By Rick Schell 

We’ve all witnessed variations on the scene: the embattled press secretary shrinking behind a podium, the corporate spokesperson issuing a feeble “no comment,” the business presenter fumbling to answer a difficult question.

Whether it’s politics or business, your success will depend at least in part on how well you plan and manage the question-and-answer period. You can’t plan the questions, but you can prepare to answer them well. The following public relations principles can help.

Get Your Idea Across

• Anticipate likely questions, especially the hard ones: Know your audience. Learn their level of knowledge, their experiences and their expectations. Brainstorm the questions they’re most likely to ask, and focus on the hardest of them so you can answer confidently.
• Rehearse your answers to the toughest questions: Know your key messages. For each of the hardest questions, write a clear, concise answer that reinforces your main message(s). When you’re satisfied with your response, practice saying it until it flows, sounding natural and unrehearsed. Give it a trial run in front of a colleague who understands your issue and your audience and can tell you how they will likely respond.
• Engage with the questioner: Listen and observe. When an audience member begins his or her question, square up and make strong eye contact. Your body language must reflect focused, respectful attention. Listen carefully, especially to the questioner’s volume and tone and his or her body language: eye contact, movement, signs of irritation or stress.
• Seek clarity: Be on point. Since many audience members compose their questions while they ask them, Q and A questions often are vague, extremely broad or simply rambling. If any aspect of a question is unclear, rephrase the question as you understand it or ask your questioner to do so. Then give one of your prepared responses or a variation that reinforces your key messages.

Name That (Hostile) Question

Don’t get trapped. Some questions are not meant to extend the dialogue but to challenge the information you’ve presented, undermine your credibility or hijack your agenda by introducing extraneous issues. Below are examples of a few types of hostile questions.

• The False Dilemma: These questions attempt to force you to accept one of two extreme (and usually undesirable) alternatives: “Are your revenues down because of poor sales performance or because of ongoing product quality problems?” Both choices may be incorrect and both are extremely negative.
• The Empty Chair: A questioner may invoke someone who is not present and whose opinion is unknown or irrelevant: “What would your CEO say about this situation?” Even if well intended, these questions can throw the presentation completely off track.
• The Hypothetical: These questions force you to speculate, often unwisely or inappropriately: “What action will you take if the unemployment rate reaches 15 percent?” Since so many other (unknown) things would have to take place before this could occur, trying to respond can introduce lots of extraneous and potentially negative topics.
• The False Premise: These questions force you to accept an underlying assumption that may or may not be true: “When will you announce the next round of layoffs?” The question assumes that there will indeed be future layoffs, so you will (unwittingly) confirm that if you attempt to answer it.
• The Forced Absolute: Trying to refute a question based on a false premise can often prompt a follow-up question: “So, there’s no condition under which you’d have another layoff?” Obviously, you never want to say never on an issue like that, but responding to questions that have a forced absolute may force you into doing so.
• The Slippery Slope: These questions assume that an action will inevitably lead to a disastrous conclusion: “If you hire contractors for this business function, won’t that lead to outsourcing your whole business operation?” There’s simply no way to refute the hypothetical domino effect that this question posits.
• The Ad Hominem: Ad hominem (literally “to the man”) questions focus not on the content of your message but on you as the messenger. In most cases they are not really questions but personal attacks, intended to throw you off balance and derail the discussion: “Why would we consider anything you’ve proposed?” You may be tempted to counter the implicit insult, but you won’t likely change this person’s attitude.
• The Ad Populum: Ad populum (literally “to the people”) questions appeal to the wisdom of the crowd: “How can you recommend XYZ when everybody knows that approach has never worked?” Responding that everybody does not know this simply initiates an argument.

Managing Unfriendly Questions

Sometimes the tone or structure of a question makes it clear that the questioner isn’t really interested in more information, but in undermining you and your position. When that is the case, here are some things to keep in mind.

• Stay professional and respectful: The first step in handling these sorts of questions is to keep calm, take a deep breath and listen carefully. Responding to emotion with emotion will escalate feelings. Also bear in mind that other, perhaps more important, audience members are watching how you respond. You may not win over a hostile questioner, but you will impress others with your professional demeanor.
• Establish clarity on your terms: Rather than rephrasing a question or asking the questioner to do so, take the initiative and ask your own clarifying questions: “Are you asking how we arrived at this recommendation? If so, let me describe our analysis process.”
• Don’t accept the premise of a hostile question. Reframe it: Many hostile questions have an implied premise, usually a false or misleading one: “What will keep you from repeating the mistakes your predecessor made when he took over your department?” The implicit premise is that your predecessor made serious mistakes. If you respond, “My predecessor did not make mistakes,” you have accepted that the topic is prior mistakes and helped dig your hole a bit deeper. Instead, reframe the question by focusing on the message you want to deliver: “Let me describe my key priorities and major initiatives going forward.” Rather than spiraling downward into a description of past decisions, you are free to provide a view of the future that you will create.

What If Clarifying And Reframing Don’t Work?

