From the Editor

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Business magazines promise insight. This issue delivers 10 key takeaways — some surprising, some practical and a few that might change the way you think about business. Happy reading!

1. Education doesn’t stop at the classroom door. Competitions, travel and real-world experiences continue to push students to test ideas beyond the syllabus. 
2. Some of the most important business problems aren’t about invention. They’re about delivery. Faculty member Diana Jue-Rajasingh has spent her career studying a deceptively simple problem: how life-improving products actually make their way to the people they are meant to serve.
3. New technologies can bring anxiety to the classroom. AI is no different — but its real impact may be less about replacing skills and more about redefining them.
4. Gender diversity isn’t all that investors are watching. In startup accelerators, investors engage more when founder and mentor teams are aligned in their gender composition. Looking at either team in isolation misses the relationship dynamics that shape investor interest.
5. AI can boost creativity — but it depends on how you use it. The real differentiator isn’t the technology. It’s whether users have the metacognition to question and refine what AI produces. 
6. Loving your job may not be the virtue we think it is. When passion becomes a moral expectation at work, research suggests it can quietly fuel burnout.
7. Your grocery receipts might one day help determine your credit score. Retail purchasing data could open new lending pathways for millions of people without traditional credit histories.
8. Big institutions run on more than tradition. Behind the spectacle of the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo lies a master class in leadership, logistics and civic scale.
9. Big visions require spaces to support them. From borrowed classrooms to McNair Hall and a new building, the homes of Rice Business mirror the school’s ambitions. 
10. The most valuable business skill is still clear thinking. Markets, technology and industries change, says associate dean of the Virani Undergraduate School of Business Bob Dittmar. The ability to reason through uncertainty endures.

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Contributors

What's one book you would read over and over again, and why?

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Dan Morrell

I am hoping to pick up Faulkner’s “Absalom, Absalom” again as an adult. I expect I will have a different appreciation of it without the pressure of having to write a term paper about it.

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Scott Pett

One of my favorite Houston novels is the dystopian legal thriller “Rule of Capture” by Christopher Brown. It portrays the city as both a real place and a version of itself pushed to a terrifying extreme.

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Helen Huneycutt

Anything by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle! The writing is captivating, the characters are timeless and there’s never a dull moment with Sherlock.