Columbia Bizcast

Leadership lessons from Jon Snow, Ned Stark, and Professor Bruce Craven. Professor Craven's book, Win or Die: Leadership Secrets from Game of Thrones, offers a trove of leadership lessons for managing groups and implementing change. In this episode of Columbia Bizcast, Bruce Craven, a professor in the Business School’s Executive Education program and director of the School’s Advanced Management Program, addresses the leadership takeaways from this mega-hit series.

“Whatever the big social problem is, I’d like to believe that business people are leading that charge and not just waiting for politics,” Hubbard says in his second appearance on the podcast. With the US government recently emerging from a record-long shutdown, Dean Glenn Hubbard can sound as exasperated as the next person with what he describes as a “feckless” political system. Which is why resilient business leaders are all the more necessary in today’s economic environment, Hubbard says in this episode of Columbia Bizcast. “Whether the issue of the day is climate change, the way we deal with training programs for the less skilled, or whatever the big social problem is, I’d like to believe that business people are leading that charge and not just waiting for politics,” says the Columbia Business School dean. In the podcast’s third season, Hubbard talks about what he’ll miss most about being dean after he steps down on June 30 and why he’s so optimistic about the future for today’s MBAs, despite the political morass. No stranger to Washington, D.C., the dean also gives his take on today’s divided government. “To me, the whole issue of a shutdown is crazy,” says Hubbard, who served as deputy assistant secretary in the Treasury Department under George H. W. Bush and as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to George W. Bush. “Obviously, in any negotiation, neither side gets 100 percent of what it wants, rarely in life does that happen, but to me this is a failure of government and both major political parties.”

What makes an idea go viral, a song become a hit, or a startup turn into a stock-listed powerhouse? It often happens, according to Assistant Professor Michael Mauskapf, because of an optimal mix of oldness and newness. Be it a Billboard No. 1 or a blockbuster business idea, the concept catches on because it’s similar enough to be recognizable but different enough to be edgy. “If your goal is commercial success and widespread adoption, you don’t want to be radically different,” Mauskapf says in this episode of Columbia Bizcast, which delves into his widely cited research paper into what makes pop music popular. Featured in the Economist, New York Post, and Quartz, along with Ideas at Work, the paper dissects the sonic attributes of six decades of songs from the Billboard Hot 100 to answer the question, “What makes a hit?” “There’s a trade-off between being similar and being different,” says Mauskapf, who is himself an orchestral trumpeter with dual doctorates in management and musicology; he teaches the MBA course Foundations of Entrepreneurship, an overview of the concepts and skills needed for both entrepreneurs and those who want to act entrepreneurially. “Novel is a necessary but not sufficient condition for being innovative.”

Developing a successful organizational strategy isn’t easy, especially in an unpredictable business climate. Navigating a shifting landscape requires leaders to abandon pre-conceived notions and think differently, according to Rita Gunther McGrath, a professor in the Business School’s Executive Education program. A globally recognized expert on innovation and growth strategy, McGrath argues that to maintain a competitive advantage in times of change, organizations must protect their key resource — personnel. “One of the few sources of advantage left is going to be that core group of people who carry the culture, who carry the norms, who are the secret sauce of the place,” McGrath says in this episode of Columbia Bizcast, which highlights the critical importance for leaders to create a culture where all employees feel safe. “All leaders need to create psychological safety, need to communicate up and down the organization, need to be able to see what’s going on out there, need to be able to hear uncomfortable information and not lash out at the person bringing it and so forth,” says McGrath. “If you think about it, organizations would benefit by that style of leadership becoming more prevalent.”

