By Weezie Mackey

In remembering the life and legacy of Professor of Entrepreneurship (Emeritus) Ed Williams (1945-2018) we are republishing an article from the Spring 2015 edition of the Jones Journal in his honor. 

Ed Williams grew up in Houston and discovered early on that he had a knack for selling

At age seven he started putting old magazines in the back of his wagon and knocking on doors. “Half the people would slam the door in my face. The other half would listen. A few would buy used magazines. I’d make another round in another neighborhood, ‘do you have any old magazines you’d like to get rid of?’ My cost of goods sold was zero,” he said, revealing the first inklings of an audaciously entrepreneurial childhood.

Williams’ father worked for the Southern Pacific Railroad. When he was old enough, he took school excursions to Austin or San Antonio once a year. “My dad would lend me $5. I’d buy curios on the trip and then go through the train on the way home selling them to kids or trading. I’d come home with at least $25. One time I had some extra inventory, and I went to see Carl Cohen who owned the little grocery store around the corner from where I lived at 14th and Studewood. He liked me. I asked Carl, would it be all right if I sold some of these things outside his store? He said yes, so I set up my little stand and sold out the first day. I was 10.”

From a little red wagon to crossing the border into Juarez to buy exotic inventory — Mexican bats and bull whips — Williams built a business and an entrepreneurial acumen one sales trip at a time. Today, at 70, always ready with a story, it isn’t hard to imagine the blond-headed kid with the gift of gab who readily admits he had better luck selling to women than men. There would be no holding him back. 

Mentors made the difference

As of July 1, 2014, Ed Williams — formerly the Henry Gardiner Symonds Professor of Management — retired from his career teaching entrepreneurship at the Jones School. He estimated that he taught about 3000 students in 100 courses in 36 years, including the first graduating class — all together more than half the alumni. It’s no wonder so many of them have stories to share. And that Williams has even more.

Somehow, the war stories of entrepreneurship stick. Whether it was born from necessity or desire, his entrepreneurial approach shaped him as a scholar and an educator.

“I knew from a fairly early age that I was going to be looking after myself by the time I was 17 if not sooner,” Williams said. “My dad was a yard master with SP. He was out in the field originally but became a freight re-check clerk, examining mileage and commodity records. He was born in 1897, lived through both World Wars and the Depression. My dad was very conservative. You don’t live through two wars and a depression and come out a risk taker. His own history had a lot to do with mine because the people who worked for the railroad never made a lot of money, at least not at his level. It was sufficient to live on but not to pay for college.”

Through hard work, pluck and several formative relationships during his life, starting with store-owner Cohen, Williams made his way in the world. And then some.

As a student at the newly built Waltrip High School, he became a little less entrepreneurial and a little more studious. After a few summers as an archives clerk at the Magnet Cove Barium Corporation, he landed a plum summer job through his aunt at University State Bank, working as a sight payer and bookkeeper. “The man who owned the bank was a fellow named Goldston. He asked me what I was going to do with my life?” Williams explained that he was saving to go to college. Goldston invited him, after work and on his own time, to come up to his office and learn to read the Wall Street Journal. “We started on page one. While he was teaching me how to read the Wall Street Journal and the quotations and prices,” Williams said, “he was also teaching me how his bank operates. It was fascinating.”

During his senior year of high school, while president of the student council, Williams was introduced to Bob Waltrip, the owner of Heights Funeral Home. A lifelong friendship began that day as Waltrip shared his plans for Service Corporation International (SCI), where Williams would become vice president years later. First, of course, the budding business man had to go to college. He studied economics and finance at Wharton at the University of Pennsylvania. “I got through Wharton in three years because I ran out of money,” Williams said. After graduation, when Waltrip asked him if he was ready to come work, Williams said, “No. I like academia. He told me he thought I was making a serious mistake.”

The fast train

After looking into and deciding against graduate school at Yale — it was longer and more expensive than what he could afford — Williams got a hold of the head of the finance department at the University of Texas. “The tuition was $50 a semester for all the courses you could take. There were no constraints on time. You had to pass five field exams and write a dissertation. And you had to take so many course hours. I signed on and finished my Ph.D. in two years. I was 22.”

He shrugs and claims it was a matter of necessity. “I had no money. I got the Texas Savings and Loan League fellowship and ultimately wrote my dissertation on the savings and loan industry. I remember one semester I was taking seven courses. I was teaching two and writing my dissertation. And living on a $100 a month.”

As he was finishing his doctorate, Williams attended the American Economic Association meeting and ran into a former professor of macroeconomics from Wharton, Paul Davidson, another mentor who remains a good friend to this day. “I was looking for a job. He was a professor at Rutgers by then. He said, ‘You’d be younger than the kids in our graduate school, but why don’t you come up and give a paper, and we’ll see how it goes.’ It went well.” He was hired as an assistant professor of economics in the College of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers. After two years he was hired as an associate professor of finance in the Faculty of Management at McGill University.

Three years later he called Bob Waltrip. SCI had gone public in 1969 and was doing very well. He told Waltrip he was ready to leave academia for a while. “I went down to visit and got a job offer to be a vice president. It was three times what I was making at McGill plus stock options. This was 1973. My basic job was to oversee our investments, including our endowment care funds and still am today as chairman of the investment committee of our board of directors. In those days, we had $9 million. Now we’ve got $9 billion.” 

Today, SCI is the world's largest operator of funeral homes and cemeteries in North America, and Williams worked there five years before he got a call from the first dean of the Jones School, Dr. Robert Sterling, asking if he might be interested in returning to academia.

“I said to Sterling, if I come back to academia, I’m not interested in teaching finance and economics. I did that already. I want to do something different.” Which is how Williams arrived at Rice as the founder of a new program in the emerging area of entrepreneurship. It was 1978, and Williams was 33.

Head of the class

Only a handful of business schools were teaching entrepreneurship back then. “The exciting thing about that time was the Jones School was new,” said Williams. “The upshot of that was you could mold it.” Molding it meant finding literature and textbooks, creating a curriculum. “There was a textbook being used, Patrick Lyle’s The New Enterprise. He was an adjunct at Harvard. It was a case book, but it had snippets of the theory of entrepreneurship. Which is almost an oxymoron. I spent the summer with that book preparing to teach the fall class, The New Enterprise. The spring class would be Buying and Selling Companies.”

