Based on research by Haiyang Li, R. Michael Holmes Jr., Michael A. Hitt, Kaitlyn DeGhetto and Trey Sutton

• Setting up foreign research and development centers can create lucrative new markets.
• But the risks are real: When establishing a new R&D center, location matters.
• Multinational corporations that set up shop overseas must be vigilant about their intellectual property.

Setting up a research and development center abroad can be a brilliant move. Thriving foreign R&D hubs can lead to growth, new technologies and hungry new markets. Foreign R&D also comes with plenty of risks: Choose the wrong spot and your multinational firm could spend more than it makes. How should corporations choose where to go?

In a paper, Rice Business professor Haiyang Li joined a team of colleagues to analyze the ups and downs of foreign R&D. While the study focused on China, they noted that their findings could apply to multinationals considering other locales.

To conduct the study, Li and his team studied data from 164 multinational corporations between 1998-2012. The researchers focused on publicly-traded U.S. corporations, because public companies offered more accessible data and because more U.S. corporations have R&D centers in China than do any other countries.

Because moving corporate R&D to other countries is an established trend, the data clearly showed its advantages. The main perk: a chance to tap into the new country’s resources, including its people, materials and culture. In China, the enormous population combined with an explosion in higher education has created especially fertile ground for R&D staffing — even though hundreds of multinationals have already moved in. Cisco Systems is one such business: Its R&D facility in Shanghai now employs 100 Chinese telecommunications engineers.

Access to material resources and an understanding of local culture both help immensely — first in the early R&D phase and then in development and marketing of new products. This strategy worked well for Caterpillar, which used its China-based R&D center to help establish a Chinese market for their heavy machinery. Establishing foreign R&D centers also helps firms tap into wider global markets. Opening a research center in China, for instance, is more than just a push into that market, the researchers wrote: It can be part of a larger, global strategy.

While foreign R&D centers are by now a longstanding trend, deciding when and where to set them up has been surprisingly haphazard, the researchers wrote. Recent history shows that choosing well requires weighing a daunting array of economic, political and cultural factors.

So where does a shrewd manager start? From an economic perspective, the researchers advised, prioritize a host country with strong growth indicators — especially if your company might enter markets in that country. From a political angle, look for countries with proven, long-term political stability. Finally, you’ll need sophisticated information about the economic and political realities in different parts of a country. In a nation as vast as China, for example, choosing the right region for your R&D center is as almost as consequential as choosing the right country.

A less tangible, but enormously important, consideration is the role of intellectual property or IP. Since a company’s IP is its lifeblood, it’s vital that its host country provide real, enforceable legal protections. China in particular is notorious for shoddy IP protections, leading to rampant bootlegging and other forms of idea theft. While new laws theoretically protect intellectual property, companies should still seek assurance that these laws would be enforced. 

Last on the multinational to-do list: take logistical and cultural challenges seriously. For firms based in the United States, moving people and materials around the world needs careful cost-benefit calculations. And that’s only half of the equation. To succeed in a foreign culture, multinationals then need to fully research, understand, and honor the new host culture.

Despite all these challenges, and the very real cost when companies fail to meet them, globalized R&D is booming. To help companies avoid mistakes, Li and his colleagues wrote, future researchers need to pinpoint exactly when, where and for whom global R&D really works. There’s clearly a market for such research. Whether measured in airline miles, shipping containers or even financial ledgers, multinationals are clearly finding overseas R&D worth the risks.

Haiyang Li is a professor of strategic management and innovation at the Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University.

To learn more, please see: Holmes Jr., R., Li, H., Hitt, M., DeGhetto, K., Sutton, T. (2016). The Effects of Location and MNC Attributes on MNCs' Establishment of Foreign R&D Centers: Evidence from China. Long Range Planning, 49, 594-613.

Updated from original post that was published on 02/21/2020.

Looking for a job that’s future-proof? At Rice Business, we train you instead to make your own future, with first-rate foundational knowledge, expert technical training, practical experience -- and powerful relationships based on collaboration and shared values.

A successful career today often includes both a traditional climb up a corporate structure and the exhilarating launch of a startup. Our MBA program (ranked #1 in entrepreneurship and #5 in finance by Princeton Review) blends classroom skills and practical training, balancing traditional core curriculum with experiential learning opportunities for students to apply what they've learned in real-time.

