Private Innovation in the Public Interest

Professor Mary Tripsas has been studying radical industry change over the course of her entire legendary career.   In this conversation with Anita, she explains what allows incumbents to retain their relevance through generation after generation of new ideas.  Mary describes why and how many musicians are not reaching back into analog synthesizing for the nuanced creative opportunities that you can’t get with digital.  And she analogizes this to the problems that we’re all having with the austere prose of AI-generated LLMs.   Where’s the beautiful writing going to come from if we all concede writing to machines?  Mary’s work is about the ways in which organizations restructure themselves to give us the best of both worlds:   high-touch expertise and low-cost access to new ways of doing things.

Professor Tim Gubler has studied commercial laundries, real-estate brokers, moonlighters, paramedics, and US civil servants to understand what the work we do means to us asindividuals.  His central focus is on the design of our jobs, and the ways in which employer-provided incentives can leadto unintended consequences.   Moonlighters, for example, may be moonlighting because they are not fulfilled in their day jobs.  And high-performing real-estate brokers may raise the performance of peers that we customarily think of as competitors.  Paramedics may overserve private-pay patients who don’t need their care as much as lower-income patients that have no better alternative for getting medical attention than to call an ambulance.   Listen to Tim Gubler and you’ll hear a depth of wisdom about the meaning of work that will move you to want to be a better colleague.

Professor Voni Pamphile studies the unresolvable tensions that show up in organizations:  stability vs. change, business vs. society, exploitation vs. exploration, global vs. local.   Where the rubber hits the road is when these tensions involve stigma, social ordering, counter-culturalism, philanthropy,and other frontier domains that are so essential for improving our quality of life.  Voni studies the heroic, hard work of holding these tensions and finding ways to move forward despite  heartbreaking challenges.   In this conversation with Anita, she talks with excitement and optimism about the reclaiming of worth through displaying of stigma; about paradox peers; about making it easy to do hard things.  Listen and be inspired on how organizations can change the societies in which they work.

Professor Luiz Mesquita has done it all as a businessperson and a scholar.   He’s a Brazilian who has lived all around the world, including now in Arizona, where he teaches a course on awakening your entrepreneurial mindset.  In this fascinating conversation, he describes the successive deepening over the phases of his career of understanding of what makes businesses contribute to their communities.  His landing point is that the strength of our emotional and social connections is right at the center of what makes an organization great.   And that’s true of multinationals, family firms, governmental agencies, and entrepreneurial organizations around the world.   You build these relationships by doing big things, like traveling the world and starting businesses and trusting people.   Luiz sees greatness in bringing passion to the work you do with your closest friends.

Professor Trevor Young-Hyman is a sociologist and professor of business administration who studies democracy within and about hierarchies.   He is deeply interested in how the sharing of power across a field of stakeholders can benefit organizations despite the short-term coordination and power-sharing consequences.   What he finds in his empirical studies is that organizations overcome the costs over time by learning and adapting, and that residual costs are offset by the benefits of stakeholder investments in the firm.    In the end, decentralizing is not so fragile.   Your stakeholderslearn and interact in ways that support distributed decisions that are remarkably value-creating.

Professor Carol Kulik is renowned for her scholarly research on workplace excellence.  She talks with Anita about how she began her career in thinking about employee-center topics such as job design, employee experience, and motivation.   As her interests turned toward understanding the structures that employees create, and how they benefit the employer as wellas the employee, she began to appreciate just how baked-in structural problems could become.  Her massive body of workon DEI, the gender pay gap, and mature-age workers have led her to a range of insights on the silver linings that arise as stakeholders demand change.   She is now thinking about how AI can be deployed by line managers to reshape jobs to make them even more meaningful for employees and efficient for employers.  But getting this right is not assured.  We need to focus intently to make this happen.

Professor Amisha Miller studies how our prevailing systems for accelerating entrepreneurs and for making investment decisions leads to bad outcomes, like gender disparities and wasted time and heartbreaking refusals.   Our systems arewell-designed, she argues, to support stars.  But what about all the rest of us?  In this interview, she talks with Anita about how difficult it is for entrepreneurs to implement the advice they receive, for example.  At the same time, investors that seek to reduce gender disparities often narrow their attention to so few candidates by category that they can’t discern which candidates may perform best.   There are solutions to these problems, argues Amisha, if you understand them fully.

Professor Britta Glennon is a superstar scholar of innovation who focuses specifically on the role of immigration in the development of important insights.   Among many other accomplishments, she has testified before the US Senateand cited in Congressional testimony. In this talk with Anita, she describes the massively important and central role of immigrants in driving innovation in the U.S., China, andelsewhere.   The knowledge held in the minds of skilled immigrants is so important that, if companies are restrictedin hiring immigrants, they may move their hiring into other countries.  The great risk that comes with restrictive immigration policy is that great innovating countries, including especially the US, fall far behind in areas of critical science.

Professor Tom Lyon has been studying corporate environmentalism for decades, and he thinks that, unambiguously, we’re going backwards.   The blast of greenwashing over the past five to seven years was the result of the tremendous incentives and pressures on companies to respond to ESG investing.  Now that the world has awakened to the fact that very few companies are pure-play environmentalism, what’s now vividly clear is that we need better regulations and public policy to resolve marketfailures in pollution, R&D, and experimentation.   The biggest issue is that the barriers to accomplishing this require political reform particularly in the US, particularly around the role of money in elections and lobbying.  

Professor Michelle Rogan is a pioneer in research on social networks, social impact, and innovation.  In a highly cited paper, she and her co-authors report that companies may more readily retain employees by offering them social-impact project opportunities.  Yet her most recent work with the same collaborators shows that employers may see men who take on social-impact projects as a poor fit for promotion.   In this insightful conversation, Michelle reflects with Anita on how social-impact projects in companies are changing, how networks are changing, and the implications for what we work on together.