The reason companies such as Twitter are moving to distributed workforces isn’t to combat future viral outbreaks. It’s because top talent doesn’t always live within commuting distance of a company’s headquarters. And even when the majority of a company’s workforce is tethered to a physical office, most of them don’t want to be there every day. According to “The Remote Work Report,” published by Zapier.com in November 2019, “95 percent of U.S. knowledge workers want to work remotely and 74 percent would be willing to quit a job to do so.” And nearly 60 percent of knowledge workers (those employees whose main capital is information and the flow of information) say that working remotely is “one of the perks they’d most prefer to be offered” by an employer—ranking well above extras like daily free lunch or unlimited vacation time.

That said, companies wouldn’t be able to embrace remote workers without recent innovations in technology that make a remote workforce efficient and effective. From fast and consistent connectivity to improvements in webinar applications such as WebEx and Zoom, the quality of virtual communications has created a viable alternative to travel and led to changes in organizational practices and processes. This, in turn, has led to an increase in virtual employment structures, including the ability to create well-functioning virtual teams of “distributed expertise” that aren’t co-located, explained Anandhi Bharadwaj, vice dean for faculty and research, Goizueta Endowed Chair in Electronic Commerce and professor of information systems & operations management.

But integrating a remote workforce is not without challenges. The move from physically co-located environments to virtual environments can exacerbate or increase conflict. That’s because it’s easier to personalize disagreements when coworkers lack context or can’t interpret the body language of the person they’re communicating with. “Seeing someone’s expression, mannerisms and gestures is a large part of the human aspect that upholds a team’s efforts,” said Sandy Jap, Sarah Beth Brown Professor in Marketing. “It really does make a difference.”

Jap believes the best way to manage potential issues and conflicts is to share expectations regarding the team and the project up front. Sometimes just answering the simple questions of how often, when and how a virtual team will interact can get the team off on the right foot. “Research shows that not setting real, simple expectations can be the downfall,” Jap noted. “People’s assumptions about what those expectations can be are particularly faulty.”

Deconstructing conflict

When conflict does arise, Bharadwaj suggests ascertaining whether the conflict is “task related or personality related. Is it a poor choice of technology or a poor use of that technology?” she said. “You can’t just take the same process and have it work in tech-mediated environments.” If the technology isn’t set up to build team trust, it can be much harder to manage team trust, she added. For example, if some team members are physically gathered in a conference room in one place and other individual team members are participating in the meeting via satellite, the satellite-center employees may not see or understand everything that’s going on in the conference room. This can lead to misunderstanding and conflict. “It takes time to work through these issues to know how to use the technologies effectively from a cost perspective and to feel that the work is productive,” explained Bharadwaj. “Case studies document that this impacts team quality and performance.”

When various groups come together to form a larger virtual team, it’s not uncommon for some members of the team to identify more with their subgroup than with the formal group—especially if team members are located in different cities and/or countries. “Sometimes subgroups can work against each other rather than with each other for the good of the team,” said Jill Perry-Smith, Goizueta Foundation Term Professor of Organization & Management. In such cases, it’s important for the team leader to “create a systematic way of building relationships that brings the team together in a psychological way.”

The ability to identify potential problems within a team is extremely important, and those who lead virtual teams need to act as “social sensitivity managers,” said Perry-Smith. Can the team leader read the people on the team? Can he or she identify those people on the team who aren’t forthcoming about how they’re feeling? When the potential for subgroups to sabotage the formal group exists, Perry-Smith finds it helpful to create space for team members to interact face-to-face and/or have team members from different subgroups work together to solve a particular issue.

It’s also important to have a process for handling conflicts when they do arise. “At what point do we accelerate to another level or have people from outside the team get pulled into this?” asked Jap. Perry-Smith suggested establishing something akin to the
“elephant in the room” process at Kayak.com. At the travel website’s Massachusetts headquarters, there is a dedicated conference room (outfitted with a large, stuffed animal elephant) where employees go to discuss disagreements and work through conflict. “It’s critical to have a process for team members to address problems quickly and preferably one-on-one,” said Perry-Smith. A process that encourages them “to deal with the elephant in the room,” she added.

Enhancing global business

One of the most difficult things Colleen Pritchett 02MBA, president of Aerospace, Americas Hexcel Corporation, has dealt with in her 20-plus year career is turning around a business in financial crisis. Pritchett did so with the help of a virtual team. The experience made her realize how important it is “to assess the situation quickly, formulate and communicate a compelling vision and strategy to move forward and have the courage to make tough decisions quickly”—all while, she explained, “showing genuine care” for members of her team so they could work well together and succeed.

