Polish Business Management: A Contredanse of Theory and Practice

In the early 1990s, when I was spending most of my time teaching and conducting research at the UCLA Anderson School of Management, my dear friend and co-author of numerous publications, Professor Donald P. Cushman from the State University of New York in Albany, wrote to me: “Do not waste your time here, focus on what is happening in Poland, in this one-of-a-kind ‘management laboratory’ developing there at the moment. In order to catch up, Poles will need to absorb the entire acquis of management theory and practice over a very short period of time. It is an unprecedented situation, so go and watch, explain, participate”. I realized that for a researcher interested in management, it was indeed an unparalleled opportunity and one I simply could not miss. The fruit of my observations was the frst book on the business management transformation process in Poland and other countries of “the Socialist bloc” to be published in the U.S. (Koźminski, 1993), followed by numerous other studies and publications (Koźminski, 1998; 2008a; 2008b; 2008c; 2013; Koźminski i Yip, 2000).