“Engage,” says the president and CEO of education nonprofit organization Children’s Aid. “Don't sit on the sidelines.” Child homelessness is at a record high in New York City, with one in 10 students in public schools living in temporary housing. Phoebe Boyer ’93 is on the front-line working to prevent these children from falling through society’s cracks. As president and CEO of Children’s Aid, one of the nation’s oldest and largest nonprofits serving children, Boyer is responsible for leading a team of more than 1,200 employees who provide health, education, and wellness services to New York City’s needy and at-risk youths. “Kids who live in poverty, it’s through no fault of their own,” says Boyer, who studied nonprofit management at the Business School and earned the Joanne Martin Academic Award for Public and Nonprofit Management upon graduation. “With the right supports they can achieve anything, and that’s been the motivator, I think, for my entire career.” In this episode of Columbia Bizcast, Boyer discusses her important work in overseeing an organization with 45 citywide sites that provide a gamut of children’s services, from adoption programs to summer camps to after-school education. As the first female CEO of Children’s Aid — a role she took on in 2014 — Boyer has become something of a role model for both her staff and the many single mothers and young women that her organization works with daily. “We are in the opportunity business,” says Boyer. “Our kids, because of the realities of living in poverty, they often face many barriers to the opportunities that I think other people take for granted, whether it’s educational opportunities or opportunities to have high-quality healthcare. Our kids need those opportunities, and that’s what we’re providing them with.”

Any hospital patient basically wants two things: to get well and to get out. Jing Dong is helping that happen faster. An assistant professor in the division of Decision, Risk, and Operations, Dong is at the forefront of research into improving hospitals’ operational and procedural efficiencies, from lowering admittance wait-times to speeding up discharges. “I still see a lot of exciting things to do in the healthcare domain,” Dong tells Columbia Bizcast. “I’m helping hospitals identify the costs of a lot of the operational procedures they’re running and then helping them to say, ‘Okay, if I realize there is a cost and benefit to these procedures, what would be the best way of balancing this?’” In this episode, Dong shares how her parents encouraged her to study math when she was growing up in mainland China and how now, at the Business School, she has elevated her research by partnering with professors from across the divisions. The proliferation of data and analytics is transforming the way businesses operate, she says, which is allowing leaders to make more quantitative-driven decisions. “My research horizon has also been broadened since I came here,” Dong says of joining the Business School. “It has simply improved my whole decision-making process a lot.”

Through the startup Iluméxico, this graduate is bringing solar power to Mexicans who live off the grid. One in seven people worldwide lacks access to electricity, including some 3 million people in Manuel Wiechers’ home country of Mexico. But he’s slowly changing that. Through his startup Iluméxico, Wiechers has installed 13,000 solar power systems servicing 58,000 people in the deepest recesses of rural Mexico, including to homes only available by boat, donkey, and day-long trek. And now, with training from the Business School’s 13-month Entrepreneurship and Competitiveness in Latin America (ECLA) program, which Wiechers completed in 2017, he is eyeing even more ambitious goals: To bring electricity to 50,000 homes by 2020 and to light up all of Mexico by 2025. On this episode of Columbia Bizcast, the Mexico City-native talks about why he launched Iluméxico in 2010, the challenges to convincing Mexicans to move away from pollutive diesel generators, and how he overhauled his company’s operations during the ECLA program with mentorship from senior lecturer Alonso Martinez. “He worked with us for five months on developing our key initiatives for operational excellence,” says Wiechers, whose business restructuring became the basis for a new Columbia CaseWorks study on supply chain strategy. “We formalized, standardized, and structured them in a much more efficient manner. That allowed us to be prepared for growth [and] get a very quick second investment round and boost what we were doing.” A former Ashoka fellow, finalist for the Unilever Sustainable Living Young Entrepreneurs Awards, and participant in the Endeavor entrepreneurship program, Wiechers has also been featured in Forbes and Ideas and Insights. Iluméxico is a certified B Corporation, a designation for social responsibility and environmental sustainability. “I had more opportunities than the average Mexicans,” says Wiechers. “I knew I had to give back.”