To ensure individual team members were getting what they needed, Pritchett scheduled regular one-on-one calls with team members to check in. She did her best to have the same type of discussions they’d have “if we were in the office together,” she said. Pritchett invited input, asked whether they needed support and listened. “It helped us stay connected. We learned more about one another through each interaction. It built trust,” she added.

Pritchett, who continues to lead a number of virtual teams, finds it useful to make sure there is “a clear agenda” regarding the information to be discussed prior to virtual meetings or calls so that the team can “review and absorb it—especially when English is not someone’s first language,” she said. “Team members come from different functions and different cultural backgrounds, and that diversity of thought will help the team operate more effectively and better represent the diverse needs of our global customer base and business. This open environment and discussion will help show respect for one another and help the team operate more effectively as a virtual team.”

Regardless of whether companies are ready to shift their knowledge-based workforces to virtual team structures, a global pandemic can force them to consider it as a viable alternative. “Meeting face-to-face doesn’t necessarily mean a more productive meeting,” Bharadwaj reminded. Technology gives virtual team members “more opportunities to bring more” to meetings, she said. “It’s all a question of what you’re trying to accomplish and how best to accomplish it.”

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Who do we want to be as a society?

It’s a question that fascinates David Germany 13WEMBA and has inspired a lifelong desire to give something back and to play a part in redressing some of the imbalance in society.

“At a time when the U.S. economy had one of the strongest decades of growth, more than 40% of the population is struggling to make $15 per hour. It begs the question: what’s fair and what’s the right thing to do?”

It’s this small sense of disquiet—an imperative to do good while doing well—that undergirds Germany’s two-decade career in finance, a career that has seen him progress through a number of leadership positions in banking to that of vice president and assistant treasurer with insurance corporation Protective Life. Throughout his professional life—which includes 17 years at Regions Bank—Germany has been instrumental in financing a breadth of projects in his native Alabama, simultaneously satisfying this quant’s need to solve problems through finance while fulfilling the desire to have a positive impact on people’s lives.

In 2019 he took on the position of chairman of the board at Birmingham Airport Authority— a decision, he said, that speaks to his belief in the “little city that could.”

“Birmingham has good bones. This is a city with strong legacy industries in iron and steel production, and we’re at an inflection point,” said Germany. “We’re building the solid infrastructure and transport systems to drive growth and to wrap some innovation and entrepreneurship around our industries. I want to be a part of that—to use my skills to help build that future. My work with the airport authority is another way of giving back to this community.”

Germany’s ties to Alabama are also deeply personal. His grandfather worked for U.S. Steel Corporation in Birmingham for more than 35 years. “I’m proud of what my grandfather stood for. His influence has always inspired me to extend that legacy and to make him proud.”

Germany also takes inspiration for the future from his four-year-old son. “It’s my ambition to build the kind of legacy within my own career that my son can be proud of too.”

A good deal of Germany’s success, he said, is keeping an “open mind” and giving free rein to his instinct for continuous learning and development—that same instinct that brought him to Goizueta to pursue his MBA in 2011.

“I still use all that I learned at Goizueta, from understanding our economy to knowing what it takes to create long-term value and competitive advantage. During my time there, I built a lifelong network. And I experienced a broadening and strengthening of perspective that will last across the entirety of my career.” — Áine Doris

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“The COVID-19 pandemic continues to challenge the business status quo like never before,” said Amelia Schaffner, director of entrepreneurship at Goizueta. “Entrepreneurial resilience in the face of adversity, relentless problem hacking and pivoting to new needs are critical components for companies to not only endure a major economic shift such as this, but also emerge stronger once the pandemic subsides.”

While the United States continues the rolling process of reopening businesses and defining a “new normal,” the pandemic is far from over. “The international community is working together like never before to produce a coronavirus vaccine,” said Elissa Prichep 08MBA, project lead for precision medicine at the World Economic Forum. In her recent article on the forum’s website, she stated, “If a vaccine is developed in the timeline predicted, then people will have a preventative option should COVID-19 recirculate next year. Protection from the virus will save lives and help society return to functioning as normal.”

Prichep noted, “This timeline feels excruciatingly long as the coronavirus pandemic continues to ravage the world around us. But it deserves some context. New technologies combined with international cooperation to fight infectious diseases are enabling faster responses to new disease outbreaks, shaving several years from traditional vaccine development timelines.”

