On Principle

On a mid-May afternoon in 2020, Lauren Kriegler sat in her home office and scribbled a warning to her young kids—who were in the thick of remote learning—on a Post-It Note and stuck it to her office door: “Important call. Do not come in!”For five years at Alaska Airlines, Kriegler had led a massive project to overhaul the uniforms provided to its 20,000+ frontline employees—five years building a program from raw materials to design and development, inventory planning and distribution, and ultimately the culmination of a rollout during the early stages of the pandemic. This included multiple visits to China to get closer to the supply chain, as well as the integration of industry-leading textile safety standards, leading Alaska to be the first North American carrier to integrate Oeko-Tex into a custom supply chain. Along the way, Kriegler led additional teams, including retail operations, freight and logistics, and print programs. As the uniform program launched and was moving to steady state, she was starting to think about her next challenge.Now, as the Teams window on her computer flashed open to her weekly tie-in with her boss, she was confronting what might come next: leading the fuel program for the airline as director of fuel—an area of the business where she had no experience. It was a role fraught with challenge and opportunity that started with the consolidation of two departments, the lack of a hand-off from her predecessors in the role and a massive learning curve.Once she assumed the role that July of 2020, she would see planes get fueled for the first time, spend time on the ramp learning the operation and become quickly immersed in the complexities of the oil and refining markets and supply chains. She openly acknowledged with internal and external partners that at many times she had more questions than answers.She worked diligently to overcome her learning curve in order to prepare the fuel program to support the airline's emergence from the pandemic, both operationally and financially. Through all of these learnings, she also started to wrap her arms around an initially small but critical component of the fuel program: Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF)—something that as the months went by would become a much more significant focus of her day-to-day role. By the end of her first year and what Kriegler called a “brutal summer,” she had confronted all that and more, including a Mother's Day 2021 alert to the Colonial Pipeline shutdown, wildfires, labor shortages, extreme weather and other external events that buffeted fuel supply chain operations.“I've only known volatility,” Kriegler said. “During that first summer, I remember thinking (that) how I navigated that summer's seemingly never-ending challenges would shape my future at Alaska as an operational leader. I was determined not just to get through it, but to establish an industry-leading program that was resilient and intentional. And to be honest, I had many moments of self-doubt given my lack of experience—and I know others did as well.”Related LinksLauren shares supply chain learnings with students at the University of Washington.Alaska Airlines' news release on the launch of its uniform redesignMore about WashU Olin's Sergio ChayetLauren's LinkedIn pageCreditsThis podcast is a production of Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis. Contributors include:Katie Wools, Cathy Myrick, Judy Milanovits and Lesley Liesman, creative assistanceJill Young Miller, fact-checking and creative assistanceAustin Alred and Olin's Center for Digital Education, sound engineeringHayden Molinarolo, original music and sound designMike Martin Media, editingSophia Passantino, social mediaLexie O'Brien and Erik Buschardt, website support

In the heating-and-cooling industry, they're calling it “The Great Consolidation” as the pace of company acquisitions has risen from about 20 in 2011 to 120 a year by 2019. Meanwhile, The Great Consolidation is slamming head-first into the pandemic-born Great Resignation, as firms battle for a share of the scarce pool of talent on the market.That's the environment Chris Hoffmann has faced since 2016, after taking over the St. Louis-based, family-owned business his father began 28 years earlier with four employees and a simple business model. Today, while he watches competitors grow through acquisition and consolidation, Hoffmann sees an alternative path: scaling up geographically and serving existing customers more deeply.That's why he's expanded into Nashville. That's why he's exploring adding pest control to his suite of commercial and residential services. But there's still that other nagging problem. "The companies that are going to be able to grow are the ones that can solve the talent issue,” Hoffmann said on a recent industry podcast. “Everyone knows that. Everyone's talking about that."In this episode of On Principle, we talk to Chris Hoffmann about how he came to realize Hoffmann Brothers would have to make some big investments to thrive in a heavily fragmented but consolidating industry. What drove his decision to grow by expanding his service area and his services? Why did he decide against buying his way into new markets by acquiring existing residential and commercial services firms?And what does it take to move from simply recruiting talent on the open market to growing your own in a newly built, 15,000-square-foot training facility?Related LinksThe Hoffmann Brothers websiteThe family office site Chris and his family created to manage investmentsMore about Peter BoumgardenThe Koch Family Center for Family EnterpriseA piece Chris Hoffmann wrote for the Tugboat Institute on employee engagementThe St. Louis Business Journal reports on Hoffmann Brothers' expansionThe Olin Brookings Commission project referenced in this episodeCreditsThis podcast is a production of Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis. Contributors include:Katie Wools, Cathy Myrick, Judy Milanovits and Lesley Liesman, creative assistanceJill Young Miller, fact-checking and creative assistanceAustin Alred and Olin's Center for Digital Education, sound engineeringHayden Molinarolo, original music and sound designMike Martin Media, editingSophia Passantino, social mediaLexie O'Brien and Erik Buschardt, website support

Since 1999, the digital agency that Brian Williams and his brother cofounded has weathered—often just barely—some tough blows to the economy. There was the bursting of the dot-com bubble. Then there was 9/11. Then, the global financial crisis of 2008.In fact, that last shock compelled Williams to create a formal business development function at Viget—a team that would market the firm, demonstrate its expertise, drive in-bound business leads and keep the phones ringing. Viget hummed into its 15-year anniversary in 2015 with an energizing employee retreat near Boulder, Colorado, where the firm opened a new branch office.But when the year drew to a close with dismal results, Williams was worried. Yes, Viget had built a business development function. But it hadn't created a way to forecast and project revenue, anticipate when existing projects would end, maintain a pipeline of “back-up” projects for slow times and rigorously manage existing projects.There was no external economic shock, yet business had collapsed. “This was a crisis of our own making,” Williams said. “My mistakes led to us being in this precarious position.”With potential layoffs looming ahead, Williams issued an off-the-cuff rallying cry that came to be known as “Best 6 Ever”—an audacious goal to exceed Viget's previous best six-month period. And the team rallied. Extra hours. Aggressive marketing. Sharing the #Best6Ever hashtag internally. Meanwhile, Williams and his team worked to create version 2.0 of Viget's business development team—complete with all the accountability measures that hadn't existed before.Today, Viget's biz dev function is more sophisticated. The business is more profitable. The firm's leadership is better equipped to accurately forecast revenue trends. And Williams sleeps better at night.Related LinksViget's websiteBrian Williams' bio page on the Viget websiteMore about Jackson Nickerson from the WashU Olin websiteJackson's Wikipedia pageCreditsThis podcast is a production of Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis. Contributors include:Katie Wools, Cathy Myrick, Judy Milanovits and Lesley Liesman, creative assistanceJill Young Miller, fact-checking and creative assistanceAustin Alred and Olin's Center for Digital Education, sound engineeringHayden Molinarolo, original music and sound designMike Martin Media, editingSophia Passantino, social mediaLexie O'Brien and Erik Buschardt, website supportPaula Crews, creative vision and strategic support

This story is not really about the first pivotal moment Camryn Okere navigated. That's the moment when the pandemic upended plans for a college internship and shuttered a business she had grown to love. In that moment, she decided to gather some mentors and some fellow students across a few universities to create a boutique consulting firm serving small community businesses—and providing experience to budding business leaders.No, this story is about another big “oh, shoot!” moment, after that volunteer, student-driven firm—Rem and Company—took off across 20 college campuses, recruited more than 650 student consultants and served more than 300 small businesses around the country.It's about the moment Okere's partners in the early days of Rem and Company started charting another career path, found appealing full-time jobs and left Okere to figure out how to make her baby a sustainable enterprise. She didn't want her work—providing professional experiences for students and services for local businesses—to die.“My moment was truly understanding that something has to change,” said Okere, BSBA 2020. You want it to become something, but that means the systems have to be built to make it sustainable.”What was Okere's story and how did it lead to that moment? How much of herself had she invested in Rem and Company—and why? What compelled her to think the enterprise was something worth sustaining in the first place? How did she realize that the model as it was created wouldn't be sustainable? What steps did she take to traverse that “oh, shoot!” moment for Rem? What can we learn from her experience? And in what ways was her experience transferable to larger enterprises?Related LinksThe Rem and Company websiteRem's Instagram and LinkedIn pagesAn Olin Business magazine story featuring Camryn OkereOlin Blog story about Rem and Company soon after its launchMore about Staci ThomasCamryn, as a WashU sophomore, was featured for winning “best room” in a residential life competition.Camryn and Rem featured in her hometown newspaperCreditsThis podcast is a production of Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis. Contributors include:Katie Wools, Cathy Myrick, Judy Milanovits and Lesley Liesman, creative assistanceJill Young Miller, fact-checking and creative assistanceAustin Alred and Olin's Center for Digital Education, sound engineeringHayden Molinarolo, original music and sound designMike Martin Media, editingSophia Passantino, social mediaLexie O'Brien and Erik Buschardt, website supportPaula Crews, creative vision and strategic support

In the wake of the global pandemic, some of the loudest voices in corporate America proclaimed the end of work as we know it. Lockdown, it seemed, had proven workers could be productive from home. Work-from-home came into vogue. We'd never have to commute to the office again, some suggested.But as pandemic-era restrictions eased in mid-2021, Steve Degnan, then chief human resources officer for Nestlé Purina PetCare, joined other senior leaders and prepared to bring its workforce back. All of them. In-person.“It was not without controversy,” Degnan, EMBA 2008, recalled. “It was our belief that better work happens when people are together. But we did lose people.” Indeed, about 30% of Purina's workforce declared its dissatisfaction with the return-to-work policy, which launched in 2022. The company, for years a leader in worker satisfaction ratings on jobseekers website Glassdoor, saw its scores plummet in the wake of the decision.Beyond their basic belief that employees work better together, Purina leaders had also just gone through a process to combat “big company diseases” such as lumbering decision-making and single-stream work processes. They'd fostered greater agility in their work teams, empowered team members to make decisions, coached effective collaboration.“That work was being blown up,” he said. Degnan, now retired, recalled how senior leadership knew it would have to spend some of its cultural capital to implement a decision that many rank-and-file employees would support—but that a small and vocal group would not, including a large share of Generation Z and Millennial team members.Why did Purina buck what seemed to be a trend in its approach to the workplace? How did it manage the communication of that requirement? What were leaders willing to sacrifice to make that decision—and what were they not willing to sacrifice?RELATED LINKSMore about Steve DegnanMore about Andrew KnightBloomberg: “People Working in the Office Spend 25% More Time on Career Development” (paywall)A version of the same story that's not behind a paywallNestlé Purina PetCareMcKinsey & Company: “Americans are embracing flexible work—and they want more of it”Business Insider: “Here's a list of major companies requiring employees to return to the office”Nina Leigh Krueger: Her On Principle episode, “Out of the Box”CREDITSThis podcast is a production of Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis. Contributors include:Katie Wools, Cathy Myrick, Judy Milanovits and Lesley Liesman, creative assistanceJill Young Miller, fact checking and creative assistanceAustin Alred and Olin's Center for Digital Education, sound engineeringHayden Molinarolo, original music and sound designMike Martin Media, editingSophia Passantino, social mediaLexie O'Brien and Erik Buschardt, website supportPaula Crews, creative vision and strategic support

