Private Innovation in the Public Interest
Tune in with Professor Anita McGahan as she speaks with leading thinkers to understand and reinvent corporate social responsibility in service of the public good. Presented by Pi Squared, a project of the Burnes Center for Social Change at Northeastern University, this series explores new ways for companies, NGOs, and even government itself to collaborate and drive meaningful change.
Episodes
125: Carol Kulik. Workplace excellence comes from deep understandings of how both the employee and the employer flourish together
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 appreci
124: Amisha Miller. Why does our system for accelerating entrepreneurs produce so many unwanted outcomes?
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
123: Britta Glennon. Immigration doesn’t take US jobs, it drives US firms to search for talent
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., Chi
122: Tom Lyon. We’re going backwards on corporate environmentalism
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, wh
121: Michelle Rogan. Are you perceived by your employer as “up to no good” if you take on social-impact work?
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
120: Michael Pirson. How can business and tech get support human dignity and flourishing.
Professor Michael Pirson is interested in elevating our sights toward a humanism in management that focuses on enactingancient wisdom in our work with each other. Why don’t we elevate the intrinsic value of what we create through oursocial systems, communities, services, exchange, and connection with each other. Let’s tell better stories andcultivate authentic conversations. Let’s get out of o
119: Valentina Assenova. Silicon Valley can learn from the rest of the world about human actualization
ProfessorValentina Assenova studies entrepreneurship at two levels. First, she looks at what incubators and accelerators do to support aspiring leaders – all the way from Soweto in South Africa to Silicon Valley. In this line of work, what she finds isthat developing human potential through exposure to business practices and through the cultivation of funding relationships can make a big diffe
118: Zeke Hernandez. Immigration is good for economic prosperity – but it can take two or three generations to come fully to fruition
Professor Zeke Hernandez was born in Uruguay and then lived in Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Argentina before returning to his home country, only to immigrate again – this time to the United States. Now a Professor at Wharton, heis an internationally renowned expert on the economic impact of immigration. His award-winning 2024 book pulls together a lifetime of experience and scholarly study show
117: Vikram Bhargava. New technologies like AI that change how we relate to each other also change our ethics
Professor Vikram Bhargava studies business ethics and technology. His groundbreaking work on technology addiction, hiring algorithms, autonomous vehicles, social media, and AI has changed the way we think about ourresponsibilities to each other and to ourselves. In this wide-ranging conversation with Anita, Vik describes some of the paradoxes and challenges that we face as technology advances to
116: Sekou Bermiss. Political ideology and diversity influence firm performance in unexpected and subtle ways
Professor Sekou Bermiss studies how “strategic human capital” gets deployed in organizations through socialinteractions that have consequences for the organization’s performance. This means that, if you look at skilledworkers with roughly the same capabilities, what may matter most to their impact on organizational outcomes is the ways in which ideology and diversity shape the social interactions
115: Christos Pitelis. Entrepreneurship in the “praxis” is our chance for global sustainable value creation
Professor Christos Pitelis of the University of Southampton and the University of Cambridge is a legendary theorist who,among other things, is the literary executor of the estate of Edith Penrose. In this talk, he describes the long arc of his interests in how political economy – in the sense of Schumpeterian innovation – drives global sustainable value creation. He talks with Anita about what
114: Wesley Koo. Platforms can be confusing and scary
Professor Wesley Koo of Johns Hopkins started his career as an engineer and tech entrepreneur interested in how platforms shape environmental outcomes. Since studying at Stanford, he turned to the impact of platforms on rural retailers and on vulnerable domestic workers. In this fascinating conversation, Wes and Anita talk about the instability that ranking algorithms create for rural vendors i
113: Audra Wormald. How David overshadowed Goliath to create a new way of banking in low-income settings
Professor Audra Wormald of the University of North Carolina’s Keenan-Flagler Business School left a promising career in intellectual-property analysis and consulting to study innovation in the business of banking. She wrote her PhD thesis on the ways in which local companies in developing markets were more effective than multinational banks in serving low-income customers, particularly in Tanzani
112: Rachelle Sampson. How can executives overcome short-term pressures to invest for the long term?
