A Day in The Life of A Rice MBA: Launch

Follow Full-Time MBA student Sophie Randolph as she starts Rice Business with dual delivery sessions and travels to campus to meet fellow MBA first years face-to-face (with 6 foot distance). Physically distant, but socially together.

By Jennifer Latson

In one of the most stunning twists of the final season of Game of Thrones, teenage ninja zombie-killer Arya Stark achieved what no other warrior could: She took out the Night King. And as she ascended to her rightful place at the top of the Westeros hero hierarchy, the obvious question soon emerged.   

“Ah, but is Arya likable enough?” tweeted Vox.com co-founder Matthew Yglesias. 

It’s a question that seems to have plagued powerful women from the World of Ice and Fire to the 2020 election landscape. Whether or not you can get the job done is a secondary concern; people first want to know you’d be fun to grab a beer with. Responding to Yglesias’s tongue-in-cheek tweet, commenters joked that Arya should try smiling more. 

The phenomenon is no joke, though. Women in so-called masculine occupations (such as politician or assassin, along with pretty much anything in the STEM world) tend to be seen as either competent or likable, but rarely both, according to a 2004 study led by NYU organizational psychologist Madeline Heilman. When women succeed in these areas, they are more often disliked and denigrated — labeled cold, selfish, deceitful and devious, along with more colorful descriptors — than similarly successful men, Heilman found. And this isn’t just personally hurtful: Being perceived as unlikable can have career-altering consequences. 

Why are we fixated on the idea that our top bosses and officials needed to be likable? After all, it’s just one of many traits we value in a leader, while others, like competence and creativity, seem like they should rank higher. Interestingly, however, both of these traits tend to work against likability, according to research by Rice Business management professor Jing Zhou. 

In a 2017 study, Zhou and her colleagues found that an organization’s most competent workers tended to be disliked by their peers, who often actively sought to undermine them. “Their teammates were ambivalent toward high performers,” she explains. “We’re kind of torn between the tension of wanting our teammates to be competent when we’re working with them, but when we’re competing for a promotion, that becomes a liability.” 

The same goes for an organization’s most creative members, who tend to evoke dislike by challenging the status quo, Zhou says. “They’re asking questions and proposing new ways of doing something, and those tend to make people uncomfortable,” she explains. “Psychologists find that when we’re uncomfortable, we try to find a target to ascribe those feelings to. So it’s not ‘I’m uncomfortable thinking along these lines’— it’s ‘She makes me uncomfortable.’ ”

Clearly, it would be bad business to devalue your most competent and creative employees, whether or not you like them. But studies show that managers routinely do. 

Given how important likability is to clinching a candidacy or a promotion, many of us are eager to learn how to attain it. Luckily, Washington Post columnist Alexandra Petri recently outlined a few simple steps. 

“It must be clear that you can hang. You must be able to take jokes. Your laugh must be a good laugh, not a cackle or a guffaw or a hoot,” she writes. “You must be effortlessly natural but also meticulously and faultlessly prepared. You must be warm, but not too warm — like a cardigan, never a pantsuit. You must be well-informed, of course, but not tiresome. No haranguing! If possible, do not remind people of their mothers, or Hillary Clinton, whichever comes to mind first.” 

It's true that likability also plays a part in whether men are hired, promoted, or elected. But men can cackle or guffaw or hoot — or not smile very much at all — and still be liked. And their likability doesn’t decline as their careers advance. 

“Success and likability are positively correlated for men and negatively for women,” Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg writes in Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. “When a man is successful, he is liked by both men and women. When a woman is successful, people of both genders like her less.”

The inherent unfairness of likability is that it takes a subjective, external circumstance — whether or not you like someone — and ascribes it to that person as an objective, internal trait: whether they warrant liking. In the kinds of scenarios where likability is often a make-or-break factor, like hiring a manager or electing a president, the irony is that whether or not you like them has little bearing on how well they’d do the job. 