The startup Eat Offbeat turns refugees into chefs who share their homeland’s cuisines. It all began with a food craving. A native of Lebanon, Wissam Kahi ’04 had been living in New York City for more than a decade when he and his sister, Manal Kahi SIPA ’15, discovered a gaping hole in the US food market: the hummus was sub-par. Using their Syrian grandmother’s recipe, they made their own hummus, shared it with friends to great reception, and immediately saw the commercial appeal of bringing home-cooked international cuisine to New Yorkers. The siblings soon launched the catering company Eat Offbeat with startup funding from the Center for Social Ventures at Columbia. Their business not only meets a consumer demand for authentic cultural dishes, but also has a social mission to integrate refugees from Syria and other countries by hiring them as chefs to share their homeland’s recipes. “I’m having a hard time imagining how something like this could have happened without [my Business School] background,” says Wissam, nodding to his foundational experience at Columbia. “At the end of the day, what will make the customer come back is because they really love the food and they found something different and super tasty and high quality,” he says. “They may come to us first because they think, ‘Okay. There's a social mission there. Hey, we should try out this company and support refugees.’ They will not come back unless the food is amazing.”

Why would a pro golfer want an MBA? On this episode of Columbia Bizcast, Anna Rawson ’15 talks about her road to the Business School after winning a national golf championship at the University of Southern California and playing three years on the LPGA Tour. She combined her prowess on the pitch and her management skills learned from Columbia to transition to the business side of sports as marketing director for equipment company Parsons Xtreme Golf. More recently, Rawson co-founded the company SeedLyfe, which makes superfood supplements for women. A native of Australia and the daughter of a professional Australian football player, Rawson says she’s brought lessons from the links to her post-MBA career. “At any point, you could have a hole-in-one,” she says. “It’s a good metaphor for life. You never know when something good is going to start happening. You have to just stick to your routine and stick to what you’re doing, and just have faith that it will work out.”

“Good speeches, as a rule, generally push a single idea,” says the former speechwriter for the Obama Administration. When the Democratic National Committee needed a volunteer speechwriter in 2012, Ryan Jacobs ’19 was quick to put up his hand. The gig soon turned into a full-time job as a speechwriter within the Obama Administration. “I was an incredibly minor, minor, minor character in this administration,” Jacobs says. “If the Obama Administration was a movie, I’d be like extra No. 1,846. But I was there. And it’s a privilege to be there. You sort of feel like you’re in the middle of something big.” On this episode of Columbia Bizcast, Jacobs talks about how his career in speechwriting started with emulating a character from TV drama The West Wing and led to traveling around the country as chief speechwriter for former President Obama’s secretary of transportation. Jacobs also explains why he wanted to learn “the language of business” from Columbia Business School. Now working toward his Executive MBA degree as a cross-country commuter based in Seattle, Jacobs is a senior speechwriter for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. “Good speeches, as a rule, generally push a single idea,” says Jacobs. “Bad speeches, as a rule, are like kitchen-sink speeches. Speeches that try to placate everybody. By saying everything, they say nothing.”

For a Broadway performer, a vocal cord injury can be devastating. For Halle Morse ’20, who starred in the mega-hit Mamma Mia!, a battle with pseudocysts was motivation to reassess her career and pursue a Columbia MBA with the goal of leading a nationally recognized theater. “To produce at such a high level requires a lot more intimate knowledge of the business world,” says Morse, who attended the University of Cincinnati’s award-winning College-Conservatory of Music. In the third season premiere of Columbia Bizcast, the first-year MBA candidate talks about her love for theater and how she plans to use her MBA to become one of the first executive directors of color for a regional theater. In addition to attending business school full time, Morse is currently the assistant director for the new rock musical Jagged Little Pill, which debuted this year at the American Repertory Theater in Boston.

