Day-To-Day Creativity, and More – Chicago MBA News
Let’s explore some of the most interesting stories that have emerged from Chicago business schools this week.
Putting Creativity to Work – Chicago Booth Magazine
Chicago Booth recently published an article about how entrepreneurs and employees alike create opportunities for creative thinking.
Bay Area online video startup Darby Smart’s Nicole Farb (’09) suggests setting aside “open blocks of time for less structured thinking while brainstorming initial ideas.” She adds, “In my own life, creativity is a journey. I’m often doing it for the process, not the outcome.” She also advocates that part of embracing creativity is “failing fast.”
U.S. Postal Service Marketing and Client Relationship Manager Mauresa Pittman (’10) writes of the challenge involved in distilling the creative process to just a stamp. She writes, “The creative challenge became, how do we sum up one of the most prominent American artists of the 20th century in a pane of 12 stamps. [We also] need to consider how this message could land with different audiences and ask ourselves if we are being mindful of the diverse viewpoints.”
Ted Wright (’00), founder of Atlanta-based word-of-mouth marketing agency Fizz, believes creativity is the result of “data plus will.” He adds, “We start by asking a lot of questions about your company. For us, creativity starts with what the story is that you are trying to communicate to people.”
You can check out the full article here.
Business Students Learn the Meaning of ‘Moralogy’ During Summer Program in Japan – Mendoza Ideas & News
The Notre Dame University Mendoza Business and Culture in Japan course introduced “undergrads to Japan’s cultural and business traditions during four campus class sessions and two weeks on-site in Tokyo.”
Mendoza Associate Teaching Professor of Management & Organization and Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies faculty fellow Jessica McManus Warnell led the 17-member cohort on the trip to understand Japan’s “moralogical” approach to business, which “presents the idea that business can foster a virtue ethic that then makes business better for all stakeholders—customers and clients, employees, managers, and society.”
She writes, “What we were hearing from the companies we visited [in Japan] was that successful business is more about societal impact and employee engagement and customer satisfaction.”
You can read more from the article here.
What Will It Take to Get More Women on Boards? – Kellogg Insight
Northwestern Kellogg surveyed the gender gap that exists within many company boards—19.9 percent of S&P 500 company directors and 14.7 globally—and how to build more momentum to get more women to serve on boards.
The article’s first point involves the consideration of women who happen to be senior VPs or C-level positions other than CEO when companies want to add a female director. “Applying the same qualifying criteria to both male and female directors would increase the pool of executive women who bring talent, experience, and a diverse perspective to board service.”
The article notes that a major part of being considered as a board director involves “honing a value proposition,” which Kellogg’s Women’s Director Development Program has helped almost 800 women understand in order to be better prepared for board opportunities.
The article singles out a story from one high-level executive whose phone did not ring despite “vast experience, incredible skills, and a huge network.”
“When nothing happened, she realized she needed to reach out strategically to an even broader range of people to communicate the value she could bring to particular types of boards and seek their advice. She ultimately secured a seat not only on the board of one company she admired, but a number of others as well.”
Read the rest of the article here.
MIT Examines the Appeal of Lying, and More – Boston News
Let’s explore some of the most interesting stories that have emerged from Boston business schools this week.
When the ‘Lying Demagogue’ is the Authentic Candidate – MIT Sloan Newsroom
One of the major questions in the post-Trump U.S. public discourse is how voters could possibly support a political figure that so brazenly bends the truth at every possible turn. In a new paper published in February’s American Sociological Review, MIT Sloan School of Management professor and deputy dean Ezra Zuckerman Sivan attempts to rationalize the appeal of a lying demagogue:
“When a candidate asserts an obvious untruth especially as part of a general attack on establishment norms, his anti-establishment listeners will pick up on his underlying message that the establishment is illegitimate and, therefore, that candidate will have an ‘authentic’ appeal despite the falsehoods and norm-breaking.”
Read more about Zuckerman Sivan’s research here.