An MBA Program That Listens To Students

The outcomes speak for themselves. Class of 2020 member Doug Fiefia, born in Tonga and raised in Utah, is heading to Google as a manager in customer solutions. At Rice Business, he said, one of his most powerful learning experiences has been in student leadership. In the school’s collaborative environment, even first-semester students are pushed to lead and shape campus groups.

“During the first year of my MBA, I realized there was no formal process for voicing student concerns and ideas,” Fiefia recalled. “I met with several stakeholder groups to try to resolve this gap and we came up with a tool called Owl Voice.” Feedback from the popular tool now goes to student officers, who respond in collaboration with staff, faculty and school leadership. “I’m grateful that I am part of an MBA program that listens to students,” Fiefia said.

Linking Business And Public Policy

Norma Torres Mendoza, also class of 2020, will be going to Ernst & Young. Torres Mendoza said she chose Rice Business for its many scholarship opportunities, its size and its partnerships with international universities. A key element of her education, she said, was studying Business-Government relations with Professor Doug Schuler. “He teaches us that business should not and cannot work isolated from politics and the external world,” she said. “He created a bridge between the business and public policy worlds and has reinforced my passion for international mergers and acquisitions. Furthermore, he continues to teach us that all of our business actions have consequences, and as business leaders, we must have a consciousness about the positive and negative effects of our strategies.”

Bringing Houston To Rice Business Students

For all Rice Business students, interacting with Houston -- the fourth largest and 2nd diverse city in the country – is an essential part of the program. A roster of short elective courses allows our students to learn directly from the city’s top-tier business leaders on key emerging business topics. These immersive, experiential short courses cover topics such as digital disruption in financial services, block chain as a new economic infrastructure, building the data-driven firm, SQL for managers, and commercial real estate in the new economy.

 “A benefit of sitting in Houston is our ability to tap phenomenal business leaders to bring their perspective and expertise to our students,” Ostdiek said. “At Rice Business, we are able to blend a tight-knit, elite university environment with this vibrant commercial center. We make a point of bringing Houston to the students.”

Rice Business fortifies this classroom experience with hands-on work. “Our students apply what they’ve learned on messy real world problems,” Ostdiek said. Second year Rice Business students can choose from a roster of specialized “lab” courses where small teams work on real problems for corporate clients or, in some cases, the students’ own new product ideas or business acquisition initiatives. Among these courses are the Wright Fund, a student-led investment fund, the Athena marketing group, and labs focused on health care operations, supply chain challenges, international energy entrepreneurship, new enterprises, and enterprise acquisition.

Prepares You For A Range Of Opportunities

Rice Business also prioritizes diversity. Both research data and practical experience agree: 21st century business leaders need to be able to interact with a range of colleagues, economies, resources and cultures. Our program includes a required Global Field Experience that includes consulting with companies and organizations in the host country. Students also have the option of studying abroad at a broad network of partner institutions.

On campus, the tight-knit collaborative culture ensures that professors know your name – and students from an array of backgrounds become lifelong colleagues. All are eligible to tap the Doerr Institute for New Leadership for free, expert coaching on professional and personal development. To Dominic Smith, class of 2020, this Rice Business network was crucial preparation for his new position at Wells Fargo as an investment banking associate.

"I am most proud of being selected to work in the Wright Fund," Smith said. The rigorous student-led equity fund, he said, thoroughly prepared him not only for investment banking -- but a range of other possible career paths. Meanwhile, outside the classroom, as Co-President of the Black Business Student Association, Smith joined his classmates in creating an innovative business case contest for local second graders. In addition to prepping and judging the students, Smith said, his team has set up a meeting for the second graders with executives from a Fortune 100 company. The topic? Their own goals as 21st century business leaders.

Explore Our Rice MBA Programs

By Andrew Sessa

To the casual observer, it may look like a rough time to be a founder-CEO. Stories of startup founders behaving badly have filled the pages of the Wall Street Journal and the airtime on CNBC. Disruptive companies that once promised to deliver good returns and change the world for good have seen their tremendous valuations drop precipitously, if not disappear entirely, as a result of their founders’ actions. WeWork’s Adam Neumann, Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes and Uber’s Travis Kalanick became household names — first cited as visionary leaders, now as cautionary tales.

Each of these messianic figures rose to fame, power and riches on the strength of their moonshot ideas, their compelling stories and their charismatic personalities. They attracted abundant funding and fawning attention from investors, the media and the public. But many of their seeming strengths — and the control they wielded as a result — proved both blessing and curse. Previously seen as their companies’ greatest asset, these founder-CEOs proved to be their businesses’ biggest liability.

