One of the things the MBA program has given me is confidence — the feeling that there’s nothing I can’t explore.

 

Keyuri Popat, EMBA ’21 

As an anesthesiologist at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, where she is also a professor and the medical director of the hospital’s Acute Pain Service, Dr. Keyuri Popat treats patients with complex pain, which can stem from their illness as well as from the treatment they’re undergoing to cure it. It’s a difficult job, but the emotional payoff is huge. “It’s so rewarding because you can give people instant relief,” she says. When she started thinking about ways to move from treating individual patients to improving the patient experience across the board, she turned to Rice Business.

“Over the last 20 years that I’ve been practicing, the business of medicine has changed quite a bit,” she says. Facilities are now run by a combination of physician leaders and professional administrators, and the two levels of leadership need to understand each other to function seamlessly. “I’m already leading a team of doctors and nurses who manage pain after surgery, so I thought: I could take this to another level and make pain and suffering in our entire patient population as minimal as possible,” she said. “I thought the MBA program would help me get there.” Rice Business was an easy choice: Her husband earned his MBA here in 2016, and her son is an undergraduate at Rice now. He’ll graduate with a degree in computer science at the same time that she earns her MBA.

Equipped with new insights into operations, leadership and innovation, Dr. Popat is leading a pain management committee that brings together stakeholders across MD Anderson to improve pain management for the entire hospital’s inpatient population. “I’m taking a customer experience class now, and it’s fascinating,” she says. “I’m hoping I can apply those lessons to our patients to map their customer journey and improve their full experience — not just in the O.R. or as outpatients, but along their whole MD Anderson journey.” 

None of us shed a tear for the commutes we lost when we first started working remotely. Their loss, we thought, was our gain — an extra hour (more or less) to do whatever we wanted with. Get in a workout! Cook a gourmet breakfast! Or, for some: More time to work!

Now, a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve started to miss our old routines — even the ones we never valued in the before times. It’s why the “fake commute” has become a thing: people put on “real clothes,” pack a lunch, leave their house, walk around the block, and then go back inside and sit at their desk to start the work day.

These people haven’t cracked: They’re taking an essential step toward rebuilding the boundaries that have blurred during lockdown, according to British researchers. “Engaging in a ‘pretend commute’ at the beginning and the end of the day not only provides an opportunity to build some physical activity into your daily routine but also provides an opportunity to transition between work and non-work parts of lives,” says University College London Professor Anna Cox.

Scott Sonenshein, an organizational psychologist at Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business, has been a fan of the fake commute since the early days of lockdown. It started as a way to get his two daughters to settle down for a day of virtual school, he says.

“At first there was nothing — there was no structure, there was no virtual program, and it was quickly obvious that they were languishing. My wife and I divided up the homeschooling responsibilities, and we talked about how to signal when the school day starts and stops,” he says. “I needed that marker for myself, too. So very quickly, probably within the first week, we decided to walk around the block and then come in, and that means you’re in school. They took it seriously — they’d put their backpacks on — but they also had fun with it. After a while they were like, ‘Can we ride our bikes to school? Can school be further away?’ ”

Replacing the old routine with a new one helped make the “new normal” less daunting, explains Sonenshein, the author of “Stretch: Unlock the Power of Less — And Achieve More Than You Ever Imagined” and the co-author, with Marie Kondo, of “Joy at Work.”
 

“Routines allow us to habituate action. They mean we don’t have to think about certain things; they happen automatically,” he says. “And they provide predictability, which these days is hard to come by. The paradox of the pandemic is that people are struggling with the monotony of lockdown, but we’re also longing for these routines that have been upended. This goes down to the deep-seated need humans have for control — that’s what we’re missing during the pandemic.”

Humans are hardwired to make and keep routines, in part because surprises are biologically alarming to us. We are, at heart, prediction machines, writes Kate Murphy, the author of “You’re Not Listening: What You’re Missing and Why It Matters.” Disrupting the way we’ve always done something — from driving to work to shopping for groceries — pulls the rug of predictability out from under us, sending our brains into a tailspin.  

“Our brains are literally overburdened with all the uncertainty caused by the pandemic,” she writes. “Things we had already figured out and relegated to the brain’s autopilot function — going to work, visiting the gym, taking the kids to school, meeting friends for dinner, grocery shopping — now require serious thought and risk analysis.”

In retrospect, our commutes may have been the unsung heroes of our old workdays. Not only did they create a valuable transition between our “on” and “off” hours, they gave us the opportunity to operate on autopilot, freeing up brainpower for new ideas and insights, Sonenshein says. 

“Studies show that doing something mindless — just walking around the block or playing with a fidget spinner — allows your mind to wander and make connections. So even though it seems like you’re not working, the brain is working and coming up with ideas. Activities that don’t require a lot of concentration, but stimulate the brain really mildly are typically when the best insights come to you,” he says. “For many of us, those activities were built in to our old workdays. Just having a routine like walking to lunch or walking to get a coffee help make you more productive because you need that space to make the connections that don’t come to you when you’re thinking really hard about something.”