There are three things you can do when calmly seeking clarity and reframing do not work.

• Call out the questioner, gently: Ask a question like, “Can you help me understand how your question relates to our purpose here?”
• Call out the questioner, not so gently: Say calmly, “I don’t think we’re moving the dialogue forward. Let’s you and I talk after the presentation.”
• Know when further conversation is a waste of time, say so, and move on: Say again, calmly, “I need to move on to other questioners.”

And finally, some folk wisdom. Don’t get into a spraying contest with a skunk. And don’t try to teach a pig to sing—it doesn’t work, and it annoys the pig. Your audience will likely thank you.

Rick Schell is a former senior lecturer in management and communication at Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University, where taught leadership communication and consultative selling.

Based on research by G. Anthony Gorry (1941-2018) and Robert A. Westbrook

• The larger the business, the harder it is to listen to individual customers.
• But feedback can pinpoint crucial problems and successes. Both can improve your business.
• Chat with customers on social media to understand how they interact with your business. Then promote their stories to build the company culture you need.

Listen up. Pull your head out of the marketing data. Pay attention to your customers — then use their stories to build a successful, inventive business.

All entrepreneurs understand that a healthy business must know its customers. This means listening in order to address problems, and using customer feedback to innovate. It’s old-school business, and there still is no better way to boost market share.

For many companies, though, this is easier said than done. Small, owner-operated businesses traditionally deal with customers face to face, building their relationships one at a time. But for large, multi-national corporations with millions of consumers, it’s daunting to connect with enough of them to truly understand their experiences.

G. Anthony Gorry and Robert A. Westbrook, both professors at the Rice Business, looked at the way large corporations attend to their customers’ stories and use them, if at all, to create a company culture.

A big company’s standard procedure, of course, would be to analyze quantitative data to craft a sort of paint-by-numbers portrait of its customers. But individual voices can get lost in this quantity of information. And customer feedback — individual voices on a macro scale — is where the most valuable marketing information lies, Gorry and Westbrook argue. Go beyond the data, they urge large companies, and listen to individual customers again.

The idea is not merely to respond to customer complaints. It’s also to find the kind of tales that can inspire others. And it works. Several leading companies are already doing this, Gorry and Westbrook write, tapping people’s innate taste for stories in order to improve customer relations and fuel organizational creativity.

Storytelling, they argue, lies at the core of what makes us human. Narratives appeal to empathy, which in turn inspires us to act.

Companies such as Harley-Davidson, Kimberly Clark, Levi-Strauss and Ritz-Carlton are skilled at this, deliberately training employees to pass along out-of-the-ordinary tales that illustrate client needs and the power of attending to them. They’re the kind of stories colleagues might tell at a staff meal, like the one about the chef at Ritz-Carlton Bali, who flew in his mother-in-law from Singapore carrying specific ingredients so he could make a soothing meal for a sick client.

But getting employees to gather tales like this for work is tricky. Gorry and Westbrook came up with an approach companies can use for spotting and collecting useful stories.

First, senior managers need to know why they’re trying to learn more from customers. Maybe they’re trying to upgrade customer service. Maybe they want to improve a product. The clearer the intention, the better the questions they can ask. And, Gorry and Westbrook point out, there’s value in listening just to keep up with what customers are thinking and feeling.

Next, managers must choose where the listening will take place: a call-in center, sales, technical support or other point of contact.

Then they should decide who will take part in the project. The group that is gathering information should be big enough to glean a proper sample of customers, and small enough to train and manage.

The next challenge: how to collect the stories? It could be via management talking directly with customers. Or company employees might emulate ethnographers, gathering stories via conversations with customers on social media.

Finally, managers have to choose what stories to save, and what to do with them. Those answers depend on the answer to the first question: What is the purpose of the research in the first place?

When a business grows, so does its distance from customers. But there are ways to cross that gap, and it is well worth it, Gorry and Westbrook argue. “By truly caring about storytelling,” they write, “business leaders can better serve their customers and their companies.”

Ever since the first innkeeper served a traveler, service providers have amused each other with tales gleaned from their clients. These tales are even more valuable up in the C-suite, Gorry and Westbrook say. Gathered carefully, customer stories are the seeds of top service, visionary products and healthy company culture – which includes great conversations in the break room.

Tony Gorry was the Friedkin Professor Emeritus of Management and Robert A. Westbrook is the William Alexander Kirkland Professor of Marketing at Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University.

To learn more, please see: Gorry, G. A. & Westbrook, R. A. (2011). Can you hear me now? Learning from customer stories. Business Horizons, 54(6), 575-584.

Dustin Windham ('15) lived in Azerbaijan during his time in the U.S. Peace Corps and ate unprocessed and cooked-from-scratch food. It changed the way his body functioned and felt. And it inspired him to provide Houstonians with the same experience.

His startup, Grit Grocery, was born in the business school while Dustin was an MBA for Professionals student. Grit is a neighborhood grocery on wheels that is changing the food landscape in Houston. Focused on local, natural and unprocessed goods, it sells in urban neighborhoods around the city and is committed to bringing the best of the farm back to the block.

