Business leaders today are juggling more than ever, from creating diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs to managing conflict in highly-charged environments. The brunt of the pandemic may be behind us, but its effects continue to ripple deep throughout today’s workplace. Even before the death of George Floyd and the start of the Black Lives Matter movement became catalysts for change, business executives were starting to recognize the case for…
A few years ago, Tuck assistant professor Sonya Mishra was talking with her research colleagues, Charlotte Townsend and Laura Kray, about the Forbes rankings of the “Most Powerful People” and the “Most Powerful Women.” They noticed something intriguing. An assistant professor of business administration at Tuck, Sonya Mishra teaches Leading Diverse Organizations in the MBA program. The individuals on the “Most Powerful People” list consisted mostly of men, and these…
Wheelan was recently named faculty director of Tuck’s Center for Business, Government, and Society whose mission is to “empower business leaders to navigate immediate stakeholder interests and the broader, deeply intertwined interests of both governments and society to help build a more sustainable global economy and contribute to the common good.” With a background that spans academia, journalism, and public policy, Wheelan brings a unique perspective to his role at…
One of the things Michelle Kinch loves about teaching operations to MBA students is the chance to dispel some of the myths around it. Many students begin with the belief that operations management is about mathematical models, data analytics and spreadsheets—and dominated by manufacturing contexts. To Kinch, an assistant professor of business administration at Tuck, the name “operations” obscures its true nature: a value creation system with humans at its…
It’s an easy mistake to make. When you look at a graph of the number of public firms in the U.S. between 1980 and 2020, and you see a 50 percent decline after 1996, it’s natural to think that companies don’t see the benefit of going public in the U.S. It causes one to question the competitiveness of the U.S. economy and stock markets. Tuck Centennial Professor of Finance, Bjorn…
As climate change accelerates and wreaks more and more havoc across the globe, a crucial question is how we can increase the share of power produced by renewables while simultaneously reducing demands on the electrical grid. Policymakers have an important role to play in this transition, but businesses arguably have a bigger one. In 2022, the U.S. produced 4.24 trillion kilowatt hours of electricity, which resulted in $488 billion in…
There’s a famous quote from a 1982 Frank and Earnest cartoon that says a lot about gender equity in just a few words. Commenting on a poster for a Fred Astaire film festival, the woman in the cartoon says to her male companions, “Sure he was great, but don’t forget that Ginger Rogers did everything he did … backwards and in high heels.” The implication, which has been borne out…
Who really controls public companies? Some might say it’s the CEO and other top executives. Others may argue it’s the board of directors. Still others may mention the shareholders, to whom the C-suite occupants must ultimately answer, via the value of the firm’s shares. All those answers are correct, but there’s one cohort missing, and it has become increasingly influential over the past decade: activist shareholders. Tuck professor Mark DesJardine’s…
According to a recent study reported in USA Today, Americans these days spend nearly $500 per year on tipping at restaurants and bars. More than one-quarter of those surveyed for the study said they often felt forced to tip more than they wanted to, which isn’t surprising given that tipping percentages have steadily increased over the last hundred years. And yet, tipping is a completely voluntary behavior. Moreover, even though…
If you fill it up today, the government wants you to plug it in tomorrow. Erin Mansur is dean for faculty and research and the Revers Professor of Business Administration at Tuck. Mansur’s research and teaching focus on energy economics and the nuances of energy transition. To reduce carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels, Congress in 2021 and 2022 enacted a host of laws designed to turbocharge the transition…
Getting a credit card these days is, for most people, no big deal. But it wasn’t always so easy or so common. In the 1950s and ’60s, credit cards were mainly used by wealthy people who wanted to pay for goods and services at department stores and restaurants without carrying cash. At the time, women could not get a credit card without a male cosigner. That began to change in…
One of the defining transformations of the 20th century was globalization. Since the end of World War II, countries and cultures have become more interconnected than ever before, through free trade agreements, technology, multi-national corporations, and the creation of structures such as the IMF and the World Trade Organization. Trade economists liked to think that the benefits of globalization—economic growth, more consumer choice, lower prices—had made it unassailable. But cracks…
A windowpane is just a piece of glass. But embed it with sensors and Internet-of-Things (IoT) technology, and it can automatically get darker to block the sun, and display images as if it were a computer screen. A tractor is just a machine of brute force. But endow it with cameras, GPS computing, and machine learning, and it can self-navigate a 2,000-acre farm while differentiating a weed from a crop…