In addition to sparking good ideas, these mundane moments can also increase our sense of joy and purpose, says Samantha Heintzelman, a psychology professor at Rutgers University. By infusing our lives with pattern and regularity, they add a sense of coherence and comprehensibility to the world around us.

“When the world makes sense, life feels more meaningful,” she writes.

And while we tend to think of finding meaning in life as a grand, lightning-bolt moment, Heintzelman’s research shows that it’s more closely intertwined with the small habits we often take for granted: our morning hygiene regimen, our daily coffee runs, our weekly grocery shopping excursions.

“Some correlational research suggests that routines (e.g., consistently sitting in the same seat in a classroom or routinely visiting the same neighborhoods) are associated with feelings of comfort, confidence, safety, and control,” she wrote in a 2018 paper.

Those feelings are the scaffolding around which our sense of a larger purpose is constructed. The good news is that the routines themselves don’t matter as much as the sheer fact that they are routines: regular, reliable and consistent. Every routine was brand-new once, of course, and just doing something new once a day for two weeks will make it feel automatic—and likely to stick, King’s College London researcher Benjamin Gardner tells The Economist. That means the routines we established during lockdown are likely so well established by now that they’ll linger long after the pandemic ebbs.

But it’s never too late to create new routines, Sonenshein says. We can start by letting go of the ones that no longer make sense in our new normal.

“Don’t focus on what you don’t have,” he says. “Find potential in what’s around you. That starts with taking stock of what you’re able to do and the places you can go.”

If your fake commute starts to get old, infuse it with the kind of (limited) novelty you might have done with your real pre-pandemic commute, he suggests. On their “commute” to “school” every morning, Sonenshein and his kids try to spot three new, interesting things each time.

“The commute is always the same, but there’s always at least three new things we notice,” he says. “It could be something new in someone’s yard, a flower sprouting from a gutter, or an interesting doorknob. I would bet you can get through the whole pandemic on your same route and find new things each time.”

The commute itself may be pretend, after all, but the benefits of sticking with it are very real.

Jennifer Latson is an editor at Rice Business and the author of “The Boy Who Loved Too Much.”

Losing the essentials, such as power and water — and for others so much more — has a way of shifting your priorities and your mindset. The winter storm that devastated Texas in February felt like a final blow in a long and challenging year, especially when we learned that EMBA student Jackie Nguyen lost her mother, Loan Le, and her three children — Olivia, 11; Edison, 8; and Colette, 5 — in a house fire during the disaster.

Sometimes a loss, even if it’s not your own, puts your life in perspective and shapes how you move forward.

Where do we go from here? Houston is back on track. We have clean running water and our power grid is stable once again. How will we become part of the solution the world needs? To help those suffering from power and water outages during the winter storm, we opened McNair Hall to families of students, faculty and staff (see “Huddling Up”). To address the ongoing pandemic, Rice remains committed to policies that keep our community safe (see “COVID, One Year Later”). To address issues of racial equity and social justice, we have established a new position leading our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion efforts (see “Expanding DEI”).

The way to overcome challenges like we’ve seen over the past year is to commit to being a part of a community. The healing power of community is one of the core beliefs at Rice Business. We strive to be better at what we do and be of use to those who need us.

The stories in this issue reveal some of the ways our community provided shelter from the storm and lit the path to our future. Catch up on what students, staff, faculty and fellow alumni are doing to build community and make the world a better place.

— Peter

The past four years have seen some of the most restrictive immigration policies in generations take effect in the U.S. Experts are still analyzing the full effect of those policies, but it’s clear that they’ve taken a toll on a broad swath of industries, including higher education. The restrictions dealt a major blow to Rice Business and countless other academic institutions, making it harder to recruit the best and the brightest from around the world.

At Rice Business, enrollment was down among talented candidates who would otherwise have set their sights on the school from abroad. Stress was up among those who had already made the journey. And the ripple effects were felt across the board.

“It’s taken an emotional toll on our staff and on many of the students whose classmates are struggling under the anxiety that comes with all of those policy changes,” said Rice Business Dean Peter Rodriguez. “The pain you feel is knowing that the foreign students who did so much to come to your country and study with you just can’t relax and feel welcome.”

The situation is especially troubling considering how important international students are to the Rice Business experience, providing access to a global pool of talent and to an inherently diverse body of experiences and opinions.

“We learn from and with each other in the classroom, and the perspectives and backgrounds of international students are irreplicable,” Rodriguez says. “We could not produce the type and the value of education we do without them.”

The same issue applies to all U.S. companies looking to attract top talent and stay competitive in the global market, he says. And while Rodriguez is guardedly optimistic that the next few years could bring welcome policy changes, experts agree that it will take time to rebuild the reputation of the United States as a country that welcomes immigrants rather than shuns them.

New Bottle, Old Wine

The restrictions of recent years, including the so-called Muslim ban on immigration from countries in Africa and the Middle East and a drastic reduction in the number of refugees admitted to the U.S., were far from the first time America has cracked down on newcomers.