Funding global efforts like vaccine development is a key priority. Jeff Miller 10MBA is senior director of global creative strategy for Snapchat. “Now, people are leaning into the platform, connecting with close friends and family when they can’t be face-to-face,” he said. For World Health Day on April 7, his team created an innovative way to fund the United Nations COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund for the World Health Organization. “We’re encouraging Snapchatters around the world to take action in response to the pandemic
by showing them that every dollar can make a difference. Their loose bills can make real change. We launched the first-ever global donation augmented reality (AR) marker experience on Snapchat to raise funds for hospitals, medical supplies and research and development,” Miller said of the campaign developed in under two weeks in 11 languages across 33 countries. For this ongoing initiative, “With marker technology, Snapchatters can hold bank notes in front of their cameras to trigger AR visualizations of the causes that the fund supports.”

Emergency room doctor Angela Fusaro 01C 17WEMBA cofounded Physician 360, which now operates in 50 states providing convenient, cost-effective and diagnostically accurate care for common medical illnesses such as anemia, urinary tract infection, strep throat and flu. When the coronavirus pandemic took hold, the infrastructure of Physician 360’s direct-to-consumer model was already in place to handle increased demand for virtual medical care. At the onset of the pandemic, the company built a resource database of testing sites for patients who were at risk and needed access to confirmatory testing. Now, an individual who may have been exposed to coronavirus can purchase a consultation through the smart phone app or the website. Working alongside local pharmacies, board-certified physicians will then guide eligible candidates through the process in their state for coronavirus testing if screening indicates they may have the virus. Physician 360 is working to expand the scope of its low-cost and convenient testing capabilities, including COVID-19 antibody testing. “Seeing the overcomplexity and excessive cost in the health system, I want to be part of the solution to these inefficiencies and not just work within a broken system,” Fusaro said. In these medically challenging times, “For people who can’t wait for a doctor’s appointment, or don’t want to be exposed to others’ germs, telemedicine is an innovative solution.”

“Healthcare professionals, scholars and public agencies are creating enormous amounts of data on COVID-19, but it’s highly fragmented,” said Eric Crane 09BBA, chief operating officer and cofounder of Flatfile, which helps companies import and manage data. That’s why his team accelerated the launch of their latest venture, CSV.org, last week in collaboration with scientists from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) as well as technologists at Google and Airtable. Crane explained, “With CSV.org, we’re doing what we do best: aggregating, healing and normalizing data. Only instead of doing this for companies, our goal is to make all public data easily accessible.” The site offers a curated and normalized set of thousands of global metrics free of charge, with an initial focus on COVID-19 data. “We aren’t scientists or journalists, but we can do our part to make those experts’ jobs easier,” he added.

Changing conditions demand swift response from businesses

Factory shutdowns and consumer hoarding may have temporarily impacted the natural flow of our nation’s supply and demand, but businesses are keenly aware of changing customer needs. Arming frontline healthcare workers and patients has taken
top priority across the world as the virus continues to spread. Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) to minimize hazardous and potentially illness-causing exposure is in limited supply, yet Goizueta alumni and the companies they work for are stepping in to quickly change that reality.

INVISTA, a division of Koch Industries, is known for its innovations in the nylon, spandex, polyester and specialty materials industries. Renita Jones Anderson 02EMBA, marketing director, and Daryl Lipscomb 10WEMBA, global sales director, shared news about the company’s responsiveness to COVID-19. “INVISTA’s Kingston, Ontario, manufacturing plant has been able to respond quickly by providing nylon 6,6 fiber for medical isolation gowns in the United States and Canada without a change in our equipment,” Lipscomb noted. “As a key supplier of this fiber to the global airbag industry for nearly 50 years, we are grateful that our products are going into these gowns and helping to protect people in a different way.”

In response to economic challenges faced by the retail sector, Vice President of STAINMASTER Brook Brown 10WEMBA explained, “STAINMASTER brand has quickly developed a simple 3-step process supporting local businesses, allowing them access to corporate-level tools that provide them a way to sell flooring virtually,” she said. “Supported by customer leads driven by the national brand, local retailers are being allowed to keep their storefronts (virtually) open at a time when many other businesses are being forced to shut down.”

Preparing individuals on the front lines to safely protect themselves against COVID-19 has evoked tremendous response across businesses. Linda Burhance 95EMBA, vice president of product development for United States Class I medical device manufacturer The Marena Group, designed a reusable antibacterial non-surgical PPE mask. These masks meet the criteria of the FDA guidance for a Class I medical device to be used by the general public and by healthcare professionals in a healthcare setting under the Emergency Use Authorization Act. The one-size-fits-all devices can be washed without losing effectiveness and can be worn over N95 respirators or on their own. “Many personal protective devices (PPDs) can cause some facial bruising or irritation,” Burhance said. Marena’s proprietary TriFlex fabric has been used in healthcare settings for many years and contains an active silver ingredient with antibacterial properties that is familiar to those in the medical field. “I designed a mask to be breathable and soft against the skin yet still protect the face, nose and mouth against respiratory droplets, germ particles and splashes.”

