How we’ve adapted to the new normal during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Jennifer Latson
How we’ve adapted to the new normal during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Over the past few months, as the scope and impact of COVID-19 have become alarmingly apparent, we’ve seen the world transform. At home and abroad, we’ve witnessed courage and compassion, innovation and improvisation, stumbles and successes. Nowhere in the world is it business as usual.
Here at Rice Business, it’s business unusual. The business of everyday life continues — just in very different forms than we’re used to. Classes go on, research continues, and admission information sessions are still happening, but in ways we’d never have expected three months ago.
The safety of every member of the Rice Business community — students, staff, faculty, alumni and applicants — is our top concern. And we’ve had to innovate faster than ever before to accommodate the needs of everyone in our community who’s been impacted by the pandemic. Which is to say: everyone.
That started with taking classes online on March 16, a week before the rest of Rice University. It continued when the Faculty Senate unanimously agreed to allow all graduate students to choose pass/fail grades instead of letter grades for up to two courses this semester. It extends to prospective students as well: MBA applicants who are unable to take the GMAT or GRE because testing sits are closed are temporarily allowed to provide ACT or SAT scores instead. And the first ever virtual admit day for full-time MBA students kicked off with an online partio at the beginning of April, when newly admitted students were split into groups for trivia and getting to know each other.
In the midst of all this change, we’ve also launched a new program: MBA Early Admit, which allows promising undergraduates to apply to the Rice Business Full-Time MBA during their final year of college and reserve their spot two to five years after graduation. Students are encouraged to explore all sorts of career options, from traditional companies to startups, to help develop their professional and leadership skills during the required pre-MBA work. The deferred-enrollment program is available to Class of 2020 graduating seniors from Rice as well as other universities and has a June 30, 2020 application deadline.
Alumni have convened virtually for coffee hours and networking events in recent weeks, as well as for a webinar on angel investing in uncertain times. And, of course, we’ve taken this issue of Rice Business magazine online for the first time.
Faculty and staff, meanwhile, are keeping connected via Slack and on Zoom, including in the “Brady Bunch”-style town hall meeting pictured here. We are all getting used to seeing each other remotely instead of in person — and discovering that we can still find connection from afar. Videoconferencing brings us into each other’s homes, offering glimpses of personal lives that we don’t always get to see. We’re getting to know each other’s new coworkers and classmates — particularly the furry ones with no respect for personal space.
We’re also seeing members of the Rice Business community rise to the challenges this pandemic has posed. When MBA student William Jon Weintraub, who is deaf, realized that he wouldn’t be able to get the information he needed from online lectures, SPO director Adam J. Herman worked with him to make remote classes more accessible. Rice Business hired a closed captioning provider who does real-time transcriptions during Weintraub’s online courses and in breakout sessions on Zoom.
To help us maintain our inner balance, Emily Reichenbach, a senior client manager in Executive Education, volunteered to teach an all-levels yoga class every Monday morning on Zoom. Apart from being an accomplished yogi, Reichenbach is also a former Houston Rockets Power Dancer who spent six years coaching the Rice Dance Team.
Even while socially distant, members of the Rice Business community continue to find ways to make an impact in Houston and beyond. Take Coco Ma and Kathleen Harcourt, two MBA students who created the nonprofit #SnacksForMedStaff to deliver free meals to medical staff treating COVID-19 patients. The nonprofit has raised more than $14,000 already and delivered meals to Houston Methodist, Ben Taub, Memorial Hermann and other local hospitals, as well as to healthcare facilities in New York, Michigan and California.
These uncertain times may obscure the positive and inspiring actions all around us and within our community, but I've seen many of them recently.
“Speaking with dozens of newly admitted students this week assures me that our future is bright and that the ways we demonstrate our community's care, compassion and resiliency are noticed by everyone we touch. And, this unprecedented event is already producing innovations and improvements in all we do. Despite its challenges, this is also an exciting time to work in academia.”
We’re looking forward to the future and closely tracking the latest public health guidance to plan our next steps. We anticipate that students will be able to begin their fall semester studies on time and on campus as long as the city and Rice University President Leebron approve reopening. But the health and safety of our community remains paramount. We are prepared to make any necessary adjustments to minimize risk, which may include social distancing requirements and remote learning options.