“It’s not as if this is something new. It’s as American as apple pie,” says Steve Klineberg, founding director of the Kinder Institute for Urban Research and Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Rice. “Whenever we have a large wave of immigration, we have a nativist response.”

The Immigration Act of 1924, for example — which Klineberg describes as “one of the most viciously racist acts ever passed by Congress” — completely excluded immigrants from Asia and imposed strict quotas on those from Southern and Eastern Europe.

Unlike previous attempts at reshaping the immigration system, however, virtually all of the policy changes of the past four years were made via executive actions and administrative maneuvers rather than through legislative action by Congress. This has implications for the Biden administration, since anything done by presidential fiat can be similarly undone. But that raises the prospect of successive administrations reversing those reversals, and of immigration policy becoming a perpetual political football.

“Nothing that is done from the president’s desk as an executive order is a permanent solution,” says Tony Payan, director of the Center for the United States and Mexico at Rice’s Baker Institute for Public Policy.

To achieve both rapid and lasting change, the Biden administration will therefore need to work along parallel tracks, Payan says. On the one hand, it can issue executive actions to quickly overturn selected Trump-era policies. On the other, it must court congressional support for comprehensive immigration reform that would combine some form of legal status for undocumented immigrants with enhanced border security and a more rational approach to employment-based visas.

That dual focus was evident in President Biden’s first flurry of immigration-related moves. Those included not only executive actions to end the Muslim ban and halt the aggressive deportation of unauthorized immigrants, but also a call for legislative action to provide the latter with permanent status and a path to citizenship — something that would represent the most ambitious congressional overhaul of immigration law in decades.

Short Game, Long Game

When it comes to executive actions, some reversals can be effected immediately, experts say. That includes reinstating visa programs that allow international students to attend schools such as Rice and secure employment with American firms.

Guidance issued by the previous administration regarding visas made it much harder, and in some cases impossible, for foreign nationals to study and work in the U.S. Undoing that guidance would be good not only for foreign jobseekers but for American companies, too: The kneecapping of the H-1B visa program, for example, has made it possible for only the largest firms to assume the costs and burdens of hiring foreign workers, leaving smaller firms unable to compete for global talent.

“That’s not good for competitiveness or equity,” Rodriguez says.

Fully reversing the effects of specific immigration policies through the use of executive actions will take time, but getting the ball rolling involves little more than a stroke of the presidential pen. In the long run, however, comprehensive legislative reform will require the current administration and its allies to make the case for immigration to the American people.

Fortunately, it’s a compelling one. America’s future depends on immigration: The fertility rate for native-born Americans has fallen below the so-called replacement rate, meaning that the country can no longer replenish its own population — or its workforce. That, say Rodriguez and Payan, represents a looming demographic crisis of the sort that has inflicted so much economic pain on Europe and Japan.

At the local level, Klineberg already sees the writing on the wall. His own research shows that Houston’s growth has been driven entirely by immigration since 1982, with a steady influx of new arrivals fueling the city’s diversity and economic vitality. “No city has benefited from immigration more than Houston,” he says.

With pent-up demand for labor across all skill levels in industries ranging from engineering and medicine to construction and daycare, the importance of immigration to the economy will only grow: A report by the Center for Houston’s Future predicts that by 2036, 57 percent of all new jobs in Houston will be filled by immigrants.

And while critics contend that immigrants take American jobs from native-born workers, the idea of immigration as a zero-sum game ignores the extent to which immigrants help grow the economic pie for everyone, Rodriguez argues.

“It is certainly true that immigrants compete for the jobs that we all compete for,” he says. “On the other hand, immigrants of all types bring skills we need and make the U.S. much more productive. And it’s that general productivity that converts this from being a zero-sum proposition into something that makes the economy larger and more successful overall.”

Alexander Gelfand is a freelance writer based in New York City who often covers business, science and social justice.

The lights went out at Aman Bhargava’s place in the Rice Village Apartments around 2 a.m. on Monday, Feb. 15. As the day passed, the apartment got colder. The pipes froze, cutting off the water supply. And the temperature — inside and outside — was only going down.

Bhargava, a full-time MBA student in the Class of 2021, hadn’t expected to lose power and water during a Houston cold snap. Luckily, he still had some bottled water left over from his preparations for a summer hurricane that never materialized. But he had no canned food and little to keep him warm in the Arctic indoor conditions that developed as the outage dragged on into Tuesday.

A number of his classmates, he realized, were in the same boat — many of them international students, like him, living in the Rice grad student apartments where conditions were quickly deteriorating. Two emails from Rice Business gave him hope: One said there was still power and water in McNair Hall. The other said anyone who needed help should contact administrators. So he did.
 

“I reached out and said, ‘Can we shelter at school?’ ” he said. The answer was yes.

Bhargava and his RVA neighbors joined dozens of others who sheltered at McNair Hall the week of Feb. 15, including business school faculty, students and staff, along with members of Rice’s “ride-out team” of essential personnel who stay on campus during disasters. The building never lost power or water during the winter storm that caused widespread outages throughout the region, when temperatures dropped to lows not seen since 1989.