Professor Rachelle Sampson has long studied the challenges that executives face to increase short-term earnings by cutting investments with longer-term investments. After decades of research on technology adoption, alliances, corporate social responsibility, and ESG investing, Rachelle is now thinking as well about the effects of personal consciousness-raising on executive decision-making. In t
111: Shaz Ansari. Don’t surrender your cognition to AI
Professor Shaz Ansari of the Judge Business School at Cambridge University is renowned for his work on institutional logics, cultural frames, and the effects of ArtificialIntelligence on how we think about what’s important. In this conversation with Anita, he explains how the logics that reflect our identities both shape and are shaped by newframes. Shaz ties everything together by describing h
110: Brent Goldfarb. Great scientists think big, think long-term, and have integrity
Professor Brent Goldfarb studies big ideas, arguing that short-term investor pressures can cause firms to innovate less than they might otherwise. Brent also studies how well-intentioned corporate innovators may pull the plug on their work once they achieve results that are good enough to pass muster – even when breakthroughs are just around the corner. With training in both economics and compu
109: Adam Clark. Authentic organizational commitment is a long game with a big payoff
Professor Adam Clark of Chapman University is studying something that is notoriously difficult to assess: the authenticity of an organization’s commitment. In this powerful conversation, he talks with Anita about whether and how an organization’s authenticity may evolve over time. Thestakes are high, with firm survival turning on getting authenticity right.
108: Herman Aguinis. Know your tools. And use them for impact
Professor Herman Aguinis is a pre-eminent scholar, educator, and leader in the field of Management. With more citations, accolades, and leadership responsibilities than just about anyone else in our field, Herman remains lighthearted, optimistic, and incredibly productive. In this engaging talk, he characterizes research methodologies as tools that must be mastered to achieve the impact to whi
107: Felipe Csaszar. Just as computers replaced human elevator operators, AI may replace Strategy executives
Professor Felipe Csaszar of the University of Michigan is an eminent scholar with extensive publications on managerialcognition, organizational decision-making, and the ways in which AI is reshaping the process of strategizing. In this conversation, he explains how the hard-core analytical work of strategizing may be much more effectively done by AI than by human analysts. Yet in the end, this
106: Aparajita Agarwal. The local agents delivering mobile money in low-income communities aren’t in it to maximize their incomes
Professor Aparajita Agarwal of INSEAD was a successful executive in consulting and digital tech firm when she decided to step away from her top-flight career and enter into a PhD program in Strategy. Fast forward fifteen years, and her research now shows how large firms – like those she once advised – cannot succeed by taking for granted that high-powered financial incentives will motivate local
105: Hyunjin Kim. Sure, AI is widely available, but organizations vary a lot in their capabilities for using it
Professor Hyunjin Kim is at the frontier on understanding how organizations – and particularly entrepreneurial companies – build the capabilities to use AI to improve their performance. Her research demonstrates that, at this early stage, there’s a great deal of variation even in AI uptake to improve workflows. But what really excites her is how organizations can be designed from scratch to use
104: Mabel Abraham. Let’s talk about how inequality gets produced inadvertently by unbiased people
Professor Mabel Abraham has built her career around understanding how inequality in employment practices getsproduced by people who want to do the right thing but end up with biased outcomes. Mabel has studied how biasesemerge unintentionally through interactions between individuals, such as evaluators and job candidates; within triads, such as through referrals; and within networks and systems.
103: Chris Yenkey. You cooperate as a driver in profoundly complex ways, yet if you sometimes speed, you’re engaging episodically in corruption.
Professor Chris Yenkey studies corruption, political violence, misconduct, and bribery. In this impassioned conversation with Anita, he gives us deep insight into what constitutes corruption, and how it gets produced by people who want things that are important to them. Chris describes how this problem is changing on a macro level, and what it’s going to take to address corruption at scale. I
102: Deepak Somaya. Tech firms get advantage by attracting and retaining committed people – both as employees and as customers
Professor Deepak Somaya has studied the ways that technologies influence the competitive advantages of firms in one way or another ever since he was an undergraduate in engineering. As a Professor at the University ofIllinois, his expertise now is in the ways that technology amplifies the strategic importance of employee retention and mobility. In this conversation, Deepak describes forAnita wh
101: Colleen Cunningham. Guardrails + Incentives - Excessive Competition = Innovation
Professor Colleen Cunningham studies why and how companies accomplish innovations that benefit the public, such as in pharmaceuticals and alternative energy. She sees a role for government in clarifying the guardrails on what’s allowed, but that’s not enough to get great outcomes. It’s also important for government – and for civil society at a broad level – to make sure that the incentives rewar
100: Anita McGahan. What have we learned, and where do we go from here?