“We are doing what almost every other organization is doing right now: Working to do the regular work necessary to deliver on our mission while doing the extraordinary work necessary to deliver on our mission in these extraordinary times,” says Senior Associate Dean of Degree Programs Barbara Ostdiek. “The resilience, the positive approach, and the tremendous effort of our faculty, staff and students are what make this possible.”
The restaurant business is notoriously tough. Here’s how Rice Business alumni restaurateurs are innovating — in the age of the coronavirus, and for the future.
Based on research by Wagner Kamakura and Danny P. Claro
How To Turn Top Employees Into Coaches
In retail, having a sales force that uses best practices can be the difference between survival or failure.
Researchers created a formula to assess which workers might have valuable hidden skills they can share with their coworkers.
By accounting for both known and unknowable factors, managers can identify salespeople with traits that work best in different types of sales.
When you’re a manager, decisions barrage you each day. What product works? Which store layout entices? How will you balance the budget? Many of these decisions ultimately hinge on one factor: the skills of your sales force.
Often, when managers evaluate their salespeople they contend with invisible factors that may not show up in commissions or name-tagged sales rosters — intangibles such as product placement, season or simply a store’s surrounding population. This makes it hard to fully evaluate a salesperson, or to spot which workers can teach valuable skills to their peers and improve the whole team.
But what if you could plug a few variables into a statistical model to spot your best sellers? You could then ask the star salespeople to teach coworkers some of their secrets. New research by Rice Business professor Wagner A. Kamakura and colleague Danny P. Claro of Brazil’s Insper Education and Research Institute offers a technique for doing this. Blending statistical methods that incorporate both known and unknown factors, Kamakura and Claro developed a practical tool that, for the first time, allows managers to identify staffers with key hidden skills.
To test their model, the researchers analyzed store data from 35 cosmetic and healthcare retail franchises in four South American markets. These particular stores were ideal to test the model because their salespeople were individually responsible for each transaction from the moment a customer entered a store to the time of purchase. The salespeople were also required to have detailed knowledge of products throughout each store.
Breaking down the product lines into 11 specific categories, and accounting for predictors such as commission, product display, time of year and market potential, Kamakura and Claro documented and compared each salesperson’s performance across products and over time.
They then organized members of the salesforce by strengths and weaknesses, spotlighting those workers who used best practices in a certain area and those who might benefit from that savvy. The resulting insight allowed managers to name team members as either growth advisors or learners. Thanks to the model’s detail, Kamakura and Claro note, managers can spot a salesperson who excels in one category but has room to learn, rather than seeing that worker averaged into a single, middle-of-the-pack ranking.
If a salesperson is, for example, a sales savant but lags in customer service, managers can use that insight to help the worker improve individually, while at the same time strategizing for the store’s overall success. Put into practice, the model also allows managers to identify team members who excel at selling one specific product category — and encourage them to share their secrets and methods with coworkers.
It might seem that teaching one employee to sell one more set of earbuds or one more lawn chair makes little difference. But applied consistently over time, such personalized product-specific improvement can change the face of a salesforce — and in the end, a whole business. A good manager uses all the tools available. Kamakura and Claro’s model makes it possible for every employee on a sales team to be a potential coach for the rest.
Wagner A. Kamakura was the Jesse H. Jones Professor of Marketing at Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University.
To learn more, please see: Claro, D. P. & Kamakura, W. A. (2017). Identifying sales performance gaps with internal benchmarking. Journal of Retailing,93(4), 401-419.
Peter Rodriguez is the dean of the Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University: “We know that some businesses really can't open at this capacity level and be profitable, so 25% isn't any better than being completely shut and it will stay that way." He says today's effort to restart our economy in southeast texas is a step forward. It's not a miracle drug.
“The big question is, in the absence of any government action, what will consumers do?” said Peter Rodriguez, an economist and dean of the Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University. “Many are going to hold back at least a few more weeks and wait for a real sign of safety.”
The program provides students with a pathway to pursue rigorous and interdisciplinary study in the field of innovation and entrepreneurship. It enables students to understand the theory and frameworks behind different disciplinary aspects of entrepreneurship and how to apply these theories to develop and scale innovative solutions to societal problems.