Also rising to the challenge is Doris Mukangu 17MPH, founder of the Amani Women Center in Clarkston, Georgia, which empowers and provides support to refugees. As an Emory-trained public health professional and now a nonprofit leader, Mukangu specializes in prevention. “I understand very well the importance of taking all preventive measures when it comes to a pandemic like COVID-19. We are currently supplying sewn masks not just to healthcare workers in hospitals like Emory and the Clarkston Community Health Center but also to police forces, public work departments, post office workers and many businesses,” said Mukangu, a graduate of Goizueta’s Start:ME accelerator, a 14-session training program for small business owners. “Masks are also available through the website not only to frontline workers but to the general public as well.”

In addition, the Amani Women Center provides timely information from the Georgia Department of Health to the refugee community. Using social media platforms in languages area refugees can understand, “We have become a trusted voice to provide credible and digestible information from the Georgia Department of Public Health (DPH) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to a community that has linguistic and literacy challenges.” She added, “Refugees are resilient, and they want to give back to a country that has been so welcoming to them.” Our country, struggling with coronavirus on many fronts, “is the country they now call home.”

Editor’s Note: Have you or your company responded to the COVID-19 pandemic or helped to mitigate its impact? Please use the hashtag #EmoryTogether when you share your stories and images and mention us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram. We will periodically share stories on EmoryBusiness.com and social media posts on the myriad ways our alumni are involved in this effort.

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Last December, the Goizueta community suffered the passing of long-time and beloved professor Jim Rosenfeld. As an associate professor of finance, Rosenfeld cared deeply for Goizueta Business School and spent 30 years actively working to build the finance department. “It’s hard to imagine Goizueta without Jim Rosenfeld,” said Kristy Towry, former vice dean, John and Lucy Cook Chair and professor of accounting.

Prior to joining the Goizueta faculty, Rosenfeld taught at the graduate business school at the University of Georgia. He received his PhD from New York University, his MBA from Columbia University and his BA from the Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania.

A consummate researcher, Rosenfeld could always be found hunched over a computer, feverishly writing or investigating new topics. His published works appeared in numerous academic journals including the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, the Journal of Financial Research, Managerial and Decision Economics, The Accounting Review, Financial Management and the Journal of Money, Credit and Banking.

When he wasn’t working, Rosenfeld could be found on the tennis courts or driving around in his sports car. His infectious chuckle will long be remembered.

“He was a major force in our rise in stature over the last four decades,” Towry said. “More importantly, he was a beloved member of the Goizueta Business School family. I’ll miss his ready smile and his gentle soul.” — Patty Pohuski

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Pritchett, who lives in the San Francisco Bay area, became president of Aerospace, Americas for Hexcel in 2018, an advanced composite materials company that makes products for the aerospace and industrial markets. “Our materials go on all the commercial airline planes, helicopters, fighter jets, drones and launchers for satellites going into space,” she said. “The intent is to make them lighter and more fuel efficient.”

And then there are the cool, futuristic applications, such as “flying cars.”

“As cities around the world get more congested, vertical options, including urban air mobility systems such as air taxis, are being developed to take people or cargo from point A to point B,” Pritchett said. “Our Hexcel composite materials will be at the heart of urban air mobility to provide energy-efficient, reliable and cost-competitive transportation vehicles. My daughters are pretty excited about it. As my 11-year-old asks, ‘When can I get one?’”

At Hexcel, Pritchett runs a significant portion of the global company. “The definition of leadership for me is all about service and courage,” she said. “A leader needs to have the courage to take risks, to lead the team and to run the business. A great leader formulates and communicates a compelling vision of the future in a way that helps other people mobilize toward it.”

Her own approach, said Pritchett, is to be transparent and compassionate: “How you have treated people in the past will either pay off or be a detriment. You can’t fake caring, or your employees will know it. They will trust that you’re working for their benefit if you’ve built that trust. They want the straight news.”

Pritchett’s philosophy was honed during the 22 years she spent at DuPont before joining Hexcel. At DuPont, she worked in a variety of leadership roles running global businesses in the U.S. and while based in Asia such as the Electronics and Communications Microcircuit Materials business based in Taiwan, and leading the Asia Pacific Performance Polymers business based in Shanghai, China. She has a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from Pennsylvania State University.