In this milestone episode, host Anita McGahan reflects on the key themes explored across the podcast's first 100 episodes,which bring together scholars, practitioners, and policymakers to discuss how private innovation can serve the public good.Complexity and entrenchment — Grand challenges like climate change and inequality are deeply baked into existing systems, making change difficult but n
99: Barry Finette. It's always just about the patient
Professor Barry Finette is a global-health physician who decided as a college student to pursue his passions and to find a career in which he had control over what he did andwhen. Fast forward to today, and he is a pediatrician, an exited entrepreneur, and a professor with two major appointments and a pioneering impact on the health of children in low-income countries. In their conversation, A
98: DK Kryscynski. AI can take over drudgework and free you up to do more meaningful work
Professor DK Kryscynski is an expert on how employees bring their unique skills and capabilities into their employment duties in ways that create value for their employers, their customers, their co-workers, and themselves. In this conversation with Anita, he expresses an almost unbounded optimism about the potential for AI to make our jobs more meaningful and creative. The way that this will w
97: Bryan Stroube. Finding untapped potential in underserved corners of markets
Professor Bryan Stroube of the University of Kentucky has studied English, Engineering, and Management – all with a passion for understanding the human experience of interacting with products and services that are available through markets. In his discussion with Anita, he describeshow he has identified the ways that misfit album tracks, movie themes, and fine-art representations have evoked str
96: Bukky Oyedeji. How ambience, spatial configuration and aesthetics unlock strategic human capital
Professor Bukky Oyedeji is a LEED-certified architect with extensive experience in designing physical workspaces in the UK, the US and Africa. As a Professor of Strategy, she focuses on the implications of physical space for unlocking our human potential as individuals, in teams, and in our communities that makes firms flourish in the unlocking of human creativity at all these levels – and tha
95: Christiane Bode. What employees want from firms may not be optimized social impact
Professor Christiane Bode studies how firms implement social-impact initiatives. In this far-reaching conversation with Anita, she emphasizes how the field turned from extreme positions – first that companies will not do CSR and then that companies will all do CSR – to a middle ground where the current emphasis is on employee motivation. In her own research, Christiane has found that there ar
94: Michael Leiblein. Strategy offers serious insights on how to create structures that shape corporate investments
Professor Michael Leiblein has studied a wide range of subjects over the course of his long and storied career. Mostrecently, he has examined how uncertainty about the future can lead companies to compete for effective climate technologies. Broadly, what will it take to structure incentives so that companies invest at scale toward addressing the world’s most pressing problems? Michael argues
93: Arzi Abdi. Find solutions to long problems
Professor Arzi Adbi hails from the poorest province of India, Bihar, where he studied assiduously for exams so that he could become an engineer. After a storied career at Schlumberger, Goldman Sachs, and Loncar Industries, he decided to pursue his passion for long-term impact through a PhD at INSEAD, after which he became a professor at the National University of Singapore. Arzi’s research is
92: Sharon Alvarez. Soul is what makes entrepreneurs successful.
Professor Sharon Alvarez transformed the field of entrepreneurship through her early work on Jay Barney showing that entrepreneurship is about creating opportunities much more than about discovering them. It’s not as though Taylor Swift and Oprah and Jack Ma and Steve Jobs and Elon Musk saw something pre-determined sitting on the side of the road awaiting them. Rather, each had compelling insig
91: Caroline Fry. Scientific knowledge doesn’t flow like water. It is exchanged by people who need support.
Professor Caroline Fry studies how low-and middle-income countries build scientific capabilities, which occurs onescientist at a time. The successful migration of scientists from low-income countries can create significant benefits for the country from which the migration occurs, but only when institutions in the home environment are designed to make that happen. Without those institutions, mi
90: Isin Guler. Innovation has at least as much to do with transforming people as with technology
Professor Isin Guler is a renowned expert on the limitations of venture-capital investing for stimulating entrepreneurship. Among other problems, inventors from marginalized populations have trouble attracting attention, and yet even when they do, they are often misunderstood and passed by. Yet entrepreneurship can be profoundly important especially to owner-managers. Isin’s recent work with d
89: Kris Irwin. To understand success and failure, you need to understand the people involved.
Professor Kris Irwin had a fifteen-year career as a management consultant prior to earning her PhD at theUniversity of Alabama. In this inspired talk, she describes how the individual motivations, situations, and circumstances that shaped individual ambitions drive the outcomes of mergers, acquisitions, and new-firm formation. People cause projects to fail. She analyzes how leaders develop t
88: Jeffrey York. What are we going to do with the stranded assets of oil & gas companies?
