I truly value research--a determined and objective effort to figure out what works, and why. In theory, academic institutions are the ideal places for research to happen.

In practice, I'm not sure that's true. There's merit to the case-study approach, for example, but when B-school folks are still studying the L'Eggs case, long after L'Eggs stopped using the plastic-egg packaging, you have to figure there's a certain lack of institutional curiosity.

Any institution, any organization, even one as loose as Wikipedia, spend some of its energy on negotiation, structure, and so on. (That's why the Wikipedia talk pages are probably ten times the size of the actual articles.) Institutions as they grow end up with more and more of that infra-connectivity. It allows them to (occasionally) apply tremendous force, like mass production; but it also burdens them with history and precedent. Those aren't unmitigated drawbacks, but they're not unmixed blessings, either.