In early March 2022, the skies over Irpin, Ukraine, sizzled with Russian missiles and thundered with mortar shells. Under those skies in the first days of Russia's aggression, the lead software developer for a Chicago-based startup huddled in his parent's basement when the air raid sirens sounded.For a substantial investment of thousands of dollars, the leadership at that startup—Phenix Real Time Solutions—could hire an extraction team to relocate their Ukrainian-based developer and his parents to relative safety in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv."It didn't take any convincing for our CEO or our founder,” said Kyle Bank, BSBA 2014, and the COO at Phenix. “It was, 'What's it going to take? How do we do it?' Same thing with our board of directors. Not one word of hesitation.”It was a situation Bank never anticipated when he joined the video streaming company in 2016. Bank joined soon after Phenix found a Ukrainian software engineer through an outsourcing company and built an in-country development team around him.That programmer's harrowing ordeal with his parents, who are in their 70s, started with a walk through a Russian checkpoint and across a makeshift bridge to replace the bombed-out span. They had to hurry to the Ukrainian-occupied part of Irpin, where they could catch a ride with volunteers to neighboring Kyiv. A day later, the extraction team—actually, a single driver employed by an organization that arranges such things—would collect the threesome and their belongings.“The experience of getting out of Irpin to Kyiv was probably the most dangerous part of the story,” the programmer said as he described the ordeal, which included a 13-hour drive to Lviv through more checkpoints and around battle-damaged roads. Said Bank: "I was absolutely glued to the computer screen all day trying to find out if he'd made it. It was a nerve-wracking day."The programmer was the focus of this particular episode. But it wasn't the only thing Phenix did for its Ukraine-based team of developers in the early days following Russia's aggression.RELATED LINKSWebsite for Phenix Real-Time SolutionsKyle Bank on LinkedInStory on WashU Olin's website about Bank's story about the programmerVice News report from Irpin by Ben Solomon mentioning the Irpin BridgeMore about Kurt Dirks"Leadership in Dangerous Situations," a book referenced by Dirks, to which he contributedCREDITSThis podcast is a production of Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis. Contributors include:Katie Wools, Cathy Myrick, Judy Milanovits and Lesley Liesman, creative assistanceJill Young Miller, fact checking and creative assistanceAustin Alred and Olin's Center for Digital Education, sound engineeringHayden Molinarolo, original music and sound designMike Martin Media, editingSophia Passantino, social mediaLexie O'Brien and Erik Buschardt, website supportPaula Crews, creative vision and strategic support

Christine Chang recalls the moment in the back seat of a cab, heading across Manhattan to her next appointment. She and her cofounder, Sarah Lee, finally had to have a tough conversation about the future of their beauty business Glow Recipe.The pair had originally built a successful business focused on curating Korean beauty products produced by other manufacturers. A business that had generated a significant customer following and an engaged fan base through savvy use of social media. A business that generated the majority of Glow Recipe's revenue, which was reported to be $1 million in their first year of business and growing triple digits year over year.But the other 10% of their revenue was calling to them. That was the revenue that began to grow in 2017 after Glow Recipe started its own in-house brand of beauty products. And there Chang and Lee sat, in the back of a cab in early 2019.“As a growing but small team, we were being pulled in multiple directions by having to manage a rapidly growing in-house brand and another business vertical together," Chang, BSBA 2004, recalled. “We talked seriously about whether this was sustainable. Five years from now, what will we wish we'd done? By the end of that cab ride, we had aligned.”The curation business had to go. Glow Recipe would be all-in with its in-house brand of products. People would have to be let go. Inventory had to be shed. Their online community of fans and customers—invested in one version of Glow Recipe—would have to be invited along for a difficult transition.Skincare brands are typically known to position their brands as either serious and clinically efficacious or whimsical and fun. Glow Recipe's mission was to combine both worlds into a line of products that delivered results but were also sensorial, joyful and approachable.“It was a massive pivot to shut down the curated business,” Chang said. “As the brand grew, we realized we couldn't do both.” Two years later, the pivot paid off as Chang and Lee's company continued an explosive growth trend.RELATED LINKSThe Glow Recipe websiteElanor Williams' page on the WashU Olin Business School siteChristine Chang's Instagram pageGlow Recipe on InstagramCNBC reports on the Glow Recipe storyA report by Katie Couric Media on Glow RecipeCREDITSThis podcast is a production of Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis. Contributors include:Katie Wools, Cathy Myrick, Judy Milanovits and Lesley Liesman, creative assistanceJill Young Miller, fact checking and creative assistanceHayden Molinarolo, original music and sound designMike Martin Media, editingSophia Passantino, social mediaLexie O'Brien and Erik Buschardt, website supportPaula Crews, creative vision and strategic supportSpecial thanks to Ray Irving and his team at WashU Olin's Center for Digital Education, including our audio engineer, Austin Alred.

Akeem Shannon was stressed. In three weeks, his Shark Tank episode would air, the episode where he'd pitch Flipstik—a novel cellphone attachment that doubles as a kickstand and a sticky wall mount.He knew one thing with absolute certainty: Whether or not the “sharks” on the popular ABC-TV show offered him a deal, he was going to sell some Flipstiks. Probably a lot of them. And he didn't have any. Or any money.At the time, in mid-October 2020, Shannon's startup was so young he sometimes sold only one Flipstik a day. One bright spot: He'd recently landed a commitment of $50,000 from Arch Grants, a St. Louis nonprofit that provides capital to startups willing to plant roots in the community.With the Shark Tank air date weeks away, he contacted his manufacturer in China. “I need product. Lots of it. Right now,” he said. He mobilized his team to build a makeshift distribution warehouse. He upgraded his website's software to handle the crush of transactions he expected. He maxed out his credit cards.It wasn't enough. Ultimately, he had to pick up the phone to Arch Grants, which was supposed to pay out its commitment in quarterly installments. “Is there any way I can get some cash up-front—right away?” Shannon pleaded. “I don't have two weeks to wait.”The cash arrived. The episode aired—with one more hitch. Ninety seconds into his segment, ABC broke in with news from the 2020 election. “I just cried when it happened,” Shannon said. But it didn't matter. He'd set the hook. He reeled in Shark Tank fans, with orders totaling more than $100,000 in just a few days. When the episode repeated on January 1, 2021, sales spiked once again. Ultimately, Shannon got an offer from one of the sharks—a deal that later fell apart off-air. Yet for Shannon, the episode was a turning point. The last-minute race to prepare, the 11th-hour request for cash, maxed out cards—it had paid off.RELATED LINKSThe Flipstik websiteAkeem Shannon's segment on Shark Tank (including his rap)Akeem on InstagramMichael Wall's faculty page at WashU Olin Business SchoolThe St. Louis Business Journal on the Inc. rankingsCREDITSThis podcast is a production of Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis. Contributors include:Katie Wools, Cathy Myrick, Judy Milanovits and Lesley Liesman, creative assistanceJill Young Miller, fact checking and creative assistanceHayden Molinarolo, original music and sound designMike Martin Media, editingSophia Passantino, social mediaLexie O'Brien and Erik Buschardt, website supportPaula Crews, creative vision and strategic supportSpecial thanks to Ray Irving and his team at WashU Olin's Center for Digital Education, including our audio engineer, Austin Alred.

At the start of the day, Lisa Baron and her board of trustees gathered for the fifth strategic planning cycle in the 20-year history of Memory Care Home Solutions, the nonprofit Baron founded to serve families with Alzheimer's patients. How would they expand? How would they diversify their revenue sources? How would they create sustainable long-term earnings?But after dinner, at the end of the day, the planning facilitator put a question to Baron and her board, a question she wasn't expecting at all. “You can grow incrementally,” the facilitator said, “or you can change the world. What do you want to do?”The question sent a bolt of lightning through Baron and her board. It changed the focus of their strategic planning entirely. The game was no longer just about contract reimbursements, revenue streams and federal grants. It wasn't only about seeking inclusion in employer assistance programs or third-party healthcare contracts.It was about advocacy for families. It was about forming coalitions to influence policy around memory care issues. “It was huge,” Baron said. “It opened us up to the power of more people helping us achieve more than we could by ourselves.”Within weeks, work had begun to expand the agency's vision into the advocacy space, using the experience of hospice workers—who moved the palliative care practice from the fringes of healthcare into the mainstream—as an example.What steps in its history brought Baron and Memory Care Home Solutions to this moment? How are they building the groundwork to “change the world”? And what can business leaders learn from Baron's experience?UPDATE SINCE THIS EPISODELisa Baron announced her retirement from MCHS in December 2022 and officially stepped down May 31, 2023. According to Jill Cigliana, the organization's new executive director, “Lisa continues to inspire and guide MCHS in her new role as founder and director emeritus. She remains involved in advocacy and policy work on behalf of people living with dementia and family care partners.”Since the approval of the fifth strategic plan, Cigliana said the organization has focused on building out its dementia navigation service line based on the Care Ecosystem model of care developed at the University of California-San Francisco. “This work connects us with a national team of researchers and collaborators to advance best practices in dementia care and is aligned with our strategic goals. Additionally, we have been meeting with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services to inform a payment model for dementia care services.”On July 31, MCHS was invited to Washington, DC, to attend the advisory council meeting of the National Alzheimer's Project Act. At that meeting, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced a test program to roll out a dementia care model which will be covered through Medicare benefits. “This means that for the first time in this country, there will be a covered benefit for Medicare beneficiaries who are living with dementia, including education, training and paid respite for their family caregivers. MCHS will continue to be involved in the testing for this model of care.”Said Lisa Baron, “It's thrilling that we are being included in the national conversation. This is exactly what we were aiming for.”RELATED LINKSMemory Care Home Solutions websiteFrom Small Business Monthly: “Time With The Boss - Lisa Baron, Memory Care Home Solutions”Nick Argyres' page on the WashU Olin websiteLisa Baron testified in 2016 about Alzheimer's services to the Special Senate Committee on AgingCREDITSThis podcast is a production of Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis. Contributors include:Katie Wools, Cathy Myrick, Judy Milanovits and Lesley Liesman, creative assistanceJill Young Miller, fact checking and creative assistanceHayden Molinarolo, original music and sound designMike Martin Media, editingSophia Passantino, social mediaLexie O'Brien and Erik Buschardt, website supportPaula Crews, creative vision and strategic supportSpecial thanks to Ray Irving and his team at WashU Olin's Center for Digital Education, including our audio engineer, Austin Alred.

The voices in today's bonus episode may be familiar to On Principle listeners. They're voices from previous guests, sharing stories about some major “Oh, shoot!” moments they confronted in their businesses. They came together for a special "On Principle Live!" event at WashU Olin Business School on September 1, 2022, called "Now What?" The event was the first of our Leadership Perspectives events for the academic year.Featured GuestsAlaina Macía. An Olin MBA alum and president and CEO of MTM, a nationwide non-emergency medical transportation service provider.Angel Likens, third-generation president of Bogey Hills Country Club, a St. Charles, Missouri, institution since 1962.Jason Wilson, an Olin Executive MBA alum, coffee entrepreneur and owner of Northwest Coffee Roasting Company.Gerard Craft, St. Louis chef and restaurateur and owner of Niche Food Group, with eight restaurants in St. Louis and one in Nashville.CreditsThis podcast is a production of Washington University in St. Louis' Olin Business School. Contributors include:Katie Wools, Cathy Myrick, Lesley Liesman and Judy Milanovits, creative assistanceJill Young Miller, fact-checking and creative assistanceHayden Molinarolo, original music and sound designMike Martin Media, editingSophia Passantino, social mediaLexie O'Brien and Erik Buschardt, website supportPaula Crews, creative vision and strategic supportSpecial thanks to Ray Irving and his team at WashU Olin's Center for Digital Education, including our audio engineer, Austin Alred.