Professor Jeffrey York is the OG on environmental scholarship in the field of management. The titles of some of his most recent work suggest optimism about adaptation to the climate crisis: “How to Make Corporate Sustainability Work…” and “Climate Capitalism.” That optimism reflects his belief that the barriers to technology adoption are nottechnological. Rather, they are organizational, cul
87: Nur Ahmed. Responsible AI, Regulatory Ambiguity, and Improving Lives
Professor Nur Ahmed studies how frontier technologies like AI, geothermal energy, and quantum computing can improve lives. In AI, for example, a remarkably low number of firms have committed publicly to principles of responsibility, and yet their ambitions are to hire engineers who support principled AI. In geothermal, jurisdictions such as the U.S. states may sustain regulatory ambiguity to attra
86: Sharique Hasan. Why Do We Miss So Many High-Potential Ideas and the People Who Produce Them?
Professor Sharique Hasan is fascinated by the gap between ideas with high potential and their fruition in practice. In this wide-ranging and clear-thinking conversation, he outlines the core ideas in several of his most recent research projects. First, he talks about why some scientific ideas get buried, and what it might take for them to become commercialized. And second, he describes how th
85: Christina Lubinski. Entrepreneurship Takes a Village, So Let’s Stop Heroizing Start-Up CEOs
Professor Christina Lubinski takes the long view as a historian of entrepreneurship. What she sees is shared achievement, and yet we tend to celebrate the roles of single individuals as iconic of success. It’s worthwhile to consider whether this is working well. Don’t we want less disruption, and some sense of stability? And shouldn’t we recognize the many individuals who contribute collectivel
84: Michael Bikard. Eureka Moments and Credit for Ideas
Professor Michael Bikard studies ideas: where they come from, who gets credit, whether they get traction, and how we can measure them. In this fascinating conversation, he takes a long view to describe how history credits innovators for their ideas despite their emergence among communities of scientists. Michael talks about the high-stakes competition between Darwin and Wallace as iconic of th
83: Aseem Kaul. Reinventing Strategy
Professor Aseem Kaul began his career by studying what we call “corporate strategy:” mergers and acquisitions, for example. No more. He is now convinced that companies are not equipped to solve truly important problems such as Grand Challenges because solutions require system change beyond their capacity. What we need now is to reinvent strategy to support community organizations, non-profits,
82: Lori Rosenkopf. Entrepreneurship is Leadership in Innovation
Professor Lori Rosenkopf, Vice Dean of Entrepreneurship at the Wharton School, has spent her career expanding how we understand innovation and entrepreneurial leadership. In her new book, Unstoppable Entrepreneurship, she explores pathways to innovation that go beyond the familiar story of disruption, highlighting intrapreneurs, tech commercializers, and alternative investors who are reshaping mar
81: Wes Sine. We Have The Wills, Value, And Technology For An Energy Transition.
Professor Wes Sine is optimistic, deeply, convincingly, contagiously optimistic. After decades of studying the global energy transition, he believes the moment has arrived: we now have the technology, the public support, and the shift in values needed to transform how the world generates and uses energy. The missing piece is political will. In this energizing conversation with Anita, Wes explains
80: Nan Jia. AI May Shape Geopolitics
Professor Nan Jia brings a rare combination of expertise in artificial intelligence, industrial policy, and creativity. A leading scholar of U.S.–China technology strategy, she studies how national choices about data, AI adoption, and innovation policy are already reshaping global industry and power. In this wide-ranging conversation, Nan and Anita explore how the pathways through which we unleash
79: Damon Phillips. Prisoner Releases, Entrepreneurship, Jazz, Creativity, and a Sociologist Who Loves Talking with Economists
Professor Damon Phillips studies how society's structures, beauty, and contradictions shape business and creative expression. In conversation with Anita, he discusses how entrepreneurship can offer pathways to economic independence for formerly incarcerated citizens and how the business of jazz reveals deep, profound truths about markets, creativity, and community. Through re-entry, rhythm, an
78: Ranjay Gulati. The Forest for the Trees on Courage
Professor Ranjay Gulati is a renowned scholar of organizational networks and strategic alliances who has recently turned his attention to courage, boldness, and purpose. His newest book, How to Be Bold, explores how individuals and organizations can act decisively in the face of fear and uncertainty. He argues that courage is a choice that can be cultivated by understanding how fear arises and how
77: Rem Koning. AI Can Democratize Entrepreneurship
Professor Rem Koning studies entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School, using experiments, data, and fieldwork to understand how AI can make innovation more inclusive. A pioneer in A/B testing and a global leader in AI for good, he believes AI can change who gets to innovate and who benefits. Instead of further enriching elite investors, AI can help on-the-ground pioneers do more with less, scal
76: Phanish Puranam. Let’s Re-Humanize Organizations!