Williams loved being back in the classroom. “I like talking to people and explaining things. It’s funny because even when I was in junior high I would pretend to be a teacher. I would stand up with a little black board and teach Texas history or something like that. I pretended that I had students. I even graded fake papers.” He laughed. “I’d write stuff up with mistakes in it and grade it. I always wanted to be a teacher.”

The second year he added a third class. “My agreement with Bob Sterling was I could teach two the first year and three the second. The added class was micro-economics, which I didn’t really want to teach, but I did, and I met my wife Sue in that class. She was a student,” he smiled. “But nothing happened until later.” Susan ‘84 had two children, Laura and David ‘99, and a dog from a previous marriage. The two married in 1983 and now have five grandchildren.

In 1979, Williams attended the first Babson College Entrepreneurship Conference to see what other business schools were doing. Rice was in good company. Harvard, UCLA, USC, Carnegie Mellon, Wharton and Babson were the universities that pioneered the development of this new discipline, and they were all in attendance. Next, Williams began to recruit the first of many adjunct faculty members who were instrumental in the early success of the program. The first was George Ballas, inventor of the Weed-Eater, who team taught the New Enterprise course with Williams.

The question remained: can you teach someone to be an entrepreneur? “My thinking on that is it’s a practice. You learn to be an entrepreneur by having done it for a while. You can structure an analysis of it, almost like a social scientist looks at a phenomenon. Actually teaching somebody to be an entrepreneur is a different story. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be put in a formal framework and examined.”

Enter Al Napier 

When Al Napier began teaching Information Technology at the Jones School in 1984 there were still only 15 full-time faculty members. Williams had known Napier as a doctoral student at the University of Texas at Austin in the ’60s. They struck up their old friendship and began fishing together. On one of their trips, they talked about Napier joining the entrepreneurship faculty. “He had his computer consulting company, Napier and Judd, but we were getting to the point where the classes were getting larger and larger. I wanted help teaching The New Enterprise. It kind of brightened my day because needing another professor showed the entrepreneurship program was working.”

It brightened Napier’s day as well. “Ed has been a great friend. He mentored thousands of students and alumni with their entrepreneurial pursuits and mentored me in my teaching of entrepreneurship,” Napier said. “His impact has been immeasurable.”

Being bigger gave the Jones School the opportunity to claim some fame in the world. “Businessweek came down here,” Williams said modestly. “They nominated a few people back in ’96 for top entrepreneurship professors, and I was No. 2.” In the country. Not only that, but he won so many teaching awards within the school, that he eventually declined to be in the running so that others could take home the honors. 

The rest is history. After Napier accepted the position, and The New Enterprise course ultimately became his, more adjuncts were hired, including Jerry Finger, a successful banking and real estate entrepreneur, and Dennis Murphree, a serial entrepreneur who was also a savvy venture capitalist.

From one faculty member teaching two courses in 1978, the program now has over 23 faculty members teaching 27 entrepreneurship-related courses. The year 2013 marked the naming of the Ralph S. O’Connor Associate Professor in Entrepreneurship, awarded to Yael Hochberg, and a schoolwide entrepreneurship initiative, for which she is executive and academic director.

Go out and learn a business

Williams walked among a sea of students in the Rice Memorial Center, looking professorial. He came from a course in statistics and investments that he was teaching with John Dobelman. “It’s through the statistics department. He’s the professor in charge, and I go over and lecture some. Once a week, three hours. Gives me a chance to stay in touch with students. I like the lecturing. I do it for free. I do it for me.”

Though the two just wrote a text book together — Investing for Profit: A Data Based Approach — the teaching of entrepreneurship never seems far from his heart. “I used to try and leave the students at the end of the year with this advice: go out and learn a business. Know that business. Then buy one in that area. Jack Ledford did that. Even though he’s military and has a financial background. He actually got his feet wet in the operations of a business.”

Ledford, class of ’02 and CEO of Spearhead Services, added, “Ed’s class really opened my eyes to a whole world I didn’t know existed. I realized that’s what I needed to do. He taught us it’s about the balance sheet not the income statement. Managing the balance sheet is the answer. He’s been an investor in two of my companies. A lot of people don’t put their money where their mouth is. He does.”

Cooper Etheridge, class of ’03 and president of Automation Technology Inc., agreed. “He was the very first person to invest in my business, proving that he is willing to practice what he teaches. Ed represented a breaking away from the usual and mostly theoretical approach of our other classes. He emboldened his students, and made us feel, while we were in school, that we were already in the game and to start acting like it.”

Williams scowls at what he sees as his own limitations. “It’s still not sufficient. A student could take my class. They know all the tricks of buying and selling but they still don’t necessarily know how to operate a business. Buying and Selling is easier, but it’s still not a substitute for knowing how to run something.”

Sometimes he had a student with some kind of experience. Take Caroline Caskey Goodner ’92, CEO of Caskey Holdings LLC, as an example. “Her father is a physician. He’s also quite an inventor and entrepreneur. Her mother is as well. She grew up in an environment of ‘let’s start a business. Let’s do this.’ And, believe it or not, that helps.”

Goodner said, “Ed’s class and his enthusiasm for entrepreneurship was the catalyst for me starting a company after graduation. I had no intention of pursuing entrepreneurship when I entered business school, but after catching his passion for being an independent employer and employee, I decided to start the company I had devised in a business plan during his class.”

And business plans are vital. But it is Williams’ belief that while the skillset of being an entrepreneur is teachable, “Being one is not.”

On the horizon

Rob Royall ’84, a partner at Ernst & Young, said Williams offered this advice in one of his classes: the key to success and building wealth is to find something no one else wants to do and become very good at it. “When I pursued an expertise in derivatives accounting, there was literally one person in all of Ernst & Young who was deeply experienced in it. I eventually became his successor and the leader in the firm on the topic—the topic no one else was clamoring to cover. They made me a partner in order to get coverage on the topic and the risk it presented to our practice.”

