H@H: Ep 71 – Dr. Rebecca Portnoy joins us today to discuss some of her research in the field of organizational behavior. We touch upon topics such as procedural vs. distributive justice, the toxic tandem, and why Americans are continually disengaged at work. Rebecca then offers perspective on her Haas experience and how it’s been a two-way street of learning & enrichment between herself & the students. Throughout the podcast, we also learn about how food has constantly played a role in Rebecca’s life and career.
Episode Quotes:
On organizational decision-making – “If a process is fair (procedural justice), then people are more willing and likely to be OK with an unfair outcome (distributive justice)”
On the toxic tandem – “When we’re living in that world of pleasing my supervisor or helping my unit reach the organization’s goals, it’s so easy to forget about helping others to get that experience, that sense of control.”
Her perception of students at Haas – “There’s this synergy that happens because of the community of students – they have let their guard down and they’re just willing to be so generous with each other, that I benefit as well.”
Show Links:
- Makanai
- Adam Grant
- Art of Pie (book)
- Office Space (film)
- Boys State (film)
Transcript:
Ray: Welcome to here@haas, a student-run podcast of the Berkeley Haas community. Today, we’re joined by Dr. Rebecca Portnoy, a professor who teaches the leading people course for both full time and evening weekend students. Rebecca is an interloper of both academics and consulting and strives to support people to develop healthy, sustainable organizations.
[00:00:26] Welcome to the podcast, Rebecca.
[00:00:28] Rebecca: Hey, thanks, Ray.
[00:00:30] Ray: I want to ask you about your interest in organizational behavior. It seemed like you studied that in undergrad.
Interest in Org Behavior
[00:00:38] Ray: So, first I want to ask you, how did you develop an interest in organizational behavior?
[00:00:45] Rebecca: Good question. It’s a bit of a twisted background in that if I go way back, I go to the chimpanzees. In that as a child, I loved primate behavior and Jane Goodall and just thinking about, I don’t know, you would look at pictures in magazines of like the cooperation in chimp societies, right, there was a lot of like backscratching and patience of the chimpanzees sitting next to each other to like comb out knots in their fur and there was just so much communality in that sort of social support that I was always fascinated by. So, fast forward.
[00:01:24] I went to Cornell to be premed and study psychology. And, while I was there in my first couple of years, they have a hotel school and I was so fascinated by everybody who got to study things like wine, food, and beverage management.
[00:01:42] I was so jealous. So, I did this thing where I directly transferred from the liberal arts school, studying psychology, and pretending to be premed, failing miserably at organic chemistry.
[00:01:54] Ray: A tough course.
[00:01:55] Rebecca: Oh, it was one of those where they have, they call them the weed out courses. So, I weeded myself out and went to the hotel school where I discovered a couple of different amazing faculties teaching to both organizational behavior and human resources and realized that I didn’t have to give up on psychology. And that there was this, this whole field that was applied psychology.
[00:02:20] And mind you, I didn’t give up on the primates either. I became a little bit neurotic and I had my feet in the hotel school, you know, starting to learn all about organizational behavior and also hotel management while still not wanting to miss out because Cornell had, you know, premier primate behavior faculty.
[00:02:38] So I still went and took my classes and chimps and primate behavior.
[00:02:43] Ray: Sounds like a lot of us were, you know, in the part-time program at least are kind of balancing work and balancing the MBA. So, I guess back then, did organizations in general value, well-being in the days where you studied, or is this something that’s really been pretty progressive in the last 20 or 30 years in the last generation or so?
[00:03:04] Rebecca: So, I would say the idea of organizations caring about wellbeing, you know, it wasn’t something that I naturally understood right away or came to. Finishing up my undergrad and just thinking about this idea of getting a job for me personally, I was fascinated by the idea of how do people spend their lives in offices and these workplaces? I just was so curious about what are they doing there all day, right? Like granted, I was really lucky I had part-time jobs as an undergrad, you know, but I hadn’t been totally immersed in the working world. And, you know, at the time you’re graduating, you’re 22.
[00:03:39] And so, you have such limited exposure to what it means to be part of an organization. I mean, I think I was rather naive, I guess, but it was this curiosity around what are people doing there all day. And this was pre 9/11 as well which led to a lot of changes. But, was the notion of wellbeing and focusing on employee wellbeing there?