Even in the midst of a busy travel schedule, Pritchett makes time to stop by Goizueta. Earlier this year, she met with school staff and Dean Erika James. Pritchett remembers her time at Goizueta fondly and still stays in contact with classmates.

As the company she leads continues to push boundaries and create new inroads, so too, does Pritchett. She is a big advocate for women in business and is quick to dispel the myth that women in leadership can’t also have a successful home life.

“Some people think women can’t have a family and continue to pursue big roles and big responsibilities, based on a false assumption that their spouse is not willing to help at home and make sacrifices in support of their wife’s career,” she said. “I know a lot of ambitious women whose spouses do support them. My husband, Len Pritchett 08MEMBA, has been a tremendous support to me and our daughters as we have moved all over the world.”

Indeed, when it comes time for family, Pritchett is firm in putting boundaries in place. And, wherever they find themselves in the world, Pritchett’s family has a passion for adventures. “We loved living internationally, and we have continued to explore no matter where we live, spending time hiking, snow skiing, camping, enjoying nature and being outside.” — Mary Loftus

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First, Robin Dittmann is the school’s new chief business, analytics and operations officer (CBAOO).

Dittmann comes to us from the University of Minnesota Law School, where she served mostly recently as chief financial officer. Over the course of her more than 20 years at the law school, Dittmann has acquired invaluable financial and leadership experience, promoting organizational excellence at both the central and academic unit levels. In her new role as CBAOO, Dittmann will oversee the financial planning, technology, facilities and business analytics for Goizueta.

Goizueta also welcomes Reshunda Mahone as senior director of development and assistant dean.

Mahone joins us most recently from Virginia State University, where she was vice president for institutional advancement. She has called Atlanta home before, however, in her previous jobs in annual giving and development at Spelman College and Georgia State University. An active member in the Council for the Advancement & Support of Education (CASE) and their Commission on Philanthropy, the Minority Serving Institution Advisory Board, Mahone has repeatedly demonstrated “a deep commitment to the advancement profession, and has a contagious enthusiasm for the philanthropic arena,” said Dean Erika James. “She is a proven leader who models a collaborative approach, and her expertise will be a tremendous asset to Goizueta.”

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The following students are this year’s crop of Sheth Fellows.

Accounting

• Leo Barcellos
• Jen Choi

Finance

• Jaemin Lee
• Ishitha Kumar
• Jinoug Jeung
• Abinash Pati

ISOM

• Jiayi Liu
• Sokol Tushe

Marketing

• Wooyong Jo

O&M

• Ananya Chatterjee
• Tosen Nwadei

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This spring saw changes in the leadership of the Goizueta Advisory Board (GAB) when Todd Foreman 86BBA, who served as GAB’s chairman for nine years, stepped down. Rebecca Ginzburg 94BBA, a GAB member since September 2016, is the new chair.

Ginzburg, president and chief operating officer at Junto Capital Management LP, considers it an honor to have served Dean Erika James on the advisory board and vows, as GAB chair, to “work hard with new leadership to continue pushing forward on the existing initiatives and those that will come,” she said. “I am passionate for the university and the business school in particular. I owe so much back for the incredible education and opportunities I have been afforded.”

In addition to acting as a resource and mentor to Goizueta Business School leadership, GAB members provide strategic direction and feedback and advocate for the school by increasing outreach and awareness. The board is also charged with driving revenue
and generating philanthropy to ensure Goizueta’s excellence and long-term stability.—Allison Shirreffs

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Tarun Chordia is fascinated by asset pricing and the mechanisms that undergird it. Pricing, he says, is absolutely fundamental to how capitalist economies function.

However, the pricing of securities—be they bonds, stocks, commodities or other assets—can be as perplexing as it is critical. Not least because the basic paradigm of risk and return is frequently turned on its head.

“Most of us understand it like this: the higher the risk, the higher the expected return. But in financial markets, this concept is regularly violated,” says Chordia, R. Howard Dobbs Jr. Chair and Professor in Finance. “We often see prices deviating from our theoretical models. It’s an area I’ve been researching for many years, focusing on what causes these atypical patterns or anomalies in asset pricing. It’s a really complex area, and I’m drawn to it in part because of its very complexity and the intellectual conundrums that it throws out to researchers.”

Most recently, his interest has been focused on high-frequency trading (HFT) in particular and its impact on market efficiency—whether information is absorbed into prices effectively, quickly and accurately. And it’s an area that couldn’t be more relevant. In today’s markets, more than 50 percent of trading is already being powered by computers with the capacity to submit and execute orders in fractions of a second.

Chordia wants to know if there are welfare trade-offs in terms of costs and benefits involved in this kind of trading. Because the costs, he says, are huge.

