin (whose YouTube you should subscribe to) for giving me this before my oral defense of the proposal. My presentation approach was as follows:

1. General Motivation: What is the overarching problem (i.e., what is worsening the human condition that needs to be resolved) prompting this research?
2. Personal Motivation: Why does this problem resonate with you personally; why do you care?
3. Contribution: How will pursuing this research affect business (practice/policy, etc.) and affect you personally in business? Positioning: Have others not already done this research? Someone has done something similar, so what did they miss? Whose work are you building upon?
4. Progress to date: What have you done so far, what did you learn, and how has that path inevitably pointed you to the plan for study 3?
5. What remains: What is the plan for study 3? Why that methodological approach? What can we expect to learn from study 3 that we don’t already know from the prior studies? How does study 3 round out the dissertation and help address that original problem?

It seems like a lot, but this was the easy part. Ask me those questions on any given day, and I will talk your ear off through an afternoon. The trick is, can you do that in less than 30 minutes and make any sense?

That was my task. On a jet-lagged brain. With three years worth of information in my head and scrawled across 89 pages. Somehow, I accomplished this, and I answered my committee’s questions over the following hour or so. I posited theories and methods and contrasted them. I answered and offered approaches for identified gaps. We talked about the good, bad, and ugly.

And I loved every minute of it.

Others had told me that such defenses can be hostile or filled with animosity. I experienced none of this; we had an enlightening conversation with actionable approaches to make updates, changes, and progress forward. For this, I thank my committee immensely, as they made it easy to not only move forward (approved, no changes required) but also gave me action to continue doing the research. I’m told this was because I was well prepared. Case does not lack in this regard; you are always primed and ready to do the lift.

Shortly after passing my proposal, I was bound on a plane back to California. The whirling sound of the engines, as we pushed back from the gate was welcome, lulling me fast to sleep before we ever got off the ground.

Onward to the final defense, February 28, 2025.