Big box groceries have become dependent on processed goods and conveyance in place of connection with community. Grit Grocery wants to change that and revive the centuries-old tradition of building community around food. Today he envisions a fleet of Grit Grocery mobile units operating in neighborhoods throughout the metro-area to address the current gaps in today’s grocery industry.

A native Houstonian and Grit Grocery’s owner and operator, Dustin believes you can’t fake food. It’s either real or not, and your body always knows the difference.

“Grocery shopping outside the U.S. looks very different — neighborhood bakers and butchers across the street from fruit stands and flower shops; small store formats where you are greeted by name and get to know your neighbors. Processed goods are rare, because cooking is both sacred and celebrated.” Dustin Windham

This article originally appeared in Rice Business Magazine, Spring 2017.

By Vikas Mittal

According to a 2015 Consumer Reports survey, nearly 80% of consumers say they would rather buy an American-made product than an imported one, and 60% are willing to pay 10% more for it.

In his 2017 inaugural address, President Donald Trump vowed to “follow two simple rules: buy American, and hire American.” Organizations such as the Buy American Movement—which was founded on the premise of promoting American-made goods and services—are also gaining popularity.

But buying American is not just a matter of price and quality. Decades of research has identified four drivers of country-based branding: country branding, country animosity, consumer ethnocentrism and local identity. How can brand managers leverage these drivers to build on the “Buy American” movement?

1. Country Branding

A product’s country of origin is known to affect people’s opinions about the product. Consumers hold certain beliefs and associations about a country’s capabilities, its state of development and its relevant history. These associations can affect whether consumers view products associated with that country in a positive or negative light.

For example, a French wine’s association with France will likely lead us to the conclusion that it is of a higher quality than a wine from India. Likewise, Italy’s brand is associated with high fashion and quality clothing. These associations are rooted in our perceptions of countries’ brands, what they are known for and what they’re trusted for.

A broad analysis of 41 different country-of-origin studies shows this effect is most pronounced when it comes to consumers’ quality perceptions. For example, American consumers’ faith in the quality of products designed and assembled in the U.S. is generally higher than it is for products designed and assembled in other countries.

Consider the results of a 1998 study that assessed the impact of NAFTA: Consumers uniformly gave higher quality ratings to a TV they were told was designed in the U.S. than to a TV they were told was designed in Mexico.

Brand managers can define and highlight specific attributes of quality, reliability, design and innovation that are associated with the U.S. For example, many companies conduct quality and design work for their products in the U.S. but don’t highlight this phase of development to their customers. Doing so could help them capitalize on the U.S. national brand and increase perceived quality.

2. Country Animosity

Historical interactions between nations can promote and cement feelings of animosity—both economic and militaristic. For example, a study of Chinese consumers published in the Journal of Marketing shows that their animosity toward Japan negatively affects their evaluations and willingness to buy Japanese brands.

In another study, French consumers’ animosity toward the U.S. was shown to negatively influence French attitudes toward iconic American brands such as Kellogg, Heinz and Ford. A 2015 study shows that American consumers’ animosity toward Russia has led them to avoid many Russian products, irrespective of their judgements of product quality.

Animosity toward a country is a potent and often deep-seated emotion that can be difficult to reverse. Marketers should use consumer research to determine associations related to country animosity and carefully position their brand to minimize any negative effects. For example, Tiffany & Co. has had a strong presence in Russia since 2013 and in China since 2008. Yet within the U.S., Tiffany de-emphasizes its presence in both countries to avoid spillovers of country animosity.

3. Consumer Ethnocentrism

Consumer ethnocentrism is the belief that it is fair, appropriate and moral to buy products made in one’s own country because it supports domestic jobs and helps the economy. A higher level of ethnocentrism among American consumers motivates them to buy American because of a sense of fairness to American workers and a desire to promote the American economy.

To leverage ethnocentrism, brand managers should strategically link their brand to domestic jobs, to growth in the domestic economy and to a general sense of fairness. Consider foreign-based companies Toyota and Honda as examples: To capitalize on the ethnocentric tendencies of U.S. consumers, both companies have worked through difficult periods to successfully rebrand themselves as key producers of American jobs and as positive contributors to the American economy.

In fact, the top five vehicles in the 2016 American-Made Index by Cars.com were produced by Toyota and Honda, with Camry and Accord enjoying the top spots. Featuring this success prominently in their positioning and branding has helped Honda and Toyota dominate the U.S. market.

4. Local Identity

Consumers’ local identity is the extent to which they identify with their local community rather than the larger, global world. Forthcoming research in the Journal of Marketing shows that consumers with a strong local identity are more invested in local causes and are willing to pay more for locally sourced products.

Compared to ethnocentric consumers, consumers with a strong local identity are not necessarily motivated by the entire U.S. economy. Rather, they find local causes worth supporting—even if that means paying more for certain products and services. Thus, local identity operates at a local and regional level, while ethnocentrism operates at a national level.