“Fast trading is super expensive. It’s immensely costly to develop the algorithms, access real-time data feeds and to build the high-speed data networks that connect the trading centers in New York, London, Chicago and other cities. In my research I address a fundamental question: does this type of expensive trading improve welfare? Does it make things better for us? Because the money spent on networks is money that could just as easily be spent elsewhere—on education, schools or hospitals.”

Since the 2008 collapse, the financial world has come under unprecedented scrutiny from the public and the media, but with innovations like HFT reshaping the markets at vast speeds and making it harder to understand who really benefits and how, questions are again being raised about regulation—specifically, whether more regulation of financial markets, high frequency traders in particular, is needed. Academia has an “absolutely central role” here in making sense of all this, says Chordia.

“It’s true that speed confers an advantage to fast traders, and HFT is highly profitable, so understandably there have been a number of market participants who have called for regulating HFTs. However, the academic literature has shown that HFT improves market quality in terms of lower trading costs, lower volatility and improved price discovery.”
Chordia and his colleagues have played a key part in bringing this understanding to light.
“First off, we’ve debunked some of the myths about just how much profit is being made in the HFT environment and about traders making a killing at everyone else’s expense. The profits simply aren’t as high as people suspected.”

This, explains Chordia, is due to competition in the markets.

“Fast trading has become much more competitive in recent years. What we’ve found is that the very mechanisms of this competition squeeze profits, even as the speed of incorporation of information into prices has increased. Profits have declined. So, for now, our prescription is: let competition work its magic in high-frequency markets, as it has in other markets.”

Getting it right sits at the heart of Chordia’s understanding of the role of academia and academics. This, and providing unbiased rigor and understanding of the data, he adds.

“Over the years my colleagues and I have presented papers making real-world contributions that can be used by all kinds of practitioners, from hedge fund managers to regulators. One example is a paper I shared with the Securities and Exchange Commission back in the late ’90s when the tick size—the minimum price increment—was fixed at 6.25 cents. We argued that this tick size was too large, creating an incentive for dealers to make massive profits out of spreads (the gap between the bid and ask price) and hampering liquidity in the market. Shortly thereafter, the tick size declined to 1 cent. So academic research can have genuine real-world impact,” he says.

“In finance, as in other fields, someone has to act as the referee. And as academics, I believe we have a duty to rigor and honesty both in the work that we do—it takes five to seven years to produce a published paper—and in sharing the results of that work with key decision-makers,” he explains. “Our world is only set to become more complex with the explosion of big data, fintech, machine-learning and systemic risk. It’s my belief that academia has a crucial role in understanding the potential of these important new fields. Science has the power to change the way we think and to move our societies and our world forward. Quite simply, it is essential.” — Áine Doris

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Professor Jagdish Sheth, Charles H. Kellstadt Chair in Marketing, is going to need more space in his award case. Over the more than five decades of his distinguished career, he’s been named Marketing Educator of the Year twice, given the Viktor Mataja Medal from the Austrian Research Society in Vienna and received all top four academic awards bestowed by the American Marketing Association, just to name a few. And now, Professor Sheth has been awarded India’s third-highest civilian award, the Padma Bhushan, for literature and education, an award which is the equivalent of the Presidential Medal of Freedom in the United States. He is only one of four Indian Americans among the 140 recipients of this award, which recognizes “Indians who have made exemplary contributions on a global scale and generated national pride.”

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If you haven’t yet met Danielle Rubenstein, you should. In short, she’s delightful. She’s exactly who you hope to meet when you need guidance on big decisions—like your career options. For many years, Rubenstein has sat at the head of alumni career relations, guiding former students through career transitions and helping to facilitate the ever-growing alumni network. She’s now taken on an even bigger role as director of career management for alumni and working professional students, which expanded her purview to current students’ career planning needs.

In her new role, Rubenstein helps others find their footing and begin to shape—or reshape—their futures. She’s just begun the work of bridging those two worlds in ways that will help both groups benefit and connect in meaningful ways.

“My vision for the future is to increase utilization, bringing a greater awareness around our services and expanding our connections,” she said. “We aren’t a placement service, although we do have career fairs and offer an abundance of resources for people to gain the knowledge they need to plan the next step in their careers. But what we do holistically is teach lifelong career management skills.”

So, whether the need comes from working professionals in school or alumni seeking to discover their next fulfilling opportunity, Rubenstein can help. Her team is diverse and offers the type of coaching that helps students and alumni figure out what’s next, what’s possible and how to get there. Virtual appointments provide the flexibility needed for bustling professionals.