False Promise

The latest scandal played out at WeWork, where a $47 billion valuation dwindled to $8 billion before the company called off its late-2019 IPO plans. Prior to his ouster, Neumann had spent nearly a decade claiming that his co-working company would create a moneymaking communitarian utopia — a “capitalist kibbutz” as the Israeli-born entrepreneur put it — that could expand into apartments (WeLive), finance (WeBank), schools (WeGrow) and more. Energetic to the point of frenzy, with the charisma of a cult leader, and, at 6’ 5,” physically dominating, Neumann famously charmed Japan’s SoftBank into making an initial $4.4 billion investment in his company after just a 12-minute tour of its headquarters.

At the same time, Neumann was leading tequila- and marijuana-fueled retreats, spending lavishly on such items as a $60 million corporate jet, and, perhaps most gallingly to investors, personally profiting from rents WeWork paid to lease space in buildings he partially owned. As the managing member of a private company that trademarked the word “We,” he also forced WeWork to fork over nearly $6 million for the rights to the word.

His erratic behavior and the company’s questionable financials came home to roost on the eve of the now-scrapped IPO — whose prospectus, The New York Times noted, “was quickly ridiculed for its incoherence.” Within weeks, Neumann parachuted out of the company on a $1.7 billion exit package and SoftBank took over.

For early investors who thought they were about to ride a unicorn to sky-high stock gains, WeWork failed to follow through on its magical promise. The same can be said of Theranos, whose value crashed from $9 billion to zero after founder-CEO Elizabeth Holmes’ grandiose claims turned out to be nothing more than smoke and mirrors — and she was charged with fraud. Uber's Kalanick, for his part, built his business based partially on his rule-breaking brashness, driving the company's valuation upwards of $70 billion, but his bad-boy style led to his leaving the company amid accusations that he fostered a workplace plagued by sexual harassment, gender bias and other unacceptable behaviors. Uber still IPO-ed, but it never went up much past its initial $45 share price, and was recently trading in the $20s.

“God’s Gift to Technology”

All of these cases are different, but each centers on the erratic and even narcissistic behavior, unconventional management style, personal eccentricities and corporate maleficence of CEOs who at first seemed infallible — until they failed. And those failures didn’t just affect their own fortunes. Because they’d become so synonymous with their corporate brands, their downfalls dragged their companies down as well.

Although these are extreme examples, they are hardly isolated incidents. Recent research by Yan “Anthea” Zhang, Fayez Sarofim Vanguard Chair Professor of Strategy at the Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University, found that more than half of startups that received venture capital funding between 1995 and 2013 had replaced their founder with a new CEO by the time they launched their IPO. Other studies, meanwhile, have shown that some traits common among entrepreneurs make them prone to the sort of unpredictability that can be their downfall.   

John Gartner, a Baltimore-based clinical psychologist and assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, offers an explanatory diagnosis: “As a group — and there are exceptions, though relatively few — entrepreneurs have hypomania.”

“Hypo is Greek for ‘lesser,’ so it’s not that they have bipolar disorder,” explains Gartner, who wrote “The Hypomanic Edge: The Link Between (A Little) Craziness and (A Lot of) Success in America.” “I like to say that, ‘If you’re manic, you think you’re Jesus; if you’re hypomanic, you think you’re God’s gift to technology.’”

Hypomania isn’t entirely a disadvantage for entrepreneurs; it carries strengths as well, Gartner explains. Those include extraordinary creativity, confidence, charisma, energy and drive, which allow them to have big ideas, to act on them and to bring others on board. They have the messianic ability, he says, to “create buzz around a movement that didn’t exist before, to make it seem inevitable.”

The downsides of hypomania, however, include impulsivity, irritability, and impatience, which can cause entrepreneurs to jump into action without thinking, demonstrate poor judgment, be arrogant about the value of their ideas and fail to consult with others, Gartner says. “Something that differentiates successful entrepreneurs from unsuccessful ones,” he says, “is the ability to listen to non-hypomanic individuals.” 

Several other mental health conditions are more common among entrepreneurs as well, according to Michael A. Freeman, a psychiatrist and University of California San Francisco School of Medicine professor. Freeman coauthored a 2015 study in which 72% of entrepreneurs reported mental health concerns, compared to 48% of the non-entrepreneurs surveyed. Those in the entrepreneurial group were significantly more likely to say they were affected by depression, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), substance use conditions and bipolar disorder.

