So Proud of Katie!

Tuesday I had the enormous privilege of attending Katie's public PhD dissertation defense. What an incredible moment it was as my wife stood before her colleagues and presented her research findings, the culmination of her last six years of work and the reason for our cross-country move to North Carolina!

To be clear, Katie's dissertation research was fraught with challenges. Her initial target group became reluctant to participate after the 2016 election. She had to change her research subjects on the fly but ultimately managed to recruit dozens of participants and maintained 90% of them over the full year of her longitudinal study. Some of the data she collected posed great difficulty in analysis such that Katie unexpectedly had to develop new methods to process them.

In addition to these direct challenges, we also had significant indirect challenges in our personal life. We experienced four pregnancy losses during this time period and, as much as these heartbreaking events affected us both emotionally, Katie bore the brunt of their effects physically. She lost months of time recovering from these losses - not to mention dealing with the challenges (nausea, etc.) of being pregnant in the first place!

Then, when we finally had a healthy pregnancy and a healthy baby, those were certainly joyous times - but just as certainly not times that lent themselves very well to deep time and focus on research! Not long after our baby was born, Katie interviewed, was hired, and began a job at Duke University, where she has been thriving for the last year while writing her dissertation in parallel. Oh and, by the way, Katie has been an amazing partner to me / mother to our child the entire time!

It has not been a straightforward or easy road for Katie but, despite that, she persevered and accomplished her goal. There are still some revisions to be completed but the major hurdle of defending her thesis against leaders in her field has been passed with flying colors. Her strength, resilience, and competence is inspiring - not only to me but it certainly will be to our toddler as well.

I have been in awe of / inspired by / in love with smart women since literally the day I was born. Some, like my mom, had no choice but to be stuck with me. Katie, however, actually chose to spend the rest of her life with me and to build a family together. I'm not sure I deserve it but I'm grateful for it every day. And, on days like this, I'm just so damn proud of who she is and what she has accomplished.

Congratulations to the soon-to-be Dr. Katie!

Bragging About My Wife

Although I usually devote this blog to bragging about myself, I must take this opportunity to brag about my wife. Yesterday Katie was awarded the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, the first fellowship for which she ever applied. Katie was one of 2,000 awardees selected from more than 14,000 applications - huzzah!

I have been very excited to support Katie in her major career move to go "back to school" for her PhD. This is the most enthusiastic I have seen her be about her work since I have known her. Applying for programs and grants and fellowships comes with a risk of rejection and failure. No stranger to failure myself, I would love Katie just as much even if she didn't get into the top schools, receive the top awards, or have her articles published in the top journals. Over the course of an entire career, those types of failures are bound to happen. However, she is certainly off to a great start - accepted at top anthropology programs, top marks in her courses, and now winning research fellowships - and it is very rewarding to see that others value the work she is doing too.

It is no secret that I married "up" with Katie. Hopefully I can keep up with her contributions to Team KJBGH!

School Pride Continued

No sooner had we returned to the US than we traveled to San Antonio for more IMD action - but this time closer to "home" turf! The Academy Of Management's annual meeting was being held there in several venues along the River Walk. The AOM is the preeminent academic organization for scholars in the fields of business and management. As such, many IMD professors, including IMD's president, were in attendance - along with 10,000 other management profs! I had been asked to participate in the session of one of my former IMD professors and jumped at the chance.

Katie and I arrived Saturday and spent the afternoon strolling along the River Walk. Although my brother attended university in San Antonio and I visited quite often, we never really spent much time in this part of town. Katie and I were enchanted by the canopy of trees, the fun restaurants along the river, and - above all - the lower temperature down in the shade! What a fantastic environment they have created!

Sunday morning was my presentation in the San Antonio Convention Center. Our session, led by Maury Peiperl and Suzanne de Janasz, focused on social value creation. Specifically, is it possible for organizations to to embed it in their philosophies/cultures? Or will it always be bare-minimum-box-checking?

We began with research by IMD professor Francisco Szekely, who had been my leadership coach during my MBA year, on Corporate Social Responsibility efforts by large corporations. The conclusion was that generally these have been ineffectual and are not being approached correctly at all.

I then followed up with my case study of Smart Office Energy Solutions, which we have designed from the ground up to have social value creation inextricably embedded in its DNA. It would be absolutely impossible for us to achieve economic success without also doing some good - and the more of one we achieve, the more of the other we achieve. Furthermore we create that same alignment of economic and social value for our clients, suppliers, employees, and investors such that this "good capitalism" spreads virally. My conclusion therefore was quite optimistic: that capitalism can align with social good but we need business leaders to search out business models that feature that alignment.

Our final "practitioner" (as we non-academics are called) was Lynellyn Long, who concluded with a much less optimistic "reality check" based on her experience in human rights activism, working with non-profits, NGOs, and governments. Her conclusion was that yes, perhaps it can be done but that Smart Office Energy Solutions is by far the exception to the rule and that the current landscape for corporate social value creation is actually quite bleak.

Finally we launched a session-wide discussion about not only these topics but also, more pointed for the business school professor crowd: how can social value (or attempts to align it with economic value) be taught to future generations of business leaders? The discussion was quite lively as we had a packed venue and I was encouraged by how much interest there was in the topic. Regarding social value pedagogy, I get the feeling that it may be like entrepreneurship, for which the consensus is that it can't be "taught" theoretically; instead it has to be developed experientially. That corresponds with my own experience; I certainly didn't develop a passion for using business to "do good" in the classroom!

I was really honored to be included in this session and it felt good to dip a toe back into the pool of academia. Who knows, maybe some day in the future I will expand my academic pursuits - in the meantime, though, I'm focused on getting things done! In addition to the session, it was a good chance to catch up with other IMD professors, including the few minutes I spent psychoanalyzing Jack Wood over coffee - I thought I was turning the tables on him but he was probably actually just gaming me the entire time! And on top of it all, it was a lovely 30 hours or so in San Antonio with my beautiful bride - tough to beat that!