“We help people understand who they are, what they want in their next career step and then how to build a roadmap to get there,” Rubenstein said. “We do that through research and exploration, while reminding everyone not to compare themselves to others. Everyone has a different path.”

Rubenstein is keenly aware that her own transition to this leadership role involved the same types of questioning and preparation she advises others on. Understanding this correlation, she said, will only make her more effective.

“It was the opportunity for me to merge my love of working with both alumni and students,” she said. “There are so many synergies that work together. I saw how I could build a bridge between the two populations—they have a lot of overlap in what they need.”

In addition, her own career journey has informed the need for bold moves—something she can now share during her coaching sessions with students and alumni. This job process has “solidified my courage to seize what I want, and I want to help others do the same—to get on the path to their dream job,” Rubenstein said. “To be ready to say yes when opportunity comes knocking.”

Rubenstein keeps her own life lively by spending time with her husband and two teenage sons. She also has a love for animals and rounds out her family with her faithful companions—her dog and bird. She enjoys hiking and soaking up the restorative powers of nature. Reading is also a favorite pastime, and she likes to attend author speaking engagements. “I was really excited to hear Tara Westover speak about her memoir Educated at Emory last year, because I’d just finished it. It was really a fascinating story.” — Jennifer Corbett

Each issue, we select faculty or staff members, current or retired, to “have coffee with” and gather insights and perspective on a topic of interest to alumni and friends of Emory University’s Goizueta Business School. If you have a favorite faculty or staff member you would like to “have coffee with,” please send your suggestion to GBSmag@emory.edu.

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Do we dismiss bad news because we know better?

No one likes getting bad news. But grim tidings can, at least, inform our decisions and help us make better choices, right? Not necessarily, says Diwas KC, associate professor of information systems & operations management. Together with colleagues from UNC and Harvard, KC tested the hypothesis that we sometimes stick to pre-existing ideas even when bad news should reshape our perceptions. They looked at responses from 147,000 cardiologists to a 2016 announcement by the Food and Drug Administration criticizing a type of artery stent. While the doctors were generally less likely to use the stent following the news, it turns out that their views on it were also significantly influenced by their own experience and that of their peers. Not only that, but the more experienced they were, the faster they discounted the bad news over time. The study sheds new light on how we respond to bad news, and how perception and experience drive behavioral bias. Management Science (2019)

Calibration committees lead to better performance assessment

Most employees are dissatisfied with their company’s performance evaluation processes. This is one of the key findings of a new large-scale study conducted by Goizueta’s Karen Sedatole, interim dean and Goizueta Advisory Board Term Professor, in collaboration with the WorldatWork association. That said, there is one evaluation practice that consistently garners favor: calibration committees, which consist of peer supervisors or higher-level managers who assess performance ratings and adjust them to drive greater consistency across the organization. Surveying more than 250 WorldatWork members, Sedatole and colleagues found that 43 percent of organizations had been using calibration committees in recent years. Some 78 percent of the survey respondents reported that calibration committees were effective at reducing bias, while 82 percent said that they boosted consistency. These findings build on Sedatole’s previous research into calibration committees and their potential to attenuate the issues surrounding subjective performance evaluation. “Pay equity and even-handedness remain some of the most critical issues facing organizations,” she says. WorldatWork (2019)

Using customer data to value non-subscription firms

Deciding whether to buy or sell a company has historically boiled down to two things: sales growth and profits. Recently though, customer-based corporate valuation has been gaining traction on Wall Street and elsewhere. For “contractual” firms that operate a customer subscription system, tracking customer loyalty and engagement is relatively straightforward. But most businesses are non-contractual, making it harder to assess customer-based valuation. A new paper by Goizueta’s Dan McCarthy, assistant professor of marketing, addresses this. McCarthy and Peter S. Fader (Wharton) have developed a methodology that overcomes challenges such as unobservable customer churn and highly aggregated data—things that make customer-based valuation hard to assess. Their model crunches publicly available data like latent attrition, repeat purchasing and time-varying spend-per-purchase patterns to give new depths of insight into overall firm valuation. Not only that, says McCarthy, it also “permits external stake-holders to get beneath surface-level metrics like revenues, and to therefore better understand the underlying unit economics of these kinds of businesses.” Journal of Marketing Research (2018)