As with hypomania, however, these conditions also come with advantages. Depression, for example, has been linked with empathy, which could help a CEO engage more meaningfully with those around them, Freeman notes, and with realistic judgment, which can lead to more grounded decision-making. When it comes to the entrepreneurial personality profile, Freeman cites characteristics that could easily describe Neumann, Holmes and Kalanick: Though they can prove open-minded, creative and flexible, they’re also driven, mission-focused, action-oriented, assertive, self-sufficient and open to more risk than the general population.

Minimal Oversight

Gartner and Freeman’s work helps explain why some entrepreneurs might excel at coming up with disruptive ideas, launching innovative businesses and developing cult-like followings — even if they then prove constitutionally unfit to run those companies. But it doesn’t explain how they manage to convince investors to buy in, and to the tune of hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars with seemingly minimal oversight.

Alessandro Piazza, a Rice Business management professor who studies high-tech entrepreneurship and corporate scandals, chalks this up to two key factors: an overabundance of capital at all levels and a reliance on a startup’s and its founder’s story rather than the business fundamentals.

“It is both difficult and time-consuming to evaluate ventures,” he explains, “and most of the due diligence stuff is profoundly boring.”

What we prefer instead, Piazza continues, are good stories. And those narratives, rather than a business’s actual viability, are what often drive investment these days. “Increasingly, founders must be good storytellers,” Piazza says. WeWork and Theranos, especially, used strong rhetoric and compelling stories — “Israeli kibbutiznik creates communitarian utopia”; “Stanford dropout disrupts lab testing” — to cover up weaknesses.

Lately, Piazza observes, the expectation around startups seems to be that a strong, charismatic founder will build a mission-driven company around him or herself, sell the idea of the mission with a compelling story and then cast themselves as the sole person who can accomplish that mission.

“That creates a situation in which unruly behavior is accommodated,” he says. “What I find interesting about all this is that the whole system of corporate control and governance in America — the separation of the management running the company from the board of directors who they report to — is designed to make sure this doesn’t happen. These new startups have weak oversight by design. Founders don't recognize the value of an independent board that keeps you in check.”

Greg Putnam, an investment manager and lecturer at the University of North Carolina, believes a sense of “VC FOMO,” fear of missing out on the next big opportunity, also contributes to the lack of pre-investment due diligence, which leads to the unbridled entitlement of modern founders.

So what’s the solution? How can investors stop hitching their wagons to unhinged unicorns? Perhaps, Putnam and Piazza suggest, it’s all in how you train your unicorn.

“These examples,” says Putnam, “are calls to the folks providing that next-step capital —  the SoftBanks, the J.P. Morgans of the world, the VC funds — to say, ‘Founder X, Founder Y, we need to have some corporate controls written into how this is going to work.'" In other words, the TED Talk and the promotional video and the glossy marketing collateral aren’t enough. They don’t stand in for a real business plan, or governance structures, or standard operating procedures.

Putnam calls for a return to first principles — the fundamentals of business — and to previous levels of corporate oversight and governance. “In the old days, people used to talk a whole lot more about Excel spreadsheets, the internal rate of return, what the cash flow looks like,” he says.

“We have boards for a reason: to separate management and ownership. If we allow boards to become an extension of the CEO — and we see more and more that are stuffed with the CEO’s friends — it’s not good for the shareholders, and it’s good not for the company either,” Piazza argues. “The things CEOs do now wouldn’t have flown 20 or 30 years ago, when boards did a better job of monitoring their behavior.”

Part of the issue, he notes, is that these messianic startup CEOs are increasingly identified with the company — they don’t just lead the brand, they are the brand. So boards are afraid that the market might react negatively if the CEO resigns or is fired.

“How Do You Make Money?”

Zhang’s research shows that there is at least some measure of oversight often enough. She and her colleagues discovered that 41% of CEOs — both founders and non-founders — are replaced after a company gets its first round of VC funding. Still, she notes that founders are less likely to be replaced than non-founders, a fact she attributes to founders’ personal connection to their businesses and their significant share of ownership.

Her research also revealed that VC funds frequently make what she calls “calculated decisions” about changing CEOs. They replace those with the lowest human capital — in particular, the least experience with management and leading publicly traded companies. When they do, the CEO switch both increases a company’s value at the time of its IPO and its performance immediately after. “The higher the human capital of the CEO, the better the valuation and the operating performance,” she says.

