Yale Alums’ Startup Fights Coral Reef Die-Off

Wharton

Cracking The Code On Brand Growth

News from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania

“When Dollar Shave Club founder Michael Dubin launched his now famous YouTube video in 2012, no one imagined that it would cause earth-shaking tremors under razor behemoth Gillette. But it did. The tongue-in-cheek style video explaining the Club’s many virtues had a seismic effect. The day it was released, the brand’s website crashed from huge traffic. Within 48 hours, 12,000 orders were received. A few years later, Unilever bought the Club for $1 billion.

“Most analyses of the Dollar Shave Club’s success conclude that it accomplished this feat because of millennials’ obsession with direct delivery, the founder’s comedic flair, or its bargain basement prices. We say it was something much deeper. In fact, Dollar Shave Club rose to prominence because it employed the formula we have discovered to be the key to changing subconscious brand preference: the expansion of a brand’s positive associations in customers’ memories to the point that it becomes an automatic, involuntary choice.”

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There were more than 47,000 deaths from opioids in 2017 — close to six times more than in 1999. Dartmouth Tuck

The New Year’s Upside Of Falling Life Expectancy

News from Dartmouth College Tuck School of Business

“Welcome to 2019. We hope you enjoyed some end-of-year rest and good cheer. Here in America, the new year is off to a mixed start.

“The Employment Situation report for December was uniformly upbeat: higher-than-expected growth in payroll jobs, an uptick in the length of the average workweek, and the 3.2 percent year-over-year rate of increase in hourly wages was the fastest since 2009. And yet, America rang in its New Year with more than 800,000 federal employees throughout the country not reporting to work due to the funding standoff between the White House and Congress. This federal-government shutdown, now in its 17th day, is emblematic of the prevailing dysfunction in Washington.

“Your correspondents firmly believe that each new year brings new opportunity for renewal and progress. It is in that optimistic spirit that we focus our first missive of 2019 on the paradoxically grim topic of falling life expectancy in America.”

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Michael Meier

How To Make Inclusivity More Than Just An Office Buzzword

News from Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management 

“Most leaders would say they value diversity in their organizations. Some do so for strategic reasons, perhaps to mirror their diversifying customer base; others value diversity because it is the right thing to do. Yet for many companies, gaps can appear between rhetoric and action. And even those that succeed in establishing diverse organizations can fall short when it comes to inclusion. After all, having employees with a wide array of backgrounds does not ensure that everyone feels equally welcome and valued.

“That’s why focusing on both diversity and inclusion is crucial, explains Ellen Taaffe, an assistant professor of leadership and director of women’s leadership programs at the Kellogg School.”

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Chase Wilson. Owen photo

How I Got The Job: Lessons From The Recruitment Process

News from Vanderbilt University Owen Graduate School of Management 

“During his time in the Army, Chase Wilson (MBA’19) managed large teams, sometimes more than 100 people, as he served as a logistics officer. This experience gave him great stories to tell as he recruited for MBA internships — and helped him realize how important leadership was to him and his future career.”

“’I remember thinking, which of these roles is going to give me the opportunity to jump back into a leadership capacity as quickly as possible?’ he recalls of his recruiting process.”

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Text analysis based on machine learning is beginning to reveal previously inaccessible truths about organizational culture. INSEAD

Algorithms To Decode An Organization’s Culture (At Last)

News from INSEAD

“Everybody agrees organizational culture is extremely important for managers to understand and shape. Few are satisfied with the tools we have to do it today. It’s not the absence of solid theories about culture that’s the problem; the challenge has been reliable measurement. That’s a cue for machine learning and big data to enter the fray. These techniques mine large volumes of free-form text data to infer relatively simple attributes (e.g. employee sentiment), as well as more complex constructs, such as the strength and uniqueness of an organization’s culture.

“Pioneers in this area include The Computational Culture Lab, a collaborative venture between Stanford University and University of California-Berkeley. Its recently published papers analyze years of internal emails at a tech firm to show how employees’ use of single vs. plural pronouns reflects their level of ‘enculturation,’ which in turn predicts the probability that they will leave the firm. Another research team found that the language used in shareholder letters from 167 European banks was highly indicative of overall corporate culture as well as the banks’ propensity to engage in risky behavior.”

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