Consider the 95 million-plus customers who shopped at neighborhood businesses for American Express-sponsored Small Business Saturday. That is not a small niche of well-intentioned consumers pursuing an obscure cause. That is a major movement driven by consumers’ strong commitment to local identity.

In addition to promoting their brand’s association with America at the country level, brand managers can highlight local aspects of their products. For example, Shinola proudly promotes its roots in Detroit and Ben & Jerry’s celebrates its association with Vermont. Brand managers can clearly associate their products with regional and local communities and attach their brands to causes that support and nurture this sense of local identity. The key is to stay local, even while selling nationally.

‘Buy American’ Branding: Start With Your Consumers

Leveraging the “Buy American” positioning will require managers to plan carefully. The planning process will start by surveying customers to bring greater clarity to important nuances: How much do customers care about local versus national causes? Is the customer base driven more by ethnocentrism, local identity or perhaps both? What are the different countries with which a brand is associated? How do customers feel about those countries? Do these countries impart a positive or negative spillover to the brand? If a brand is multinational, what perceptions do customers have about the different countries in which the brand has a presence?

A better understanding of these nuances—gained through customer surveys and critical observations—will provide a roadmap for brand managers to maximize the impact of “Buy American” positioning.

This article by Vikas Mittal, J. Hugh Liedtke Professor of Management in Marketing at Rice Business, is reprinted with permission from Marketing News April/May 2017.

Based on research by Scott Sonenshein, Utpal Dholakia and Michal Herzenstein (Delaware)

Key findings:

• Peer-to-peer lending online connects borrowers and lenders who have never met.
• Lenders on startup digital platforms typically assess traditional metrics like credit — and the often unverifiable narratives written by borrowers on open-text boxes.
• These narratives are surprisingly influential with lenders — and can be surprisingly accurate about borrowers.

Startup digital platforms have vastly changed the lending business. For better or worse, individuals can now secure personal loans without ever meeting a banker. Most often, lenders judge a borrower’s credit risk through traditional metrics, such as a credit score, and the less intuitive tool of a short, optional open-text field where a borrower can type anything that occurs to him or her.

With so little to go on, how does a retail investor decide if the exchange is worthwhile?

Scott Sonenshein and Utpal M. Dholakia, both professors at Rice Business, think that the open-text field plays a big role. In a recent study with University of Delaware colleague Michal Herzenstein they tested this theory, hypothesizing that borrower narratives shape several outcomes of personal loans.

Even when those narratives make totally unverifiable claims, the researchers argued, they still influence lender choices. This is because loan narratives give a glimpse into what a borrower believes himself or herself to be. Oddly, these beliefs seem to actually shape the borrowers’ future choices.

To test their theory, the researchers turned to the original and second largest peer-to-peer lending platform, Prosper Marketplace. Combing through a year of personal loan data, they found a portrait gallery’s worth of identity claims: trustworthiness, success, hard work, economic hardship, morality and religiousness. These self-crafted identities, the scholars found, affected loan funding. Not only that: Connotations linked to specific word choices statistically affected lending interest rates and repayment.

Borrowers who described themselves as trustworthy and successful were more likely to get loans. They also repaid these loans ahead of time and landed lower interest rates. On the other hand, claiming to be successful did not predict actually paying a loan back.

Self-applied labels of moral probity and economic hardship also correlated with loan repayment – but in opposite ways. Moral claims positively predicted loan repayment. Perhaps, the researchers speculated, a self-regulatory mechanism also drove these individuals to deliver.

Conversely, when an applicant told of economic hardship, it predicted a lower rate of loan repayment. Lenders often funded loans for these borrowers, but the borrowers often seemed to lack either the ability or willingness to pay them back.

Written or spoken, the researchers concluded, stories remain a powerful tool to get personal loans. Online, at least, these narratives even shape interest rates and performance. In the thinly regulated new world of digital peer-to-peer lending, thoughtful borrowers and lenders can both gain an edge by paying attention to stories. 

For borrowers, digitally crafting a responsible life story can make the difference in landing a loan. For lenders, a shrewd read of these stories can yield a treasure trove of clues about whom to trust.

Herzenstein, M., Sonenshein, S., & Dholakia, U.M. (2011). “Tell me a good story and I may lend you my money: the role of narratives in peer-to-peer lending decisions.” Journal of Marketing Research, 48(SPL): S138-S149. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmkr.48.SPL.S138. 

Based on research by Scott Sonenshein Otilia Obodaru (former Rice Business Professor) and Kristen Nault

• Competition is usually viewed as a ruthless battle to capture scarce resources. But in some cases, mutual interests inspire rivals to cooperate.
• Competing businesses can form strategic groups that maintain each company’s identity while acknowledging and upholding standards for collective benefit.
• These rivals cooperate to preserve the group’s overall reputation for excellence, and compete inwardly to best exemplify its core traits.