[00:03:59] No, I mean that was very much the minority of organizations. So yeah, fast forward after my PhD and I started teaching in a tenure track position in Washington state. I was in Southwest Washington at Washington State University and there was a company there, they were called Burgerville. And, I loved the fact that Burgerville didn’t call themselves fast food, they prioritize being quick service. And, this was still like in the rise of the organic, you know, slow food movement. But they would hire elderly and senior citizens to kind of be working the floor in their restaurants. And they would hire, they would source local fresh ingredients.
[00:04:39] So like in the springtime you could get these Walla Walla onion rings. Anyways, where I’m going with this as I would talk to Burgerville as a local faculty about research, I started learning that they had this role called the chief cultural officer. That was say 2007. And I thought that was really unique, right?
[00:04:57] Like just thinking intentionally about the type of culture that they wanted. And, they were doing things like giving people the opportunity to think about their career aspirations and their goals, their professional aspirations, even if they were beyond Burgerville. So, in their headquarters for where their company office operated people could come in and seek out professional development that didn’t necessarily have to pertain to a future at Burgerville.
[00:05:20] And I thought that was really, you know, thinking outside the box. So just planting the seeds then about what does that look like when an organization really cares? And that was sort of the starter for me but I knew that that was unusual. And as we looked at the, you know, I started to look at the research and the evidence.
[00:05:35] I knew that this idea of centering your organization around people was not so common.
Research & Findings
[00:05:41] Ray: I liked how you answered it because you tied it back to the beginning, which was the question I asked you about the interest in organizational behavior.
[00:05:48] So, I guess moving on to, you’ve done a lot of research not only in your undergrad but also in grad school and doing your Ph.D. on employee engagement on the wellbeing of employees or organizations. What are some key findings that you’d like to highlight in your years of research?
[00:06:07] Rebecca: I would say the one that I come back to the most frequently, I’m speaking to today as a consultant, the one that I hit on the most common with clients is telling them that there’s this idea from research on equity, meaning fairness, and the idea says that if a process is fair and that’s called procedural justice and people are more willing and likely to be okay with an unfair outcome, that’s distributed justice.
[00:06:40] And, the reason that that one is so powerful and relevant is because over and over again, whether I’m working with a client to think about, you know, some sexy new thing that they’re gonna try to convince people to go after, whether it’s transitioning to going virtual long before COVID or rolling out a new banking system or software system, whatever the thing is, there are so many variations in the ways that organizations think about those humans and how they’re going to go along with this change. And so in that experience of trying to help them one with the leadership ones, I’m always holding on to thinking about like, how could this process be fair for everyone?
[00:07:21] And I think we see examples of that. I mean, we’re going through COVID right now and the economic impact on a lot of companies in this area and throughout the country and throughout the world is that they’re going to make sacrifices. And it makes sense that employees want those staff providers to, I guess, be somewhat within their control instead of just handing it, handed down to them.
[00:07:50] Rebecca: Yeah. Right now as organizations are making choices with coping to the response of COVID, you know, they want people to feel like they have things in their control.
[00:08:00] I would say that’s yet another one of these powerful research findings that it blows me away how infrequently people aren’t consuming that, like that fact, right? Like, year after year, I see it coming up in the media. It’s a research finding this idea that people want mastery.
[00:08:19] This is the intrinsic motivation piece, right? Like that we all want meaning, purpose, and control work lives and that sense of like I have control over these outcomes, as much as we here, you know, with amazing scholars who are translating our research to, to popular mainstream media, like Adam Grant, anywhere now, ski, as much as that happening, it’s amazing to see that organizations continue to just, you know, go the traditional route and not create those environments with choice, with control, with challenge.
[00:08:51] Ray: Why do you think that is?
[00:08:54] Rebecca: You know, I always talk with the students every time we get to this topic in class. And, we sort of push on that when we think about these cases of why is this so unusual to find these sorts of elements in the workplace?
[00:09:06] And I think it’s really hard when you’re managing others to make this connection between the things that I, as a human want, aren’t just unique to me, but it’s actually something that other people want. It’s this idea called the toxic tandem, right?
[00:09:21] That like, as humans and especially when we’re in these bounded organizations where we have to operate on a hierarchy, when we have to kind of calculate and think about the people who might impact our outcomes that are tunnel, our vision becomes more like tunnel vision, and it’s a lot harder to be expansive and think about the other people that we’re managing and what do they care about and what are their needs.
[00:09:42] And so to answer your question for why is that when we’re living in that world of balancing, pleasing my supervisor, or making sure that I’m helping my unit to reach the organization’s goals or even furthermore steering the entire organization, it’s so easy to forget about helping others to get that experience, that sense of control.