And the relative human capital of founder-CEOs? Theirs tends to be lower rather than higher, she found. As companies like WeWork demonstrate, the charisma of a founder, the persuasiveness of a company’s origin story and mission, and the flashiness of its marketing materials can be inversely proportionate to the actual value of the company.  

At the end of the trading day, Zhang says, all we really need to know is: “What is the business? How do you make money? In business, we talk about business.”

Andrew Sessa is a Boston-based writer and editor.

Based on research by Wagner Kamakura  and Carl W. Schimmel 

• Professional orchestras have multiple, often conflicting, goals: art, education, promoting new artists and staying afloat financially.
• A forecasting model that focuses on the different features in one program can help orchestras meet all their goals. 
• The same modeling approach can help a range of organizations and industries combine their offerings into more attractive bundles. 

The Metro Symphony Orchestra needed to hit the right note: delighting its various music lovers, bringing in enough money to thrive through the next season – and, of course, making scintillating art.

To do it all, the programming had to harmonize musical offerings for corporate and individual donors as well as faithful season-subscribers. At the same time, it couldn’t tune out the all-important single-ticket buyers – listeners who attend a few times a year, but play a key role in revenue.

Rice Business professor Wagner A. Kamakura came up with some answers. In research conducted at Duke University, where he was previously a professor, Kamakura joined Illinois State School of Music professor Carl W. Schimmel to build an analytic model that helps professional orchestras synchronize their goals. The model analyzes single-ticket sales activity, resulting in a tool music directors and marketing executives can use to fine-tune concert programs to meet their diverse goals. 

Based on ticket sales data from 47 U.S. orchestras over multiple concerts and seasons, the model shows how specific concert features interact with each other at the box office. It also takes into account the diversity of taste across different markets. Any orchestra can use the model, Kamakura and Schimmel write, simply by applying its own managerial insights and plugging in its sales data. In fact, other industries can make use of it as well: the model works for any product/service sold in bundles of features, such as fast-food, groceries, hotel rooms, spas, cable TV and telecom. 

To create the tool, the professors studied a kaleidoscope of ticket-selling scenarios, ultimately coming up with 24 variables to be mixed and matched. Among them: Saturday evening audiences; April-June schedules; appearances of a star soloist; visits by a guest conductor; choral music; Mozart; the “three B’s” (Bach, Beethoven and Brahms); and contemporary music.

The researchers then tracked sales outcomes from mingling these variables. In one case, for example, the model found a negative interaction in a program offering a star soloist and a “most popular” piece.  Because people who want to hear a star soloist are likely the same ones who want to hear popular pieces, combining them won’t attract additional listeners. Offering either feature individually, however, will prompt more single-ticket sales, and can help increase revenue.

In another scenario, combining a star soloist and a regular soloist resulted in a positive interaction, suggesting a star soloist adds to the appeal of a regular soloist. Put another way, when it comes to soloists, familiarity leads to audience loyalty. In a third instance, programs that included a guest conductor negatively affected the single-ticket sales of top national orchestras. The conclusion? Guest conductors only boost ticket sales for smaller regional orchestras; top national orchestras should market their resident conductors as community figures, boosting sales by emphasizing them as local personalities.

The researchers also studied how to entice the occasional concertgoer. The single-ticket crowd, Kamakura and Schimmel found, was most likely to attend programs that include both choral work and a very popular piece rather than programs that showcase only one or the other.

The researchers even isolated the single-ticket sales high note: a program that mixes less-popular works from 1750 to 1950. Unfortunately, the strategy has an inherent drawback: Overall, that type of program will likely sell fewer tickets than one with a highly popular work.

Art, like business, requires tradeoffs. Kamakura and Schimmel’s model helps orchestras make the best of such decisions by using single-ticket sales analysis to calibrate their musical, educational and revenue strategies. Similar big data models, the researchers write, can help other arts groups too. 

Wondering what type of artist to showcase after the traveling Obama portraits? Plotting how to maximize sales for an avant-garde stage show of “Don Quixote?" The possibilities are endless for those with enough data. But like a good tuning fork, Kamakura and Schimmel’s model helps arts groups keep their programming from hitting sour notes. 

Wagner A. Kamakura is Jesse H. Jones Professor of Marketing at Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University.