That kind of advice and the practical foundation he provided has made the entrepreneurship program what it is today. It is the legacy he leaves in his wake. His free time is jammed packed with golf, the investment committee at SCI and his own personal investments, teaching with Dobelman, the model railroad set that takes up 1,500 square feet and hundreds, possibly thousands, of feet of track.

The idea of the train set was to give him something to do in his 70s and 80s. “When I was a kid, we went everywhere on the train because we had a free pass. That was the way we got around. We didn’t even have a car. So I’ve always been interested in trains. Always enjoyed riding them. Even to this day I love to take a train.” The elaborate train is a replica, of sorts, of the Southern Pacific’s main line, which ran from New Orleans through Houston to El Paso and Los Angeles, Oakland and San Francisco, and then all the way to Oregon. “I started with Houston and made big passenger stations, including the two in Houston – Union Station and the SP's Grand Central Station. I now have every train the SP railroad had from that era.”

The historical precision of stations and cities from the 1950s — he’s working on Los Angeles now — requires a strategic perspective and the constant care and maintenance of a master gardener. “I like operating them. I enjoy putting them together and planning what will go where.”

From his first entrepreneurial adventures to the meticulous model railroads, Ed Williams looks much the same in retirement as he did in the first blush of his career: there’s no holding him back.

Ed Williams was a Professor of Entrepreneurship at the Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University. BusinessWeek named him one of the top two of the nation's best entrepreneurship teachers. He believed exposure to entrepreneurship is essential to a business education.

Weezie Mackey is the Associate Director of Marketing and Communications at the Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University. 

By William M. Arnold 

This op-ed originally appeared in The Hill. 

Oil prices are again on the minds of statesmen and executives as world leaders convene at the U.N. General Assembly in New York. Suffice it to say, these are not the 1970s, when oil-shortage angst gripped the United States and Presidents Nixon and Carter urged the nation to make serious sacrifices.

Let’s review what’s going on: Brent oil prices, associated with production in Europe’s North Sea, have exceeded $80 per barrel, the highest since prices collapsed four years ago.

Production constraint by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and Russia, growing world demand and sanctions on Iranian production have contributed to this surge. This is taking place despite record U.S. production of 11 million barrels a day, which is flooding and disrupting markets.

President Trump has called on OPEC and its allies to increase production to lower gasoline prices, and he has threatened to use the country’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve to unilaterally lower U.S. prices.

But the OPEC/Russia cartel, well aware of how vital oil is to its economies and prestige, has a new vision of its future that they hope will drive prices higher.

Predictions of oil prices are fraught with casualties. Oil prices might again reach $100, but is that next month or five years from now? Pundits brag about the occasional accurate forecast while remaining silent about those that didn’t materialize.

Many factors impact oil prices, ranging from geopolitical risks like Iran, production costs in different countries, shifts in markets (more production in the U.S., more demand in Asia), technical issues like refinery configurations and capacity and logistics. (Brent is already sea-borne while West Texas is landlocked.)

Currently, Brent prices are about $10 per barrel higher than West Texas Intermediate related to U.S. production. Traditionally, there has been only a modest gap between the two, and the balance shifted frequently.

But after the shale boom erupted a decade ago, there was insufficient U.S. pipeline and refining infrastructure near the producing areas. As a result West Texas oil sold at a $23 discount to Brent in 2012.

At the same time, Brent prices were inflated by perceived heightened political risk in the Middle East. That spread dissipated until late last year.

Markets determine prices, and they fundamentally reflect supply and demand, just as we learned in Econ 101. The more interesting question is who and what impacts supply and demand?

The story of the last decade has been the surge in U.S. production and the OPEC/Russia response to it.

The U.S. has become the world’s largest producer of crude oil after eroding in the 1980s and 1990s from a high in the 1970s. Much of this comes from the “shale play,” which combined horizontal drilling with hydraulic fracturing.

Skeptics expected operational costs and infrastructure challenges to cause production to peak and decline. Instead, shale has transformed into a manufacturing process based on constant adaptation of technology and cost reduction.

OPEC, Russia and others were deeply concerned about these new additions to oil markets at a time when global demand was just rebounding from the global financial shock of 2008-2009. OPEC chose to maintain production levels, which combined with the new U.S. production, tanked oil prices from highs near $120 to levels below $30.

Conventional wisdom suggested that shale production costs were around $70, so production was expected to diminish drastically at much lower prices. There was turmoil in the market. Hundreds of corporate bankruptcies took place in the U.S. and more than 200,000 jobs were lost globally.

But the U.S. industry, pressed against a wall, found ways to lower breakeven costs and generate cash flows, often in the $40 price range.

OPEC, Russia and related countries this time responded by agreeing to production cuts that reflected unique characteristic of member nations. The tradeoff was straightforward: Cut production by "X" but world prices rise by "2X" — and the bottom line grows.

To the surprise of market skeptics, the agreements held and were renewed. Now OPEC/Russia see potential for their production to increase as a substitute for reduced Iranian production. But the cartel has not forgotten recent lessons and, under Saudi leadership, is moving judiciously.

As U.S. production reached 11 million barrels per day, infrastructure and operational constraints have been a constant challenge.

There is a huge need for water, for the right kind of sand, for trucks and truck drivers, for rig crews, for pipelines to move oil and the natural gas associated with its production and for export facilities.

This impacts the ability to get it to market and accounts for some of that $10 spread between Brent and West Texas Intermediate prices.

President Trump, not unlike other U.S. presidents at a time of rising gasoline prices, sees a political problem. He proposes using the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to add to production and lower gasoline prices.

The reserve was created, as the name implies, to use in emergencies and not to manage prices. In any case, the reserve is finite and relatively small in terms of U.S. demand. It would be a short-term measure at best.

This week, he has been jawboning OPEC about its production controls. While the markets are free, OPEC is a cartel and, along with Russia, has learned a lot in the past decade about its impact in the face of resurgent U.S. production. It will act in its own perceived interests.

Additionally, the president’s use of tariffs may have unintended consequences. Tariffs on steel impact the capital and operational cost of oilfield production, reducing profit margins and possibly longer-term investment that can restrain U.S. production and raise prices.

Retaliatory tariffs by China on U.S. liquefied natural gas can hurt growing U.S. exports and favor countries as disparate as Qatar and Australia. If a trade war escalates, this could dampen global demand for all products and lower energy prices, but that would be associated with slower global economic growth.