When this month's guest and I originally talked, she remembered the toilet paper woes in the early days of the pandemic as a turning point for consumers, a time when supply chains entered the common lexicon. We decided to take a deeper dive into the topic by going further into that original interview from May 2022.CreditsThis podcast is a production of Washington University in St. Louis' Olin Business School. Contributors include:Katie Wools, Cathy Myrick, Lesley Liesman and Judy Milanovits, creative assistanceJill Young Miller, fact-checking and creative assistanceHayden Molinarolo, original music and sound designMike Martin Media, editingSophia Passantino, social mediaLexie O'Brien and Erik Buschardt, website supportMark P. Taylor, strategic supportPaula Crews, creative vision and strategic supportSpecial thanks to Ray Irving and his team at WashU Olin's Center for Digital Education, including our audio engineer, Austin Alred.

Our first season three bonus episode looks back at my conversation with Erik Dane, an associate professor of organizational behavior at WashU Olin Business School. We originally spoke for our episode called “Warrior Heart, No Stigma" featuring Gen. Mike Minihan. Today, we're revisiting Erik's comments about how mindfulness and its perceived opposite, mind-wandering, are valuable tools in the workplace by driving efficiency, creativity and well-being.CreditsThis podcast is a production of Washington University in St. Louis' Olin Business School. Contributors include:Katie Wools, Cathy Myrick, Lesley Liesman and Judy Milanovits, creative assistanceJill Young Miller, fact checking and creative assistanceHayden Molinarolo, original music and sound designMike Martin Media, editingSophia Passantino, social mediaLexie O'Brien and Erik Buschardt, website supportMark P. Taylor, strategic supportPaula Crews, creative vision and strategic supportSpecial thanks to Ray Irving and his team at WashU Olin's Center for Digital Education, including our audio engineer, Austin Alred.

Arguably, the four consultants in our story have already weathered their share of pivotal moments. They've navigated a full-time MBA program, coursework across three continents in six weeks and a global pandemic halfway through their studies.Indeed, all that may have prepared them for the professional path they've taken. All four work full-time as consultants. They're also co-founders of Oystar, a student-driven platform to improve and expand university recruiting. “We're better at being comfortable with the inconsistency of what we're working on,” said Lungile Tshuma, a consultant at World Wide Technology. “We've learned how to be more comfortable with adjusting.”But that convergence of ambition might be tossing the most meaningful moments across their paths in a series of small, pivotal moments as they skip back and forth between managing their startup and managing their day jobs. “Something we learn in our real jobs we can quickly apply to our startup,” Tshuma said. “And it goes both ways.”The foursome—all 2021 Olin MBA grads—includes Tshuma, Kevin Ko, Tim Brandt and Abhinav Gabbeta. As professional consultants, they've quickly learned how to refine a presentation deck for their big clients—and adapted that skill to showcase their startup.They've run across challenging leadership personalities—learning what kind of leader they want to be … and don't want to be. They've watched how their big clients depend on Agile development practices—and adopted them at Oystar. They've mastered multitasking across four time zones. They've learned to trust each other—so they don't all have to attend every meeting with advisors, potential funders and their intern team.In this edition of On Principle, our roundtable conversation with Tshuma, Gabbeta, Ko and Brandt examine the small pivotal moments in the life of a business leader—and the high impact those moments ultimately yield.RELATED LINKSOystar's LinkedIn company pageOystar wins startup funding at the Skandalaris Center's Entrepreneurship AwardsThe company is featured in Washington Magazine, the university's alumni magazineThe company gets a shout-out in Poets & Quants after the WashU Olin MBA entrepreneurship program takes a fourth consecutive No. 1 ranking.Abhinav Gabbeta mentioned his appreciation for Asha for EducationCREDITSThis podcast is a production of Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis. Contributors include:Katie Wools, Cathy Myrick, Judy Milanovits and Lesley Liesman, creative assistanceJill Young Miller, fact checking and creative assistanceHayden Molinarolo, original music and sound designMike Martin Media, editingSophia Passantino, social mediaLexie O'Brien and Erik Buschardt, website supportPaula Crews, creative vision and strategic supportSpecial thanks to Ray Irving and his team at WashU Olin's Center for Digital Education, including our audio engineer, Austin Alred.

Kendra Kelly wryly refers to it as “her old friend.”She's an accomplished junior executive with years of marketing experience. She served as a field organizer for the Obama presidential campaign. She led WashU Olin's graduate student body as its president and was elected its graduation speaker.Yet a year after joining L'Oréal, where she serves as chief of staff for the president of the luxury division, she's only just beginning to understand how to deal with her old friend—an unwelcome visitor otherwise known as “imposter syndrome.”In a recent piece in the Harvard Business Review, authors Ruchika Tulshyan and Jodi-Ann Burey write of the phenomenon as “a workplace-induced trauma” induced by the repeated confrontation of systemic racism and bias. They argue that addressing imposter syndrome should be less about “fixing women at work” and more about fixing the places where women work.And yet, a year after earning her MBA, in the wake of her mother's passing, in the shadow of the isolation of learning and working remotely during the pandemic, the challenges posed by her “old friend” persist. She found herself occasionally gripped by self-doubt in her company's fast-paced work culture—while she must step back, slow down and meticulously break down business problems.“Your brain is not your friend,” Kelly said. “I was not myself. It was starting to weigh on me. And I realized this was not OK.”How did Kelly come to realize her old friend was knocking on the door? How did it affect her at work? How did she come to confront it? And how is she learning to deal with it? And what, more broadly, should workplaces do to banish this “old friend” from their hallways, offices and conference rooms?Kelly's story is emblematic of the oft-stated importance of bringing one's whole self into the workplace—knowing what it means and knowing how that principle can contribute to the organization and support the individual. In Kelly's case, for example, she came to learn her meticulous approach to work was a valued skill—different, but necessary. “I have found it to be a skill,” she said, “to take the thing we've all been swirling around and name it.”More than that, she's learning how to cope with her old friend. “This is not something I need to get over,” she said, “but learn to live with and thrive with.”RELATED LINKSWorkplace-induced trauma. Read how the Harvard Business Reviewdiscusses the concept of imposter syndrome.Kendra Kelly on LinkedIn. See her profile.Best and Brightest. While Kendra Kelly was an MBA student, Poets & Quantsnamed her among the “best and brightest” MBA students that year.Hannah Birnbaum. See her website.CREDITSThis podcast is a production of Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis. Contributors include:Katie Wools, Cathy Myrick, Judy Milanovits and Lesley Liesman, creative assistanceJill Young Miller, fact checking and creative assistanceHayden Molinarolo, original music and sound designMike Martin Media, editingSophia Passantino, social mediaLexie O'Brien and Erik Buschardt, website supportPaula Crews, creative vision and strategic supportSpecial thanks to Ray Irving and his team at WashU Olin's Center for Digital Education, including our audio engineer, Austin Alred.

Eighteen whiskey producers comprise the famed Kentucky Bourbon Trail, something of a mecca for bourbon aficionados. They come to wander the trail and sample each distillery's golden recipe—a guarded combination of grain types and grinds, cooking times and temperatures, yeast blends and finishing processes borne from generations of tradition and training.Among the trail's newest stops: Bardstown Bourbon. Founded in 2014, the distillery has decidedly less than a generation of tradition under its belt. But it has shaken the industry with a new approach: a “collaborative distilling program” serving brand owners and non-distilling producers eager to market their own unique whiskies.Along the way, it's learned a thing or two about rocking tradition—and serving customers.For co-founder and WashU alum David Mandell, AB 1996, a lawyer and former chief of staff for several high-profile federal agencies, Bardstown Bourbon exploited an opportunity revealed when the US bourbon market began to boom. Indeed, its model was so successful, Bardstown sold out its own planned capacity before it finished building its facility. The company quickly attracted big-name brands, including a well-known global manufacturer that had committed tens of millions of dollars to a contract with Bardstown. That's where a chink in the model first appeared.Turns out producing custom whiskey for multiple companies isn't easy. Everyone wasn't always satisfied—including that high-profile customer. And when Bardstown's master distiller balked at being questioned about his ability to deliver a product that satisfied their strict requirements, Mandell had to navigate the intersection of tradition and customer service—and quickly.“Nobody was used to giving customer service like we were promising in this industry,” Mandell said. “And that customer was roughly 50% of our business at the time.” How did Bardstown Bourbon solve the problem? What did they learn from the experience? And how did one of Mandell's earlier industry failures inform the creation of Bardstown? RELATED LINKSThe Bourbon Trail homepageWashU profiles David Mandell in Washington MagazineStoli Group announces hiring David Mandell at Kentucky Owl Real Estate to lead construction of a new distilleryRaphael Thomadsen's WashU Olin homepageRecent Thomadsen research: “Forecasting the spread of COVID-19 under different reopening strategies”CREDITSThis podcast is a production of Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis. Contributors include:Katie Wools, Cathy Myrick, Judy Milanovits and Lesley Liesman, creative assistanceJill Young Miller, fact checking and creative assistanceHayden Molinarolo, original music and sound designMike Martin Media, editingSophia Passantino, social mediaLexie O'Brien and Erik Buschardt, website supportPaula Crews, creative vision and strategic supportSpecial thanks to Ray Irving and his team at WashU Olin's Center for Digital Education, including our audio engineer, Austin Alred.

If you read the website for Jimmy Sansone's company, he doesn't beat around the bush: He hated working in finance—a career he pursued for five years after earning his business degree from WashU. But then, there was that shirt …Yes, Sansone made a shirt. A shirt he loved. A shirt he thought everyone would love. He called it the Normal Shirt. And in 2015 he quit his finance job, moved into his parents' basement and started making shirts. Full time. And people loved them. His brothers joined him right away and now they run it together.People might have loved them too much. Because that's when Sansone, BSBA 2010, realized they didn't have the supply chain expertise they needed. How do you source fabric, thread, buttons? How do you define cut, color and wash? How do you ship products from Asia to your distribution markets?"We had a middle-man that was handling a lot of this,” Sansone said. “Then we didn't have one in the middle of the season.” That was 2016.They'd never talked directly to a factory owner. They'd never directly managed shipping from a different country. “We had no visibility into the process. We weren't in control of that. We needed to learn quickly and have people on the team who could handle it,” he said.“We had to source the backup plan very quickly,” he said. “Had we not been able to do that, we probably wouldn't have the company.”How did he do it? How did he go from zero to 100 mph in the supply chain world on the turn of a dime? What did he learn in the process? And what would he counsel others to do in the same situation?RELATED LINKSThe Normal Brand. Find men's and women's apparelJimmy Sansone, BSBA 2010, was named one of Olin's emerging leaders in 2022An early story about The Normal Brand from the Olin Blog.Faculty page for Lingxiu Dong, Olin's Frahm Family Chair of Supply Chain, Operations, and TechnologyCREDITSThis podcast is a production of Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis. Contributors include:Katie Wools, Cathy Myrick, Judy Milanovits and Lesley Liesman, creative assistanceJill Young Miller, fact checking and creative assistanceHayden Molinarolo, original music and sound designMike Martin Media, editingSophia Passantino, social mediaLexie O'Brien and Erik Buschardt, website supportPaula Crews, creative vision and strategic supportSpecial thanks to Ray Irving and his team at WashU Olin's Center for Digital Education, including our audio engineer, Austin Alred.