“What would it mean if we could reinvent what it is that makes a candidate ‘likable’?” Potter asks. “What if women no longer tried to fit a standard that was never meant for them and instead, we focused on redefining what likability might look like: not someone you want to get a beer with, but, say, someone you can trust to do the work?” 

Arya Stark proved that she could be trusted to get the job done — but if she’d spent more time smiling and less time sword fighting, who knows whether she could have ever pulled it off. For now, successful women still have to do both: Smile sweetly and carry a sharp sword. 

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

Owl Have You Know

SEASON 1, EPISODE 1

David Droogleever speaks with fellow Rice Business graduate Bethany Andell ’01, president of Savage Brands and current president of the Rice Business Alumni Board. Bethany spoke with David back during the summer of 2020 about her passion on helping the corporate world get back to a place where people trust, respect, and love business.

A special “thank you” to Rice Business alumna and former alumni board member Karen Crofton for her work on this podcast project. Without your enthusiasm and hard work, none of this would be possible.  

Subscribe to Owl Have You Know on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Youtube or wherever you find your favorite podcasts.

Can A Rice MBA Help You Navigate The COVID Era?

We recognize that strong job placement statistics and career outcomes are crucial factors in selecting the right MBA program. With an outstanding track record of job placement, our graduates are equipped to succeed, even in challenging environments.

Q and A with Jessica Campbell, Rice Business Director of Corporate and Employer Relations

Even in good times, top leaders are experts at managing change. Now, during the pandemic, nimbleness, quantitative strength and strategy skills may be more important than ever for landing a job. Rice Business has seen its highest enrollment ever this year, thanks in part to the changing career landscape. So, what should Rice MBA students know about the recruiting outlook? Jessica Campbell, director of corporate and employer relations at the Rice Business Career Development Office, offers valuable insights into the evolving job market and how the Rice MBA program adapts to meet its demands.

Industry Will Be Rebuilding

Q. What’s the first thing Rice MBA students should know about the recruiting environment?

A. The most important thing to know is that there are reasons for optimism. COVID-19’s impact on the economy is unique: the pandemic forced shutdowns to try to avoid an even worse catastrophe. Right now, COVID-19 is continuing to alter consumer behavior. Once the pandemic is under control, the economy should bounce back.

In fact, employers are expecting a rebound in MBA hiring in 2021, according to the annual GMAC survey. Before COVID-19, 92% of firms sampled said they planned to hire MBA graduates in 2020. That dropped to 77% during the pandemic. But when employers were asked about 2021, nearly 90% voiced plans to hire MBAs – close to pre-COVID levels.

Q: What are common questions from prospective students?

A: We’re getting lots of questions around GMAT scores, given the difficulties around testing. So we took that question to our employers and asked whether or not GMAT scores were necessary this year. Some maintained that GMAT scores are still absolutely necessary. Others said they will be one data point among many. Certainly, for some industries like consulting and investment banking, taking the GMAT and having a solid score makes it a much easier process.

The Internet Opens Doors

Q: What questions are you hearing from first year students?

A: We’re getting lots of questions around how many hires to expect from consulting firms. Most of these firms don’t know or aren’t yet sharing this information. We do know that consulting is always competitive, and we expect that will be especially true this year. So it’s important for students to have a range of options. It’s critical to start networking early and do your research in order to stand out.

Interestingly, students are also discovering advantages to the online job search. In a recent column, our first-year MBA student Katie Chung wrote, “The internet opens doors. You can start your day with a meeting in Europe and end your day with a session in Asia … going virtual has provided the opportunity to reconnect with alumni who can, in turn, help current students recruit.”

Employers Have Learned To Stay Engaged

Q: What’s changed about recruiters’ practices?

A: Employers have shifted to virtual recruiting for this year. Companies will return to campus physically as circumstances allow, but I anticipate that virtual recruiting will stick around. Employers have been increasing virtual recruiting efforts for years and COVID-19 accelerated this trend.