[00:10:02] Ray: Right. It’s kind of like treating others and taking into account that some people work to live instead of live to work, I suppose to some extent. You mentioned earlier, Rebecca, that you also run a consulting business, Makanai, I guess first of all, what does Makanai? I mean, and I think you have a fascinating story behind it if you’re willing to share.
Makanai
[00:10:28] Rebecca: Yeah. Yeah. So, in 2003, I was living in Seattle in my Ph.D. program at Seattle at UDaB University of Washington. And with my husband, we would go, or at the time he was my, I guess, partner, not even a fiancé, and we’d go, we would go for dinner at the sushi bar, near our apartment on Lake City way in Seattle. And I just remember sitting down at this restaurant and at the end of the night, seeing how the restaurant employees took all the leftover sushi and moved it to this communal table so that everybody could sit together at this communal table and share the leftover sushi.
[00:11:12] So the name, the word Makanai, this idea of kind of like a leftover family meal as a Japanese ritual. But what fascinated me that night in watching the workers gather for the meal together was that I had worked in restaurants in Houston and you know, I’d been a waitress and I’d done that.
[00:11:30] And I just knew that like the culture in restaurants was that at the end of the long night working, you want to get out of there, you’re done, you know, you try to find the quickest route to leave. But at this restaurant, everybody was then coming together and they were going to sit down and share a meal together.
[00:11:47] And I was just blown away that that was something that they were prioritizing. And that though employers are the restaurant had prioritized that time together for everybody. So, I later learned though that as a Japanese ritual, the purpose is meant, you know, beyond nourishment of literally just eating the food but that it served this nourishment of connection and building these connections for junior sushi chefs to more senior sushi chefs.
[00:12:16] So, literally in 2003, I learned Makanai in that place, which, you know, has stayed with me for years to become this like deep appreciation for the role of shared meals and what that can mean to have rituals like shared meals and workplaces. And what does that do to, create bonds?
[00:12:36] Ray: Yeah, it’s almost like providing not just a job but a community of shared culture, of shared values, of collaboration.
[00:12:47] Rebecca: Yeah, no, I mean, you’re entirely right. It’s this, there’s this shared pleasurable experience, you know, because as humans, we all eat. Right. And we all, for the most part, that everybody takes as much pleasure as I do in just like thinking about and planning for and then the experience of, and to make this connection back to our conversation around organizations and sharing meals in the workplace, just the word company, great. If you, I don’t understand Latin completely but I’m a fluent Spanish speaker. And so, if you break down companion or company, calm bond, right in Spanish cone or, is with PON as bread. Right? So that whole concept of breaking bread.
[00:13:37] Ray: That’s right.
[00:13:38] Rebecca: Means one eats bread with. Right? So, there’s something to be said there about what does it mean to have this term company today built on this idea of breaking bread together?
[00:13:48] Ray: Yeah. I studied a year abroad in Madrid so I’m familiar with those two words but I never made the connection. That’s cool. So, then what does your company, Makanai, focusing on.
[00:14:03] Rebecca: So since we’ve been talking a lot about this idea of how to create spaces and workplaces where people find that sense of meaning and purpose and challenge, and we’ve been talking about, you know, what I know from creating these rituals where people share a meal together and all the pleasure that can come from building social bonds from that way.
[00:14:24] When I thought about, you know, when I thought about starting a consulting practice, I decided that I really wanted to be able to help organizations to work towards that sort of healthy workplace. So, that goes back to that fascination with how do people spend their time, all day, you know, as you said, whether it’s to live to work or work to live, you know, and we keep seeing one thing that I care a lot about, and especially in my work is that we keep seeing years and years and years of this idea of disengagement in the workplace.
[00:14:57] The statistic doesn’t change year after year. Gallup will put out a poll or a study a year after year showing two-thirds of the American workforce is guest disengaged at work. And so in some ways that bums out my 22-year-old self coming out of college, that answer to that question of what do people do all day?
[00:15:16] That for most people they’re doing it in a disengaged way. Yet at the same time, like when you asked me earlier about, you know, what are we, what do we know from research? And we were talking about just this basic finding of knowing that, you know, people want meaning they want mastery, they want purpose, they want control. That’s simple, right? With humans, it’s not additive that like you can bring in Makanai consulting and we just plug in the sense of purpose and meaning and boom, you’ve got this like healthy, amazing workplace. Like clearly I don’t…
[00:15:46] Ray: That secret formula.
[00:15:48] Rebecca: Yeah, no, I don’t.