Gen. Mike Minihan will be the first to tell you: The United States loses a staggering number of veterans or servicemembers to suicide every month. Indeed, a 2021 report pegged the number at 30,177 suicides among military personnel and veterans since 9/11. That's about 127 a month. And it's more than have died in military operations in that time—by a lot.As Minihan put it, traditional approaches tend not to “crack the code” on the problem. One day at a leadership workshop, a retired chief master sergeant approached Minihan, commander of the US Air Force's Air Mobility Command, issued a challenge to the general. If you want to make a difference, make a mental health appointment. Put it on your calendar.Minihan was in the Pentagon on 9/11. He served in Iraq and Afghanistan. He's ridden in military Humvees carrying human remains, watched body bags being loaded into planes, comforted grieving servicemen and women, and commanded airmen in combat zones.But when he made that appointment, when he put it on his calendar, when he shared a picture of that calendar entry on Twitter, “It started the most terrifying three days for me.” How would it be received? Would it make a difference? “I'd rather fly into Baghdad.”“Warrior heart,” the tweet read. “No stigma.”In this episode, we look at the place well-being, mindfulness and mental health play in the workplace and what one leader did in one of the most traditionally hard-boiled institutions in the country, the US military. Minihan has no illusions that his statement will revolutionize attitudes, only that it's a step toward normalizing attitudes about mental health.RELATED LINKSSuicide Prevention Lifeline. In the United States, simply call 988. More information. Visit here for international resources.CHADS Coalition. Communities Healing Adolescent Depression and SuicideMilitary Crisis Line. Free, confidential resource for service members and veterans.Gen. Minihan's tweet. "Warrior heart, no stigma"USO story. "Military Suicide Rates Are at an All-Time High; Here's How We're Trying to Help"Military suicide research. Paper by scholars from Brown University and Boston UniversityTask & Purpose coverage. Publication covering military issues tells Minihan's storyMinihan bio. On the US Air Force websiteErik Dane. His background and access to his CVCREDITSThis podcast is a production of Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis. Contributors include:Katie Wools, Cathy Myrick, Judy Milanovits and Lesley Liesman, creative assistanceJill Young Miller, fact checking and creative assistanceHayden Molinarolo, original music and sound designMike Martin Media, editingSophia Passantino, social mediaLexie O'Brien and Erik Buschardt, website supportPaula Crews, creative vision and strategic supportSpecial thanks to Ray Irving and his team at WashU Olin's Center for Digital Education, including our audio engineer, Austin Alred.

Fake it till you make it. Talk the talk before you can walk the walk. We hear it all the time, and that's where Russ Flicker was in 2009. Russ left the Blackstone Group to join Ian Schrager Company as its chief investment officer but “irreconcilable differences” compelled him to leave only months after joining to strike out on his own—in the midst of the worst global economic crisis in decades—with two children under 5 years old and his wife.In fact, he wasn't really even trying to start a business. In his words, he was “unemployable,” thanks to a devastated economy where everyone in his line of work—real estate equity, private equity and development—was hanging onto their jobs for dear life. “I was just trying to make some money and stay relevant,” Flicker said.That process started when he identified the Sheraton Safari hotel in Orlando, a property in need of a massive upgrade. A property he thought could use his talents, giving him a toehold to start his own business. And, as it turned out, his former associates at Blackstone owned the property. Flicker and his partner Jon Rosenfeld (who also previously worked at Blackstone) put months of work into networking, connecting with potential investors, assembling financing—all with the belief that Blackstone might be willing to sell. Along the way, at least two dozen potential investors told him he was nuts. No way was that property worth what Flicker thought it was worth.Still, with one key investor, Flicker was able to pull together the purchase. But when the time came to seal the deal, the answer was no. Flicker was devastated—in fact, he struggled to keep that “fake it till you make it” attitude. But he was undeterred, following up with former colleagues higher in Blackstone's ecosystem. “You've got to believe in your idea even when everyone else is telling you not to,” Flicker said.And that was the crux of his case to the Blackstone higher-ups. His presentation basically said this: Nobody thinks this hotel is worth what I'm willing to give you for it—so maybe this is a deal you ought to consider. The argument won the day. Flicker bought the hotel, revived it and used that deal to leverage others.Today, Flicker's company, AWH Partners LLC, owns and manages about 8,000 hotel rooms across 25 states with private equity, hedge fund and insurance company partners like Apollo Global Management, The Baupost Group and Starr Companies. As a vertically integrated hospitality firm, AWH owns a management company (Spire Hospitality) that manages its hotels as well as a development company that manages renovations and ground up construction in-house.RELATED LINKSAWH PartnersAcquisition example: AWH Partners and Funds Managed by Apollo Global Management Acquire DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel AnaheimJohn Barrios, assistant professor of accounting, WashU OlinCREDITSThis podcast is a production of Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis. Contributors include:Katie Wools, Cathy Myrick, Judy Milanovits and Lesley Liesman, creative assistanceJill Young Miller, fact checking and creative assistanceHayden Molinarolo, original music and sound designMike Martin Media, editingSophia Passantino, social mediaLexie O'Brien and Erik Buschardt, website supportPaula Crews, creative vision and strategic supportSpecial thanks to Ray Irving and his team at WashU Olin's Center for Digital Education, including our audio engineer, Austin Alred.

In March 2013, the Normandy School District's board hired Ty McNichols as its superintendent. By January 2015, McNichols was gone, resigned from the post after gaining what had been a career ambition—to lead a school district.In the course of those 22 months, McNichol ran into a buzzsaw of state and local politics, financial crisis, plummeting morale, personal attacks and lightly veiled racism as he navigated the sudden loss of accreditation for the district. Oh, and by the way, McNichols and his team had to educate 4,000 students from pre-kindergarten through 12th grade.The drama began to unfold within weeks of McNichols taking on the role offered by the elected school board for the north St. Louis County district. The chronically underperforming district needed a leader with ideas about improving student performance. The board thought McNichols might have the right ideas. By June, however, the state of Missouri had stripped Normandy of its accreditation, setting in motion a series of issues and unintended consequences.That included accommodating hundreds of students given authority to flee the district for a neighboring, fully accredited district. Those moves came on Normandy's dime—indeed, a lot of dimes Normandy didn't have. And it put the mostly Black and brown students of Normandy in the crosshairs of a somewhat hostile reception from the mostly white district identified to accept them.“What are the things I value? What was I willing to do and what not? Education is a political action for social justice,” McNichols said. “That's what drove me.”Our story is about how a leader confronts wildly competing priorities when the stakes are high—arguably no higher than the education of children. Can you strive for great? Must you settle for acceptable? Is this about making the best of a bad situation?RELATED LINKSTyrone McNichols named Normandy superintendent, St. Louis American, March 14, 2013McNichols resigns as Normandy superintendent, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 22, 2015Saint Rice on LinkedInWashington University's Institute for School PartnershipCREDITSThis podcast is a production of Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis. Contributors include:Katie Wools, Cathy Myrick, Judy Milanovits and Lesley Liesman, creative assistanceJill Young Miller, fact checking and creative assistanceHayden Molinarolo, original music and sound designMike Martin Media, editingSophia Passantino, social mediaLexie O'Brien and Erik Buschardt, website supportPaula Crews, creative vision and strategic supportSpecial thanks to Ray Irving and his team at WashU Olin's Center for Digital Education, including our audio engineer, Austin Alred.

Turns out, it's hard to differentiate one cow from another—harder than you might have thought, in any case. And that idea was at the core of the company Mark Pydynowski formed, and the technology his firm was developing.Investors seemed excited about his cow-identifying technology. Government regulators seemed excited. Then, some of the reality started to set in. The tech was reliable in a lab, but not in the field. The cattle industry was decidedly not excited about it. Narrow margins in the food industry didn't favor the cost of the technology.And suddenly, investors weren't excited.Their venture capital investor pushed back its closing date for a funding round — and the layoffs began. Then, Pydynowski's firm had to pivot: As it turns out, it's harder to identify one mouse from another than you might think. A new business plan emerged with upsides exactly where the cow-identifying version of the technology had downsides.Mice are used in drug development where margins are bigger and budgets are huge. Mice have to be tracked properly to track the data, so the industry needed this tech. Working in cleanrooms and laboratory environments, the tech was more reliable. Plus, the tech was transferable—for tracking fish, artwork, inmates, for example.“Every day I'm saying if we're not dead, we're still alive,” said Pydynowski, BSBA '04. And now he has to re-sell everyone involved in the mouse version of the technology. And while that work was underway, the firm had difficulties with manufacturing the mouse ID hardware, requiring a 100% recall. Revenue was delayed, again. Pydynowski was fired.  How do you decide how to move forward after you're fired? Do you make it easy or hard? Do you help the company and move on? What did Pydynowski learn along this bumpy road? How has he used it going forward?RELATED LINKSVideo recording, panel discussion, “The other F word”More product management insights from Mark PydynowskiMore about Dedric Carter's vice chancellor role at WashUCREDITSThis podcast is a production of Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis. Contributors include:Katie Wools, Cathy Myrick, Judy Milanovits and Lesley Liesman, creative assistanceJill Young Miller, fact checking and creative assistanceHayden Molinarolo, original music and sound designMike Martin Media, editingSophia Passantino, social mediaLexie O'Brien and Erik Buschardt, website supportPaula Crews, creative vision and strategic supportSpecial thanks to Ray Irving and his team at WashU Olin's Center for Digital Education, including our audio engineer, Austin Alred.

When her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer 11 years ago, Lauren Herring jumped in to help with projects and lead the global expansion for IMPACT Group—the firm her mother had launched in 1988.In 2007, Herring led the work of incorporating an acquisition target of the company, an outplacement firm that doubled the company's size. Two years later, she took over as the company's CEO — right after the economic downturn.But in her company's line of work at that time, economic downturns are mother's milk. With its focus at the time on employee relocation and outplacement services, IMPACT Group's business was countercyclical: Bad economic times were good for business. The company had its best year ever in 2008.And that is the crux of our story. As Herring put it, 2010, 2011 and 2012 were slow recovery years. The firm needed to restructure its lines of business to moderate the hot-and-cold nature of its business cycle.The outplacement business was countercyclical and generally meant bad news for clients, which was good news for her business in a bad economy—like, during a pandemic. Meanwhile, IMPACT Group's relocation services served a niche within a niche, focusing largely on the needs of the spouse in the relocation. It wasn't enough to even out the rise and fall of revenue as economic cycles came and went.IMPACT Group had some experience and modest success with leadership coaching, and that was the area where Herring saw an opportunity to build. But it wasn't smooth sailing.“Going into this transition, I thought we had great clients and partners, and we went into this with more hubris than is appropriate,” she said. “I thought this would be a snap. I realized it would be a difficult journey.”She realized she had more of a sales job than she anticipated to persuade potential clients she had the expertise for the job. Even more, she learned she had to bring her people into the process, help them understand how to build client relationships, rather than sell transactionally. “For the leadership, people do want that,” she said. “But I didn't understand the shift required over a number of years to confidently go to our clients and say we're really good at this.”RELATED LINKSListen to episodes of Lauren Herring's podcast, “Take Control of Your Career”IMPACT Group's websiteAbout Lauren HerringBooks Lauren Herring has written: “Take Control of Your Job Search!” and “This side up: A Simple guide to your successful relocation”More about Markus BaerCREDITSThis podcast is a production of Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis. Contributors include:Katie Wools, Cathy Myrick, Judy Milanovits and Lesley Liesman, creative assistanceJill Young Miller, fact checking and creative assistanceHayden Molinarolo, original music and sound designMike Martin Media, editingSophia Passantino, social mediaLexie O'Brien and Erik Buschardt, website supportPaula Crews, creative vision and strategic supportSpecial thanks to Ray Irving and his team at WashU Olin's Center for Digital Education, including our audio engineer, Austin Alred.

