Horror. Disbelief. Anger.

Those were just a few of the emotions that rippled through the Rice Business community in response to the May killing of George Floyd, a 46-year-old unarmed Black man, at the hands of white police officers in Minneapolis — an event that led to mass protests across the country. Amongst people of color, there was also the bone-deep weariness that comes from yet another stark reminder of the injustice that pervades American society.

“It’s been one of the most exhausting, emotionally draining times in my life,” says Valerie Valentine ’21. 

Valentine, who is president of the Black Business Student Association, lost her father in the fall. She has not set foot in McNair Hall since spring break, when the school moved to remote learning in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. And she admits that having to process what Floyd’s death means for her as a Black woman — figuring out how to respond and where to focus her energies — while simultaneously navigating the challenges of life during a global pandemic has at times been overwhelming.

But if there is fatigue, there is also hope. Hope that administrators and faculty, students and alumni can seize this moment to achieve real and lasting change on campus and beyond.
 

It’s heartbreaking, but what I feel right now is momentum. We need to move now.

 

Nalani Ortiz ’21

Shortly after Floyd’s death, Dean Peter Rodriguez established the Rice Business Task Force on Racial Equity and Social Justice. Meanwhile, the Jones Student Association launched a GoFundMe campaign that has so far raised more than $12,000 for Houston-area nonprofits such as Black Lives Matter Houston and the Black Trans Advocacy Coalition.

In ways both large and small, the entire community redoubled its efforts to confront and repair the injustice and inequality that have dogged this country for far too long.

“It’s heartbreaking,” Nalani Ortiz ’21, says of the recent killings, which include not only the death of George Floyd but also those of Ahmaud Arbery in February and Breonna Taylor in March. “But what I feel right now is momentum. We need to move now.”

Doing More

By many measures, Rice Business has been moving on issues of racial equity and social justice for some time.

When he arrived on campus in 2016, Rice Business Dean Peter Rodriguez supported and expanded the position of Director of Diversity and Inclusion. He also successfully petitioned to have Rice Business join the Consortium for Graduate Study in Management, an alliance of top-tier business schools and corporate partners dedicated to increasing minority representation in business education and corporate leadership. Member schools must demonstrate a significant commitment to diversity and inclusion, not least through scholarships to students who do the same. 

“It’s been a game-changer in terms of attracting students,” says Lina Bell, who has been Director of Diversity and Inclusion since 2017. 

Valentine and Ortiz are both Consortium Fellows; Ortiz serves as the Rice Business chapter president. Michael Arnold ’21, the diversity and inclusion chair for the Jones Student Association, is also a Consortium Fellow. And all three are members of the Task Force on Racial Equity and Social Justice, where Valentine serves as student co-chair.

The school partners with various organizations that work to increase the number of women and underrepresented minority MBAs. It actively recruits from as broad a range of communities as possible. And administrators, staff and students organize events that bring together alumni, Houston-area business leaders, and groups such as Out & Allied, the school’s LGBTQ organization, and the Forté Foundation, which aims to give women greater access to business education and professional development. 

Those efforts have helped make Rice Business one of the most diverse business schools in the United States. According to Bell, the number of underrepresented minorities on campus increased from 10 percent to nearly 20 percent between 2017 and 2019. That same year, Poets & Quants magazine recognized Rice Business as having the highest proportion of minority MBA students of any top-25 business school in the country.

In the wake of George Floyd’s death and the ensuing protests, Bell quickly organized a series of workshops for staff on topics such as bias and systemic racism. Rodriguez created the task force, which is charged with recommending specific actions to promote racial equity and social justice. Yet everyone agrees that much work remains to be done.

Minority students, for instance, cannot help but notice that neither the faculty nor the curriculum reflect the diversity of the student body.

“I don’t think students see themselves in the faculty. I know I don’t,” says Arnold, who can trace his family roots to Nicaragua, Cuba and Puerto Rico.

What’s more, they lament the limited number of business cases that feature women and underrepresented minorities as protagonists. 

“We read hundreds of cases in our first year, and none of them reflect our experiences,” Valentine says.