To learn more, please see: Kamakura, W. A. & Schimmel, C. W. (2013). Uncovering audience preferences for concert features from single-ticket sales with a factor-analytic random-coefficients model. International Journal of Research in Marketing, 30(2), 129-142.

A new survey finds men are more willing to rack up credit card debt if Valentine’s Day gifts are involved.

In fact, research shows some behaviors tend to reinforce people’s gender identity — and that includes Valentine’s Day gift-giving behavior, according to a marketing and customer relationships expert at Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business.

“It is well known that men have assumed the societal role of taking on more of the gift-giving burden on Valentine’s Day,” said Constance Porter, an assistant professor of marketing at Rice Business. She is available to discuss the phenomenon with the media.

“(Men) spend more and are more willing to go into debt to do it,” Porter said. “Doing so could help some men reinforce their sense of male identity and help them express this identity with others.”

The people they’re trying to impress include not only the gift recipient, but also anyone who hears the story about what they gave their special person on Valentine’s Day, Porter said.

“The gift-giver becomes the hero in all of those stories, and that makes him feel great about himself and look good to everyone in his orbit,” Porter said. “In this way, the storytelling on the day after Valentine’s Day becomes just as important and ritualistic as the actual day.”

Men are also more likely than women to seek help from salespeople when shopping for a gift, Porter said.

“So, if that happens with the Valentine’s Day gift, that could explain why men spend more,” Porter said. “The salesperson could exert influence on men to show their love in a manly way by spending a lot on the gift.”

To schedule an interview with Porter, contact Jeff Falk, director of national media relations at Rice, at jfalk@rice.edu or 713-348-6775.

Rice University has a VideoLink ReadyCam TV interview studio. ReadyCam is capable of transmitting broadcast-quality standard-definition and high-definition video directly to all news media organizations around the world 24/7.

Follow the Jones Graduate School of Business on Twitter @Rice_Biz.

Follow Rice News and Media Relations on Twitter @RiceUNews.

Related materials:

Porter bio: https://business.rice.edu/person/constance-elise-porter

Jones Graduate School of Business: http://business.rice.edu

Did you know that Rice Business accepts video essays for MBA applications? Stacy Fish, a former Full-Time MBA student, shares how choosing the video option for her essay allowed her to tell her story as her most authentic self. There's no better way to find an MBA program that's right for you.

Looking for more information about the Rice MBA application process? Check out our admissions guide to see the different ways you can share your story with us. 

Based on research by Yan Anthea Zhang, Robert E. Hoskisson and Wei Shi 

• CFOs often use language that mimics that of their CEOs. 
• CFOs who do this might please the boss, but could fail to adequately express opposing opinions during company decision-making. 
• The result may be higher CFO compensation — but worse decisions for the firm. 

It’s time to meet with company leadership. Whether it’s a top level conference or a routine all-company huddle, have you ever noticed a certain sameness in the way the CEO and the CFO speak? Do they ever sound too similar?

You’re not imagining things, say Rice Business professor Yan Anthea Zhang and emeritus professor Robert E. Hoskisson. Partnering with University of Miami professor Wei Shi, the researchers analyzed 11 years of conference calls by companies making decisions about high level mergers and acquisitions.

They found that seeming similarities between CEO and CFO language are real — and usually rooted in the personal goals of the CFO.

The motive isn’t too surprising. As senior-level leaders, CFOs consistently acquire responsibility in their organizations. It stands to reason that people who rise to this level are focused, motivated and looking to advance — typically, to a higher salary or a seat on the company’s board.

One way CFOs can aid their rise, the researchers found, is by using language style matching, or unconscious verbal mimicry of their bosses. To measure this mimicry, Zhang, Hoskisson and Shi tracked function words (articles, pronouns, prepositions, etc.) to reveal the similarity in top officers’ language styles.

The researchers then used these findings to predict advancement outcomes for CFOs and their companies. The predictions tended to be accurate because, quite simply, it’s easier to advance with people who are similar to you. When CFOs use high levels of language mimicry, they create a pleasant, familiar rapport with their superiors. Language mimicry also indicates a shared opinion — always flattering to hear. However, one important aspect of a CFO’s job is to challenge important decisions to make sure that they are financially sound, and here mimicry doesn’t help.

High mimicry levels have three major outcomes, the researchers found, and not all are good.