Something you never saw coming … a fire, a financial crisis, a pandemic. Some business challenges you can anticipate, while others come out of the blue. How do you grapple with the unexpected? What's your next move after the floor caves in? This panel discussion features four business leaders who have shared their stories on WashU Olin's On Principle podcast. Join us to hear them talk about their uh-oh moments, how they dealt with them and the lasting impact of their solutions.Gerard Craft, President, Craft Restaurants Ltd.Angel Likens, President and General Manager, Bogey Hills Country ClubAlaina Macia, MBA 2002, CEO, MTMJason Wilson, EMBA 2008, Owner, Northwest Coffee Roasting CompanyKurt Greenbaum, Moderator, Director of Communication and host of On Principle, WashU Olin Business School 

Our second season two bonus episode looks back at my conversation with Trish Gorman, a professor of practice in strategy at Olin Business School. We originally spoke for our first season two episode called “The $5 Million Mistake,” and at the time, Trish was deeply involved in planning Olin's new online MBA program. Today, we're revisiting her remarks about what business strategy means to her, how she thinks about it and how it informed her work on launching a new online MBA program.CREDITSThis podcast is a production of Washington University in St. Louis' Olin Business School. Contributors include:Katie Wools, Cathy Myrick, Judy Milanovits and Lesley Liesman, creative assistanceJill Young Miller, fact checking and creative assistanceHayden Molinarolo, original music and sound designMike Martin Media, editingSophia Passantino, social mediaLexie O'Brien and Erik Buschardt, website supportPaula Crews, creative vision and strategic supportSpecial thanks to Ray Irving and his team at WashU Olin's Center for Digital Education, including our audio engineer, Austin Alred.

When we first talked to WashU Olin finance professor Tim Solberg in October 2021, we sought his input for our season 2 On Principle episode “The Inspiration.” Our focus was on real estate developer Steve Smith and the winding path behind City Foundry, his retail and commercial development in midtown St. Louis.In the course of our conversation, we learned how Solberg was bitten by inspiration for another project. And we're not speaking metaphorically. In today's bonus episode, we revisit that conversation and learn how a medical emergency led to research in three continents and a toxicology authority at the University of Arizona.RELATED LINKSSee Dr. Leslie Boyer's bio on the University Arizona websiteCREDITSThis podcast is a production of Washington University in St. Louis' Olin Business School. Contributors include:Katie Wools, Cathy Myrick and Judy Milanovits, creative assistanceJill Young Miller, fact checking and creative assistanceHayden Molinarolo, original music and sound designMike Martin Media, editingSophia Passantino, social mediaLexie O'Brien and Erik Buschardt, website supportMark P. Taylor, strategic supportPaula Crews, creative vision and strategic supportSpecial thanks to Ray Irving and his team at WashU Olin's Center for Digital Education, including our audio engineer, Austin Alred.

In 2014, one of his coffee shops failed—the one on St. Louis' underserved north side. Some of the workers he held over after acquiring his coffee brand were sabotaging customer relationships. He couldn't get bank loans. Checks were bouncing. Advisors pushed him to quit. Don't throw good money after bad, they said.But Jason Wilson, owner of Northwest Coffee Roasting Company, decided he had to exist in what he calls “the gray area.” He had to push through, stay the course and survive on self-confidence, his belief in his product—and a little goodwill from friends.“Had I gotten out in 2014 when everyone told me to, I would have missed out on this great opportunity,” Wilson said. “You have to be comfortable living in this gray area.”Seven years later, this is “the great opportunity”: Wilson's one retail restaurant location now brings down more revenue than two stores did in 2018. He's got wholesale distribution deals for the coffee he roasts locally. He's on the verge of selling his coffee across the Schnucks supermarket chain in St. Louis. He's about to open a new location in the suburban community of Webster Groves.“People said you should just shut it down and get out of it,” said Wilson, who earned his executive MBA from WashU in 2008. “I never believed that. Sometimes it's a matter of never giving up.” But along the way, Wilson had to deal with:A business failure that hurt his opportunity to borrow.A business climate that historically hasn't favored Black business owners.Questions of sabotage from holdover employees after he acquired Northwest Coffee.Personal investments from friends and his own pocket.He credits Midwest Bank Centre for creating a relationship and, in his words, “giving me room to (mess) up.” He also credits a mentor named David Price, a Harvard Business School-educated former executive at Monsanto and BFGoodrich.RELATED LINKSVisit the Northwest Coffee Roasting Company website.Watch a short video about roasting the beans at Northwest.Read Feast Magazine's story about the hey-day of Chronicle Coffee.Read the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's story about Wilson's setbacks—including the closing of Chronicle Coffee.See a short blurb on that Slinky story Dan Elfenbein mentioned.CREDITSThis podcast is a production of Washington University in St. Louis's Olin Business School. Contributors include:Katie Wools, Cathy Myrick and Judy Milanovits, creative assistanceJill Young Miller, fact checking and creative assistanceHayden Molinarolo, original music and sound designMike Martin Media, editingSophia Passantino, social mediaLexie O'Brien and Erik Buschardt, website supportMark P. Taylor, strategic supportPaula Crews, creative vision and strategic supportSpecial thanks to Ray Irving and his team at WashU Olin's Center for Digital Education, including our audio engineer, Austin Alred.

In 2009, nobody wanted Jill Castilla in Edmond, Oklahoma, much less inside the halls of its century-old community institution, Citizens Bank—nobody except her stepfather. The third-generation Citizens Bank-er had coaxed her to come in the midst of a Federal Reserve examination underway at the bank. Though she'd arrived at the bank without a title, she got to work, living in her stepfather's house. The bank examination was terrible. Heads rolled. Within 30 days of arriving, she found fraud, mismanagement, erroneous financial statements and, as she put it, “a bank in shambles.” She reported her findings to the bank's board and to regulators. Soon, she was promoted to CFO. And people in Edmond, both inside and outside the institution, blamed her for stirring up trouble. “I'm still learning all of the nicknames that staff and community members had for me during that time,” she once said. The woman who cut Castilla's hair mentioned “the evil woman” over at the bank—unaware that woman was sitting in her chair. Yet, by 2014, she was named CEO and has since frequently appeared on numerous lists of top bankers to watch.What happened? What did she know about the situation before she arrived? Why did she persist? And was she able to turn things around for the bank—both its finances and its culture? Ironically, she sensed that turning around perceptions within the bank was easier than the external recovery. And even today, she wonders whether she could have done anything differently to manage the transition—and the resulting cultural turmoil.RELATED LINKSThe Oklahoman: “Citizens Bank of Edmond CEO Jill Castilla appointed to Federal Reserve Advisory Council”405 Magazine: “Jill Castilla: Star Among Citizens”The Federal Reserve's “written agreement” with Citizens Bank of EdmondVideo, American Banker: Castilla and venture capitalist Mark Cuban partner up in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. “The banker and the Shark: A playbook for small businesses”CREDITSThis podcast is a production of Washington University in St. Louis's Olin Business School. Contributors include:Katie Wools, Cathy Myrick and Judy Milanovits, creative assistanceJill Young Miller, fact checking and creative assistanceHayden Molinarolo, original music and sound designMike Martin Media, editingSophia Passantino, social mediaLexie O'Brien and Erik Buschardt, website supportMark P. Taylor, strategic supportPaula Crews, creative vision and strategic supportSpecial thanks to Ray Irving and his team at WashU Olin's Center for Digital Education, including our audio engineer, Austin Alred.

How do you honor the past while planning for the future? In a business that relies on goodwill from customers—indeed, members—whose voices count most when a massive shock threatens to bury the business? How do you balance the pull of tradition, the weight of history, and the need to look forward and innovate?These questions and hundreds of others confronted Angel Likens in February 2017, when she was the general manager of Bogey Hills Country Club. The St. Charles County, Missouri, institution began in 1962 when Angel's grandfather, Charles H. “Doc” Walters, established it on the site of an older course that had been closed since World War II.Bogey Hills was a bustling hub of the St. Charles community, hosting dozens of weddings, dances and other events each year in its 35,000-square-foot clubhouse. At that point in its history, the club was cautiously moving toward a change in top leadership from the second generation—Doc's son, Dennis, who was still president—to Angel, the third generation.Then, late in the night of Feb. 16, 2017, as Angel began to doze off in her home on land adjacent to the Bogey Hills clubhouse, the phone rang. The alarm company shared the news: The clubhouse was on fire. Angel raced to her front door and, sure enough, saw it was engulfed. In fact, a wind whipping out of the west pushed the blaze into the decade-old clubhouse expansion. As more than 50 firefighters from four departments brought the fire under control, it was clear the clubhouse was a total loss.What happened next is the story of balancing crisis management with the need to dream. Angel's dad, then well into his 70s, ceded the job of recovery to his daughter. With the recovery headquarters inside her house, she sprang into action. Coordinating with federal investigators and insurance companies. Working with customers to move scheduled weddings and other events. And planning for the next chapter in Bogey Hills' history. As Angel said of navigating the process, “Lots of tears were shed.”From an academic perspective, Olin's Peter Boumgarden speaks to the challenge leaders frequently face in a time of crisis: “Your attention gets sucked into whatever is scarce. Again, going back to this scarcity book, whether it's a scarcity of time or scarcity of resources, it can lead to some pretty suboptimal thinking,” said Boumgarden, the Koch Family Professor of Practice in Family Enterprise. “Ultimately moving forward can't be merely about not thinking of crisis and thinking about the new. You have to balance both approaches.”He highlighted in Likens' story the challenge of reinventing a business, a concept or a strategy amid a time of crisis—rather than restoring everything to the same state. Meanwhile, an additional layer to that challenge happens in a generations-old family enterprise: “It's the unique nature of innovating for a family organization where the old approach is represented by perhaps someone in your family, a father, a mother, and the new approach might be represented by you or a sibling.”Related LinksClips from Bogey Hills fire coverage by KMOV reporter Justin AndrewsBogey Hills Country Club websiteTrade publication Club + Resort Business'Bogey Hills reopening coveragePhotos and story of the Bogey Hills fire from the St. Louis Post-DispatchDetroit Free Press coverage of the Oakland Hills Country Club fire coverageCreditsThis podcast is a production of Washington University in St. Louis's Olin Business School. Contributors include:Katie Wools, Cathy Myrick and Judy Milanovits, creative assistanceJill Young Miller, fact checking and creative assistanceHayden Molinarolo, original music and sound designMike Martin Media, editingSophia Passantino, social mediaLexie O'Brien and Erik Buschardt, website supportMark P. Taylor, strategic supportPaula Crews, creative vision and strategic supportSpecial thanks to Ray Irving and his team at WashU Olin's Center for Digital Education, including our audio engineer, Austin Alred.