Professor Phanish Puranam wants AI to make organizations better for humans. As an eminent scholar of organization design, Phanish sees all organizations as places where humans flourish. We are at our best in groups, supported by our communities. This means that we need to use AI to “re-humanize” organizations by deploying the technology to enable our actualization.
75: Florenta Teodoridis. Let ’s Use AI to Unleash Creativity
Professor Florenta Teodoridis studies what makes scientists more productive and more creative AI, quantum computing, and a range of other tools relieve experts from having to perform tedious tasks. They lower coordination costs and reduce barriers to communication. All this adds up to freeing experts to be more creative by broadening the directions of innovation that they pursue. Florenta envision
74: Aline Gatignon. Cross-Sector Partnership Solve Big Problems in Ways that Make Organizations of All Types Perform Better
Professor Aline Gatignon is passionate about both solving big problems–such as food insecurity and other Grand Challenges–by making organizations of all types more effective. She's particularly focused on how companies can work with non-governmental organizations like non-profits to innovate more and innovate better. In this fascinating conversation, Aline describes example after example of ho
73: Christine Nolder. Let 's Get Skeptical About The Skepticism of Financial Auditors
Professor Christine Nolder’s breakthrough research on the mindsets of financial auditors focuses on the extraordinary conflicts of interest between the duty to client service and their duty to sustain independent judgement. What does it take for auditors to do their work effectively? Acting with integrity in this profession depends on a slate of understandings about the role of the auditor, the su
72: Lars Frederiksen. We Invented The Wreck of The Titanic When We Invented The Titanic. Let’s Not Do That With AI.
Professor Lars Frederiksen’s insights as a scholar of innovation have led him to leadership in the field of technology strategy. What he wants now is to understand how our humanity leads us to actin open-innovation communities, such as the CASP and LegoPage competitions, and on open source development platforms. The incredible diversity of these communities–and the differences in the interests of
71: Sophie Bacq. Beware of the Dark Side of Social Entrepreneurship. What ’s the Bright Side? Elevating Shared Interests, Practices, Identities and Fates
Professor Sophie Bacq has studied social entrepreneurship for twenty years. For the first fifteen, she focused on the social entrepreneur as an individual: whether to take on an initiative; how to fund it; how to succeed. For the past five years, though, Sophie has increasingly focused on what it takes to improve lives on terms that are important to those you are seeking to serve. Often the benefi
70: Julian Birkinshaw. The Resurgence of Large Incumbent Firms Is Not Just Possible, It’s Widespread.
Professor Julian Birkinshaw is a renowned authority on the ambidexterity of incumbent firms that face disruptive innovations. His newest book, co-authored with Pearson’s John Fallon and entitled Resurgence, provides a roadmap for companies in this position. The core message is that AI and other disruptions need not create Kodak moments for large incumbents. Great firms can find strength in their p
69: Beth Embry. The Capacity For Disaster Response Occurs Before The Disaster Occurs
Professor Beth Embry moved through her career deeper and deeper into finding solutions to the problems that give rise to disasters–even those disasters that at first appear to be natural, such as earthquakes and hurricanes. These events become disasters when communities are not prepared to respond to them effective in the immediate, short-term and long-term. There are many layers to what creates a
68: Lamar Pierce. No More Whack-A-Mole. Managers Need To Think About Problems That Can Arise From The Incentives They Put In Place.