• Since CEOs often influence compensation, high mimicry levels boost a CFO’s chances of a raise.
• But high mimicry levels lower a CFO’s likelihood of serving the company by playing devil’s advocate.
• Firms lacking authentic critical input from CFOs make less favorable decisions for shareholders.

What about those CFOs who are less fun for their bosses to be with — the CFOs with low mimicry rates? They’re better for business, the researchers found. Declining, or just failing, to mimic the boss actively benefits shareholders, because the CEO is more likely to hear reasoned opposition to flawed decisions. 

These dynamics affect everyone involved in a business, the researchers write. For board members and shareholders, too much similarity in top officers’ speech should be a red flag: Your CFO may care more about pleasing the boss than about protecting the company.

CEOs themselves should think twice when a CFO’s language sounds pleasantly familiar. A lieutenant who sounds too much like you may not help you make the best choices. Even if you have minimal contact with your company’s CFO or CEO, such mimicking behavior often surfaces in other power relationships as well – with potentially similar outcomes.

So when you do end up at that C-suite meeting — or simply any presentation by two people in power — it’s worth listening to how much the second in command sounds like the boss. 

It may be the sound of someone working her way to the top.

Yan Anthea Zhang is the Fayez Seraphim Vanguard Professor of Management and Robert E. Hoskisson is the George R. Brown Emeritus Professor of Management at Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University.

To learn more, please see: Shi, W., Zhang, Y., & Hoskisson, R. E. (2019). Examination of CEO-CFO social interaction through language style matching: Outcomes for the CFO and the organization. Academy of Management Journal, 62(2), 383–414.

Based on research by Bruce Carlin, Li Jiang and Stephen A. Spiller

Key findings:

• ​Though financial literacy has been studied — and taught — for generations, new-media platforms such as YouTube offer new opportunities for educating consumers.
• YouTube and similar video platforms host all kinds of entertaining (and otherwise) content, but in recent years have become a major outlet for educational videos. 
• Viewers who watched a YouTube video on what to look for in credit card ads were more likely to choose the card with the best terms. 

Think of the last time that you read all the way through the terms and conditions on a credit card ad — or, even more worryingly, on your own credit card application. We all mean to make well-informed decisions, but the sheer quantity of words on many financial products can overwhelm. Even a financial professional can find it hard to hack through the verbiage.

But what if a simple video could clarify credit card terms and conditions for the layperson — or even the professional? 

With the rise of YouTube and other video social media, new opportunities to share all sorts of information abound. Each day, hundreds of thousands of people log onto YouTube “how-to” videos to learn about everything from building a house in the Arctic to baking a cake. It’s one of the most-used self-education channels available today. 

This teaching opportunity intrigued Bruce Carlin, now a professor of finance at Rice Business. Carlin was previously a professor at UCLA’s Anderson School of Business, and with Li Jiang and Steven A. Spiller, also of the Anderson School of Business, hypothesized that online video content could make specific financial knowledge accessible to a large population easily and quickly. 
 
To investigate, the researchers studied 1,603 participants with a median age of 30, whom they recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk. These participants were randomly shown one of two “educational” videos: a baseline video featuring a character using a remote to uncover “hidden” messages in credit card advertising, and the same video with an added informational tag that summarized the messages and showed where to find key information in the standard terms in a credit card agreement. 

Once they’d viewed the videos, participants were randomly split into two groups. The first group reviewed a website with four credit card options, each linking to information described in the videos such as APRs, fees and spending limits. The second group reviewed the website as well — but this time, each of the four credit card options had a heading that was distracting or even misleading.

Regardless of which version of the website they were shown, the participants who had viewed the informational video that included a summary were more likely to choose a card with consumer-friendly terms. Within this group, those who weren’t exposed to the misleading headings were the most likely to make the consumer-friendly choice. 

“Distracting advertising curtails the time people invest in searching for the best alternative and causes worse decisions,” the researchers write. “Content geared toward giving better instructions helps to overcome this effect.” This content, they found, improves both the quality and the outcome of a person’s research.

But what good is a video if few people see it? Carlin and his colleagues next wanted to see if study participants who typically share videos via email or social media would share either version of the credit card tutorial. If they did, the researchers reasoned, the videos theoretically could protect a wide range of consumers.

But while participants who watched the videos came away better informed, they were less likely to share the version that included the summary and steps for action than the one that didn’t.

Was that because people are more inclined to share an entertaining or distracting video than a purely informative one? Was it because credit/financial literacy can be a touchy subject? Or was it simply that different kinds of videos require different metrics of success — for example, views rather than shares? Getting video viewers to share content that contains financial guidance, in other words, remains a fly in the batter. 