The program, administered by the university’s Liu Idea Lab for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (Lilie) and jointly offered through Rice’s Jones Graduate School of Business and Brown School of Engineering, provides students with a pathway to pursue rigorous and interdisciplinary study in the field of innovation and entrepreneurship. It enables students to understand the theory and frameworks behind different disciplinary aspects of entrepreneurship and how to apply these theories to develop and scale innovative solutions to societal problems.
“Entrepreneurship and the creation of new businesses and industries are critical to Houston and Texas’ future prosperity and quality of life,” said Yael Hochberg, the Ralph S. O’Connor Professor in Entrepreneurship and Professor of Finance at Rice Business, who leads Lilie. “Rice students continuously seek to lead change and build organizations that can have real impact on our world. In today’s new and uncertain world, the skills and frameworks taught in the new minor are particularly important.”
The minor’s curriculum helps students develop professional skills that are valuable beyond the confines of entrepreneurship, administrators said, such as the ability to identify critical problems or market opportunities and to develop validated solutions to meet these needs; design solutions that are sustainable, inclusive and equitable; embrace empathy to better understand customers, users, clients and team members; and excel in interdisciplinary teams and in communicating messaging across departments, organizations and industries.
Lilie, which was founded in 2015, is a cross-disciplinary initiative to provide students with skills and knowledge to succeed in a world where entrepreneurial capabilities are increasingly critical for meaningful and influential careers. Lilie’s inception expanded the entrepreneurial offerings at Rice Business, creating opportunities for both undergraduate and non-MBA graduate students. Lilie features a coworking space, graduate and undergraduate entrepreneurship courses, and a variety of cocurricular activities and resources dedicated to supporting Rice students in entrepreneurial endeavors.
In recent years, Lilie has added a large variety of programs to the entrepreneurial ecosystem at Rice. For example, the annual H. Albert Napier Rice Launch Challenge, established in 2018, allows students to vie for over $65,000 in cash prizes through a series of workshops and three rounds of competition. In addition to the new minor, Lilie also oversees the Rice Business entrepreneurship concentration, which was founded in 1978 by the school’s nationally recognized faculty led by Al Napier and the late Edward Williams. Over the past decade, Rice alumni have created more than 535 businesses and raised more than $7.1 billion in funding, according to the school’s surveys. More than 80% of those companies are still operating.
Rice’s current offerings are universitywide and encompass renowned student- and community-facing efforts. The university is currently working with Houston’s city government and major corporations and organizations, such as the Texas Medical Center and NASA, to define and develop the future of technology and industry innovation in the city. Rice is also developing the Midtown innovation district anchored by the Ion.
For more information, contact Jeff Falk, director of national media relations at Rice, at 713-348-6775 or jfalk@rice.edu.
Follow Rice News and Media Relations via Twitter @RiceUNews.
Celebrating its 25th year, the Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship hosted the celebrated Rice Business Plan Competition this month, doling out more than $2 million in investment and cash prizes to the top-performing teams.
Intero Biosystems — a life science company that has developed the first cell-derived human “mini gut” replicating cell types, spatial structure and function of the human intestine — took home the grand prize at the 2025 Rice Business Plan Competition.
Five student-founded startups have been named finalists for Rice University's prestigious pitch competition, hosted by Rice University’s Liu Idea Lab for Innovation and Entrepreneurship later this month. The teams will compete for a share of $100,000 in equity-free funding at the H. Albert Napier Rice Launch Challenge (NRLC).
How might oil and gas companies and workers navigate the latest crash in the industry’s constant boom and bust cycle? Hear from Bill Arnold, Professor in the Practice of Energy Management at the Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University.
Many consumers have been anxiously awaiting a return to normalcy, according to Connie Porter, marketing professor at Rice University. Porter said many people will probably want to support their favorite businesses, but it’s unclear just how many others will remain wary of going outside of their homes. “Without foot traffic, upon which smaller businesses truly depend on…even just to pick it up, those stores are going to suffer, even if they’re open, potentially."
How gaining power can undermine the ability to lead.
Based on research by Marlon Mooijman, Wilco W. van Dijk, Naomi Ellemers and Eric van Dijk
How Gaining Power Can Undermine The Ability To Lead
Controlling critical resources gives power.