[00:15:49] I wish I did but I don’t have that magic wand. So, what I do with Makanai is often try to bring together these two worlds of understanding, you know, my understanding of the research, but to help the organization really be self-aware and think about who they are. So, I would say one of the biggest things I focus on is this idea of organizational self-awareness, meaning helping my clients to be really reflective and think about what’s happening inside their culture before we even try to fix and tinker.
[00:16:27] Ray: Yeah. Can you just walk us through kind of an example client you’d have in terms of what the process is going from understanding the problem they have doing a little bit of that research, and then, you know, after reaching an agreement, coming up with customized solutions.
[00:16:45] Rebecca: So, in some ways, I get to still bring my research hat into this work. And, one thing that I do, and I do this with the students, you know, for all you incoming Haas students in the weekend MBA class, we do this kind of consulting case study project. And I try to teach a very filtered down version of these steps but the basic idea is data collection, right?
[00:17:10] So if I reach a point with a client where it’s not exactly clear, right? Every, organization comes forward where they think they’re their own best kind of clinician and they think they know what’s going on but in reality, they really don’t have the language of organizational behavior and management to describe their pain.
[00:17:27] So, usually they present wit we really need to fix our performance management system, right? Or, there’s the, we just need to do a reorg because if we just move these parts around, bridge these two teams or merge these two departments that will pay, they have these ideas of what’s going to solve their problems at the surface.
[00:17:46] And so with both of the team projects and in my own clients, there’s this moment of kind of hearing those presenting problems and deciding whether it makes sense to go into what I was starting to tell you this whole data collection process of either running focus groups or interviews with either a target unit, you know, to say one branch of the organization or if the organization is small enough. One of my clients a year and a half ago was 40 people and it was doable to do this large organizational assessment. Um, but they’ve doubled in size since then. And so, it would be a lot harder to do it now.
[00:18:24] Ray: That means their organizational morale probably improved.
[00:18:29] Rebecca: I would love to like say causality is due to this work and morale improved but there’s always, you know, alternative factors driving their growth as well.
[00:18:38] Ray: Right.
[00:18:38] Rebecca: But the process is really this experience of first to bring everybody together. If we decide we’re going to go from this whole org assessment and have a meeting, a community meeting of kind of explaining what the process looks like and then telling them about what to expect in the interviews or in the focus groups because, as I said earlier, process fairness matters, right? So, by doing that, I want to create these spaces where people feel comfortable, they can trust who is this person, right. If you’ve ever seen, what is it not? Is it Office Space, the movie, you know, where nobody trusts the consultants?
[00:19:14] Ray: Yeah. It’s sorry. It took me a while. Yes, exactly. Michael Bolton and then the two Bobs.
[00:19:19] Rebecca: Exactly who throws my stink blur and where your flare, like all the classes that kind of superficial stuff. So, my goal was not to be that superficial consultant but really one of the things I learned was as I was first coming out of academia and learning the skills to become a consultant was this idea of building a strong relationship that that relationship with the client was just as important as the findings, meaning, even if I come up with these genius, brilliant insights into your organization and working with you to kind of help build that sense of organizational self-awareness, you know, it doesn’t matter if we haven’t built a healthy relationship where you can trust me to partner with you and help you to move through it.
[00:20:00] Ray: No matter how good of an idea it is of a product that you’re trying to pitch, you may not get the deal done. If you have a rocky relationship with the people behind them.
[00:20:11] Rebecca: Right, right. Which is why you so often hear not so often but you hear about situations where those partnerships often lead to a marital therapy of sorts.
Teaching at Haas
[00:20:22] Ray: Awesome. Well, you did give some details about the project that I remember when I was going through your class. Uh, we did as well, I want to ask you how does your teaching at Haas compare to some of your other experiences, whether you know, teaching at other universities or taking classes as a student?
[00:20:43] Rebecca: Man, I came to Haas having taught in a number of other places. But I had these ideas about Haas as a kind of premier business school and so I had some anxieties, I’ll be honest. About like, Oh my gosh, this place is going to be so competitive, you know, that the students are going to be focused on either an individualistic culture and how do I take care of myself? And I was so blown away in getting to know the students, in discovering their gratitude and respect for the learning journey and their learning experience. And that’s in gratitude and respect that they have for each other. All my sort of anxiety or anticipations were just proven completely wrong.