On Tuesday morning, Bhargava channeled his energy into mobilizing the other Rice Business students at his apartment building, compiling their personal details to share with the Rice University Police Department, which approved their plan to camp out at McNair. Then he booked them an Uber, which took an hour to arrive on icy roads — plus another 25 minutes to make the short trip from the apartments to campus, which normally takes about five minutes.

“I’m so glad the driver showed up and was patient,” Bhargava said. “Every time we got to an intersection, it was either closed or too icy, so we had to turn around and find another way.”

When they finally made it to McNair, they faced a new problem: How to feed everyone in the building. Restaurants and grocery stores were closed, and the roads weren’t safe for deliveries in any case. But Bhargava coordinated with Adam Herman, executive director of the Student Program Office, and Joe Garcia of Elite Events Houston, which handles catering for Rice Business. They got in touch with David McDonald, senior director at Rice Housing and Dining, who immediately said the students were welcome to eat at one of the Rice undergraduate dining halls, South Servery, shared by Hanszen and Wiess colleges. Later in the week, Garcia provided meals on site in McNair Hall: enchiladas for lunch on Thursday and pad thai on Friday.

After meeting the basic needs for food, water and heat, McNair became a sort of cold-weather summer camp. Herman — who coordinated the impromptu housing effort along with Rice’s crisis management team, RUPD and other Rice Business administrators — started referring to the building as Hotel McNair for its overnight guests, who were given cots to sleep on, and Camp McNair for those who came by during the day to charge devices, warm up, and take showers.

“The mood with everybody there was kind of a quiet thankfulness,” said Elizabeth Walton, a full-time MBA student in the Class of 2022, who spent two nights camping out in a breakout room with her husband and their dog. “I’m just so grateful to have Rice Business, and that McNair Hall randomly has showers.” 

Everyone was still careful to wear masks and keep their distance, but for many students, it was the most in-person time they’d spent with their classmates in a year. No one was in the right frame of mind to do classwork, Walton said, but some played board games and watched movies together.

“It was fun to be around other people instead of alone in your cold, dark apartment,” she said. “There was a lot of camaraderie — we were all in it together.”

“With the way COVID has been, I haven’t been able to meet many first-years. But because of this winter storm, I was able to not only meet but to have meaningful conversations with some of them. It was nice to have someone in the same situation as you are and talk to them about how they’re managing,” said Bhargava.

The “crisis within a crisis” not only brought people together, but it brought out the best in the Rice Business community, said Herman.

“This was an opportunity for the school as an organization to show up for students, faculty and staff, but also for students like Aman to show up for his fellow students and form something that was organic in McNair,” he said.  

Students mobilized to help people in need off campus as well. Professional MBA students supporting a nonprofit called Amel Houston as part of a Capstone course started an impromptu initiative to help those in Houston’s refugee community after the storm.

“What started with few texts quickly became a community initiative, where our efforts coupled with the generosity of corporate sponsors (H-E-B, Target), restaurants (Dimassi’s, Fadi’s), Rice MBA classmates and neighborhoods helped contribute 75 meals, tons of water and about $1,000 worth of basic supplies to refugees,” said Arthi Vasudevan ’21.

As power and water came back on across Houston, Hotel McNair reverted to its primary purpose as an academic building. Bhargava packed up and returned to the Rice Village Apartments on Thursday. Recovering from the stress of the ordeal took a little longer.

“Because of the pandemic, it’s not going back to ‘normal,’ ” he said. “It’s going back to the ‘new normal.’ But I have power and water now, so it’s a little easier.”

Tragedy in the Rice Business Family

The severe freeze that devastated Texas in February caused at least 25 deaths in Harris County alone, the Harris County Institute of Forensic Science reported in March. Tragedy struck the Rice Business community when Jackie Nguyen, EMBA ’21, lost her mother, Loan Le, and three children — Olivia, 11; Edison, 8; and Colette, 5 — in a fire at her home in Sugar Land while the family tried to stay warm. Jackie was hospitalized with injuries from the fire but is recovering.

“The depth of this loss is unimaginable,” Dean Peter Rodriguez wrote in a letter to the Rice Business community. “Measured against it, our sympathies seem so feeble. Still, even now, we know that sharing our love and expressions of comfort with Jackie is needed and meaningful. I hope that you will join her classmates in the EMBA class of 2021 in their loving support and compassion for Jackie. The hearts and prayers of all of us in the Rice Business family are and will remain with her and her family in this sorrowful moment.”

Jackie’s classmates rallied to help her, providing clothing and essentials, cleaning up from the fire, and donating to a GoFundMe account with the aim of creating a foundation to honor the memory of Olivia, Edison and Colette. By the time of the children’s funeral services in early March, the account had nearly reached its goal of $500,000.

On the Slack channel houston4jackie.slack.com, there’s been an outpouring of love and support from all who knew Jackie’s family — and many who didn’t.

