Penn Professors on Writing in Management

Professor Mauro Guillen

About the Professor

Professor Guillen is the Dr. Felix Zandman Professor of International Management. He is also Director of the Lauder Institute. His current research deals with the internationalization of the firm, and with the impact of globalization on patterns of organization and on the diffusion of innovations.

For more about Dr. Guillen, please visit his Wharton Faculty Page.

Personal Writing Process

Professor Guillen approaches writing in management using a "broad to specific" approach. He develops a main idea first, and then gradually adds the relevant and necessary details to his paper.

“I figure out what argument I want to make as I write. Then I make all sorts of iterations. You know you have to, in the end, have a product and you know you have different components, and so you don't necessarily start with page one. Sometimes you start with something in the middle and then you work your way backwards. And so you have these different pieces and at some point put them together, and then you start seeing whether it works or not. It's pretty much assembly work.”

“After that, I start sharing my work with people, get feedback, and make further changes. And then when you send it out for publication, even after it has been accepted, the publisher has a copy editor, and the copy editor wants a certain style. The number of things you need to change is enormous.”

“If the project involves large scale data collection, then I would say the writing comes a little bit later. But often when I'm in the field, interviewing people and collecting data, I actually start writing. The writing doesn't necessarily come at the end, but it doesn't come at the very beginning either."

Genres of Writing

Professor Guillen mainly writes articles for academic journals, as well as op-ed pieces.