Policymakers — in the U.S. and abroad — need to understand the complexity of this market and the constantly changing dynamics as they consider executive actions, legislation or regulation.

Every action will cause a reaction, but it may not be equally strong. For now, President Trump would be best advised to let the markets play things out. The country is certainly not as handicapped in energy matters as it was in the 1970s.

Bill Arnold was a professor in the practice of energy management at the Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University.

Based on research by Erik Dane, Markus Baer, Michael G. Pratt and Greg R. Oldham

• Many researchers have presumed that intuitive thinking enhances creativity because it is less methodical than rational thinking. 
• Dane and his colleagues found that the thinking style itself mattered less than whether it’s what you typically use.
• Normally intuitive thinkers came up with more creative ideas when they tried rational thinking.

Creativity is an essential ingredient in problem-solving, and the importance of “thinking outside the box” has been stressed in nearly every context imaginable, business or otherwise. But that mantra assumes — wrongly — that we all start off thinking inside the same sort of cognitive box.

Instead, each person has a distinctive cognitive style: Some of us, for example, are more intuitive, and others approach the world more rationally. What happens to creativity when those who use a particular thinking style tried a different approach? 

Former Rice Business Professor Erik Dane decided to investigate. Along with colleagues Markus Baer of Washington University in St. Louis, Michael Pratt of Boston College, and Greg Oldham of Tulane University, Dane studied typical thinking styles, rational versus and intuitive, and how resisting the most familiar one can affect creativity.

Rational thinkers, the professors noted, learn information deliberately and engage in thoughtful analysis. They depend on a linear, or sequential, way of processing information. Intuitive thinking, meanwhile, is an unconscious way of processing information. It’s essentially the opposite of rational thinking: quick and holistic, rather than deliberate and comprehensive.

When a rational thinker faces a problem, her mind goes through multiple stages, tapping relevant mental data bases and coming up with alternative solutions. Her mind evaluates and refines these scenarios to choose the best possible solution to the problem.

An intuitive thinker, on the other hand, goes with his gut. Many researchers believe this type of thinking sparks creativity because it integrates so many different pieces of experience.

To explore what happens when one type of thinker follows a different approach, Dane and his fellow research colleagues gave test subjects a scenario. How could they get more students to come into a gift shop? Participants first had to come up with ideas using either an intuitive or a rational problem-solving approach. Then they filled out a short questionnaire. Afterward, the professors evaluated the ideas as creative or not creative, based on originality and usefulness.

When a participant wasn’t used to rational thinking and had to problem-solve using a more rational approach, he or she came up with more creative ideas, the researchers found. This, the researchers said, suggests it’s worth encouraging intuitive thinkers to change up their problem-solving style to come up with new ideas.

Curiously, it’s relatively easy to influence a person’s cognitive approach to a problem, the researchers found. At the same time, the research didn’t suggest that either approach — rational or intuitive thinking — was inherently better than the other. In fact, they wrote, future research on the topic ought to analyze what happens when subjects are encouraged to take a hybrid rational-intuitive approach.

In the meantime, whether you’re trying to lure customers to your new coffee shop, or figuring out the best ending to your crime novel, try attacking the problem with the thinking style that’s least familiar to you. To truly think outside the box, the first thing to do is peer over the side to see what style of thinking most often boxes you in.

Erik Dane is a former professor and was the distinguished associate professor of management (Organizational Behavior) at the Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University.

To learn more, please see: Dane, E., Baer, M., Pratt, M. G., & Oldham, G. R. (2011). Rational Versus Intuitive Problem Solving: How thinking ‘off the beaten path’ can stimulate creativity. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 5(1), 3-12.

By Mary Lee Grant

I am punching the bags at the Kingsville Boxing Club in Deep South Texas, the only Anglo and the only woman in the gym. It is a place of aspiration, a mix of professional boxers who make between $2,000 and $10,000 a fight, amateurs hoping to enter the big leagues and guys who drop by after work to punch the bags. Outside, the heat index is 107. Inside this abandoned tortilla factory with only two narrow windows and no air conditioning, it feels much hotter. Sweat drips into my eyes as I hit the heavy black bags with plastic Everlast gloves, slick with perspiration. The deep voice of salsa singer Celia Cruz resonates from crackly speakers though the cavernous old building.

The tattooed, muscled chests of the men moving next to me gleam as they grunt and grimace with every punch. Sweat gathers on the floor in pools that the boxers take turns mopping up. A sign reminds us: “Don’t spit on the floor.”

I have been practicing boxing at this mainly Mexican-American gym for two hours every day for the past year. Along the way, I have become close to men from both sides of the border, men who are boxing their way to a future they hope will bring them money and fame.

Mexican men may be the most maligned denizens of Trump’s America. Yet as I found myself growing ever more intimate with this group of macho athletes, I noticed qualities in them that the white men who are so quick to criticize might envy.

Watching them flex before the mirror, one throwing a glittery rosary around a neck, another perching a baseball cap at a studied sideways angle, I am reminded of the visual poverty that dominates the lives of most white men I know. I should point out that I am white and love many white men, so this is said with no ire. It is simply an observation, the musings of a woman who grew up as a minority in South Texas and watches with interest the differences between my own Anglo culture and the predominantly Mexican-American culture that formed me.

Unlike these vatos, white American men find few chances to relish their masculine beauty. Much ink has been spent on the rage of white men — school shooters, incels, suicides. Could white men be so angry in part because our society does not allow them the full expression of their masculinity?

We live in a society that says macho is toxic; some of its manifestations are so, profoundly. But perhaps our rules for masculinity are too limited. The result is a culturally enforced lack of style, panache and even physical grace, relentlessly mocked in popular culture from movies like “White Men Can’t Jump,” to country music, with songs like “If Bubba Can Dance, I Can Too,” and “Barney Jekyll & Bubba Hyde.”

Here at this border gym, I see something very different. I spend much of my time with men whose focus is the brute display of masculine power, who feel it is their calling to be warriors. And the anger and resentment against women that so often rears its head in the white professional world is absent here. Perhaps this arises in part because in the traditionally masculine fields in which many of them work — refineries, construction — women offer little competition. Unlike incels, who insist women must have the bodies of virginal 12-year-olds, these men enjoy women in their infinite variety. If the men at this gym have a problem with women, it is not that they hold them to impossible standards, but that they find too many of us attractive. I can’t help but wonder if their openness towards female beauty springs in part from embracing their own. 