“Jackie, your children truly became honorary members of our EMBA 2021 class this past year during the many hours spent together over Zoom,” wrote her classmate Matthew Goldsby ’21 in one Slack thread. “I will never forget their smiling faces peeking over their computer screens, in particular one day when a professor suggested that grades do not really matter. Their mischievous grins and pure delight in that moment will never fade in my memory.”

“This really made me smile,” Jackie wrote. “I also feel like they were beside me on our MBA journey...  and am just so sad that they won’t get to see us walk. They were so looking forward to it. Love y’all so much.”

Those who want to offer support but don’t have Slack can also email houston4jackie@gmail.com.

In business, as in politics, transfers of power aren’t always seamless — and when threatened, the powerful sometimes dig in their heels. After the nation’s top elected official struggled to accept his ouster in the 2020 election, management scholars reflected on similarly fraught leadership successions at organizations both large and small. For insight into this dynamic, we spoke to psychologist Marlon Mooijman, an assistant professor of organizational behavior at Rice’s Jones Graduate School of Business. With a focus on the interrelation of power, trust and status, Mooijman’s research offers a unique perspective on the current political moment — and its connection to organizations well beyond the arena of government.

How does your work dovetail with the post-election period?
What’s most relevant is the question of someone’s willingness to give up power, to relinquish control. We define power as controlling something others desire: a business budget, government funds. That control gives people power because it makes others want to do things for them, to gain access to that desirable good. As a consequence, gaining and having power is nice, and losing it is not. And that’s as relevant an issue for CEOs as for politicians.

What are the conditions under which leaders find it particularly hard to give up power?
My research suggests that on the way to the top of the corporate ladder, leaders lose trust in those around them. They start to think of the managers below them as doing their bidding only because those direct reports want something the leader has to dole out: more budget, bigger bonuses, promotions. As a result, leaders don’t trust that others are working for them because of their own good will.

In a Machiavellian way, leaders come to see interactions with those below them as all about political maneuvering, and they start to feel like they have to always be on their guard, so they don’t get taken advantage of.

And that makes it hard to cede control?
The more power you gain or exert, the less you trust. And the less you trust, the more you feel like you have to rely solely on your power to get things done.
 

The longer people stay in power, meanwhile, the more cynical they get about trust. Leaders find they have to use more and more power to hold on to power.

So they crowd out trust, they crowd out the possibility that people are willing to follow them voluntarily, and their leadership starts to rely on force and domination. People then exhaust every option to keep power.

How do organizations resolve this problem? How do they get rid of a power-mad leader who’s really dug in?
It often requires creating a cushy way out. If a board wants the CEO out, its members need to think about what’s important to him or her, what’s the underlying concern. Everyone is different. Is it really just about holding on to power?

My takeaway is, organizations have to focus more on making outgoing CEOs feel like they’re still esteemed, admired, and that they will be moving forward. Maybe that’s about some sort of honorary title, emeritus status, maybe it’s about still having a parking spot.

It’s about money, too, of course. You have to buy people out, that’s standard. But what often goes unrecognized is that departing CEOs want a good way out in terms of how esteemed they seem. Ultimately, it’s about respect.

If you’re a CEO who’s maybe failing a bit and then asked to leave, it’s embarrassing. Leaders get trapped in a phenomenon that’s called escalation of commitment: When doing poorly, they want to invest more time, more energy and money into saving their reputation. A way out of that cycle is to provide an exit that saves face.

What’s the relationship between the power-trust dynamic and this desire for respect?
In my field, we make a distinction between power, which is controlling resources, and status, which is about respect and admiration. If I have power, that tends to undermine trust. Because I have something desirable, I become more cynical about others’ motives. But if I think others admire me, I tend to trust them more.

If an organization can make people feel respected and admired, it becomes an environment where inclusion is prevalent, and trust goes up. If a workplace has more power hierarchies, it creates more distance and less trust. 

Does that mean there should be no hierarchies? 
Every organization needs to have some sort of power hierarchy. But there are other ways to boost inclusion and trust: Minimizing a focus on different titles; deemphasizing the degree to which people have access to different levels of resources and the degree to which people occupy clearly different spaces and types of offices based on their titles and level of power. If an organization can do that, it feeds into an idea of employees being close to each other instead of far away.

What steps can organizations take to make that happen?
I've been in corporate board meetings, where people smack the table and say basically, “I'm the boss, so I decide.” Sure, that’s true. But you destroyed all your authority in that moment.

Instead, you have to focus on culture, and culture starts at the top. Studies show that when CEOs place high levels of trust in managers right below them, that trickles down. That’s not a surprising outcome maybe, but it’s nice to know that research bears it out: You can change the trust dynamic in a company when you make changes at the top.

What does that mean for the country moving forward?
The tone at the top matters. The president sets the tone, the norm, the implicit understanding of what's acceptable. So it’s important to have those in charge foster trust and respect throughout an entire organization — or, in this case, the whole nation.

Andrew Sessa is a Boston-based writer and editor.

It’s been a year.