Since the introduction of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, we have been amazed that almost every conversation, whether business or casual, has turned to speculation and opining about the future of generative AI (G-AI). by Alva Taylor and Patrick Wheeler Views have ranged from a prediction of an AI-dominated Skynet/Terminator world where humans barely exist, to a future similar to Disney’s Wall-E Sky Liner world where humans grow so dependent on technology that…
Growing up, Gail Ayala Taylor would have heard about business from her father, Reginald “Ricky” Ayala. To Spartans fans, Ayala was the legendary #7 basketball player for Michigan State; to others, he was a distinguished businessman and CEO in Detroit known for his more than 30-year career in hospital administration. But what if you didn’t grow up in a household where you heard about business and corporate life at the…
When Mark DesJardine was working on his Ph.D., in 2015, he studied a few of the organizations that certify lumber harvested from responsibly managed forests. As he dug into the details, he noticed a troubling pattern. A CFA charterholder, Tuck professor Mark DesJardine teaches the MBA elective Social Entrepreneurship. He is focused on issues related to strategy, sustainability, and finance, with a specific focus on shareholder activism. The independent, not-for-profit…
The problem of personal debt is as old as the existence of money. In ancient Rome, people who were unable to pay their debts became temporary slaves to their creditors, ordered to toil on their land until the overdue sum was paid back. In 19th-century-England, broke Britons were sent to debtors’ prisons, miserable dungeon-like edifices, until their family or friends bailed them out. Associate Professor Felipe Severino teaches Corporate Finance…
In our day-to-day work at the Tuck Initiative on Workplace Inclusion, we speak with a lot of leaders across industries about just how much the modern workplace has changed in the past few years. Whether it’s a conversation about return-to-office policies, “quiet quitting,” the impact of generative AI, or employee burnout, it’s clear that leaders are navigating a lot that’s new. But for us, we’re deeply invested in a truly…
The son of a German immigrant, Tuck associate professor Dan Feiler grew up in inner-city Pittsburgh and attended a Christian elementary school, a middle school with a Jewish plurality, and a high school that was majority Black. He frequently navigated varied and sometimes unfamiliar social environments, observing social cues and trying to make sense of norms new-to-him. Quickly he learned that cultural stereotypes didn’t offer much wisdom, as he experienced a…
In 2006, the two largest U.S.-based manufacturers of laundry appliances became one: Whirlpool purchased its close competitor Maytag for $1.4 billion, outbidding the Chinese company, Haier. Before the merger could go through, the Department of Justice reviewed the proposal to determine if it would run afoul of the Sherman Antitrust Act and the subsequent Supreme Court caselaw that interpreted it. The main question the DoJ needed to answer was whether…
Marketing professorNailya Ordabayeva has long been interested in the role social and economic hierarchies play in consumption behaviors. Tuck professor Nailya Ordabayeva teaches the core marketing course in the Tuck MBA program. She also teaches Marketing Principles for Creating Value and Building Your Personal Brand in custom Tuck Executive Education programs for organizations. She admits it probably goes back to her childhood in Kazakhstan, where the fall of the Soviet…
Hart Posen is not shy about his privileged childhood, but only because it vanished with no warning. He grew up in Winnipeg, Canada, in a family of entrepreneurs. His father, who was raised in an orphanage, founded a rental car company in the early 1970s that became a large international firm. “By the time I was a young teenager, my family was very wealthy,” Posen says. In the early 1980s,…
Did you ever wonder who makes those store brand “toaster pastries” that look just like Pop Tarts but cost a whole lot less? Kusum Ailawadi, the Charles Jordan 1911, TU'12 Professor of Marketing, teaches Marketing Research and Multichannel Route-to-Market Strategy in the Tuck MBA program. It’s a fair question. The identity of the manufacturers of “private label” brands—such as Kirkland Signature (sold at Costco), Great Value (Walmart), and Good &…
Did you ever wonder what happens to your old smartphone when you trade it in for a new one? At Tuck, Laurens Debo, professor of operations management, teaches the Management of Service Operations elective in the MBA program. Most likely, it’s sold by your cell phone carrier to a phone remanufacturer who refurbishes it and sells it to a price-sensitive consumer who doesn’t want to buy a new one. The…
As climate change accelerates and wreaks more and more havoc across the globe, a crucial question is how we can increase the share of power produced by renewables while simultaneously reducing demands on the electrical grid. Policymakers have an important role to play in this transition, but businesses arguably have a bigger one. In 2022, the U.S. produced 4.24 trillion kilowatt hours of electricity, which resulted in $488 billion in…
When the world was a simpler place, most manufacturers did their work in-house and in their home country. This included product design and innovation; making inputs and assembling them; and sales, marketing, and distribution. In the early 1900s, for example, Ford made almost all of its 15 million Model Ts at its Highland Park plant, in Michigan. Tuck professor Teresa Fort teaches the core MBA microeconomics course and a seminar…