“Bury your competition,” former GE CEO Jack Welch famously told aspiring business leaders. A generation of executives accordingly set forth to do business with instructions fit for a Viking. In an existential battle for market share, Welch taught, only those willing to “steal their employees” or “steal their salespeople” would survive. Business schools advanced this gospel, developing theories with firms categorized as “attackers” or “defenders.” No one, though, delivered the manifesto to food-truck owners–entrepreneurs on wheels who are both changing the way we eat and rewriting the rules of competition.

When current Rice Business school professor Scott Sonenshein and former Rice Business professor Otilia Obodaru joined research analyst Kristen Nault in a study of food trucks in a major Southern city, they found a surprise. The food trucks operated in a business environment where would-be competitors not only welcomed newcomers, but actively supported one another. Doing so, the professors discovered, wasn’t merely an ethos of one or two angelic individuals. It was embedded in the group’s DNA. The members had crafted a strategic group identity, one that shaped both its competitive and cooperative behaviors.

When competition did occur, the researchers found, members competed to be the best in the group rather than over resources.

Food trucks are the fastest growing sector within the restaurant industry, generating approximately $850 million in revenue in 2015. It’s no longer unusual to read about emerging culinary stars who left more traditional corporate jobs to take up a life on wheels. In fact, 46 percent of the study’s informants had no prior experience in the broader food-services industry. Some first entered the food truck business because they lost their jobs in other fields such as education or information technology; others saw themselves as businesspeople seeking new ventures.

No matter how varied their backgrounds, all the food truck operators told the researchers they’d felt drawn to a collective identity, regularly referring to their peers as their “community.” Indeed, success seemed to demand this. In the food truck business, natural barriers to entry are such that without the group’s help, a newcomer probably won’t advance very far. Violate the taboos, and a would-be food truck operator may find herself shunned. These unwritten rules include a commitment to serving non-fast-food-quality fare and to keeping the trucks immaculate. “Trucks that are dirty…. That would be when you get kind of the cold shoulder,” one truck operator said.

Perhaps most distinctively, the group’s identity revolved around a belief that the market is a pie big enough for all. It’s pretty to think so, of course. But how well does this ideal actually translate into action? Overwhelmingly, it turns out. Buoyed by their sense of communal identity, members regularly help each other, even at a great cost to themselves.

Parking is a case in point. The scarcest resource for food truck operators, and one limited by laws of time, space and ordinance, parking could easily be a source of competitive secrecy and a flashpoint for conflict. Yet newcomers told the researchers that established operators “were more than willing” to help them secure parking permission in different locations. This generosity extended to ingredients and other resources as well. In a pinch, food truck owners often donated cooking or cleaning supplies to others who ran out. And everyone seemed to abide by the rule that if someone else got to a spot first, you drove to another location.

The trucks certainly competed with each other, but the rivalry had a unique flavor. Rather than trying to crush their rivals, members of the group competed to whip up the most mouth-watering foods, move through the city most nimbly or invent the most novel delicacy. By supporting any colleagues who embraced their core tenets, members protected local food trucks’ reputation as purveyors of some of the tastiest food in town.

They also crafted a business culture that needn’t be restricted to food. A group commitment to decency, cooperation and industry excellence, the truck operators have found, naturally leads to higher demand and innovation. And with inventions like the Korean taco, it’s not just the vendors who win.

Scott Sonenshein is the Henry Gardiner Symonds Professor of Management

Otila Obodaru is a former assistant professor of management at Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University. Kristen Nault is a research analyst at Rice University.

To learn more, please see: Sonenshein, S., Nault, K., & Obodaru, O. (2017). Competition of a different flavor. How a strategic group identity shapes competition and cooperation. Administrative Science Quarterly. 41. 629–658

Based on research by Jing Zhou, Yuntao Dong, Hui Liao, Aichia Chuang and Elizabeth M. Campbell

• Certain customer behaviors can boost the creativity and performance of service workers.
• When managers give employees more freedom, they find novel ways to serve customers.
• Businesses benefit when they encourage clients to give more power to service providers, because performance improves.

When the hairdresser suggests a little purple highlight on the bangs, and you listen attentively and take her advice, you may actually get a better haircut. Though few people view a salon chair as the seat of power, researchers are learning that client decisions can make a big difference in employee performance. When customers give workers more power, the workers perform better. So do their organizations.

About 79 percent of the U.S economy is now related to service, prompting increasing research into how workers can best please customers.

The findings aren’t always intuitive. A recent paper coauthored by Jing Zhou, a management professor at Rice Business, suggests that when customers listen to employees, respect them and allow them the freedom to do their jobs, the creativity of those providing the service leaps—and so does the quality of that service.

Some corporations already are experimenting with management styles that foster employee cleverness, wit and ingenuity. Southwest Airlines, for example, claims that employee satisfaction is more important than customer satisfaction. And yet it continues to take home customer service awards. The airline asks employees to show “proactive customer service,” bestowing awards and posting videos to reward those who do it best.