As a person’s power grows, so does their distrust of others — and their use of punishment as a deterrence tool.
The level of an individual’s power affects punishment decisions, which can then compromise managerial effectiveness.
Parents, bosses, managers: Most have done the same thing — punish someone who breaks the rules. And the person with power usually determines the proper punishment. Evidence also shows that the more powerful a leader grows (think the head of a totalitarian government), the more partial they are to laws and rules.
This correlation between power and punishment led Rice Business professor Marlon Mooijman and colleagues Wilco W. van Dijk and Eric van Dijk of Leiden University and Naomi Ellemers of Utrecht University to wonder: What do leaders hope to achieve with their punishments? Specifically, the researchers wanted to know if an increase in individual power boosted the use of deterrence-style punishment. To find out, they created a model that was tested on nine types of power.
Power overall, the researchers note, is generated by control of critical resources. Usually, this control takes the form of monetary, physical or even social assets. Being in charge of these assets allows those with power (or resources) to impose punishment for infractions, anything from salary cuts to fines to prison sentences. The wielder of power may be a farmer with the right to shoot trespassers in his orchard, or a Saudi prince who can have a journalist murdered.
Like the nature of power itself, the punishments a person in power might brandish vary greatly. Even so, Mooijman and his colleagues write, a powerful person’s punishment strategy usually falls within one of two categories: deterrence or what they term “just-deserts.”
Deterrence punishments try to prevent potential rule breaking by making punishments public or mandatory. Examples include public announcement of mandatory minimum sentencing or a manager scolding an errant staffer in front of the whole office. Punishments can range from humiliation to tangible damages such as firing, community service or jail. Curiously, though, research on power and leadership shows that such common punitive steps aren’t always effective in preventing crime or transgression.
“Just-deserts” punishments take a different approach. This type of punishment simply responds to an offense once it’s committed. Just-deserts punishments don’t attempt to stop anyone else from committing the same offense; they simply castigate the offender for the broken rule. Research shows that most people prefer that offenders in their community receive this type of punishment.
To better understand the effects of the two types of punishment, Mooijman and his colleagues conducted nine experiments that drilled down on the connections between power, deterrence, punishment and distrust.
First, using a power scale from previous studies that assesses people’s feelings of power in everyday life, they surveyed participants from the U.S., the Netherlands and Western Europe to determine who felt they had more power, and who felt they had less. In the subsequent studies, these participants were exposed to various facets of power such as “a general sense of power” or structural manipulations of power. Participants then were asked to consider a range of manipulated scenarios from tax fraud to academic plagiarism to social dilemmas.
The researchers analyzed the results to correlate power and distrust, distrust and deterrence and power and deterrence. In one study where subjects considered a tax fraud scenario, for example, it was found that participants who felt a stronger sense of power were less trusting of taxpayers than were participants who felt a weaker sense of power.
By combining and analyzing the results of each study, Mooijman and his associates discovered that as an individual’s power increases, that person’s trust in other people declines. This new distrust then propels them to impose public or mandatory punishments meant as deterrents. Overall, the researchers found, there is a clear connection between holding a position of power and supporting deterrence punishments — even though such punishments have been proven to be less effective.
The findings have practical implications for managers, policymakers and other leaders. The main takeaway? Don’t let your success as a manager blind you to effectively managing your subordinates.
As Mooijman and his colleagues’ research shows, with each new step upward in personal power, the likelihood of losing effectiveness grows more acute. And the more closely personal power becomes enmeshed with harsh deterrence efforts, the more likely we are to sabotage our own goals.
So you might want to think twice before calling that low performer on the carpet at the staff meeting — or, for that matter, spanking your children at home.
Marlon Mooijman is assistant professor of management — organizational behavior at Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University.
To learn more, please see: Mooijman, M., van Dijk, W. W., Ellemers, N., & van Dijk, E. (2015). Why leaders punish: A power perspective. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 109(1), 75–89.
If you’re satisfied with your pile of tasks, check in periodically to be sure you are continuing to achieve your ideal work life. For any new tasks that come your way, explicitly decide whether they are worth doing before accepting them. —Scott Sonenshein
At Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business, some 80 percent of full-time MBA students receive a scholarship. The average amount is 60 percent of tuition, but a minority of candidates receive full fee coverage.