What Most People Get Wrong About Men and Women – Harvard Business Review
The ongoing pay gap dialogue has inspired both men and women to step up and pressure the organizations that employ them to commit more aggressively to gender parity. In a recent Harvard Business Review article, HBS researchers Catherine H. Tinsley and Robin J. Ely explore the harmful rhetoric that drives many of these well-meaning initiatives and offer a four-step alternative approach for people to:
1) Question the narrative
2) Generate a plausible alternative explanation
3) Change the context and assess the results
4) Promote continual learning.
“The solution to women’s lagged advancement is not to fix women or their managers but to fix the conditions that undermine women and reinforce gender stereotypes. By taking an inquisitive, evidence-based approach to understanding behavior, companies can not only address gender disparities but also cultivate a learning orientation and a culture that gives all employees the opportunity to reach their full potential.”
“When people are less embedded, they are also less aware of opportunities for stretch assignments and promotions, and their supervisors may be in the dark about their ambitions. But when women fail to “lean in” and seek growth opportunities, it is easy to assume that they lack the confidence to do so—not that they lack pertinent information.” – Catherine H. Tinsley and Robin J. Ely
You can check out the full article here.
Unity in Diversity: The Babson Latin American Forum – Babson Blog
The Babson College F.W. Olin Graduate School of Business recently hosted its Latin American Forum, which featured esteemed guest speaker and Open English founder Andres Moreno, whose online platform teaches English, and Santa Teresa rum CEO Alberto Vollmer.
Moreno and Vollmer both used their lectures as an opportunity to examine how entrepreneurship can co-exist with social impact. Vollmer discussed the Alcatraz Rugby Project, a recognized program of social reintegration for young people with behavioral problems. Moreno chose to focus on how his delivers the best product and service to its consumers.
You read a more in-depth survey of the Babson Latin American Forum here.
Researchers at Columbia Business School Address MBA Gender Gap
Over the last few years, top business schools across the world have worked toward gender parity in their MBA programs—with considerable progress. Many MBA programs now admit more than 30 percent women, and a growing number of leading schools top the 40-percent mark. But amid these strides, another problem has emerged: an academic performance gap between male and female students. Recently, researchers at Columbia Business School (CBS) dug into the gender performance gap issue to understand why it happens and how to fix it.
After completing multiple empirical studies, including a survey of MBA students and a review of performance data, the researchers found that both students’ background and their behavior in class have the biggest impact on the gender performance gap. Further, the researchers found that the performance difference was most evident in technically focused classes, such as accounting and finance, and less so in socially oriented courses, such as leadership and marketing.
According to Michael Morris, CBS Leadership Professor and one of the study’s authors, the findings shed “new light” on the gender performance gap at top business schools. “But more importantly, they offer business school leaders directions for policies to effectively redress the grade gap,” he continued in a press release.
The researchers found that one of the main reasons behind the performance gap in technically oriented classes was the students’ background. After examining reported interests in both admissions applications and career counseling inventories, the researchers found that female students are more inclined toward the “poet” interest profile, while male students are more inclined toward the “quant.” For top MBA programs, this means that from the first day of class, male and female students come in with different interests, aptitudes, and experiences that will need to be addressed in order to break gender norms.
Gender norms were also a problem when it came to behavior in the MBA program. Researchers found that female students were typically less assertive, which hindered their learning in technical courses.
“Our research shows that female students far too often hold back and hesitate to ask the kinds of questions that would help them better master technical concepts and procedures, perhaps because it is inconsistent with the established gender norms linking men with technical ability. This has a profound effect on their overall achievement in MBA classes,” said author Aaron Wallen, Executive Director of the Management Division at Columbia’s School of Professional Studies and a former CBS lecturer.
To truly close the gender gap does not simply mean enrolling 50 percent female students, the researchers noted. Instead, top MBA programs also need to do the following three things:
- Sponsor programs that bring in more technically oriented female candidates.
- Conduct outreach to STEM undergraduate programs.
- Reduce required work experience to enroll younger students.
They also recommended including a training program for both faculty and students to teach them the skills for eliciting and managing participation in the classroom and other work settings.
To learn more about the research study—authored by CBS Professors Wallen, Morris, and Jackson G. Lu and INSEAD Professor Beth A. Devine—click here.
This article has been edited and republished with permissions from Clear Admit.