Employers also tell us they learned a lesson from 2008, when many companies disappeared from campus recruiting and then found real challenges as they returned to campus in subsequent years to recruit top talent. While a handful of employers won’t be recruiting at all this year, most of our corporate partners are staying engaged.

Meanwhile, we’ve modified all of our career education programming to reflect the virtual recruiting landscape. Students have always been able to record virtual mock interviews, but now they practice in the same format they’ll experience in their virtual interviews. And recruiting starts early! Even before the program starts, there are pre-MBA opportunities. So, although on-campus interviews for internships start in January, information sessions and coffee chats start the first week of school.

Q: What industries are most receptive to hiring right now?

A: The top four industries for our 2020 graduates were consulting (24.5%), financial services (22.3%), technology (20.2%) and petroleum/energy (12.8%). In fact, more of our MBAs accepted jobs in tech this year than in the preceding five years, and we anticipate that this could continue to grow. It’s a sector where we are focused on developing more relationships. We’re also reaching out to CPG companies, who are major recruiters for marketing MBAs. We’re ramping up outreach to these employers, some of whom who have not visited our campus. Virtual recruiting opens a really promising gateway to introduce these companies to our graduates.

Strategy, Communication, Versatility

Q: What skills do employers want?

A: What we hear from recruiters aligns with the GMAC Survey: Employers want strategic thinking, communication skills and versatility. Rice Business graduates are exceptionally well-trained in these areas. Their quantitative skills and the ability to make sense out of data are now reflected by the recent STEM designation of our entire program. Thanks to its size and culture, Rice Business is also outstanding at developing leaders. The diversity of both Rice Business and of Houston is another strength: our 35% minority student body made Rice Business the country’s No. 1 most diverse MBA program last year.

Alumni Offer Key Opportunities

Q: Are you changing your employer outreach strategies?

A: Absolutely. I think many of these changes will stick around beyond COVID-19.

Campus recruiting is 100% virtual this fall, and I expect it will remain so through the spring semester. Information sessions, coffee chats and interviews are all still happening, just in a virtual format. We’ve shifted our annual Diversity Networking Reception to a virtual networking event. And now that recruiting is virtual, we can engage with recruiters who don’t typically come to campus. Our information sessions are actually up from last fall. The recent addition of a third cohort, and our newly increased class size, may also attract more potential recruiters because of the larger candidate pool.

We also partner closely with External & Alumni Relations and Marketing and Communications on employer/alumni outreach. Our Rice Business alumni, in particular, are great advocates — a terrific resource for helping students get a foot in the door.

Explore Our Rice MBA Programs

Based on research by Brian R. Rountree, Shiva Sivaramakrishnan and Andrew B. Jackson

• Research shows that some corporate executives skew earnings to influence the market and inflate share price.
• The less in line a firm’s earnings are with its industry’s earnings, the more room a firm has to manipulate its earnings reports.
• A study of federal SEC enforcement actions reveals that firms with out-of-sync earnings are indeed more likely to misreport them. 

Say a company called CoolConsumerGoodsCo (CCGC) has just released its quarterly earnings report, revealing significantly higher profits than its consumer goods industry counterparts.

That result might spur analysts to slap a buy rating on the stock and investors to snap up shares. In an ideal world, the market wouldn’t have to consider the possibility that the numbers aren’t legit — but then again, it’s not an ideal world. (Enron, anyone?) 

Rice Business professors Brian R. Rountree and Shiva Sivaramakrishnan, along with Andrew B. Jackson at University of New South Wales in Australia, studied what makes business leaders more likely to engage in fraudulent earnings reporting. Specifically, they focused on the relationship between this kind of misrepresentation and the degree to which a company’s earnings are in line with the rest of its industry — a variable the researchers term “co-movements.” 