Zappos, the online shoe retailer, has experimented with a workplace that has no managers. Called holocracy, the system turns workers into mini-entrepreneurs who set their own goals and mark their progress with an app called Glass Frog. Importantly, this culture was self-selecting: Zappos offered a buyout to employees who did not want to work under the new system, and about 18 percent decided to take it and quit. (Zappos maintained this was because many wanted to try entrepreneurship, and the buyout gave them the opportunity to do so).

To better understand the role of customer feedback on performance, Zhou studied how hairstylists in Taiwan engage with their customers. Teaming up with scholars from the University of Connecticut, the University of Maryland, the University of Minnesota and National Taiwan University, Zhou analyzed data from 380 hairstylists matched with 3,550 customers in 118 hair salons.

After surveying both stylists and customers, the researchers found that when customers offered feedback and encouraged employees, worker creativity increased.

Zhou’s team studied salons because they require stylists to talk to customers and craft new approaches to please them. The interaction between a customer and a stylist also typically lasts more than 30 minutes, giving clients ample time to observe a hairdresser’s creativity and for the hairdresser to respond to the client. But, Zhou writes, the findings can apply far outside the beauty parlor.

Businesses typically benefit, the researchers discovered, when they encourage customers to give workers more agency. This “customer empowering” behavior creates conditions that inspire employees and make them confident about making critical work decisions.

The results can be striking. When customers voiced confidence about workers’ opinions, the workers became more creative. This dynamic involved more than just flattery. Because front-line employees talk to their customers daily, they may have a better sense of the issues that customers care about than do supervisors. Whether hairdressers, waiters or childcare workers, service providers often find new, practical solutions to client problems. Supervisors may be surprised to find that empowering employees—rather than closely controlling them—is a better way to prompt good service.

Oftentimes, customers lose out on employee creativity because the workers fear displeasing them. Managers, meanwhile, focus on training employees to avoid mistakes rather than pushing them to work independently and take risks that could lead to better interactions with clients.

When managers emphasize trouble-avoidance rather than creativity, workers may find it too chancy to try a new approach. What if the customer hates a proposed purple streak? It’s safer for the hairdresser to maintain the blonde highlights that have pleased the customer on the last three visits.

Yet when employees act creatively, they often delight customers. The customer becomes the company’s source of innovation, while the workers gain enthusiasm about their jobs and feel more invested in the business. They may devise new processes or adapt and refine existing procedures—all out of a wish to please the customer.

Zhou’s research shows that customers and service personnel can be cocreators. It’s a departure from the hoary idea that formal leaders in an organizational hierarchy are the standard-bearers of the quality of customer service. In fact, Zhou maintains, customer service ought to begin not with management, but with the customer herself.

The findings of Zhou and her team also has implications for managers. In the past, researchers have advocated less frequent customer contact, arguing that customers bring uncertainty into operations, which results in lower efficiency. Zhou’s research shows the opposite.

So talk to that stylist, and listen to her ideas. Whether suggesting a purple streak or allowing a client to vent about life, service providers who are taken seriously may perform at a higher level than any training manual could ever instruct.

Jing Zhou is the Mary Gibbs Jones Professor of Management and Psychology in Organizational Behavior at the Jones Graduate School of Business of Rice University. 

To learn more, please see: Dong, Y., Liao, H., Chuang, A., Zhou, J., & Campbell, E. M. (2015). Fostering employee service creativity: Joint effects of customer empowering behaviors and supervisory empowering leadership. Journal of Applied Psychology, 100(5), 1364-1380.

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By Claudia Feldman

Writer Claudia Feldman sits down with Rice Business professor Anastasiya Zavyalova to discuss the bad PR surrounding United Airlines.

In a nation divided, Americans woke up Tuesday morning agreeing on one thing: United Airlines blew it. Or at least, after a physician/paying passenger was forcibly dragged off an oversold flight, leaving him bloodied and dazed, the United PR machine needs an overhaul.

Earlier this week, the airline described the hair-raising incident as an "overbook" situation. They added that the passenger in question "refused to leave the aircraft voluntarily." And that he was "re-accommodated."

To most Americans, many of whom followed the story on social media and actually saw what happened on a video gone viral, what really occurred on United Express Flight 3411 Sunday was that three security officers manhandled the doctor who had already boarded and settled in his seat. As he said after the melee, he had the reasonable expectation of seeing his patients the next morning.

Out of sight were three other passengers who also lost their seats when four airline employees appeared at the gate and expected to make the crowded Chicago-to-Louisville flight.

United CEO Oscar Munoz didn't help when he said he was upset, too, and, "I apologize for having to re-accommodate these customers."

What might have the United crew done differently? And how might they respond next time, as there will inevitably be a next time? We checked in with Anastasiya Zavyalova, an assistant professor of strategic management at the Jesse Jones Graduate School of Business and an expert on bad PR.

Q: Not to pile on, but what might United have done to avoid this debacle?

A: So many things. Big companies need someone in charge of social media affairs, maybe a crisis management team that could have monitored this and had a response appropriate for the situation. They can't rely on mainstream media and statements that will appear a week later.