And while bias and inequity are sometimes discussed in the classroom in abstract terms, more difficult conversations about racial equity and social justice are few and far between.

“I can’t think of a single class where I’ve had a facilitated dialogue around race, equity, privilege and inclusion,” says Ortiz, who like Valentine identifies as a Black woman. “I really want to know where my classmates stand on these issues. But if we never get to voice our concerns or thoughts with each other, then what we are left with is assumptions. And assumptions can be so damaging.”

Rodriguez agrees. “We haven’t done enough to increase the diversity of the faculty and of the groups of people who work in the building. And we haven’t done enough to infuse the curriculum with thoughtful training on what race, ethnicity, sexuality, and everything else that creates differences amongst people tends to do to the way they think of each other and how they behave in groups and in society,” he says, adding that doing so is critical to the school’s mission of producing ethical leaders who can build efficient organizations. 

Diversifying the Faculty

Making progress on these fronts will require an innovative mindset and a willingness to play both a short game and a long one. Fortunately, those are the specialties of the house.

The relative lack of faculty diversity, for instance, is a reflection of a larger problem that afflicts all top-tier business schools, and addressing it in a comprehensive way — i.e., increasing the number of underrepresented minority PhD candidates and ensuring that they have a level playing field in terms of career advancement — will take time. 

The school already participates in the PhD Project, an initiative that helps Black, Latinx, and Native American students earn doctorates in business. But as Rodriguez points out, the current gap in faculty representation is so large that the PhD Project could triple its numbers and still not fill it. 

“There’s no short-run solution to that part of the problem,” he says.

There are, however, a number of things that Rice Business can do to improve the situation in the short term while addressing the larger problem over the long haul.

For instance, the school can expand its own PhD programs and work harder to identify talent at state schools and historically Black colleges and universities. It can reconsider the merits on which promotion and tenure are decided, looking beyond the handful of journals that currently serve as the arbiters of quality scholarship. It can invite experts who are not traditional academics to do more classroom teaching. And it may even be able to make explicit calls to hire underrepresented minorities for specific positions — though that last piece, Rodriguez admits, may present legal issues.

If the specific details still need to be ironed out, the path forward is clear.

“We have to look outside the traditional pipeline to do better sooner,” Rodriguez says. “And we have to commit to being part of the long-term solution.”

Changing the Conversation

The same basic principle applies to curricular reform. On one hand, Rice Business can encourage faculty to engage more directly in conversations around equity, bias and social justice — a task for which Ortiz, herself a former teacher, argues they are uniquely well-suited. 

“Educators are taught to be facilitators of dialogue,” she says. “By avoiding those conversations, we’re really not leveraging what our faculty are capable of.”

At the same time, says Rodriguez, Rice Business can devote more resources to attracting scholars whose own research addresses questions of equity and social justice; creating symposia and other platforms for discussing race and bias; and supporting students who have their own ideas for raising those issues on campus.

It can also do more to redress the lack of business cases that feature women and people of color. Faculty members could choose cases with a more diverse cast of characters, Rodriguez says. In addition, they could augment the formal cases they use with examples of their own choosing that feature historically underrepresented groups. 

Not doing these things, he contends, adversely affects the underrepresented students in the room “by putting them at a greater distance from the protagonists in their choices — or by suggesting that they could not be leaders.”

A Force for Change

All of these changes fall within the purview of the task force, whose creation in early June was initially met with a certain amount of skepticism by students. At the time, some worried that it would move too slowly — or worse, that it was meant to quell their concerns without taking meaningful action.

“A lot of us were like, ‘Why do we have to wait for a task force?’” recalls Arnold.

Those fears were laid to rest by the composition of the group, which includes a diverse mix of students, alumni, faculty and staff, and by its timeline: While he has made clear that anyone can present him with a request at any time, Rodriguez has asked the task force to present its preliminary recommendations to him no later than October 2 and its final recommendations no later than December 18. 

“I do feel as if the school is listening,” says Ortiz.

Yet the task force is only one vehicle for change. Bell, for example, would like to find ways of increasing collaboration with other units within the university that do work related to diversity and inclusion, such as the Baker Institute for Public Policy and the Center for African and African American Studies. Student members of the task force have already reached out to deans and faculty members to explore their own ideas for addressing themes of bias and representation, equity and injustice. And Arnold has been mulling future JSA initiatives.