Rice first canceled in-person classes the week of March 9, 2020, after a university employee tested positive for COVID following a Nile River cruise. As the coronavirus pandemic started sweeping the U.S., Rice was the first Texas university to issue major cancellations, out of “an abundance of caution.” Abundant caution quickly caught on, of course, and other schools soon followed suit.

What at first seemed like it would last a few weeks, prompting us to panic-buy toilet paper and canned goods as if we were preparing for a hurricane, became our “new normal,” a seemingly indefinite life in limbo as restrictions eased and tightened through several pandemic peaks. 

Rice Business moved all classes online for the spring semester on March 16, 2020. When classes resumed in the fall, we delivered courses using a hybrid model that meant students could choose whether to attend classes in person or virtually. To ensure a high-quality online experience, we made a $1.2 million investment in classroom technology and provided professors with additional support staff to eliminate technical difficulties. Our faculty — who delivered classes from their homes, their offices and live in the classroom — were supported by classroom ambassadors (our COVID-era teaching assistants) and technology TAs who made sure that classes were inclusive and accessible to students attending remotely. About 75 percent of students across our programs, however, chose in-person learning.

We successfully navigated the fall semester with precautions in place to keep everyone in the community safe. Everyone on the Rice campus was required to wear masks and undergo regular COVID testing. We moved events outdoors wherever possible, and we limited the number of people in classrooms and public spaces to ensure that everyone kept a safe physical distance. That allowed us to deliver courses on schedule and enable students to make progress toward earning their degrees on time. It also kept the virus from spreading. Since the beginning of this academic year, Rice has conducted more than 120,000 COVID tests, with a positivity rate of 0.27 percent.

After the winter holidays, a surge in cases nationwide and in Houston meant that Rice, and Rice Business, began this spring semester remotely once again. In mid-February, we returned to hybrid instruction — a week later than planned, due to the devastating storm that blanketed Houston in snow and ice.  

As COVID vaccines become more widespread, we hope that the newest normal will start to more closely resemble our old normal. In March, Rice announced in-person graduation plans for both the class of 2021 and 2020. We’re excited to hold the Rice Business Investiture on May 14 — and even more excited that the university’s commencement plan recently expanded to allow each graduate to invite up to four guests to celebrate this special day in person. Our ceremony will be held Friday morning at 8:30, and will still be livestreamed for remote viewing by anyone who cannot attend in person.

Meanwhile, this year’s alumni reunion is a weeklong virtual event, from April 18 to 24, with plenty of online programming, including the Rice Business Alumni Awards, school updates, webinars, coffee chats and more.

We are hopeful that the accelerated availability of COVID vaccine doses will lower overall public health risks from the virus and increase our ability to safely gather in larger groups. Along with COVID testing, Rice has been providing vaccines to eligible faculty, staff and students — and doing its part to help vaccinate the surrounding community. On March 15, Rice Stadium began operating as a community vaccination site serving the entire Houston area. The vaccine clinic, one of several operated by Baylor St. Luke’s Medical Center, heavily emphasized vaccinating underserved populations in Houston.

The indicators are improving, nationally and in Houston. We can see the light at the end of the tunnel. The sacrifices we’ve made have helped get us here. It’s no surprise that the Rice Business community has been agile and adaptive in the face of uncertainty. Most importantly, we’ve supported each other through this dauntingly difficult period. We hope that soon we can celebrate, together, our return to “regular life.”

Professor Connie Porter has been named senior associate dean of the school’s expanded Office of Belonging and Engagement. Dean Peter Rodriguez appointed her to the new position, which was created based on the recommendation of the Rice Business Task Force on Racial Equity and Social Justice. Porter joins Lina Bell, who serves as the executive director of DEI.

“I am honored to serve in this new role at a momentous time in the history of our school. The task force established by Dean (Peter) Rodriguez paved the way for the expansion of our DEI office,” Porter said.
 

“I look forward to engaging and partnering with students, staff, faculty, alumni and stakeholders in our greater community as we continue the work to be done to amplify DEI at Rice Business.”

The Rice Business Task Force on Racial Equity and Social Justice was established shortly after the May 2020 murder of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, at the hands of white police officers in Minneapolis. In October, the task force presented the dean with 33 recommendations meant to improve the racial environment at Rice Business and at the university, including that a new position leading our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion efforts be created and that this leader report directly to the dean

“Adding to the DEI leadership team strengthens our ability to further these efforts in the school and broaden our engagement with the community,” said Rodriguez. “I look forward to working with Connie as she brings her deep insight and thoughtful approach to this new position as we commit to advancing the school’s goals of diversity, equity and inclusion with students, staff, faculty, alumni and beyond.”

Porter joined Rice in 2011 and has taught core marketing, marketing research and customer relationship management courses. Her research focuses on the value of fostering customer relationships in technology-enabled marketing environments, and she has published articles in premier academic journals in this area. For several years, she taught both MBAs and undergraduates at University of Notre Dame. She earned a B.S. in economics from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania with dual concentrations in finance and public policy; an MBA from University of Michigan with dual emphases in operations and corporate strategy; and a Ph.D. from Georgia State University in marketing.