Berto and Ivan Garcia are the co-founders of what has become a St. Louis real estate powerhouse. Garcia Properties is a vertically integrated firm with divisions in construction, property management, buying and selling property, financing and insurance. But just two years into its existence, the company nearly died.How much risk is acceptable when you're trying to start something new? And while we love to hear about the risks that paid off, what do we know about the risks that didn't? These are the questions we confront in this episode.In the early days, as Ivan was trying to get the company going, he seized on an opportunity to buy the company's first residential property for $700,000. But the transaction relied on a handshake agreement with the owner.See, Ivan didn't have any money. He had time. He had skills. So, under the agreement, Ivan would upgrade the broken-down building and manage it, making sure tenants paid the rent. Two years later, under the agreement, the owner would take out a second mortgage, loan Ivan the down payment and sell the building. Ivan would repay him in two years.So, when it's time to sell, guess what? The building is making more money than ever. It's an attractive location near St. Louis University. The owner balks. The Garcias also learn the owner has $30,000 in liens that would have to be cleared.Berto and Ivan credit their parents for the skills to navigate the situation. Mexican immigrants who worked hard to make a home for their seven children, they taught the kids early to make their way. If they wanted something, they had to figure out how to get it. They learned resilience.“There's only one way to get yourself out of trouble,” Ivan said. “And that's to get in trouble. All the soft skills we learned growing up have served us in our professional lives.”Ultimately, Ivan applied those soft skills and a little financial cunning to get the building owner to close. The Garcias owned the building for 14 years, continued to improve it, and sold it for $2.1 million. The proceeds funded the renovation of the Garcia Properties headquarters in South St. Louis.Todd Milbourn, WashU Olin's vice dean of faculty and research and the Hubert C. & Dorothy R. Moog Professor of Finance, uses the story of the Garcia Brothers to put the concept of business risk-taking into context.“And at the end of the day, business is a risky venture. It's an uncertain venture,” he said. “If it wasn't risky or if it was a certainty, you wouldn't need executives and you wouldn't need to pay them very much. And you really wouldn't have to train anybody because if everything was predetermined, we'd just have one supercomputer that would be programed up of this is what you do every step of the way.”He speaks in terms of hedging against risks, net present value (e.g., risk-adjusted bets), grit and survivorship bias (“the benevolent dolphin” story, which speaks about the disasters you don't hear about).“I'm always ridiculously grateful that there are people out there that are willing to swing for the fences and go, try something completely new,” Milbourn said. “You know, certainly personally, I benefit from it, but you can think more broadly, society, we benefit from people that are willing to take these long-shot bets that are willing to come up with might look like the craziest idea ever.”Related LinksThe Garcia Properties website.Video by the Garcias about the origin of their firm.News about the building purchase financed by their first apartment building sale.Feature on the Garcias' Golden Hoosier pub in their HQ building.CreditsThis podcast is a production of Washington University in St. Louis's Olin Business School. Contributors include:Katie Wools, Cathy Myrick and Judy Milanovits, creative assistanceJill Young Miller, fact checking and creative assistanceHayden Molinarolo, original music and sound designMike Martin Media, editingSophia Passantino, social mediaLexie O'Brien and Erik Buschardt, website supportMark P. Taylor, strategic supportPaula Crews, creative vision and strategic supportSpecial thanks to Ray Irving and his team at WashU Olin's Center for Digital Education, including our audio engineer, Austin Alred.

A civic crisis rooted in racial inequity. A chance visit to an Atlanta retail attraction. A commercial developer persuaded to step outside his own comfort zone. Three events converged in 2015 that put in motion a $230 million redevelopment in St. Louis's urban core—an effort that launched like a cannonball from Steve Smith's imagination but came within a hair's breadth of dying.In this episode of On Principle, we look at the moment when inspiration launches a transformative project. What prompted the inspiration? What were the considerations? In what ways did reality temper the inspiration? How far did the reality stray from the inspiration itself? And what are the takeaways for listeners?The story of how The City Foundry in St. Louis came to be includes a wake-up call to developers, several strokes of spectacularly timed luck and a clandestine, cellphone-lit tour of an abandoned factory. The 15-acre retail, residential and dining project—built in and around a transformed automotive brake-parts factory—began when Smith visited a similar venue in Atlanta as his son graduated from Georgia Tech in May 2015.“My son took us to a foundry there, a food hall,” said Smith, CEO of real estate development firm the Lawrence Group. “It was exuding energy. Dynamism. I'm sitting there thinking, ‘This is what St. Louis needs.' I can tell you exactly what I was thinking and where I was sitting at the time.”And that was the pivotal moment.Seven days after graduation, Smith and his son visited an abandoned industrial site they knew was for sale in St. Louis' midtown. Rebuffed by a guard when they asked to take a look, the pair snuck around the back of the building, jumped a fence and toured the site by the light of their cellphone flashlights. Within a few months, the project had its first seed funding and Smith was on his way to buying the property. The $6.4 million purchase closed in December 2015.Along the way, Smith contended with:Internal company debates over assuming the environmental liability for a brownfield factory that had been idle since 2007.Civic debates over applications for tax incentives to redevelop the property.A high burn rate on capital and slow-to-close leasing commitments threatened to scuttle the entire project. This was so serious in February 2019 that Smith and his firm were seriously looking at the cost of closing down the project.Then luck kicked in.First, the federal Investing in Opportunity Act had passed in December 2017, creating a new tax incentive mechanism to pump development dollars into underserved and impoverished communities. That helped Smith raise $50 million in June 2019, later prompting Forbes to name his project among the nation's top 20 most transformative Opportunity Zone projects.Then, an angel investor facilitated a $15 million “patient capital investment”—a “gift from heaven,” Smith said—that allowed project construction to commence. “It was a civic leader stepping up to do something very nontraditional, who made a lot of other civic leaders feel this was an important project to make happen,” he said.Related LinksThe Foundry's back story as told by the Lawrence GroupThe Lawrence Group websiteNews about the opportunity zone funding Steve Smith secured for the projectKrog Street Market in AtlantaThe City Foundry in St. LouisFrom the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: “Midtown project to redevelop Federal-Mogul site should get city help, but how much remains the question”CreditsThis podcast is a production of Washington University in St. Louis's Olin Business School. Contributors include:Katie Wools, Cathy Myrick and Judy Milanovits, creative assistanceJill Young Miller, fact checking and creative assistanceHayden Molinarolo, original music and sound designMike Martin Media, editingSophia Passantino, social mediaLexie O'Brien and Erik Buschardt, website supportMark P. Taylor, strategic supportPaula Crews, creative vision and strategic supportSpecial thanks to Ray Irving and his team at WashU Olin's Center for Digital Education, including our audio engineer, Austin Alred.

On Memorial Day 2020, police in Minneapolis murdered a Black man during a routine traffic stop. In the context of that event, which sparked a deeper national reckoning on issues of racial equity and justice, business leaders across the nation grappled with their own response.How should they support workers who were shaken by the tragedy and moved to act? How would they confront their own company's record of inclusive leadership? Were they positioned to make a constructive contribution to the conversation?The days after George Floyd's murder were something of a professional turning point for Joyce Trimuel. Just three months earlier, she had launched her own independent consulting business focused on helping firms develop and execute their own strategies related to inclusion, diversity, equity and access.That career pivot itself was a turning point for Joyce, who had started her career working in the insurance industry, where she'd risen to become her company's first woman of color in its 130-year history to assume a branch manager role. Over four years and a series of carefully considered steps, she honed her passion—cultivating corporate competency in inclusive leadership—into a career, first as a chief diversity officer in a large firm and later as an independent consultant.In our story, we track Joyce's determination to make that career transition, pivoting around the days after May 25, 2020, when corporate leaders began to ring her phone for help. What prepared her to guide them through the challenges ahead? What themes emerged in her work? How did she navigate the range of corporate clients—some shaken to act for the first time, others seeking to build on existing track records?What's the contrast between developing strategy and responding to a crisis? Is it a challenge to make the case for inclusive workplaces? Has she had to deliver tough messages to clients? How did she do it? What were the results? What gives her hope for the future? What makes her despair? Was George Floyd's death the start of something bigger in the context of corporate leadership?RELATED LINKSJoyce Trimuel's bio from The Kaleidoscope Group.Read about and watch Joyce's presentation to WashU Olin, “DEI DIY: Creating a diverse, equitable and inclusive environment.”Gisele Marcus shares networking do's and don'ts, how to enhance your network, and how to stay systematically in touch with your network in this TEDx presentation.CREDITSThis podcast is a production of Washington University in St. Louis's Olin Business School. Contributors include:Katie Wools, Cathy Myrick and Judy Milanovits, creative assistanceJill Young Miller, fact checking and creative assistanceHayden Molinarolo, original music, sound design and editingSophia Passantino, social mediaLexie O'Brien and Erik Buschardt, website supportMark P. Taylor, strategic supportPaula Crews, creative vision and strategic supportSpecial thanks to Ray Irving and his team at WashU Olin's Center for Digital Education, including our audio engineer, Austin Alred.

As the curtain rises for this episode, we meet Mike Isaacson, tapped in 2011 to become the new executive producer and artistic director for The Muny. Yes, The Muny, the 103-year-old outdoor amphitheater in St. Louis' Forest Park, a massive venue renowned worldwide for drawing audiences to professionally produced musical theater. Cherished as one of the city's crown jewels, The Muny has drawn stars of stage and screen to perform before its 11,000 seats and, in many ways, is a bellwether of the health of live community theater nationwide.The business issues raised in today's episode may be familiar, and the choice of the venue is also compelling for WashU Olin Business School, which recognizes such challenges through its minor in the business of the arts, a program aimed at university undergraduates. For his part, Mike—a Tony Award-winning Broadway producer with an MBA from St. Louis University—only insisted that he have the chance during the 2011 season to overlap with his predecessor. He reasoned it would minimize the transition required when he took the reins for the 2012 season.“That's when I saw the depth of the work that was required,” Mike said. “I saw a lot of people breaking down, frustrated, screaming. People who didn't have what they needed to succeed. I didn't realize the shape The Muny was in. Shame on me for not knowing that.”CURTAIN. End of Act I.Act II of our story examines how Mike diagnosed and began to fix the problems. Dysfunction affected the creative process at The Muny. Before he came along, to streamline the process of staging productions, artists weren't permitted to collaborate. Mike called it a “factory model” for staging musical productions: It created efficiency and allowed shows to turn over quickly, one week after the next. But Mike found the process sucked out the creativity and affected the product.Attendance was down. Box seats were sold but a third were empty at showtime. They were wasting money on legacy vendors who weren't delivering creatively. And Mike frequently met people who expressed their love for the idea of The Muny but couldn't recall the last time they'd actually been to a show.It may be an oversimplification, but Mike's solution was simply to empower Muny artists to have a collaborative part in the creative process. He's also invested in new technology and theater upgrades, overseeing a transformation in every aspect of production that culminated in 2019 with the arrival of the theater's new stage and a state-of-the-art stage house that includes revolutionary LED technology and automated sets.Act III brings Olin faculty context to the process of overhauling and revitalizing a business, which requires that we remind everyone: Theater is a business.Our final act, the Epilogue, speaks to the results of that work. “My success—the success for the audience—was destroying the pyramid organization and building the organization from the bottom up so people could make a contribution,” Mike said.RELATED LINKSRead a bio of Mike Isaacson from The Muny's website.Check out this list of stars who've trod The Muny's boards over the decades.Review The Muny's history.Here's that picture of the host of this podcast, his wife and son at a performance of “Grease.”Learn more about WashU Olin's minor in the business of the arts.CREDITSThis podcast is a production of Washington University in St. Louis's Olin Business School. Contributors include:Katie Wools, Cathy Myrick and Judy Milanovits, creative assistanceJill Young Miller, fact checking and creative assistanceHayden Molinarolo, original music, sound design and editingSophia Passantino, social mediaLexie O'Brien and Erik Buschardt, website supportMark P. Taylor, strategic supportPaula Crews, creative vision and strategic supportSpecial thanks to Ray Irving and his team at WashU Olin's Center for Digital Education, including our audio engineer, Austin Alred.