I am curious about what white men, constrained still by old Puritan ideals about excess and adornment in dress, might learn from Latino men, who come from a different strain of men’s style, one informed by the breezes of the Mediterranean. It is a sensibility shared by other men with cultures rooted in southern Europe, perhaps most flamboyantly Cretans, with their bandoliers, chapeaus, and styled moustaches. Perhaps if white men incorporated a bit of Latino style into their look, swag could become an everyday affair rather than an anomaly, a glass of wine with dinner instead of a drunken binge. 

I see this style in the pride these boxers take in their bodies as well as their clothes. These are men who work out nine hours a day, jumping rope for an hour, running five miles twice a day, doing 100 sit-ups and a hundred pushups each day. And at a time when obesity rates are increasing among Americans, research has shown that overweight men face far more discrimination than those who aren’t obese.

In a study by Rice Business professor Mikki Hebl, overweight men were more likely to face casual discrimination than leaner men, both when shopping, and when serving as clerks at retail outlets. While past research has focused more on women and weight, it turns out that obesity affects how men are treated too.

“There is no doubt that I have self-confidence,” pro boxer Anthony Navarro told me. Like all professional boxers, Navarro watches his weight carefully so he doesn’t have to jump up to a higher weight class and fight bigger guys. He even sweats off final pounds in a sauna so he can make weight before a big bout. Navarro combines this body consciousness with a styled casual look, distinguished by bald head, tattooed backward baseball cap, white shirt, baggy jeans and Gangsta Nikes. 

“Sometimes I see a really preppy white guy and I think, ‘That looks good. I could wear that,’” Navarro said. “But I notice they don’t wear as much jewelry and I really enjoy my jewelry. I got my ears pierced really young, just like my father. I wear gold chains. I have a black and silver rosary I really like. Sometimes, I wear it into the ring.”

The world of Latino boxing is one of grit, flash and corazon, or heart. Each boxer has a boxing persona, often correlating with his ethnic identity or nationality. One may walk out to fight in a sequined sombrero, another in Mexican flag shorts, accompanied by traditional Mexican tunes like Vicente Fernandez’s “El Palenque."

Their ring names exemplify hyped-up masculinity. I know three different men with rooster names: El Gallo Negro, El Gallo Giro, and El Gallo Fino. For all of them, the glitz and toughness of the boxing world carry over into their daily style. Outside the gym, for example, boxer “Toro” Herrera De La Paz sports a variety of looks, from fancy suit with green tie and matching green vest, to a sleeveless Lakers shirt showing his toned, arms paired with a blue and white rosary and blue and white cap. “I think it is all about having brown pride on you,” De La Paz said.

And while white men complain of feeling oppressed and aggrieved by American society, these men, who work as custodians, nursing home aides and ditch diggers, look at their own reflection with pride. In the tradition of Charles Atlas, transforming himself from a scrawny weakling into a muscle man, they stand with confidence, despite — maybe inspired by — having sand constantly kicked in their face by the dominant society.

A big part of this style, several boxers told me, is not physical prowess but attitude. “My grandmother always told me I have too much pride, because I don’t back down, but I think that is also part of the way you carry yourself,” said “Baby Jesus” Moreno who works out occasionally at the gym. “My main advice to white men is to relax. They don’t seem to feel at ease with themselves. You know, comfortable in their own skins. Also they might consider more bling.”

With all the talk of style, it may seem strange that carrying a baby is considered an excellent look by these men. But children play a key role at this boxing gym, crawling in and out of the ring, hanging on the ropes and watching their dads spar. Professional boxer Omar Rojas said he has been taking his son into the ring since he began to crawl, keeping an eye on him while he practices. Little girls in pink dresses with bows in their hair run between the punching bags, occasionally pounding them alongside the toughest of men. I have often seen these guys, with their hands wrapped, ready to put on boxing gloves, carrying a toddler out of harm’s way.

This comfort with the presence of children is not, of course, exclusive to Latino culture. But Latino tradition may encourage it. Navarro said his love of kids in no way counteracts his tough image. “If anything, I am more macho with a child in my arms,” he said. “Having children changed my life and turned me away from the streets. The most important thing for me is to be a role model to the little ones, both my own children and others. Plus, you know if they are here at the gym with us, they aren’t getting into trouble.” (Journalist Claudia Kolker addresses children in public life in the Latin American plaza in her book, The Immigrant Advantage: What We Can Learn from Newcomers to America about Health, Happiness and Hope.)

Spending much of my life as a journalist on the border, I have observed the daily horrors of machismo as I compiled the police blotter in hardscrabble towns whose names no one north of Corpus Christi would recognize. “Subject threw multiple unopened cans of Bud Light at female victim's face, then pushed her backward off porch. Subject said he was acting in self-defense. Victim transported to hospital. Victim chose not to press charges at this time.” It is no accident that many Latinas prefer to date and marry white men. Yet these boxers have shown me another side of Mexican masculinity. On these arid South Texas plains, I see displayed valor and dreams of glory worthy of a Cervantes hero.

And although a recommendation of “more bling” might seem a superficial solution to the existential crisis some white men face, perhaps the seemingly superficial can act transformatively. Actions seem to follow feeling, William James famously wrote, but actually the two are intertwined. “By regulating the action, which is under the direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not. Thus the sovereign path to cheerfulness, if our cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there.”

Or as 12-step programs would have it, “fake it 'til you make it.” Maybe white men can imitate Latino style until they internalize it. Then Mexican macho swag will become as American as fajitas and breakfast tacos. 

Mary Lee Grant has a degree in history from Yale University and a PhD from Texas A&M University, specializing in Mexican-American history and gender history.

Based on research by Duane Windsor 

Key findings:

• Clearer concepts of corporate social responsibility and irresponsibility would make it easier to measure whether companies are meeting ethical standards.
• Establishing a reliable method of evaluating corporate social responsibility could lead to more consistent business practices worldwide.
• Crafting a new approach that’s both theoretical and practical could pave the way for improving corporate responsibility worldwide.