Growing up in a low-income household in Orange County had a big impact on the life work of Kesha Cash '10; she recalls using food stamps to buy groceries and scavenging for spare change from the couch cushions to make ends meet. Fast-forward to Columbia Business School, where she concentrated on social impact investing: upon graduating, she founded the minority-focused initiative Jalia Ventures, and then in 2013 she founded the lower-income-focused Impact America Fund, where she is currently the general partner. “I’m glad I attended business school as an older student, applying with a very clear vision in mind as to why I wanted to attend business school and what I wanted to get out of it,” she says. In this episode, Cash talks about finding her identity (6:44), leaving Wall Street (19:05), earning an MBA (25:45), starting Impact America Fund (32:20), and investing in lower-income communities (43:00). It’s all part of her mission today to transform the economic livelihoods of marginalized communities in America. “I really do feel like my purpose here is to figure out how to give more people access to upward mobility,” says Cash, who was named by Essence magazine in 2017 as one of 50 Black Women Founders to Watch.

Not many people can say their life was changed by a whale. Years before even thinking about Columbia Business School, Clare Murray ’17 was on a family whale-watching trip when she bumped into the chief financial officer of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. At the time, Murray was an undergraduate majoring in art history. But the chance encounter pushed her in a new direction. “It was really memorable and transformative for me because it was the first time that I recognized that there’s this combination of finance and art management,” she says. “I thought, ‘I’m going to follow her track and go the more traditional route of finance and then build a skill set that I could then use at a museum potentially at a later point.’” With that in mind, the native New Yorker joined Goldman Sachs and then BlackRock, soon transitioning to focus on sustainable investing. It happened to be just as the niche market was going mainstream. From 2012 to 2016, the portfolio of sustainable assets in the U.S. surged by 135 percent to $8.7 trillion. While at BlackRock, Murray also began taking the subway uptown on weekends to earn her Executive MBA. Upon graduating a year ago, she moved to Sydney to work in sustainable investing with LeagFrog, a private equity firm that targets socially responsible investments in Asia and Africa. She’s since been named to Forbes’ 30 Under 30 Asia list. In this episode, Murray explains the trends driving impact investing, gives an insider’s view of what the sector is all about, and highlights how Columbia Business School deepened her understanding of the field. “Every investment has an impact,” she says, “it's just positive or negative. So for me, I really wanted to work in sustainable investing to create products that had the financial return side where then institutions were able to invest and then also where it's doing good for society.”

In a graduation-themed episode, Matt Wilson ’18 discusses his journey to and through Columbia Business School: as a New Jersey kid who loved the creative freedom of punk rock to working in counter-terrorism and homeland security after 9/11, and then finding his path in Business School by going off script. “There is no template for how your career and how your life is supposed to go,” Wilson says. “There is no specific set of steps that anyone has in mind when they look at you... I think that the biggest takeaway I’ve had is that there is no rule book. There’s no way you must pursue your career. There's no way you must pursue your life — and frankly, often your life should take huge precedent over your career. I think a lot of times we forget that.” At CBS Wilson served as the Student Government’s VP for Careers. After graduation, he’s heading back to consulting – armed with insights gleaned from CBS. “The ability to be vulnerable, to be humble, and to take the time to look inside and figure out what it is that truly drives me, that’s the thing I’ve come to value more than anything,” he says.

Brooke Jones-Chinetti ’18 served in the military for six years with two deployments to the Middle East. In 2016, she started Your Sequel to bridge the gap between female veterans and industry leaders. She is currently Director Of Operations at Werk.co. In this episode, Jones-Chinetti talks about the importance of selfless leadership, the responsibility of having a platform, and looks back at her two-year journey through the EMBA program. “Every day I go to class, I’m humbled,” she says. “I feel like I’m sitting next to the smartest people I ever met. And I’m proud of how we’ve evolved as a group. I’m proud of the diversity of thought. I'm proud of people’s accomplishments. We’ve seen new jobs, promotions, marriages, babies. I’m proud of how we’ve celebrated each other and lifted each other up. I'm so proud of my class. I can’t imagine having gone anywhere else.”