Prior to pursuing a career in academia, Porter spent several years as a management consultant with firms including Gemini Consulting (now CapGemini), Cambridge Management Consulting (now part of Atos) and Xerox. She also worked as an internal consultant with Georgia Pacific and as a commercial banker at National Westminster Bank USA (now part of Bank of America). She will reduce her teaching commitments to accommodate the new role but will continue to benefit the school and Rice Business students in the classroom.

The expanded Office of Belonging and Engagement will further open the important conversation on racial equity and social justice to the community to generate broader engagement. Rice President David Leebron has also outlined the university’s commitment to racial equity and social justice for the good of the institution and betterment of the nation. From advanced training for staff, students and faculty — beginning this spring — to faculty hiring, curriculum, student recruitment and newly defined positions, the university is focused on growth and change.

In early March, Aaron Knape ’08 was at a meeting in River Oaks discussing his tech startup sEATz — what he describes as “the Uber Eats for stadiums,” which lets fans order food from an app and have it delivered to them in their seat.

He was joined by executives from the venture capital firm Valedor Partners and his co-founders, including Craig Ceccanti ’08, to hash out the details of sEATz’s upcoming $3 million Series A capital raise. The company they had founded in 2018 was poised for rapid growth.

sEATz already counted the Rice Owls football team and the Houston Texans as clients. Because of Knape’s platform, their fans were no longer missing precious game minutes while waiting in long concession lines. The company had developed a close relationship with the food services company Aramark, and it had recently added the Houston Rodeo to its client roster. Knape was hiring additional team members and fine-tuning his platform to help stadium concessionaries more efficiently serve their customers.
 

“We were in the starting blocks, ready to grow and scale in 2020,” he says. “It was supposed to be our breakout year.”

Midway through the meeting, however, the news broke that the Houston Rodeo had been cancelled because of COVID-19. “The air left the room,” Knape says. It meant that sEATz had just lost one of its biggest accounts.

Later that day, the NBA suspended its season. The next day, the MLB cancelled spring training games and pushed back the start of the regular season. “That week was the roughest week we’ve had as a company,” Knape recalls. Somehow, he didn’t panic. “I said, let’s just see how this plays out.”

A few months later, sEATz raised nearly $2 million in capital — on top of a $1.425 million seed raise in 2019 — and landed an MLB team as a client.

Business owners and entrepreneurs around the world were forced to tweak their business models to stay afloat during the COVID-19 pandemic. Like Knape, those who proved adept in the art of improvising on the fly — who successfully executed a pandemic pivot — managed to not only maintain but expand their business during a difficult year, even while others succumbed to the economic upheaval.

“Plenty of businesses just hunkered down, and they missed opportunities,” says Lorie Clements ’11, principal of Springboard Solutions, which coaches business owners and their leadership teams — about 20 percent of whom are Rice alumni. “The ones that persevered realized that obstacles can make us stronger, and they said, ‘Let’s grab this moment.’ ”

It’s a lesson that applies to entrepreneurs even under ideal circumstances, says Yael Hochberg, the Ralph S. O’Connor Professor of Entrepreneurship at Rice Business and head of the Rice Entrepreneurship Initiative.

“That’s true in normal times, and not just in times of crisis,” she says. “The world isn’t static. As new products and services enter the market, as people’s preferences shift, entrepreneurs have to shift with them. A product or service that is relevant in one year may not be next year.”

Startup ventures, in particular, need to maintain flexibility to adapt, Hochberg says: Getting locked into a particular vision of a concept, or how you wanted something to work, isn’t going to get you far if your customers need something else.

New Features

As the pandemic unfolded, Knape realized that his business model, designed to cut down on lines and crowds at large events, was perfectly suited to the physical distancing measures health organizations were starting to recommend. And he knew that, eventually, sports teams would return to arenas — and so would fans.
 

“We saw that we’d been handed an opportunity to help venues plan their eventual return to live events,” he says.

So instead of pulling back, the company added features to its app, including express pick-up and web-enabled ordering. “A lot of our competitors put their business in idle cash conservation mode. But we didn’t take our foot off the pedal. We said now is the time to grow.”

In May, sEATz attempted a cash raise of $1 million to get it through the end of 2021. It was oversubscribed, and sEATz ended up raising $1.7 million, which allowed it to hire new staff, including a new chief technology officer.

Now back on the field, the Houston Texans are using sEATz, and the company has integrated its app into MLB Ballpark, major league baseball’s app. In December, the company won a contract with the New York Mets, its first East Coast client, for 2021.

It was that same growth mindset that helped Don Porr ’97, the owner of Diamond Fiberglass, an industrial fiberglass tank and vessel manufacturer, decide to add new products during the pandemic.

Porr went through a major setback in 2017 when a devastating fire shuttered his business. But by the second half of 2019, business was back and humming along. That’s when Porr linked up with Lorie Clements at Springboard Solutions. Together, they mapped out an ambitious growth strategy that included expanding his product portfolio to include the service of building large, on-site diameter tanks for clients.