What’s the definition of a fair wage? What obligation do corporations have to protect the environment — or to maintain human rights? The answer depends on who you ask. 

Corporate social responsibility and irresponsibility are nettlesome, ambiguous concepts — and nearly impossible to enforce. The literature about both currently spans several disciplines, forming a patchwork of principles. And this theoretical chaos poses a serious practical problem, both for corporations and for the countries where they do business. Consumers may suffer most of all.

But what if someone devised a formula for evaluating good business practices — one that could pave the way for consistency in corporate social responsibility across the globe?

Rice Business professor Duane Windsor resolved to try. In a recent paper, he tapped institutional theory, international policy regime theory, stakeholder theory and theories of how firms operate. He brought them all together with one overarching assumption: that people all over the world want better lives for themselves and their families. 

To understand what role corporations could — and should — play in helping to maintain and improve the lives of stakeholders (and non-stakeholders), Windsor looked at the way theory and experience influence each other in the workplace. Secondly, he analyzed the ways persuasion and negotiation can encourage social responsibility and still allow for progress. This could involve UN and EU sponsorships that directly address such corporate policy issues as fighting corruption, promoting environmental protection, supporting human rights and developing and maintaining industry standards. 

Pairing logical analysis with a review of the literature, Windsor articulated 19 specific points that could be tested, such as a firm’s performance outcome, the well-being of shareholders and non-shareholders and overall social welfare in the communities that corporations serve.  

Since corporate social responsibility is currently evaluated across a variety of disciplines, specific conceptual boundaries could make good practices easier to identify — and to enforce. A consistent set of guidelines would also shape legal and ethical standards for public policy and business practices. 

But these boundaries can only be created through a consensus between nations and corporations. And that can only take place with steady scholarship, persuasion and negotiation, Windsor says.

Windsor’s vision for consistent corporate social responsibility wouldn’t require strict regulations carved into stone tablets. Instead, he argues, participants need to strike a balance between high ethical standards and the freedom for companies to grow — and allow room for standards to evolve over time. This is crucial, he says, since lasting success depends on balancing corporate social responsibility and an environment where companies can flourish and succeed. 

An international standard of corporate responsibility would not only help businesses interact better with each other and the governments that oversee them, but, ideally, would increase transparency and improve quality of life around the world. 

A consistent framework alone won’t make this happen — it will also take a commitment to meaningful enforcement by company leaders and government officials. But it would help if they could all start out on the same page. 

Windsor, D. “Corporate Social Responsibility and Irresponsibility: A Positive Theory Approach.” Journal of Business Research 66 (2013): 1937–1944.

Based on research by Jing Zhou and Inga J. Hoever

Key findings:

• Creativity is the lifeblood of modern business — the spark behind innovative ideas.
• Today’s managers have a mandate to cultivate creativity in their workforce.
• Managers can nurture creativity, even in workers who appear less creative, by building a supportive environment. 

Give a kid a toy car, a stuffed bear, or an armful of blocks, and she is off on an imaginative romp, staging epic battles, building palaces or creating new worlds.

Coaxing creativity from adults is more challenging. But if creativity in children develops their spirits, creativity in adults enriches productivity — especially at the office.

It’s simple math. Creativity is where ideas come from; ideas form the basis for innovation. In an increasingly competitive world economy, it’s innovation that allows businesses to survive and thrive. This makes creativity a prized commodity in the job market. For managers, cultivating creativity in their workforce is a crucial professional skill.

Identifying the best circumstances to make creativity bloom is one of the driving questions in a study by Rice Business Professor Jing Zhou and colleague Inga J. Hoever, a professor at the Barcelona School of Management in Spain.

To explore the mystery of creativity, the two scholars first reviewed the hefty body of research by organizational psychologists and management scholars who’ve studied innovation in employees and teams. Most early research in this field, published since 2000, focused on the creativity of the actor — the individual or the team — or else revolved around the work environment.

Current academic research takes a more holistic look. By studying the interaction between the character traits of the worker or the team, the leader or the supervisor, and the prevailing atmosphere at the workplace, researchers are unveiling new insights.

Studies show, for example, that the benefits of benevolent leadership expand when workers recognize creativity as an important component of their role. Not only that, creativity is highest in employees who experience high levels of both positive and negative moods and feel supported by their supervisors. Other research finds that leaders who empower their workers get a greater payback in creativity.

To explore these findings further, Zhou and Hoever developed a typology that sorts out research about workplace creativity based on interactions between the worker (which they call the “actor”) and the workplace (which they call “context”).

The best-case scenario is a positive actor in a positive context, a mix that is synergistic for creativity. Worst case: When a positive actor languishes in a negative context or, similarly, when a negative actor stews in a positive context. At the extreme end of possibility, a negative actor in a negative context is downright antagonistic to creativity, Zhou and Hoever found.

There’s one final type of employee-workplace interaction: the “configurational” experience, which includes factors that are neutral in shaping creativity, but, when combined with other factors, cause a kind of chemical reaction that boosts or blocks creativity.

Zhou’s research serves up some bad news and good news for managers. Choosing and hiring employees who are creative is not enough, it turns out. If your workplace is discouraging, creativity will wither in almost anyone. On the brighter side, cultivate a nurturing environment and creative tendrils may sprout even in the most no-nonsense workers. Best of all, good managers can build a nurturing greenhouse environment. Practically speaking, it means that companies can and should train supervisors to cultivate creativity in their management choices.

Plenty of research gaps remain, however. To fill them, Zhou has outlined an ambitious agenda for future research, including a close look at the impact of workplaces on collective creativity; exploring as-yet unidentified factors in workers and work settings that spark creative thinking; and seeking ways to vanquish the effects of unsupportive environments.

Making creativity happen at work, in other words, isn’t child’s play.

Zhou, Jing, and Hoever, Inga J. “Research on Workplace Creativity: A Review and Redirection.” Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior 1 (2014): 333-59.

By Thomas Kolditz, founding Director of the Ann and John Doerr Institute for New Leaders.

This op-ed origianlly appeared on The Hill.