Racial stigmatization, employee performance and the tie to lower pay for all

Research shows that there is a tie between compensation and diversity: the more black, minority or female workers there are in a team or company, the more likely it is that salaries for everyone in that team or company will be lower. But new research by Erika Hall, assistant professor of organization & management, suggests that other factors like performance can make matters even worse than previously thought. Hall and colleagues ran two industry studies and a field experiment to determine whether performance can exacerbate or alleviate stigmatization. With poor-performing teams, they found that the presence of black coworkers drives even greater stigmatization and, as a consequence, lower salaries for everyone. This is likely because managers penalize a team under the guise of “poor performance,” but in reality are discriminating against a team with black teammates. When the team performed well, employers no longer had a plausible reason for discrimination, so compensation did not suffer. Hall warns that poor performance can mask racial discrimination within organizations’ culture. Moreover, the amplifying effect of poor performance on stigmatization extends to non-black employees: a lose-lose scenario that can lead to white employees distancing themselves from black colleagues to avoid stigmatization by association. Journal of Applied Psychology (2019)

Employees with families are more absorbed in work than single, childless peers

The ideal employee is single and childless—unencumbered by family responsibility and free to focus more on work. It’s a common perception across many sectors, and for people who are married or have children, the negative connotations can impact career advancement. But new research by Jill Perry-Smith, professor of organization & management, turns this idea on its head. Together with Tracy L. Dumas (Ohio State), Perry-Smith has found that employees who have a spouse or children are actually more absorbed in their work than their single, childless colleagues. Surveying 2,000 business school alumni and analyzing employee diaries, they found that family structures and associated after-work activities have a direct tie to how absorbed people actually feel in their work. “We discover that anticipating family chores or responsibilities after work actually reinforces the work mindset rather than distract from it,” says Perry-Smith. “It keeps employees more psychologically immersed in their roles.” The onus is now on organizations to “work harder to understand the diversity of employees’ nonwork lives,” she says. Academy of Management Journal (2018)

Is effective community action a case of going back to school?

Civic action can be hugely effective. From neighborhood watch to youth projects to traffic safety initiatives, civic engagement has the potential to make meaningful differences in communities. But what happens when communities become more diverse over time? Research by Goizueta organization & management faculty Wes Longhofer, Giacomo Negro and Peter Roberts looks at 30 years’ worth of data from UNICEF’s “Trick or Treat” campaign to find out.

They discovered that counties with greater racial or economic heterogeneity experienced declining fundraising performance, likely because of the fragmentation of shared interests and less interaction between diverse groups. Interestingly, they also found that among the different kinds of community organizations involved in sponsoring civic activities, schools significantly outperformed churches and clubs.

As such, schools could be better equipped not only to bring young people from diverse backgrounds together, but also to mobilize their families around a common goal. In light of this, Longhofer, Negro and Roberts urge the research community to adopt
a more general and systemic focus on schools as critical community organizers. Administrative Science Quarterly (2019)

Are recommendation systems skewing consumer choices?

Personalized recommendation systems can take the work out of deciding what to buy in the densely crowded online marketplace. In theory, they’re good for business too—driving loyalty and sales. But it’s not all win-win, according to new research by Associate Professor of Information Systems & Operations Management Jesse Bockstedt. And that’s because computerized recommendation system don’t just reflect consumers’ tastes—they can actually mold them. Bockstedt and colleagues from Carlson (U of Minnesota) and Kelley (Indiana U) ran a series of experiments, assigning random and erroneous recommendation ratings to downloadable songs. For each 1 star increase in ratings, participants were willing to pay up to 17 percent more for the song. And that’s problematic, says Bockstedt. If recommendation engines can manipulate choices this way, there’s the potential for consumers to buy products that are ultimately disappointing or to ignore products they may otherwise have purchased. Not only that, these anomalies can compound over time, as consumer feedback influences future personalized recommendations, creating a vicious cycle that further compromises prediction accuracy. A case of caveat venditor? Information Systems Research (2018)

Incumbents versus new players—the role of “legitimacy” in customer perceptions

What happens to incumbents when new players enter the market? Goizueta’s Özgecan Koçak, associate professor of organization & management, and colleagues have leveraged the recent legalization of recreational cannabis to investigate this. In 2012, Colorado became the first state to green-light cannabis for non-medical use, creating a domino effect across the country. The researchers used data from Weedmaps, a website, to look at how incumbent dispensaries (re)positioned themselves relative to the newcomers. In counties which had not voted for the legalization of recreational cannabis, they found a “sharpening” of identity among medical dispensaries, with customers typically referred to as “patients.” Conversely, in states where voters were in support of legalizing cannabis for non-medical use, the researchers found a “blurring” of medical and recreational identity in response to increasing competition from new dispensaries with recreational licenses. The study provides a useful framework that integrates local communities’ beliefs about the legitimacy of products to show how producers can (re)connect with current and potential customers. Organization Science (2018)

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