Many people are familiar with a similar variable, calculated using stock returns often referred to as a company’s beta.  The authors adapted the stock return beta to corporate earnings to see how a company’s earnings move with earnings at the industry level. 

The researchers hypothesized that the less in sync a company’s earnings are with its industry, the higher the chance a company’s leaders will manipulate earnings reports. They started with the well-accepted premise that corporations try to skew earnings reports to influence the market. The primary motive is typically to raise the company’s stock price, as when an executive tries to “choose a level of bias” that balances potential fallout of getting caught against the benefits of a higher stock price.
 
To test their prediction, the professors analyzed a sample of enforcement actions taken by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission against companies for problematic financial reporting from 1970 to 2011 — although they noted that given the SEC’s limited resources, the number of enforcement actions probably underestimates the actual amount of earnings manipulation in the market. 

Their analysis revealed that firms with low earnings co-movements (meaning their earnings were out of sync with industry peers) were more likely to be accused by the SEC of reporting misdeeds. They concluded that the degree of earnings co-movement determines the probability of earnings manipulation. Put another way, earnings co-movements are a “causal factor” in the chances of earnings manipulations — and to a significant degree. The researchers found that firms who don’t co-move with the market are more than 50 percent more likely to face an SEC enforcement action, compared with firms who are perfectly aligned with the market. 

The researchers drilled deeper into the data to study whether the odds changed depending on the industry, since past research has indicated that the amount of competition in an industry works to constrain misreporting. That premise seems to hold true, the researchers concluded. In industries with more competitive markets, the impact of low co-movement on earnings manipulation is moderated. 

They also studied whether the age of a firm played a part in the likelihood of earnings manipulation. Newer firms often rely more on stock compensation, which could be a motive for manipulating earnings reporting to drive up share price. Indeed, younger firms were more susceptible to misreporting when their earnings were out of whack with the rest of the marketplace. 

Every firm faces some risk of misreporting, however. Even for public companies under analyst scrutiny, low co-movement proved to be a driver of earnings manipulation. But companies known for conservative reporting tend to be less likely to exaggerate their earnings, in general; these firms typically recognize losses in a more timely manner, the professors found. 

These findings suggest a number of future lines of research. For example: When do executives underreport earnings? And can analyzing patterns related to cash flow reporting help better isolate earnings manipulation? 

In the meantime, if you come across a company like CoolConsumerGoodsCo with an earnings report that’s widely out of sync with the rest of its industry, you might think twice before rushing to buy in.
 

Brian R. Rountree is an associate professor of accounting at the Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University.

Shiva Sivaramakrishnan is the Henry Gardiner Symonds Professor of Accounting at Rice Business. 

To learn more, please see: Rountree, B., Sivaramakrishnan, S., & Jackson, A. (2017). Earnings Co-movements and Earnings Manipulation. Springer Science+Business Media, 22, (1340-1365).

From 2015 to 2017, I worked for a high-profile startup in Marina del Rey, Calif., that prided itself on its social justice credentials. During those two years, Freddie Gray was killed by police in Baltimore. Alton Sterling was killed in Baton Rouge. Texas jurors refused to indict jail staff for Sandra Bland’s death and a police officer shot Philando Castile seven times in Minneapolis. It seemed as if the news reported the killings of unarmed Black women and men daily. But in my workplace, there was silence.

Every morning, I dragged myself out of bed, stuffed down the sadness and wondered if another lynching would be broadcast that day. Once in the office, I felt asphyxiated by a cloud of grief. Sometimes I’d discreetly head to the bathroom, lock the stall and cry. I wish our company had even once talked directly about the events traumatizing Black employees like me — and offered guidance to our coworkers on how to be a good workmate and friend. What could the company and my coworkers have said? The more advice you read, the more confused you may end up. It’s not simple.