Professor Lamar Pierce studies the tension between employee performance and misconduct. High-powered incentives to sell more stuff, for example, can lead salespeople to lower prices or even misreport what they have sold. It is this kind of misconduct (and much worse) that Lamar studies. What does it take to rout this out? Lots and lots of time to get the right people and systems in place, and then
67: András Tilcsik. Great Companies Force A Reckoning On Unwanted Problems
Professor András Tilcsik studies the dark sides of organizations: discrimination, disasters, crises. His scholarly work demonstrates, for example, that companies must analyze comprehensively where discrimination is arising in their hiring practices if they want to root it out. Adopting a new approach to the recruiting of applications, a go-to improvement, is typically insufficient to address the p
66: Andrew Foley. Help Your People To Help You Succeed At Developing A Great Idea
Professor Andrew Foley thinks of entrepreneurship as a social process rather than as a programmatic exercise. Motivated by his experiences as a Venture for America Fellow in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, Andrew studies why exposure to the classic formulas for successful entrepreneurship often leave the entrepreneur high and dry. Success as he sees it depends on getting the community around
65: Jillian Chown. Your Professional Peers Matter A Lot – Even More Than Your Organizational Mandate – To What You Do
Professor Jillian Chown studies how physicians make choices that may shape patient outcomes for the rest of the patients’ lives. What she finds is that doctors make core decisions–like whether a baby will be born by C-Section–to a significant degree through the influence of the peers within whom they recently speak. This effect is greater for generalists than for specialists. At the same time, the
64: Chris Eaglin. Human Ingenuity And Resilience Tip Toward Collaborative Community Even Under The Most Difficult of Circumstances
Professor Chris Eaglin studies how small-and medium-sized companies respond to strategic opportunities in low-income countries, and particularly how drivers in the minibus industry of South Africa deal with the pressures they face. Minibuses take a quarter of all South Africans to work each day. While the system is far from perfect, it is critical to the economic health of communities. The commitm
63: Keyvan Vakili. Our Understanding of How Scientists Work Is a Mess. AI Can Take Advantage of That To Persuade Us We’re Wrong When We’re Right.
Professor Keyvan Vakili studies what makes scientists creative. He has done work on governmental policy, team selection, research design, and the balance of specializations that come together to support profound scientific achievements. What Keyvan lands on as he reflects on the trajectory of his research program is the idea that AI has been trained to be persuasive rather than scientifically accu
62: Carlos Inoue. Rotations of Workers Across The Public And Private Sectors Can Unlock Value Creation
Professor Carlos Inoue studies how people in different types of organizations–public companies, state-owned companies, private companies, governmental agencies, NGOs–solve a problem in ways that reflect the constraints and priorities of their employers. Physicians in public hospitals, for example, may not have access to the same kinds of equipment or even patients as their peers in private hospita
61: Leandro Nardi. Outstanding Companies Find Long Term Payoffs Through Excellence In Creating Value For Society
Professor Leandro Nardi studies pathways for achieving outstanding social and economic performance. He has examined the reasons for the persistently mediocre financial and social performance that can arise from CSR initiatives. Much of the problem has to do with the complications that arise with enfranchising the previously marginalized. Disabled persons, for example, are not rewarded with career
60: James Orbinski. Public Good Depends On Recognition of Each Others’ Innate Dignity
Professor James Orbinski accepted the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1999 as the International Council President of Medicins Sans Frontiers. He talks with Anita about the essence of humanitarianism and the ways in which principles of mutual understanding, listening, dialogue and connection shape the public good. Citing Socrates, he reflects on how dialogue requires dignity-infused listening and a wil
59: Jim Lavery. Cultivating A Deep Internal Acknowledgement of Others’ Interests Gives Us Our Best Chance at Solving Public Problems
Professor Jim Lavery has been a professor and advocate of healthcare for the poor for his entire life. What has he learned?The equitable distribution of drugs depends as much on the development of health systems as on new medicines. And decisions by companies to incur development costs are only one step in a cascade of constrained decisions that shape who gets essential medicines.
58: Donal Crilly. There’s A Better Way To Negotiate Our Way Toward A Sustainable Future Than You May Think
Professor Donal Crilly studies the ways in which business decisions are influenced by the concepts of time employed by managers, entrepreneurs, investors, and other stakeholders interested in achieving important outcomes. In this conversation, he describes how an emphasis in negotiations on a shared vision of the future–in which good outcomes arise and devastatingly bad outcomes are averted–can re
57: Pinar Ozcan. Frontier Tech = Prosperity = Social Impact
Professor Pinar Ozcan is a superstar researcher, superstar teacher, and superstar thought leader. Among her many activities, she runs Oxford’s Said Entrepreneurship Centre and its FinTech Initiative. Ask her where she sees the greatest opportunity for addressing the world’s most pressing problems, and she’ll talk about innovation in investing through FinTech that can enable breakthrough tech advan
56: Russ Coff. Actualization Through Work Rests On Much More Than What You Get Paid
Professor Russ Coff is a pioneer in our thinking about strategic human capital and its importance to the competitive advantage of firms. So why do firms train employees in broad skills that make them more employable elsewhere? And why do the relationships that we develop with colleagues and with our employers matter so much to our decisions about whether to quit?In this conversation, Russ explains
55: John Bryson. Keep Talking
Professor John Bryson is a world-renowned expert in public administration and governance. Over the course of his career at the University of Minnesota, he has studied and written about eras in the prevailing culture of governance, particularly in the United States. We are now at a point where commitment to the core principles of the Constitution is fraying, with deep consequences for the work of g
54: Jay Barney. What Does The Most Highly Cited Scholar In The Field of Strategy See As Important Right Now?