The researchers’ primary findings were clear, however: Online instructional videos can make a difference in consumers’ lives. Much like a cooking video that takes the viewer step-by-step to a glorious mille crepe, the right video can make even intimidating financial decisions a piece of cake. 

Carlin, B. I., Jiang, L., & Spiller, S. A. (2018). Millennial-style learning: Search intensity, decision making and information sharing. Management Science, 64(7): 2973-3468. 

Do you wonder what it’s like to work as an auditor? Read our interview with recent Rice MAcc alumna Megan Palmer (Class of ‘17). She explains how she decided on a career in audit, what a typical work day looks like, and her favorite parts of the job.

Tell us a little bit about your background and why you decided to pursue the MAcc.

I was a Rice undergrad and on the Women's Basketball team from 2012-2016. Like most freshman, I had no idea what I wanted to do. I thought pre-med had a nice ring to it, so I started out there. But I realized after a few disastrous doctors’ appointments that needles and blood did not settle well for me, and so I was in search of a new passion! I took my first accounting class in the summer of 2014, and I loved it! Prof. Lansford came to talk with my class about the new Master of Accounting program Rice was starting up again, and I was very interested. As with most big decisions, I talked it over with my mom. She told me that she thought it was a great idea and that accounting was in my blood. Unbeknownst to me, her father, my grandfather whom I had never met, was a controller at a car manufacturer before he passed away. From then on, I was set on pursuing my master’s degree in accounting, and I couldn't imagine a better place to earn my degree than Rice University.

Where do you work and how long have you been there?

I am a senior audit associate at PwC (PricewaterhouseCoopers) in the Private Company Services sector and have worked there for two years. 

What drew you to auditing?

While in the MAcc, I did enjoy my tax classes, mostly because we had a great tax professor. However, I have always had more of an interest in audit. I enjoy getting to know my clients, finding new ways to test the financial statements, and working with a team. Week to week my schedule is always different. I work two to four weeks on a client, and then I move on to something else with a different team. It keeps my work exciting and fresh. 

What personality characteristics make for an effective audit professional?

From my experience, the best personality characteristics to have would be:

Open-mindedness - there is more than one way to audit, and your first instinct may not always be the best way

Hard-working - sometimes you have to work long hours or just work really hard for the eight hours you do have to get the job done

Confidence - if you see something that is incorrect in the financial statements, you need to be able to voice your opinion and support it

Personable - it is important to form relationships with your clients. A good relationship with the client means that the audit will go smoother and you might even get support and answers to questions quicker.  

What do you like most about what you do?

My favorite part of my job is the people I work with. Everyone truly cares about me as a person and my professional growth. There are times to be serious and get work done, but there are also times to joke around and let off some steam. I always have a good balance of serious and fun at work. 

What does a typical workday for you entail?

There is no typical day for me as a senior associate. I could be working on things for three different clients in one day, or I could be only testing revenue for one client for the entire day. This is something I really enjoy about what I do. I'm never doing the same thing two days in a row.

What are some noteworthy experiences you’ve been able to have working at your firm?

I have two once-in-a-lifetime experiences I have had with my firm:

1) I was selected to be a member of the 2019 PwC Team USA basketball team and compete in the International Basketball Tournament held in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Fifteen countries, about 180 people, competed in this tournament. I was one of only five females who participated, but I didn't let that slow me down! I had a great time playing basketball and getting to know my teammates, who were from all around the U.S. I also got to know other PwCers from all over the world. Team USA ended up taking home the gold! I didn't think I would ever get to compete in a sport that I loved again after college, but I was able to with PwC. It was truly a week I will never forget.

2) When I was promoted to senior associate, we had an event called "Discover" in Rancho Palos Verde, California. Discover is a week at a resort on the coast of California filled with events designed to lead you to discover what is important to you and how to better manage your life to include these important things. There was no mention of auditing, or even PwC really, the whole week. This wasn't an event to get you to "drink the Kool-Aid", but rather to teach you how to be a happier person. Discover helped me to be happier and healthier, and it has changed my life for the better.  

Does auditing sound like a career you’d like to pursue? Reach out to us! Most Rice MAcc graduates take their initial jobs in one of the Big Four public accounting firms, which are consistently ranked in Fortune magazine’s 100 Best Companies to Work For. 

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