To leadership experts, Donald Trump has never been a particularly interesting exemplar. He mostly manages with coercive power — fear — and such a leadership style is all too common in formally appointed business leaders.

In addition to being common, the outcomes are predictable. Early research in leadership, by classic researchers John French and Bertram Raven in the 1950s, predicts that fear-based leadership leads to high levels of outward compliance but low levels of follower loyalty.

In other words, people who work for a leader like President Trump will do what he wants if they are vulnerable to him, but tend to be disloyal when not under his direct influence. This is why formerly loyal associates like Michael Cohen are willing to flip when confronted with something worse than the president’s wrath — namely jail time.

We can expect much more of that behavior as others leave the White House, particularly if they are indicted. It’s predictable and common, and uninteresting from a leadership perspective.

The recent anonymous op-ed in the New York Times, indicating significant disloyalty and undercutting of the president by his senior staff is interesting, even if it is also somewhat predictable.

The majority of the American people, that majority that did not support President Trump, are experiencing considerable angst over perceptions of disarray in the West Wing.

The anonymous op-ed writer clearly intended to put some of us at ease by revealing hard work (if surreptitious work) by the president’s staff to avert major disasters.

Given the president’s coercive style and his lack of familiarity with the workings of the government, it is not surprising that senior staff members are focused more on their constitutional obligations than on blind obedience to the president. That one of them anonymously reported this to the people of the United States seems almost expected.

What becomes much more interesting to leadership experts, however, and should be of interest to every American, is what happens now? What is the probable effect of having a group of dissenters in the White House staff?

Earlier research published in the Academy of Management Journal in 2012 and 2014 by Burris & Associates forewarns a pessimistic and dangerous reaction by a leader in President Trump’s circumstances. The work centers on leaders who are ego-defensive and challenged by subordinates.

The research suggests three distinct reactions by President Trump, all of which are disastrous for his ability to lead. First, he is likely to identify his staff as less competent and to listen to them less than before being challenged by the op-ed.

The opposite would be true for those he knows for sure are loyal — but exactly who might those people be? Thus, for those who are worried that President Trump tends not to listen to staff, hold onto your hats, it is likely to get much worse.

Second, the research would predict that the op-ed would trigger ego defensiveness because the letter is an unquestionable threat to the president’s self-image. This defensive stance will cause an increase in the president’s tendency to denigrate people, especially people with suggestions counter to his.

Such ego protective behavior will manifest in a near paranoid suspicion of other around him — something already apparent in his personality.

Lastly, the research strongly suggests that staff who are subjected to such treatment will partially (or perhaps entirely) shut down.

Almost certainly there will be a marked decrease in constructive dialogue around the president, and there is likely to be a decrease in the constructive dialogue among the White House staff themselves, given the risk of an unwanted idea being proffered to the president.

President Trump has now become an interesting leadership exemplar. The existing leadership literature clearly predicts a rapid, dramatic increase in many of the negative presidential leadership qualities and outcomes highlighted recently in books by Bob Woodward and Omarosa Manigault Newman.

Time will tell, but the unfolding of the story should now have the attention of everyone who believes that leadership based on character rather than coercion is an essential quality in the leader of the free world.

Tom Kolditz is the founding director of the Ann and John Doerr Institute for New Leaders at Rice University. 

Like many Houston arts organizations after Hurricane Harvey, Mildred’s Umbrella, a women-centered theater company, struggled through months of fund-raising and rent-induced financial stress. For Jennifer Decker, Mildred’s founder and artistic director, producing shows had become less like art and more like toiling on an assembly line as they raced to keep ahead of bills. Finally, Decker had to face the question: Should she try to keep up with the frantic pace of a traditional theater company – or step away from the conveyor belt and remake Mildred into something smaller, nimbler – different? 

Most of us, including artists, prefer our drama onstage rather than in real life. But disasters such as flood, fire and personal adversity are inevitable, forcing artists and arts groups to perform without a guiding script or score. And an unscripted future can sometimes lead to occasional, magnificent, second acts.

Rice Business professor Otilia Obodaru is an expert on liminal experiences at work: those uncertain periods of transition between careers and roles. While these times naturally fuel anxiety, she said, they may lead to greater identity growth and self-discovery. For artists, especially, this can be a breakthrough.

“The key advice about how to use liminality,” Obodaru said, “is to deliberately engage in identity play, to see the liminal period as a time to experiment with possibilities and to do exactly that — try on a variety of what my research co-author Herminia Ibarra calls ‘provisional selves.’ You see how you feel when you are trying to be that kind of person.”

This process helped transform one of Texas’ most innovative theater companies, the Rude Mechs. For almost two decades, the group created and performed new works while participating in community outreach from their East Austin performance warehouse, the Off Center. Then their landlords, the University of Texas, raised the rent 300 percent and the Mechs had no option but to leave. They were faced with the choice of giving up or experimenting with a different identity.

They chose the latter. Settling temporarily in the old Austin American-Statesman warehouse, they had to come to terms with semi-homelessness. Then they went further and embraced uncertainty, announcing crushAustin, an experimental period of new work and initiatives in alternative venues across the city. 

“The work is lean. A lot of it fits in a suitcase or an app,” co-artistic director Kirk Lynn said. “The primary tools are minds and bodies and dreams and early mornings and bad attitudes and a lot of love.” 

In Houston, theater director Decker made a similar external change. She ended the long-term lease of Mildred’s home near the Houston Heights and moved it to short-term rented theater space. Then, to salvage the group’s creative integrity, she quit the assembly-line approach and shifted from four full productions to two. 

“It will be tremendously productive creatively, because we’ll have time between the productions to really dig into the art,” Decker said. “It will allow me to participate more often myself as an artist, the reason I was drawn to theater in the first place, and it will give us more time to plan and collaborate as a group.”
 
Dallas dance company Bruce Wood Theater had to find its way through a different sort of liminal fog. In 2014, just three weeks before the world premiere of its new work Touch, founding choreographer Bruce Wood died. Without their visionary leader, the dance company had to choose whether to die as an organization — or be reborn.

“We went forward ‘Bruce-style,’ as we called it,” executive director Gayle Halperin said. In his last years, Wood carefully mentored protégés and emerging choreographers. Since his death, the group has focused on furthering that mission, commissioning new works and cultivating choreographers from within.