Professor Jay Barney is a legend in his time. His resource-based theory of the firm reshaped the way we think about sustained competitive advantage, and his approach to theory-building and community leadership have been foundational to the field of Strategic Management. In this conversation with Anita, he describes how and why he has turned toward philosophy and work in low-income countries during
53: Matt Harder. Government Is Broken. Civic Trust Is The Fix.
Matt Harder was working in ecological rehabilitation in Costa Rica when he realized that the challenges of preserving the jungle would never be met without a fundamental change in the way that government works. Since that realization, he has been striving through the firm he founded, Civic Trust, to innovate in core budget processes that drive the way that local governments allocate funds. In this
52: Maurizio Zollo. Half Of All CSR Investments Aren ’ t Intended To Be Profitable
Professor Maurizio Zollo is an OG on Corporate Social Responsibility. After studying CSR as a professor at Bocconi and INSEAD, he is now at Imperial College London where he leads the Leonardo Institute. The first of the Institute’s activities is in documenting more than a million CSR activities by 16,000 corporations. Just about half of these activities are unprofitable by design because their pur
51: Mahka Moeen. The Emergence of an Industry Depends On Tech + Demand + Ecosystem + Institutions
Professor Mahka Moeen has been studying the emergence of industries for decades. In this conversation with Anita, she talks about the early prototypes of cars as fueled by a much wider range of technologies that we may have thought possible–and then compares the emergence of the industry as we know it with what might have evolved. Mahka also describes her recent work on drones, talks about the air
50: Howard Aldrich. Entrepreneurship Is Usually Just One Chapter in a Rich Life
Professor Howard Aldrich is one of the world’s foremost authorities on the building of entrepreneurial ecosystems. In this fascinating discussion with Anita, he talks about the risks of entrepreneurship without the right institutional framework, and the challenges of building a framework that reflects local conditions, capabilities and needs. Let’s teach entrepreneurship as a choice you need to ma
49: Stefan Dimitriadis. Entrepreneurship = Resilience + Pragmatic Pivoting in the Face of Extortion and Other Problems
Professor Stefan Dimitriadis studies how entrepreneurs in Togo and Nigeria have dealt with deep-seated, long-standing challenges that are occasionally made acute through external shocks. He has found that community entrepreneurship in Togo can be strengthened through the development of outside ties. And that the relief from extortion that comes with insurgent challenges to the local government can
48: Jiao Luo. Why is CSR So Unprofitable Despite The Best Efforts of Companies To Shape Public Policy To Support It?
Professor Jiao Luo studies how firms organize to shape public policy, which she describes as “non-market strategy". The goal is to develop a climate through which investments in social outcomes are valued more fully–and thus become more profitable. But given this, why are corporate-social-responsibility initiatives so difficult for firms to pursue profitably? How does the governance structure
47: Robert Eberhart. “Entrepreneurship ” Is An Ideology About How We Relate To Each Other That Rarely Delivers On What We Are Reaching For
Professor Robert Eberhart has performed at the frontier of academics, government, entrepreneurship, and business over the course of his long career as an innovator. What interests him most is “reversing the arrow,” by which he means to understand how the cultural phenomenon that we call entrepreneurship is changing the way we relate to each other. He is striving through his scholarly work, corpora
46: Tim Weiss. African Entrepreneurship Occurs In Community, Not Through The Individual Acting Alone
Professor Tim Weiss raises foundational questions about the basis of successful entrepreneurship in Africa, which occurs in communities such as the 105 co-located car repair shops in the Dagoretti neighborhood of Nairobi. These entrepreneurs are collaborating through apprenticeship programs, referrals, collaborations, and even mutual welfare funds like insurance. The success of each one is deeply
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