[00:21:27] You know, in part of that I think comes from all that work that Rich Lyons put into thinking deeply about the culture of Haas. So, you might remember though in class when we talk about culture and we analyze the Haas culture and usually, it seems so superficial to have things like your principles plastered on a wall, right, or on a plaque, you know, and Haas gone as far as embedding them in the sidewalk in that Plaza area as you walk up to Chou Hall. But it really, you know, it just sorts of reinforces this culture that truly exists from the level of what you see, a culture that is visibly student always and questioning the status quo, and confidence without attitude. You’re visibly seeing it in the sidewalk but you’re also experiencing it.
[00:22:21] Ray: Definitely. Thank you for providing that perspective as a teacher because we, as students, a lot of us have felt that but I think your perspective of Haas is more holistic across the different programs, across different classes and cohorts.
[00:22:39] So you know, I definitely feel that, and now it’s good to know that it’s not just our cohort for example, or our class. Right. So, that’s really good. I’m glad that you shared that.
[00:22:51] Rebecca: Well, and I would say that this there’s this synergy that happens because of that community of students because they have let their guard down and they’re just willing to like be so generous with each other that I benefit as well. And so, I often get fed these new ideas. So, a long time ago when I was only on a tenure track and it wasn’t consulting, sometimes teaching would really feel stale, right?
[00:23:18] Because it just felt like this kind of hamster wheel of doing it over and over again. And now it has this incredible energy because one day I’ll be in front of the class and talking about a concept that I just been talking the night before. I mean, this happened a month or two ago, a couple of months ago in the spring where with COVID and the need for the organization to shift to accommodating, you know, working from home.
[00:23:39] Right. One of the team projects was presenting on their client and how they dealt with it. Right. And so, in the day before I’d been talking with a client about how are they going to learn and respond dynamically to this world we’re in. And so, those two conversations, both with the students and with the client had this synergy for me that’s really powerful.
[00:24:01] Ray: Yeah. So, it looks like just as you’re encouraging us, students, to apply what we learn in your class in real life, you basically took your conversations with them and applied it in your own life.
[00:24:13] Yeah, that’s amazing.
[00:24:14] Rebecca: But I’m so grateful to the students for giving me that. Right. Like I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t get that. If I didn’t have this luxury of being able to dance between these two worlds.
[00:24:23] Ray: Right. So you know, for our incoming students who are listening, who are going to be taking your class or may have already been enrolled in your class by the time this episode airs, what are your goals? And, what do you want your students every year after having taken your class to come away with?
[00:24:44] Rebecca: Yeah, I talk a lot about in class, how, you know, we have so many conversations and there’s so much to hold onto and I’ll always say, put this one in your back pocket.
[00:24:54] Rebecca: I mean, in the language that we speak in my class is this world of like, there’s the individual, yourself, then there’s this concept of you’re part of the team and the dynamics of a team, and then there’s this other layer of the organization that you’re operating in.
[00:25:11] Right. And then there’s all the factors externally that are influencing everything that we see inside of an organization. And so, given that complexity, I think when I talked to the class about takeaways, I guess it’s figuring out about the balance in holding onto, you know, you hear about authentic leadership, right, and holding onto that authentic awareness of yourself, while also thinking authentically, I’ve been talking about organizational self-awareness.
[00:25:42] Ray: So, individual and collective self-awareness.
[00:25:45] Rebecca: Yeah. So that, you know, so that you’re comfortable. Right? Cause we see leaders that are sort of in this like trying to do what they think is best without staying true to themselves.
[00:25:56] Ray: Right?
[00:25:57] Rebecca: So that you’re able to make these decisions that feel right for you while being right for your organization.
[00:26:03] Ray: Yeah. And I think one of the big concepts that you mentioned in class is authenticity and it is hard enough sometimes to be authentic when you’re trying to achieve a certain business goal or business motive and probably much more difficult when you add the layer of organization authenticity which ties to your mentioned earlier about procedural versus justice. So, I guess we’re kind of going full circle here. And so, we just have some lightning round questions. First, what is your favorite activity or hobby that you’ve done during shelter in place?
Lightning Round
[00:26:42] Rebecca: I have kids and some of our activities are intertwined because here we are sharing this space together. So, with all the online stuff, I think one of the things that I’ve been having a lot of fun were there are all these online cooking classes.
[00:26:55] Ray: Any dish that you’d like to highlight?
[00:26:57] Rebecca: Hmm. The one that we did a month, a couple of months ago was with this woman who wrote the book, I think Art of Pie.