It’s too early to tell exactly what will come of all this activity. But one thing is certain: The results will reverberate well beyond McNair Hall.

“What we instill in our student body will ultimately radiate into all of the different businesses that students will have their hands in,” says Ortiz. “If they learn to release their assumptions and judgments about people, they’ll know how to check their biases, or at least be aware of them.”

That applies not only to race, says Rodriguez, but to gender, sexuality, and all the other elements of the human experience that make for diverse and inclusive organizations.

“We all know that the greatest impact that we have on society tends to be through the decisions that our students make, how they see the world and how they choose to lead,” he says. “We’re just one school. I know we can’t do it all. But the right people can make a big difference.”

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

September in Houston has always been a time to catch up on campus and settle into the school year. This fall is different. We’re all wearing masks, staying at a safe distance from each other in and outside the classroom, and many of us are streaming in from our homes. However we describe it, the bottom line is that we have reinvented what school looks like. Our adaptation for safety is working very well and we hope it will put us on a quicker path to a return to the closeness we all cherish and enjoy. 

In preparation for reopening, we have asked a lot of our faculty, staff and students. And still, so much is new and foreign. Except the things that connect us. Conversations. Eye contact. Laughter. Listening and learning.

At the same time we’re managing the challenges of the pandemic, we have also rededicated ourselves to rising to the urgent call to put an end to racial injustice and social inequities. Our Task Force on Racial Equity and Social Justice has been charged with researching, evaluating and recommending actions to make Rice Business a part of the solution to systemic racism. We have a lot of work ahead of us and an exceptional group leading our efforts.

You’ll have a chance to read up on the activities of the task force and some of its members in this issue of the magazine. Please join me in thanking and supporting this superb group of friends and colleagues as they pursue this critical work. Know that we are committed to being a part of the long-term solution on campus and in the world.

The magazine is filled with other good reads — a rundown on the first month of classes, what a virtual Global Field Experience feels like, and 20 years of entrepreneurial adventures. While this issue of the magazine will again be online — on our newly redesigned, elegant and inviting website — we hope to bring you real live pages to turn come the spring. 

Happy fall,
Peter

By Toddre' Monier

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.

Toddre' 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. 

Based on research by Ajay Kalra, Xiao Liu and Wei Zhang

• When picking a retirement fund, investors gravitate toward funds ending in the number zero over those ending in the number five.
• Because of this tendency, some investors expose themselves to financial risk and loss of wealth.
• One-on-one financial planning meetings can soften this “zero bias.”

When the Dow Jones Industrial Average hit 18,000 a few years back, the nicely rounded number dominated the news. When teens take the SAT, those who just miss scoring a round number are more likely to seek a do-over. And, research shows, major league baseball players are four times more likely to end their seasons with a .300 batting average than a .299. 

There’s something irresistible about figures ending in zero. But does that extend to our decision-making? Does our instinctive love for round numbers affect our financial plans?

The answer is yes, says Rice Business professor Ajay Kalra. Along with Xiao Liu of NYU Stern and Wei Zhang of Iowa State University, Kalra looked at data from thousands of investors in Target Retirement Funds (TRFs), which generally assume retirement at age 65 and ask employees to pick a fund with a year ending either in zero or five (e.g., 2040, 2045) that is nearest to their planned retirement date. 

Investors whose birth year doesn’t already end in zero or five must round up or round down to choose their TRF.

The zeros clearly win investors’ hearts. Succumbing to what the researchers call “zero bias,” investors consistently choose to sink their retirement dollars into funds that end in zero, not five. For many of the investors Kalra and his team looked at, especially older people, men and those with higher incomes, this meant choosing a retirement age of 60 or 70 rather than the standard 65. 

The choice was often costly. Many investors who rounded up or down to find a fund year ending in zero exposed themselves to real financial risk.