The technical term for platforms like AirBnb and Task Rabbit is “peer-to-peer exchanges,” but most people know them as part of the sharing economy. The sharing economy, or that part of commerce where individuals share their resources with others for a fee, has been around for thousands of years. Tuck professor Nailya Ordabayeva teaches the core marketing course in the Tuck MBA program. She also teaches Marketing Principles for Creating…
If you’ve browsed the Internet recently, you’ve probably noticed a significant uptick in the number of video advertisements popping up. Your eyes are not deceiving you. In the past five years, the online video ad industry has grown from $24 billion to $74 billion in size, and now video ads make up almost a third of all digital advertising. What’s behind this rapid surge? The theory goes that video ads…
It is well documented that women suffer disadvantages in the labor market due to motherhood and gender stereotypes. The “motherhood penalty,” for example, causes mothers to be perceived as having lower competence and commitment, which in turn leads to lower likelihood of hiring and promotion, and lower recommended salaries, as compared to non-mothers and men. A new professor in Tuck’s Organizational Behavior group, Julia Melin teaches Managing Organizations as well…
When Mark DesJardine was working on his Ph.D., in 2015, he studied a few of the organizations that certify lumber harvested from responsibly managed forests. As he dug into the details, he noticed a troubling pattern. A CFA charterholder, Tuck professor Mark DesJardine teaches the MBA elective Social Entrepreneurship. He is focused on issues related to strategy, sustainability, and finance, with a specific focus on shareholder activism. The independent, not-for-profit…
Marketing today looks nothing like it did in the 1960s, the start of “The Golden Age of Advertising,” when television gave brands new opportunities to connect with audiences. by Betsy Vereckey Technology has transformed the space, whether that’s machine learning algorithms that can pick the perfect image or curated social media accounts that can attract followers. New ways of collecting and using consumers’ data has marketing executives taking out some…
The technical term for platforms like AirBnb and Task Rabbit is “peer-to-peer exchanges,” but most people know them as part of the sharing economy. The sharing economy, or that part of commerce where individuals share their resources with others for a fee, has been around for thousands of years. Tuck professor Nailya Ordabayeva teaches the core marketing course in the Tuck MBA program. She also teaches Marketing Principles for Creating…
When the world was a simpler place, most manufacturers did their work in-house and in their home country. This included product design and innovation; making inputs and assembling them; and sales, marketing, and distribution. In the early 1900s, for example, Ford made almost all of its 15 million Model Ts at its Highland Park plant, in Michigan. Tuck professor Teresa Fort teaches the core MBA microeconomics course and a seminar…
This past May, the New York Times reported that the U.S. Preventative Services Task Force changed the age at which it says women should start getting regular mammograms to detect breast cancer. Since 2009, the task force had recommended periodic breast cancer screenings for women 50 and over. The new recommendation lowered the age to 40. Tuck professor Raghav Singal’s research focuses on analytics in a mix of marketplaces, including…
Tuck associate professor Lauren Grewal wouldn’t say she was destined to become an academic, yet her odds of following that career path were better than fifty-fifty. Both of her parents have been marketing professors, and Grewal has fond memories of being in their classrooms as a kid and thinking the college students were so cool. by Kirk Kardashian When she herself became a college student, at Brandeis, the influence of…
Conversation is an integral part of everyday life, anchoring all sorts of interactions, from mundane daily planning with one’s partner to collaborative work meetings to jury deliberations. Research has shown that even brief conversations can play an influential role in society, such as by creating support for anti-discrimination laws, or influencing voting behavior, and these effects can spread throughout social networks. by Kirk Kardashian But does conversation actually change…
One of the most venerable ways brands have urged customers to buy their goods is through in-store price promotions. You know these promotions well. You see them when you walk through the door of the supermarket and spot a coupon for $1.00 off a box of Cheerios. For decades, brands have been relying on these price promotions to boost their sales. And the evidence shows that it works: In the…
Did you ever wonder what happens to your old smartphone when you trade it in for a new one? by Kirk Kardashian Most likely, it’s sold by your cell phone carrier to a phone remanufacturer who refurbishes it and sells it to a price-sensitive consumer who doesn’t want to buy a new one. The market for used phones is large and growing fast. Globally, the secondhand phone market is worth…
Ever since the United Nations started publishing population figures, about 75 years ago, the top of the tables has been boringly the same: China at #1, India at #2. But last week, the UN declared that a historic change was imminent: that India’s population was expected to reach 1,425,775,850 in a matter of days, which meant it would match—and then surpass—China’s population. by Matthew J. Slaughter and Matthew Rees The…