Four hundred years of PTSD will not be undone with benevolence. We cannot heal from trauma until it ceases. But there’s a lot you can do to intercept it on behalf of your Black coworkers. The first step is simplest: Take action. Learn, vote, consider affiliating with a social justice group that can guide you through the issues. But what about the second step — supporting the people you see daily? How can you be a good friend to workmates doing everything they can to manage their grief while getting their jobs done?

To be Black in America, it’s been said, is to be African without memory and American without privilege. In particular, in many workplaces, African Americans are in a constant state of liminality — permanently suspended betwixt two cultural worlds. Former Rice Business professor Otilia Obodaru described the discomfort of this state in a paper, “Between and Betwixt Identities: Liminal Experience In Contemporary Careers.” Guiding figures and mentors can alleviate this stress of this ambiguous state, she noted. So can ride-or-die work friends. Unlike other peers, work friends have power to address structural and personal racism at the same time.

Politeness As A Survival Skill

While it may not always be obvious, African Americans constantly bend over backward to tame our Blackness to appear more “professional.” The effort can make the most mundane workdays grueling. Take everyday speech: While most of Black professionals would never use African American Vernacular English at work, we hear our white colleagues drop Black colloquialisms and be deemed “cool.” Most of us have heard or suffered disparagement or worse about Black hair worn naturally. So we subject our hair to harmful straightening treatments, wigs and weaves. Black colleagues, too, know from experience that if two or more of them congregate at the water cooler, some white coworkers will become extremely uncomfortable. So we keep our distance, sometimes not even acknowledging one another.

This workplace loneliness is sharpened by a racialized form of politeness many of us learned explicitly at home as a survival skill. Today, it’s part of modern interracial friendships that might seem to be intimate and relaxed. As Maryland opera singer Zyda Culpepper put it in this gentle, anguished video: “For a long time, I have been conditioned to believe that it is important not to make white people uncomfortable. Especially those who were white liberals or white progressives. … And so for years I held my tongue if I experienced a microaggression.” Now, like many other Black people, Culpepper has resolved to speak up — even with good friends and our friendly colleagues. To be a true friend, take a deep breath — and listen.

But the truth is, there are no easy answers. Resources telling how to behave within a moment we’ve never experienced before are conflicting. Chad Sanders, for example, wrote in the New York Times that he doesn’t need non-Black friends to send “love” texts. He’d rather you fight anti-Blackness amongst yourselves. To avoid being drained of his time and energy, he avoids communicating with his well-meaning non-Black friends altogether.

My sister April sees it differently. She works in retail and is often the only Black person within her professional and social circles. Among friends, she says, her feelings are dismissed, making her liminality particularly acute. Her knee-jerk reaction is to act as if everything is fine. But what she wishes, she told me, is for coworkers to ask her how she is doing and if her family is OK. While this is the opposite of what Sanders’ New York Times piece advises, it resonates for me too.

One thing Sanders absolutely hit the mark on, however: Don’t make it about you. My friend works in the public transportation sector, where employees are not permitted to discuss current events at the office. But he does hang out with a couple of non-Black colleagues outside work and says he’s glad to talk about politics with them. “Just be respectful!” he advises. Most importantly, he says, listen carefully, and think first about what you say. Saying, “I wish my great-grandfather hadn’t owned slaves,” comes off more about your feelings than those of your listener.

Show Warmth – And Real Professional Support

Looking back on my experience in California, how would I have suggested my non-Black colleagues behave? In addition to kindness, would I have wanted them to broach the subject of police brutality at work? Honestly, no. To ask me about such a delicate subject would undo the glue of my mask and send its glitter scattering into shallow air.

Instead, I would have wanted them to show warmth and active professional support during the workday. While I don’t want to talk about the trauma of watching a murder in a staff meeting, I would’ve appreciated an after-work call or email, admitting ignorance about the perfect thing to say, and asking honest questions about how I’m doing.

Above all I would have wanted my company leadership to acknowledge the public tragedies wounding their own Black workers every day — and to foster a culture where friends knew how to support each other, or could learn how.