According to Obodaru, this reinvention process is akin to the strange, sometimes awkward experience of trying on piles of unfamiliar clothes. “See how they look on you, whether they fit, and how other people react when seeing you in these new clothes,” she said. “Allow yourself to try on things you would have never considered before, precisely because the point is to experiment.”

Rebecca French, founder of FrenetiCore multimedia dance theater and the Houston Fringe Festival, is another artist who faced disruption, in this case from within her nonprofit. Her decision: moving on.

As the founder, she was told in 2016 that she had the option of dismissing the entire board and staff and keeping the nonprofit. But because she wanted to see the Fringe Festival continue, she chose to walk away. 

Two years later, French has found the she is creating as many new projects and championing as many artists as she always did, but now sees a once-frightening future as filled with possibility.

“There were certain risks that I didn't feel comfortable taking as the head of my former nonprofit because certain stakeholders might not approve,” she said. “Stepping away has allowed me to have complete control over each project that I choose to create.” 

Tarra Gaines is a Rice Business Wisdom guest contributor.

A version of this article first appeared in Arts And Culture Texas as "Second Chapters: Texas Artist Navigates Change." 

Based on research by Duane Windsor 

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• Virtuous behavior doesn’t necessarily conflict with rational self-interest and stakeholder wellbeing, Windsor finds. 
• A near-universal principle of ethics is to do no harm without an acceptable moral justification, which could be a basic premise for businesses. 
• Businesses should only be willing to cause harm if it can be justified in narrow circumstances, such as in legitimate competition that might harm a rival firm.

Flames filled the air and the saltwater licked fire as thick, hot oil spread through the Gulf of Mexico. The Deepwater Horizon explosion killed 11 people and resulted in incalculable environmental damage. In the aftermath, government agencies found British Petroleum responsible for one of the worst offshore disasters in history, arguably the result of corporate cost-cutting and inadequate safety precautions.

How do tragedies like Deepwater Horizon fit with the popular idea that firms are the best police for their own industries? Is there even such a thing as a foundation for business ethics – one on which most people would agree?

Rice Business professor Duane Windsor set out to define such a foundation, arguing that virtuous behavior in the business world does not necessarily conflict with rational self-interest and stakeholder wellbeing. Such an ethical foundation could even function in fields where scarcity often predominates and players must fight for advantage, Windsor argues.

Sound business ethics can be based in a variety of philosophical and spiritual systems, according to Windsor. Many religions, including Islam and Judaism, explicitly promote business ethics. Philosopher Immanuel Kant argued that an act is not right or wrong because of its consequences, but based on whether it fulfills the supreme moral duty he labeled the Categorical Imperative.

Virtue theory takes a different approach, arguing that character, rather than duty, should underpin human actions. And utilitarianism maintains that actions are right if they lend themselves to the greater good of the majority.

What about in the workplace, though? Can a moral science for business really spring from a universal foundation? And can such a foundation be non-controversial and coexist with the assumption that managers act rationally for self-interest?

In each of the theories mentioned above, a fundamental ethical principle is to do no harm without an acceptable moral justification. A moral science of business ethics should proceed from this simple premise, which is nearly universally agreed upon, Windsor argues.

At the same time, many business decisions obviously cause harm to someone: competitors, dismissed employees, or out-negotiated suppliers. These decisions are not necessarily morally wrong, though, if they can be justified and if they are accepted or regulated by the political community. Even so, the question remains: Is economic rationality compatible, or by nature antithetical, to business ethics?

 Adam Smith advocated for separating business from morality, praising self-interest and scoffing at those who affected to act in the public interest. In Smith’s view, competition would regulate self-interest, courtesy of the market’s famous invisible hand. Modern businesspeople who oppose ethically-based business education still agree, arguing that markets are self-correcting and that voluntary self-regulation is sufficient.

The AACSB, the main accrediting group for American business schools, takes a different position, maintaining that ethics, social responsibility and sustainability should play a pivotal role in business school curricula. Nevertheless, the AACSB does not promote discussion of how uniformly to implement these standards. Instead, a technical or scientific approach – one that emphasizes economics and psychology – has shaped business school ethics in the United States.

And some in the business world actually object to the teaching of business ethics, calling the endeavor quixotic. Moral values, they argue, are subjective, and conventional business ethics tends to simply fuel self-serving rationalization. Some in this school of thought argue that the sole purpose of business is to maximize wealth for owners.

Cultural relativism also stymies ethics education for students of international business, since what’s ethical in one country may be downright criminal in another.

Windsor takes a very different view. American firms should adopt a principled basis of operation, he argues, and refuse to cause unjustified harm. Although arguments can be made about what constitutes harm and whether some forms of harm are acceptable, some types of harm should not be acceptable in any industry.

All firms, Windsor argues, should avoid practices that lead to direct harm. But harm may not always be as direct as an oil spill. The so-called Vitamin Cartels that wreaked havoc on pricing during the 1990s show how monopolization can harm consumers, while AT&T has been fined for deception and fraud in communications transmission.

None of these acts of harm, Windsor says, can be justified. Instead, he writes, American business leaders need to concern themselves with moral leadership and social responsibility. In his view, the primary job of business is to create social good. That principle means protecting the wellbeing of the organization, its employees, its customers – and the world around them.

Duane Windsor is the Lynette S. Autrey Professor of Management and Strategic Management at Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University.

To learn more, please see: Windsor, D. (2016). “Economic Rationality and a Moral Science of Business Ethics.” Philosophy of Management, 15, 135-149.

This paper, presented at the 2015 Philosophy of Management Conference at St. Anne’s College, University of Oxford, was recognized as the best paper of the conference.

Illustrated by Nick Anderson. Based on research by Alexander W. Butler.

Sports, parties, friendship — there's so much to savor about college memories. For CEOs who graduated from the same schools as board members, there's even more to savor: better chance of a pay raise. The nostalgia is not quite so fun for leaders who don't share those school ties. Rice Business professor Alexander W. Butler explains the business perks of belonging to the alumni club. Cartoonist Nick Anderson shows a glimpse of the playing field.

Alexander W. Butler is a professor of finance at Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University.

Nick Anderson is a Pultizer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.