That’s because TRFs are graded portfolios — meaning they start out stock-heavy, move to a mix of stocks and bonds and finally emphasize bonds. Investors who rounded down for a too-young retirement target gave themselves less time to benefit from a stock-dominant portfolio. Investors who rounded up for a too-old retirement target ending in zero contributed less money to their retirement because they assumed they had more time to invest. Investors who rounded down did worse than those who rounded up.  

Who is most susceptible to losing hard-earned retirement dollars this way? The researchers looked at people born from the 1950s through the 1980s. Of these investors, those born in years ending between three and seven selected the appropriate fund. The zero bias was prevalent in those born in years ending in eight or nine, who tended to project their retirement age as 60, and those born in years that ended in zero, one or two, who favored retiring at 70. 

Overall, the researchers discovered, 34 percent of people born in years ending in eight or nine picked retirement funds that targeted too-early retirement — and ended up financially worse off. Meanwhile, 29 percent of investors born in years ending in the numbers zero, one or two picked later TRFs. With the exception of those who were risk averse, these investors ended up better off than those who chose too-early TRFs. Overall, however, investors who picked funds with mismatched retirement dates (that is, inconsistent with retirement at 65), saw more losses than gains.

The infatuation with zero held up even when the researchers replicated their study in an experimental setting. So they tried something different: They presented participants with math problems to coax a “calculative mindset.” It worked. Rather than gravitating to zeros, these investors chose retirement funds that matched their ages. Straight talk in the form of a 30-minute one-on-one financial planning session helped too. At least some investors who got this counseling made better choices. 

Rounding up or down to zero can be a nice mental shortcut when stakes are low and time is short. There are good reasons, for example, to go for the zero in calculating sales tax when you’re buying a book, or tallying how many party guests want cake. 

But when it comes to life savings, instinct-based math can be trouble. Financial firms should be aware of this and discourage preference for the shiny number zero. Advisors should nudge clients toward funds that will truly enhance earnings. Most important, however, investors themselves need to keep their heads, think of the future and resist the allure of round numbers.

Ajay Kalra is a professor of marketing at Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University.

To learn more, please see: Kalra, A., Liu, X. & Zhang, W. (2020). The zero bias in target retirement fund choice. Journal of Consumer Research (forthcoming).  

If you’re looking for an unconventional approach to doing business, select a CEO with an uncommon name, according to new research co-authored by an expert at Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business.

“Using 19 years of data on 1,172 public firms, we show that firms’ distinctive strategies are systematically linked to their CEOs’ uncommon names,” wrote co-authors Yan Anthea Zhang, the Fayez Sarofim Vanguard Professor of Strategy at the Jones School, and Yungu Kang and David H. Zhu of Arizona State University’s W.P. Carey School of Business.

Past studies have examined how organizational outcomes are associated with leadership personalities, values, experiences and demographic characteristics, but not CEO’s names — “one of the most fundamental attributes,” the authors argue. A person’s name influences their behavior, cognition and sense of self, according to the paper.

Studies suggest that individuals with uncommon names tend to have a self-conception of being different from their peers.

“Although many people may not have the confidence to exhibit how unique they believe themselves to be, CEOs do — they are generally confident individuals,” they wrote.

CEOs who have uncommon names are motivated to differentiate themselves from other CEOs, they argue, which influences strategic distinctiveness, or the degree that a business’ strategy differs from industry peers.

“This is consistent with findings from psychological research that successful professionals who have uncommon names tend to view themselves as more special, unique, interesting and creative,” they wrote.

Developing and implementing unique business strategies is “critical for firms to obtain competitive advantage and achieve superior performance,” according to the authors. They argue that CEOs with uncommon names tend to adopt strategies that deviate from the industry norm, leading to distinctive strategies.

“Our findings can help all stakeholders to better understand and predict a CEO’s strategic decisions, they wrote. “Because CEOs with uncommon names tend to pursue distinctive strategies, boards that seek to enhance the distinctiveness of their firms’ strategies may want to hire CEOs with uncommon names.”

“Other top executives, middle-level managers and employees can also expect a higher likelihood of implementing distinctive strategies when their CEOs have more uncommon names,” the authors continued. “Competitors can expect a firm to engage in unusual competitive moves when the CEO has an uncommon name.”