Also, no matter how much control or intent the company had, showing sympathy for the victim is a first step. Just showing their human side. Had the flight attendants intervened, for example, they could have looked like heroes.

Q: It's odd, isn't it, to describe dragging someone down an aisle as "re-accommodation"?

A: Yes. Re-accommodation as a person is bleeding and dragged down the aisle? Someone should have briefed the CEO on how to make a more appropriate statement.

Q: Is this the first PR mishap for United?

A: There was the incident with the two girls wearing leggings. (In March, they were barred from a United flight for violating its dress code. Critics called that decision sexist and overbearing.)

Q: We have to acknowledge that the displaced passengers were offered money—$800—to give up their seats.

A: One thing that makes this interesting was that the United staff didn't go up to the quota. They could have gone up to $1,350 in compensation, but they didn't.

Q: Who is going to give United the benefit of the doubt? Who isn't?

A: I guess some people who will not uninstall their app and lose their mileage. On the other hand, in China there is an uproar in the Chinese form of Twitter. A lot of people there see this as an example of discrimination against Asians. I think United needs to express sympathy to this doctor and maybe offer some form of compensation to him and the others who lost their seats.

United executives might say they are working to get to the bottom of this incident. Surely they don't want to lose the whole Chinese market.

Q. Will it be hard for United to smooth the waters?

A. It's much more difficult to shed this kind of attention, because it involves a lot of negative emotions and people are much more locked into those kinds of feelings. Even with the positive form of fame, when there's admiration and adoration, a couple of missteps will drag you down.

Q: Anything that might help?

A: Time. And someone who really knows how to respond to the media.

Postscript: Were Munoz' ears burning? Shortly after this interview with Zavyalova, the United executive released a new statement:

"I continue to be disturbed by what happened. I deeply apologize to the customer forcibly removed and to all the customers aboard. No one should ever be treated this way." Munoz added, "We are going to fix what's broken so this never happens again."

He also promised to review United's partnerships with law enforcement and policies on overbooking.

This conversation with Zavyalova has been condensed and edited.

Claudia Feldman, formerly a Houston Chronicle reporter, is now a freelance writer. This interview originally appeared in the Chronicle's Gray Matters blog.

By Claudia Feldman

Already named by Architectural Digest magazine as one of the best new university buildings in the world, the Moody Center for the Arts opened at the end of February to rave reviews as a vital addition to the campus and the city of Houston.

The 50,000-square-foot center, designed by renowned Los Angeles-based architect Michael Maltzan, serves as an internationally focused arts institution, built as a free public platform for creating collaborative works of all kinds and for presenting innovative, transdisciplinary experiences to the public and the university community.

Alison Weaver, the center’s executive director, stresses that she is not an artist but an art historian. Her insistence contradicts the creative mind that was instrumental in bringing Houston’s newest arts institution from construction to completion in roughly 18 months.

After celebrating the center’s opening, Weaver took a moment to reflect on her career and her hopes for the $30 million project on the Rice University campus.

Q: You have two advanced degrees in art history and an MBA. How do those degrees fit together?

A: For much of my adult life, I lived in New York City, worked in business and spent all my free time in
art museums. But finally I realized I could combine my vocation and avocation and commit to the arts. What I found is that management skills and a passion for art make a terrific combination.

Q. You’re a Houston native. When you moved back to town in 2015, did you feel like you were coming back to Hicksville?

A: No! Houston’s a very urban and sophisticated city, and over the years it’s become more densely populated and diverse. Moving back has been a great thing.

Q: The art center opening lasted four days. What happened?

A: We focused on the intersection of art and ideas. For example, there was a talk that featured Thomas Struth, a photographer who creates images of space exploration and highly technical environments. So we had a panel discussion with Struth, Douglas Terrier, NASA’s chief technologist, and Rice professor James Tour, who focuses on nanotechnology. It was a truly interdisciplinary discussion, which is something we want to foster.

Another favorite of mine is “Green light — An artistic workshop,” which calls attention to the international refugee crisis. We partnered with Interfaith Ministries of Greater Houston to work with a group of recently arrived refugees to make, alongside students and volunteers, stackable modular green lamps designed by Olafur Eliasson. A portiion of the proceeds from the sale of the lamps will benefit Interfaith Ministries.

We really do want broad- based conversations appealing to a wide variety of visitors on campus and in the community.

Q: What are your limits?

A: We have no limits. We have this beautiful building, and we want to use the space to connect the campus and the community. We’re right by Entrance 8, the most used entrance on campus, and we want people to come and visit. It’s open to the public five days a week, admission is free, and we have a cafe. We’re hoping students and other visitors will come and get coffee and a snack and see our programs. It’s so exciting. At Rice, people talk about living “inside the hedges.” We hope to break down that barrier.

Q: Judging from the opening, you want to go far beyond the campus hedges.

A: Of course. Our first artist-in-residence is Mona Hatoum, a fabulous Beirut-born Palestinian artist, who is coming this spring. Then she’ll be back in the fall for a major exhibition at the Menil Collection. That way we can have a longer conversation, which is so much better than dropping in for a lecture.

