A new season of podcast episodes is starting and what better place to kick it off as the world’s largest business and management conference. We are recording this episode at AOM 2025 in beautiful Copenhagen, made possible through a generous invite from Attila Marton from CBS who organized a recording studio for us. Being here amid symposia, professional development workshops, panels, and paper presentations makes us wonder: what does it take to produce great, stimulating, and productive academic discourse? Does it depend on the people that get invited to speak, is it about their ideas, or what else? We sit down with our friend Philip Hukal with whom we share some stories from the events we’ve attended at AOM and we distil a few rules that characterize good intellectual debate: let there be cognitive conflict about the merit of ideas, be bold enough to propose new ideas, show humility for the craft and work of others, and be respectful to your colleagues.

Episode reading list

Kulkarni, M., Mantere, S., Vaara, E., van den Broek, E., Pachidi, S., Glaser, V. L., Gehman, J., Petriglieri, G., Lindebaum, D., Cameron, L. D., Rahman, H. A., Islam, G., & Greenwood, M. (2024). The Future of Research in an Artificial Intelligence-Driven World. Journal of Management Inquiry, 33(3), 207-229.

Brynjolfsson, E., Collis, A., Diewert, W. E., Eggers, F., & Fox, K. J. (2025). GDP-B: Accounting for the Value of New and Free Goods. American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, https://doi.org/10.1257/mac.20210319.

Stelmaszak, M., Wagner, E., & DuPont, N. N. (2024). Recognition in Personal Data: Data Warping, Recognition Concessions, and Social Justice. MIS Quarterly, 48(4), 1611-1636.

Habermas, J. (1984). Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society. Heinemann.

Lehmann, J., Hukal, P., Recker, J., & Tumbas, S. (2025). Layering the Architecture of Digital Product Innovations: Firmware and Adapter Layers. Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 26, https://doi.org/10.17705/1jais.00956.