In 2003, Alaina Maciá arrived at MTM, the St. Louis-based broker of non-emergency medical transportation services, to find a company on the verge of explosive growth. By 2005, she was MTM's CEO, and since that time the company has rocketed from $30 million to nearly $700 million in revenue, with clients and customers nationwide.A nagging concern she noticed as she began, however, was the stable but not particularly cutting-edge technology platform the company was built on. Yet she faced a conundrum: How do you overhaul your tech foundation while onboarding clients at a fever pitch? Can you afford to pause growth for the sake of a foundational investment? Is it possible to grow and rebuild simultaneously?Increasingly, as the tech world advanced, Maciá saw that customers were demanding a higher level of self-service—apps and functionality that offer an “Uber-like” transportation experience, for example. “It's probably been the single biggest challenge I've faced since I began running the company,” Maciá said. “This is big dollars for a medium-sized company.”Knowing she didn't have the in-house expertise to make this transition, Maciá contracted with an outside firm to work on the tech upgrade with her team.And this is where the pivotal moment occurs.Five million dollars into the project, she realized the work had barely scratched the surface of what MTM was going to need. She decided to scrap the project. Soon after, MTM brought Salesforce aboard to collaborate on the upgrade, but “they don't tell you that you have to have a robust team,” she said. “We launched some projects on Salesforce, but it was clear it would be slow to get where we needed to go and it still didn't do everything we needed.”That was another $5 million down the tubes.Ultimately, progress began when Maciá engineered the $15 million purchase in August 2017 of Reveal Management Services in Kansas City, effectively bringing in-house the expertise of technologists focused on transportation scheduling algorithms and real-time GPS tracking. Now, she is seeing light at the end of the tunnel and MTM has already implemented a number of technology upgrades—including that Uber-like experience. The progress has her looking at adding new service lines such as meal and grocery delivery and other things.Maciá refers to work they've accomplished with the Reveal technology as MTM's “resting platform” while they fully overhaul their system, with a hard deadline of Dec. 31, 2022, to complete the transition. “It took 20 years to move off the old platform, three years to move to the dot-net platform, and it'll take 18 months to move to the new platform,” she said.RELATED LINKSMTM's websiteA story about Trish Gorman's talk to "The World of Business Ideas" conference in 2014. CREDITSThis podcast is a production of Washington University in St. Louis's Olin Business School. Contributors include:Katie Wools, Cathy Myrick and Judy Milanovits, creative assistanceJill Young Miller, fact checking and creative assistanceHayden Molinarolo, original music, sound design and editingSophia Passantino, social mediaLexie O'Brien and Erik Buschardt, website supportMark P. Taylor, strategic supportPaula Crews, creative vision and strategic supportSpecial thanks to Ray Irving and his team at WashU Olin's Center for Digital Education, including our audio engineer, Austin Alred.

How do you recover from a multimillion-dollar mistake while your company is expanding and your technology is ailing? How do you capitalize on unusual sources of inspiration? When is a handshake deal ever good enough? How do you plan strategy during a crisis? These are some of the questions we explore, thanks to the business leaders who share their stories in season two of On Principle. We'll have eight more episodes that put you inside the C-suite or out on the street as our guests confront these challenges. And, as usual, WashU Olin academics lend their expertise, add context and drive home the takeaways.GuestsIn this trailer, you hear the voices of (in order):Paula Crews, senior associate dean of strategy and marketing for WashU Olin Business School;Alaina Maciá, CEO of MTM, Inc.;Steve Smith, CEO of Lawrence Group;Ivan Garcia,co-founder of Garcia Properties.CreditsThis podcast is brought to you by Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis. Contributors include:Katie Wools, Cathy Myrick and Judy Milanovits, creative assistanceJill Young Miller, fact checking and creative assistanceHayden Molinarolo, original music, sound design and editingSophia Passantino, social mediaLexie O'Brien and Erik Buschardt, website supportMark P. Taylor, strategic supportPaula Crews, creative vision and strategic supportSpecial thanks to Ray Irving and his team at the Olin Center for Digital Education, including our audio engineer, Austin Alred.

In our first-season On Principle episode with Dave Ciesinksi, CEO of Lancaster Colony food brands, we also spoke to Anjan Thakor, Olin's John E. Simon Professor of Finance. He had consulted with Lancaster Colony as its leaders sought to drive deeper employee engagement—and better results. Thakor, along with collaborating researcher Robert Quinn from the University of Michigan, has done pioneering research into the economic benefits of higher purpose. Why does the firm exist?As the pair found, higher purpose must be discovered, not invented. And once it's discovered and articulated, it drives the firm's decisions. It's not about charity or doing good for the sake of doing good, but about understanding why the organization exists and having a north star to drive decisions.In our third bonus episode of On Principle, Thakor helps us understand what drove his research into higher purpose in the first place, what it means for leaders, and the benefits to firm employees and the firm's bottom line.OTHER RELATED LINKSMore about Anjan Thakor and Robert Quinn's book, The Economics of Higher PurposeThe original Harvard Business Review article by Thakor and QuinnA summary of the Higher Purpose book from the Olin BlogVisit the book's website.CREDITSThis podcast is a production of Washington University in St. Louis's Olin Business School. Contributors include:Katie Wools, Cathy Myrick and Judy Milanovits, creative assistanceJill Young Miller, fact checking and creative assistanceHayden Molinarolo, original music, sound design and editingNate Sprehe, creative direction, production and editingAngie Winschel, production assistance and project managementLexie O'Brien and Erik Buschardt, website supportMark P. Taylor, strategic supportPaula Crews, creative vision and strategic supportSpecial thanks to Ray Irving and his team at WashU Olin's Center for Digital Education, including our audio engineer, Austin Alred.

In our first-season On Principle episode with Nina Leigh Krueger, CEO of Nestle Purina PetCare for the Americas, we also spoke to Anne Marie Knott, Olin's Robert and Barbara Frick Professor of Business. Her research focuses on questions around innovation, R&D and entrepreneurship. We talked to her about corporate innovation and how companies know they're seeing a return on their innovation dollar.In today's second bonus episode of On Principle, we dive a little deeper into our conversation with Anne Marie as she explains the genesis of RQ and some of the tools firms use to drive research, invention and innovation.We also learn a little about her background, how she creates her semi-regular RQ 50 list of top corporate innovators and why she thinks firms haven't more widely adopted her measure of corporate innovation—even as the research community seems to embrace it.OTHER RELATED LINKSRead about Anne Marie Knott's RQ 50 list for 2021.Listen to Anne Marie and Nina Leigh Krueger discuss innovation at Nestle Purina.Check out season one of On Principle.

In a white paper published in June 2021, WashU Olin's Professor Stuart Bunderson and Jesse Wolfersberger, CEO and cofounder of Vrity, outlined a cross-section of consumer attitudes about how they relate to brands that outwardly articulate their values.Among their findings:Consumers said they will vote with their wallets when people value-align with a brand. They'll drive farther, dig deeper, spend more to support those brands.Consumers who had job disruptions because of the pandemic were more likely to reevaluate their personal values.Thirty-nine percent of people said there are brands they will never support because they were silent on an issue that was important to them.“On the whole, what was so interesting is simply that these younger generations — and by younger, you've got to include Gen X in there — they're very values-driven in their purchasing behavior and the way they think about companies,” said Bunderson, director of Olin's Bauer Leadership Center. “So, this isn't going away.”OTHER RELATED LINKSRead more about the pair's research and their white paper.Read the white paper.Learn more about Vrity, Jesse Wolfersberger's company.CREDITSThis podcast is a production of Washington University in St. Louis's Olin Business School. Contributors include:Katie Wools, Cathy Myrick and Judy Milanovits, creative assistanceJill Young Miller, fact checking and creative assistanceHayden Molinarolo, original music, sound design and editingNate Sprehe, creative direction, production and editingAngie Winschel, production assistance and project managementLexie O'Brien and Erik Buschardt, website supportMark P. Taylor, strategic supportPaula Crews, creative vision and strategic supportSpecial thanks to Ray Irving and his team at WashU Olin's Center for Digital Education, including our audio engineer, Austin Alred.

David Karandish is, by any standard, a massively successful entrepreneur. His most noteworthy transaction is the sale of Answers.com for $960 million—a “rounded unicorn,” he says, using startup shorthand for a billion-dollar deal.But that success was hard-fought and made possible by a litany of failures and one unexpected disaster. Meanwhile, those failures—and that one big success—paved the way for what already promises to be another massive hit for Karandish, BSCS '05. Capacity, his AI-driven customer support platform has been on a tear.Our story hinges on a two-hour period in 2011, 90 days after David—at age 26—and his partners had engineered the merger of their company with Answers.com, taking the once-public Answers private. That day, David's team watched the traffic drain from their site in the wake of a change in Google's search algorithms. “Our $127 million acquisition went unprofitable in about two hours,” he said.This is the story of what led to that moment, how David and his team responded, what in his history informed that response and how he's carried those lessons into his next chapter with Capacity.Along the way, we learn something about the difficulty of thinking in terms of failure—though failure was the fate of his first six startups. We learn about the danger of taking customer acquisition for granted. We learn how a successful entrepreneur can roll up the lessons into one more big win.And we begin to understand why it's so important to learn how to take a punch.OTHER RELATED LINKSCapacity, Karandish's AI-power support automation platform.“How do you build a tech giant?” from The Source at Washington University in St. Louis, September 9, 2016.“Olin alum, serial startup founder fills faculty entrepreneurship post,” WashU Olin blog, July 18, 2019“Olin entrepreneurship chief sells company he co-founded in 2007 for $30M,” WashU Olin blog, January 20, 2021

For most of her career with Nestlé Purina PetCare, Nina Leigh Krueger had worked on the pet nutrition side of the business. When the WashU Olin alumna joined the company's cat litter group to lead its marketing, she found she was a fish out of water—and facing a challenge with a high sales goal in a stagnating business. Leadership, questioning whether or not to exit the business, challenged her to make or break the line.Our story sets the stage for that pivotal moment and goes on to share the work she did in building and creating a team dynamic that was creative in its thinking. Then, once Krueger understood how the team worked, how could she blow that up and identify new paths to pursue in the business—for example, renovating an existing product or finding something totally new to build from the ground up. Then she did something marketers rarely do and offered up her marketing budget to R&D to help spur growth through product development. And she gave the scientists a seat at the table to listen to consumers.The kernel of the idea for lightweight litter came from one of those scientists. They began to toy with potential solutions. A prototype was created using corn husks. A year later, Krueger was promoted to president of the litter business, and it was time to accelerate the work toward lightweight litter.The end of the story? Success and a challenge from Krueger to make the company's litter division—near extinction a couple of years earlier—into a billion-dollar business. That milestone came when the brand reached $1 billion in sales in 2020.OTHER RELATED LINKSOne of the television spots for Tidy Cats Lightweight litterNestlé Purina's Nine Square Ventures websiteAnne Marie Knott's book, “How Innovation Really Works”CREDITSThis podcast is a production of Washington University in St. Louis's Olin Business School. Contributors include:Katie Wools, Cathy Myrick and Judy Milanovits, creative assistanceJill Young Miller, fact checking and creative assistanceHayden Molinarolo, original music, sound design and editingNate Sprehe, creative direction, production and editingAngie Winschel, production assistance and project managementLexie O'Brien and Erik Buschardt, website supportMark P. Taylor, strategic supportPaula Crews, creative vision and strategic supportSpecial thanks to Ray Irving and his team at WashU Olin's Center for Digital Education, including our audio engineer, Austin Alred.