In most ways, being a good friend to your Black colleague during a time of trauma is no different than being a good friend, period. Even so, technology, scholarship and a changing national culture have shown many Americans not only the effects of structural racism — but of the racial aggressions that take place even between people who genuinely care about each other. From my own experience, as a high performer in a workplace where I was often weeping inside, I can tell you that if you work to be a reliable friend, and you listen actively even when you hear things that surprise you, your Black colleague will feel your genuineness. We are all learning what to say and how to behave in the new America attempting to rise from the ashes.

How To Be A Good Friend

So, how can you be a good friend to your Black colleague(s) during this unprecedented moment? As a Black woman who has worked in corporate and government spaces for over 20 years, from coast to coast, I offer these suggestions:

1. Share a kind word, genuine smile and greeting. Warmth goes a long way.
2. When you make a kitchen run for snacks and beverages, ask us if we’d like something too. Food and drink bond people and show love.
3. When you hear someone make an inappropriate or inaccurate statement about your Black coworker, speak up. It’s what any friend would do. But for a Black colleague the practical results can be momentous.
4. Invite us to lunch or share food from home.
5. Give us the inside scoop on what’s happening in the company especially when it has the potential to affect our careers.
6. Encourage us to apply for open positions we would be perfect for.
7. Embolden us to take advantage of company sponsored mental health benefits.
8. Pick up the slack when you see that we are overwhelmed with responsibility and/or grief.
9. Send funny memes for a good laugh.
10. Give us space when we need it.
11. Commit to becoming a lifelong learner about the pernicious effects and causes of racism.

Toddré Monier is a multi-hyphenate creative and freelance contributor to Rice Business Wisdom. You can discover more about her at https://beautyisuniversal.com/

A version of this article appeared in the Houston Chronicle. 

With Election Day just over a month away, Rice University’s School of Social Sciences and Department of Political Science are hosting a virtual discussion about the presidential, congressional, state and local contests.

Panelists for the Sept. 30 event include former Harris County Judge Ed Emmett ’71, a senior fellow at Rice’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research, fellow in energy and transportation at Rice’s Baker Institute for Public Policy and professor in the practice in Rice’s School of Social Sciences; former Houston Mayor Annise Parker ’78, who previously served as a professor in the practice at Rice’s School of Social Sciences and the Jones Graduate School of Business and was a fellow at the Doerr Institute for New Leaders; and Houston Chronicle reporter Lisa Gray ’88. They will examine the impending election and the far-reaching implications for Houston, Texas and the U.S. A Q&A session will follow the 7 p.m. discussion.

Amid the intensity of the presidential race, the 2020 general election will be the first in which Texans can’t vote a straight ticket.

“While the attention is focused on presidential and national politics, I am interested in the impact of not having straight-ticket voting on local races,” Emmett said.

“Voters will have to choose one office after another, all the way down the long list of positions — including judges — that Texas puts on the ballot,” Gray added. “I’d like to think that’ll lead to a burst of civic engagement, in which voters carefully evaluate the candidates in each race. But c’mon: Will most Texans really do that?

“It’ll be fascinating to see what happens on those down-ballot races,” she said. “Will people stop voting when they get to the races they don’t know about? Will they just pick the R’s or the D’s all the way down the line?  Will they vote for slates of candidates — Republican, Democrat and third-party — who advance whatever cause is dearest to their hearts? Or will we see an outbreak of voting based on which of the candidates’ names the voter likes best? I worry it’ll be that last option.”

The event will be moderated by Mark Jones, the Joseph D. Jamail Chair in Latin American Studies at Rice.

“We are pleased to be able to offer an opportunity for our community to learn more about what to expect from the 2020 elections and what this will mean for Houston and Texas in particular,” said Ashley Leeds, a professor of political science and the department chair. “We’re fortunate to have such distinguished alumni who are able and willing to provide their perspective.”

Register for the Webinar.