[00:27:03] And, anyways, I learned to make like really good dough and the reason the dough is so good is I learned how much butter you put into it. And so, with that dough you can, you can do all kinds of things but I’m Jewish and one of like the treats that, you know, I love like when you’re in New York City and you go out to Brooklyn, as you get really good rugelach, it’s like that swirly kind of pastry regular is often like boring flavors or like cinnamon and nuts and kinds of things.
[00:27:29] I’m a chocoholic. So, I love like a good chocolate rugelach. So, you can see the theme, right?
[00:27:35] Rebecca: Like I switched to a hotel school. My business is named after food. Like, there’s a bit of an obsession.
[00:27:43] Ray: Okay. And then, second question. What is your ideal first vacation spot after the shelter in place, the quarantine clears up on a global level?
[00:27:54] Rebecca: Ideal not practical, right?
[00:27:58] Ray: You can say either.
[00:28:01] Rebecca: Oh, yeah. Well, I mean, what’s been hard the week that COVID started, I was really lucky. And March 8th or 9th, I had gotten to squeeze in a trip that had been planned to a film festival in Missouri, in Columbia, Missouri. A friend here in Berkeley, she initially was part of the founding team of this film festival called True/False. And that was just so fun. Like I’d never been to a documentary film festival. It was so fun to just like be with friends and go see these amazing films, which I’ll put a plug for, like one that’s coming out on Apple TV in a month that I saw called Boys State, just awesome films. So, to go from that world and to come back a few days later and discover like, you know, everything’s shutting down, my kid’s school shutting down, like, so awesome vacation I would do that all over again. And it’s in Columbia, Missouri.
[00:28:57] Ray: Yeah, I was gonna say, it sounds like it may not be the place that match, is just being with other people being around
[00:29:03] Rebecca: The experience.
[00:29:04] Yeah.
[00:29:04] Ray: Cool. All right. Well then, last lightning round question. What’s your favorite defining leadership principle?
[00:29:11] Rebecca: I’m a boundary pusher and my life has been all about pushing boundaries and everything I do is always seeing like, what, we’re going to push a little bit more. And so, I love question the status quo.
[00:29:23] Ray: Nice. And, you know, for, our ACS cohort, we did axe the status quo.
[00:29:30] It was our chance. Okay. So then I wanna wrap this interview with having been experienced in both kind of the academic world in, you know, your Ph.D., as well as in consulting, you know, these last few years or last several years, how has that experience been like living in both worlds, academics and consulting?
[00:29:54] Rebecca: Before I started consulting and I was a full time academic, I felt like nobody really cared about our research. You know, a lot of our research was really looking at like these what we called incremental variables. How do you impact satisfaction in the world?
[00:30:09] Is it okay having more frequent supervisor conversations? And, as a boundary pusher, I never was satisfied with doing that sort of research. I wanted to do these really exciting, sexy topics, like my dissertation on underemployed immigrants. Anyway, so I felt like nobody cared about our research.
[00:30:27] I just thought there was no way he was able to translate what we were doing so that managers, supervisors, people who care about organizations or trying to do better, could have that information, the link, the conduit didn’t exist.
[00:30:40] I remember SHRM, Society for Human Resources Management, starting to talk about in the early 2000 Sanjay Gupta from CNN if you’re familiar with him and how he could get on CNN and translate medical research for the average person watching TV to understand why sugar was a problem if you had diabetes.
[00:30:59] Right. But that we didn’t have a Sanjay Gupta for our field.
[00:31:03] Ray: Hmm. Okay.
[00:31:05] Rebecca: Until more recently, you know, where you have Adam Grant, as I mentioned earlier, you know, often publishing in the New York Times, helping raise attention to, you know, things like what we talked about earlier. So, to answer your question about, where do I see the synergy is that I am no Sanjay Gupta, I’m definitely not Adam Grant, but I do get so much pleasure out of those moments when I can bridge those two worlds and help clients appreciate evidence-based management, right? Making decisions that are grounded in this hundred-years of research that our field has.
[00:31:45] Ray: Right. And then incorporating some of the science and more modern application of using David driven methods into the actual everyday life for organizations. All right. Well, thank you so much for your time today, Rebecca. I appreciate you coming on the podcast for our listeners.
[00:32:03] Rebecca: Thank you, Ray. This was so fun.
[00:32:05] Outro: Thank you for tuning in to another episode of here@haas. If you enjoy the show, please leave us a rating and review on your favorite podcast player. For other Haas podcasts including episodes with alumni, please check out our website at haaspodcasts.org where you can also subscribe to our monthly newsletters.
[00:32:27] I’m Ray Guan and we’ll see you next time here at Haas.