As the factory manager gave David A. Ciesinski, CEO of Lancaster Colony food brands, a tour of the facility, he led the company's top executive into a locker room with collapsing ceiling tiles and rusted fixtures. “Is this befitting of a ‘better food company'?” the manager politely asked, reflecting the company's slogan.That was one of many moments that drove home for Ciesinski that his company could do more to walk the walk of a better food company. He strove to lead an organization that treated employees well and, by soliciting their involvement, produced better products. His prior experience in other packaged goods companies led him to an epiphany: That employees demanded and expected more from the companies where they worked. Leaders needed to be dialed into what's important to their people.“We were leaving effort on the table,” he said. “I could just tell we were 25% of the way penetrating through. I had an intuitive sense we weren't getting everything we could out of people. And we could go a click deeper.”He felt the company was getting traction behind its mission statement, but at an abstract level. They'd articulated the “what”—what was Lancaster Colony—“but it didn't answer a fundamental question for us: Why does this company exist? What do we owe each other?” he said.Those conversations found their resolution after Ciesinski was exposed to an article in Harvard Business Review. Subsequent conversations with its authors—Olin's Anjan Thakor and the University of Michigan's Robert Quinn—exposed him to their research-based philosophy of “the economics of higher purpose.” Ciesinski tells the story of this turning point, what it took to get there, how he made it happen and what it has meant to the future of Lancaster Colony.RELATED LINKSMore about Anjan Thakor and Robert Quinn's book, The Economics of Higher PurposeThe Lancaster Colony websiteThe original Harvard Business Review article by Thakor and QuinnA summary of the Higher Purpose book from the Olin BlogCREDITSThis podcast is a production of Washington University in St. Louis's Olin Business School. Contributors include:Katie Wools, Cathy Myrick and Judy Milanovits, creative assistanceJill Young Miller, fact checking and creative assistanceHayden Molinarolo, original music, sound design and editingNate Sprehe, creative direction, production and editingAngie Winschel, production assistance and project managementLexie O'Brien and Erik Buschardt, website supportMark P. Taylor, strategic supportPaula Crews, creative vision and strategic supportSpecial thanks to Ray Irving and his team at WashU Olin's Center for Digital Education, including our audio engineer, Austin Alred.

Olin alumnus Jason Wang, BSBA '09, owns a popular chain of restaurants in New York City, Xi'an Famous Foods. In the summer of 2020, one of his employees was punched in the face while she headed home on the subway, cutting her lip and bloodying her nose. Later, another was punched in the face on the way to work in the morning. The assailant had followed him off the train, looking for an opportunity.Those are the attacks he knows about. And they're among the nearly 6,600 incidents of anti-Asian abuse and violence recorded by the Stop AAPI Hate reporting center from March 19, 2020, to March 31, 2021. These abuses came in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak, evidence of scapegoating against a population.Wang resisted speaking out. “I kept quiet about it. I ruled against that and didn't want to traumatize employees.” But at some point, he couldn't continue to keep quiet. In late February 2021, he appeared in a full-page, illustrated spread in the Sunday New York Times.As he said, “even though we are not a social enterprise, more business people are taking a stand these days for the good, and it's something that is a bit contrary to traditional beliefs that business is business.”What are the issues business leaders must confront when they decide to take a stand—or not? What's the upside? The downside? What does the scholarship and the research say about brands taking a public stand?OTHER RELATED LINKSThe company Jesse Wolfersberger cofounded, VrityShalom Schwartz and the theory of basic human valuesStop AAPI Hate resource pageStuart Bunderson/Jesse Wolfersberger research summaryThe New York Times spread that inspired today's episodeCREDITSThis podcast is a production of Washington University in St. Louis's Olin Business School. Contributors include:Katie Wools, Cathy Myrick and Judy Milanovits, creative assistanceJill Young Miller, fact checking and creative assistanceHayden Molinarolo, original music, sound design and editingNate Sprehe, creative direction, production and editingAngie Winschel, production assistance and project managementLexie O'Brien and Erik Buschardt, website supportMark P. Taylor, strategic supportPaula Crews, creative vision and strategic supportSpecial thanks to Ray Irving and his team at WashU Olin's Center for Digital Education, including our audio engineer, Austin Alred.

In the summer of 2017, a data breach occurred at Atlanta-based credit bureau Equifax affecting the records of more than 140 million consumers in the United States. The company announced the incursion in September, arguably one of the largest such breaches in history at the time, giving hackers access to private information—names, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, credit card numbers, even driver's license numbers.Into that scene, WashU Olin alumnus Paulino do Rego Barros Jr. stepped in as the company's interim CEO, charged with managing the fallout from the situation. Employees were scared as they faced furious backlash—even threats from consumers. Systems were overloaded as consumers flooded the firm's call centers and websites. “The building was on fire,” do Rego Barros said.In this episode, we examine the steps he and his colleagues took to confront the situation and begin to restore trust among consumers, customers, regulators and policymakers. While avoiding the regulatory and legal issues—these won't be relitigated in this episode—we focus on three primary decision points: Engaging with employees, engaging and reassuring consumers (e.g., individuals), and doing the same with customers (e.g., banks and other institutions).The subject remains topical today as companies and institutions continue to be vulnerable to data breaches that expose private consumer information. What decisions had to be made in the immediate aftermath of the breach? What were the implications? How does a business re-establish trust with customers under those circumstances? Then, once the immediate fire is quelled, how do you propel the business into a better place?

Lisa Hu, PMBA '16, failed at least 40 times before succeeding. It's as simple as that. The founder of Lux and Nyx, maker of handbags designed for “jet-setter luxury and boardroom quality,” had the idea in mind, and worked on it while ascending the corporate ladder. Yet she failed over and over to find the right manufacturer to execute the vision she had in her mind.She tried doing it herself. She hired a seamstress. She looked at professional bagmakers—all the while, collecting prototypes that didn't fill the bill. Mind you, all this was happening while she was still working as finance director for a large corporation. At some point, the process became unsustainable. The moment came. She had to make the leap. It was all or nothing for this handbag. She quit the corporate world in October 2017 and focused exclusively on Lux and Nyx.In some ways, this is a story about being unwilling to compromise. She wasn't fulfilled in the corporate world. She wasn't satisfied with the first 40 prototypes for the bag she envisioned. That may be what she means when she says the pivotal moment was the moment when she found her “ultimate voice.” “It was never really about just bags—it was what the bag made possible,” she said. “It made possible an emerging community of rock-star women, moving fluidly through daily challenges with confidence.”Cliff Holekamp, founder of Cultivation Capital, WashU Olin alum (MBA '01) and former director of Olin's entrepreneurship platform, lends professional perspective to a story that carries a lot of … well, a lot of baggage.RELATED LINKSSee the Lux and Nyx website. The site includes Lisa's story.This podcast is a production of Washington University in St. Louis's Olin Business School. Contributors include:Katie Wools, Cathy Myrick and Judy Milanovits, creative assistanceJill Young Miller, fact checking and creative assistanceHayden Molinarolo, original music, sound design and editingNate Sprehe, creative direction, production and editingAngie Winschel, production assistance and project managementOlivia Hanford, social mediaLexie O'Brien and Erik Buschardt, website supportMark P. Taylor, strategic supportPaula Crews, creative vision and strategic supportSpecial thanks to Ray Irving and his team at WashU Olin's Center for Digital Education, including our audio engineer, Austin Alred.

On October 28, 2011, the St. Louis Cardinals completed a comeback from a 2-3 deficit to win their 11th World Series championship. It was a thrilling series that twice saw Cardinal hitters score clutch runs with the team a single strike away from elimination.Three days later, the reality of the team's future resumed for John Mozeliak, the Cardinals' president of baseball operations. Manager Tony La Russa, destined for baseball's hall of fame, announced his retirement. And an off-the-field drama that had loomed over the entire season reappeared: star slugger Albert Pujols was a free agent. Negotiations to keep him with the team, put on hold for the season, had to begin anew.In this episode, we explore how Mozeliak approached that process, what he had to keep in mind throughout and how it affected the team's ability to make moves far into the future — keeping catcher Yadier Molina and pitcher Adam Wainwright, for example. Making a deal for Matt Holliday. Trading for Paul Goldschmidt. Even how the ripple effects of losing Pujols allowed the team to acquire Nolan Arenado a decade later for the 2021 season.How much was Albert Pujols worth to the franchise — and what would have been the opportunity costs for keeping him? Is negotiating over a ballplayer the same as negotiating a car deal? And how do fans complicate the work? Mozeliak says, “the value of these deals won't be known for some time. When you close a deal, there's the euphoria that I got this done, but it's going to require patience. As you're building your company, there are still ups and downs.”This podcast is a production of Washington University in St. Louis's Olin Business School. Contributors include:Katie Wools, Cathy Myrick and Judy Milanovits, creative assistanceJill Young Miller, fact checking and creative assistanceHayden Molinarolo, original music, sound design and editingNate Sprehe, creative direction, production and editingAngie Winschel, production assistance and project managementOlivia Hanford, social mediaLexie O'Brien and Erik Buschardt, website supportMark P. Taylor, strategic supportPaula Crews, creative vision and strategic supportSpecial thanks to Ray Irving and his team at WashU Olin's Center for Digital Education, including our audio engineer, Austin Alred. Special thanks, also, to the St. Louis Cardinals and Major League Baseball for permission to use a clip from the final game of the 2011 World Series and credit to ESPN for a breaking news clip about Pujols.

On March 18, 2020, or thereabouts, the world turned upside down. With dire news around the spread of the deadly coronavirus came staggering uncertainty for business leaders. How should they respond? Among restaurateurs, owners were forced to make incredibly consequential decisions in the snap of a finger. They had to look into the fog and consider how long this new world would last. Pivoting operations is expensive—and hard to justify for only a few months. Fail to pivot quickly enough, however, and opportunity is lost, people lose jobs, businesses shutter.We look through the eyes and the experience of James Beard Award-winning chef and restaurateur Gerard Craft, owner of Niche Food Group, a group of restaurants in St. Louis and Nashville. We explore what decisions he faced in the first weeks of the pandemic, what lessons he quickly learned, how he pivoted and how his decisions differed from colleagues in the industry. The bigger story here is about how to lead through uncertainty.We also talk to WashU Olin Business School scholars Elanor Williams, associate professor of marketing, and Peter Boumgarden, Koch Professor of Practice in Family Enterprise, to share what history and research tells us about leading through these situations.This podcast is a production of Washington University in St. Louis's Olin Business School. Contributors include:Katie Wools, Cathy Myrick and Judy Milanovits, creative assistanceJill Young Miller, fact checking and creative assistanceHayden Molinarolo, original music, sound design and editingNate Sprehe, creative direction, production and editingAngie Winschel, production assistance and project managementOlivia Hanford, social mediaLexie O'Brien and Erik Buschardt, website supportMark P. Taylor, strategic supportPaula Crews, creative vision and strategic supportSpecial thanks to Ray Irving and his team at WashU Olin's Center for Digital Education, including our audio engineer, Austin Alred.

How do you put a price tag on a hall-of-fame ballplayer? How do you decide to throw away one career dream for another one? How do you survive an existential crisis in your business? The debut season of On Principle puts you behind the scenes for these decisions and more. We interview leaders of startups and C-suite executives of major corporations. We talk to the president of baseball operations for the St. Louis Cardinals and an award-winning chef. Then, for each episode, we talk to academics and scholars who can put the decision-making lessons into context and help drive home the takeaways.GuestsIn this trailer, you'll hear the voices of (in order):Gerard Craft, president, chef, dishwasher, Niche Food GroupPaulino do Rego Barros Jr., former interim CEO, EquifaxLisa Hu, founder, Lux and NyxJohn Mozeliak, president of baseball operations, St. Louis CardinalsKurt Greenbaum, host, director of communications, WashU Olin Business SchoolMark P. Taylor, dean, WashU Olin Business SchoolCreditsThis podcast is brought to you by Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis. Contributors include:Katie Wools, Cathy Myrick and Judy Milanovits, creative assistanceJill Young Miller, fact checking and creative assistanceHayden Molinarolo, original music, sound design and editingNate Sprehe, creative direction, production and editingAngie Winschel, production assistanceOlivia Hanford, social mediaLexie O'Brien and Erik Buschardt, website supportMark P. Taylor, strategic supportPaula Crews, creative vision and strategic supportSpecial thanks to Ray Irving and his team at the Olin Center for Digital Education, including our audio engineer, Austin Alred.Additional informationPlease subscribe on your favorite podcasting app to be notified when each new episode of On Principle is available.