When the pandemic hit, Porr thought about pumping the brakes, but ultimately decided to keep his momentum going. “We said we needed to forge ahead with all our plans,” Porr says, “and we did.”

The company’s manufacturing arm turned a prototype into a fully produced tank and invested $200,000 in upgrading the equipment needed to build the tanks. Sales held steady and revenues dropped by only 10%. The company’s industrial services arm, which requires workers to go on site, was harder hit, with revenues down some 40%. But no staff were laid off after careful expense cutting.

A Lift from Lilie

For both Knape and Porr, help from Rice Business was integral to both surviving and thriving. They benefitted from weekly Zoom meetings organized by the Liu Idea Lab for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (Lilie), where business owners and entrepreneurs convened to discuss cash conservation, PPP loans and strategies for keeping their businesses open. “We were really working together and supporting each other,” Porr says. Lilie also ran webinars on topics like mental health to help alumni adapt to change.

In March, Lilie moved quickly to help alumni startups secure grants and loans to stay afloat while they worked on their pivots, says Kyle Judah, Lilie’s executive director. sEATz ultimately received a PPP loan, and Knape credits Lilie with facilitating the application process. “The Rice network has done such great things for me,” he says.

For Darrell Morris ’18, the insights he gained from his finance classes at Rice Business helped him keep the burners lit at his cooking school, Well Done Cooking.

Morris and his wife bought the Houston-based business in 2018 and planned to grow the school from one location to 10 over five years.  COVID-19 forced them to halt their in-person culinary classes, and at first the setback felt paralyzing.

Then, “after three days, we picked our jaws up off the floor and put pen to pad and took massive action steps,” says Morris. “We said, we need to play offense on this and innovate and adapt to this new normal.”

They quickly shifted classes online, and to differentiate the company in the crowded space of online courses, decided to deliver cooking kits to customers to better simulate in-person classes. That decision didn’t come without its growing pains, however. Early on in the pandemic, when they shipped dozens of ingredient kits across Texas and Massachusetts for a corporate cooking class, the ice packs melted in transit and the meat arrived warm.

“We took a hit on that,” Morris says, “but luckily the client was gracious enough to give us another chance, and we learned how to pack things correctly.” What’s more, the consulting firm client provided a three-page document filled with feedback that Morris and his wife were able to incorporate into their processes.

In May, the cooking school opened to 50% capacity, and in December, it saw a significant rush, with high demand for holiday baking classes. Morris hired new staff and the company broke even. He’s planning to pick up with the company’s expansion in 2021.

Ingredients for Success

Businesses that excelled during the pandemic have a few factors in common, according to Clements.

Companies that did well were able to move quickly from a fear-based mindset to one of growth and action. They crafted a new vision, made plans, tested solutions and experimented. And they didn’t shy away from communicating with employees.

“This has really been a test of how resilient businesses and their culture were, and how aligned the leadership team was,” she says. “I was seeing a lot of true colors come out.”

Successful companies pursued “nice-to-have” projects, like creating unique onboarding and training videos and redesigning processes to be more efficient. They also hired new talent while competitors laid off staff. “They asked themselves, how can we do more for clients when everyone else is doing less? They took a leap of faith,” Clements says.

That was especially true for Emily Baker ’16, the director of finance and operations at the Houston Botanic Garden. COVID-19 could have foiled the garden’s plan to open its doors to the public in the fall of 2020. But Baker, who joined the nonprofit at the beginning of 2020, made sure planning and construction stayed on track in the spring and into summer so the 132-acre park could open in mid-September.

“We decided to open, and open on time, because the garden is mostly outside, and people were craving places to go outdoors,” she says.

Baker and her colleagues had to make do with an operating budget cut from $2.7 million to $1.9 million and work around construction delays. The team made peace with the fact that the in-person educational programming they had long planned for would largely have to be postponed. An in-person lecture series planned for the opening was delivered to visitors instead through videos on the garden’s website.

Yet the park was able to expand its staff, adding 15 employees since July. Baker says the pre-pandemic installation of new HR software and other automation for the garden’s finance and communications functions made interviewing, hiring and switching to remote work for some employees much easier.

The park exceeded its first-quarter operating goals for admissions and memberships, with earned revenue of $390,000 in the last quarter of 2020. It now has over 2,000 members, half of whom joined after visiting.

“We take that as a huge stamp of approval,” Baker says. “The garden has proved to be a place where people want to be.”

Successes like the Houston Botanic Garden’s may be a rarity during the pandemic, but that doesn’t mean it’s too late for other companies and nonprofits to pivot. There’s really no wrong time to reinvent yourself, says Clements. She suggests looking at how the landscape has changed and creating a new business plan.

“My advice is to think big,” she says. “Set a long-term target. Plan where you want to be in three years and work backwards from there. And don’t let the uncertainty of today’s times put your plans on hold.”

Deborah Lynn Blumberg is a Houston-based freelance writer specializing in health and wellness and business and finance.