Claudia Feldman is a freelance writer living in Houston and editor of the Last Word, a service that helps people tell their own stories.

By Claudia Feldman

After the opening of Rice University’s Moody Center for the Arts, Alison Weaver was so hoarse she could only whisper, and she had a chest-rattling cough. But perched in her office at the new, $30 million arts center, Weaver, the Moody’s executive director, looked thrilled, as if she had just finished a long-distance race.

Truth was, she had.

Weaver orchestrated the four-day launch of the nonprofit, multi-disciplinary project she helped build from nothing to newsworthy on the Rice campus.

She spoke movingly of the national and international artists who made the opening a success, and the confluence of art, science and current events that makes the Moody Center a beautiful and thought-provoking place to visit.

“It’s just like a startup,” Weaver said, recalling the blank slate she had to work with back in 2015. “We launched new programs and a new building, hired a team and set strategic directions.”

If that sounds like business speak, it is.

Weaver represents a relatively small group of nonprofit leaders from the worlds of art, social service, government, philanthropy and religion who have enhanced their skills with an advanced business degree, a Master of Business Administration.

“The MBA helps me every day, and it’s also very fulfilling,” says Weaver, who also has a Ph.D. in art history. “Having managerial skills and business skills helps me do what I do well.”

The value of the degree is obvious to John Byrne, editor-in-chief of Poets and Quants, a website that covers graduate business education. “The essentials of an MBA experience — accounting, finance, marketing, strategy, operations — are all central to the tool kit for a nonprofit founder, CEO or manager,” he says.

As proof that the business degree is increasingly versatile, Byrne ticks off a list of half a dozen nonprofits led and championed by MBAs, including Habitat for Humanity International and the Alzheimer’s Association. Just last year, U.S. News & World Report ranked the top 11 business schools in nonprofit management, a sign that these types of programs are here to stay. In a story about the ranking, Byrne paraphrased sculptor Henry Moore’s theory of a productive life: “Throw yourself into something big that you believe in. Obsessively dedicate your life’s work to it. And make damn sure it’s ambitious enough to stretch you to the limits.”

The idea that business schools should train not only business leaders but civic leaders first emerged in the 1970s at Stanford and Yale. Today, several dozen business schools offer courses that allow students to experiment with their own notions of social responsibility and free enterprise.

Peter Rodriguez, dean of the Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University, likes to say it’s not a question of whether his students will become entrepreneurs, but when. “Challenge yourselves to be bold,” he advises. “Care to change the world.”

Rodriguez, the first Hispanic to lead a top-10 business school in the United States, believes that the stereotypical image of a white, male MBA student enrolled in courses only to enrich himself is simplistic and untrue.

However, fewer than five percent of newly minted business graduates — one in 20 — take jobs with nonprofits or hybrid firms with an explicit social mission.

“It’s complicated,” says Patty Oertel, president and founder of a consulting group specializing in nonprofit management. “I don’t know of any solid research, but I think students who get master’s degrees in nonprofit administration, public health and arts management have a higher percentage of participation.”

Oertel, who has an MBA, has taught MBA students, and has served as executive director of the Center for Nonprofit Management in Southern California, understands the dilemma facing well-intentioned graduate business students today. Some of them will invest more than $100,000 for their degree.

“When I got my MBA from UCLA in 1980, I paid $1,500,” Oertel says. “That was a cost I could recoup. Today, students might study nonprofits with the best of intentions, but they have to pay back their student loans. They see a majority of their classmates going into business jobs with top salaries, and they think, ‘Wow, I have these costs, I’m capable, I want a family. Maybe I need to put my dreams on hold and get a salary commensurate with my education.’”

Even those who opt out of the nonprofit path, Oertel says, still find ways to give back by serving as board members, donors and mentors.

Education expenses notwithstanding, Byrne hopes business students attracted to nonprofits will stay the course.

Many of the best schools, he says, “are quite generous with scholarship aid, especially for people who will pursue nontraditional career paths with their MBAs. In fact, a number of schools, including Harvard and Stanford, help to subsidize students who take nonprofit internships between their first and second years. So don’t let the sticker price scare you away. In many cases, you’ll find some significant — if not deep — discounts given for an explicit desire to work in the nonprofit world.”

Mary Ittelson, once a professional dancer and choreographer, agrees with Byrne that the degree is invaluable. Today she holds an MBA, leads a consulting business with an emphasis on arts nonprofits, and co-teaches a Stanford MBA course titled “Leadership in the Arts and Creative Industries”—and she, too, embraces students willing to make the sacrifice to pursue the degree.

But however encouraging she hopes to be, she also offers students what she describes as “a jolt of reality.”

Ittelson ticks off a few of the business challenges that nonprofit arts leaders must be prepared to face: rising costs, stiff competition for audiences, even an aging fan base. Inevitably, the seniors will have to be replaced by younger, more diverse patrons who are new to the arts scene.

She adds, “What these groups can earn does not keep pace with expenses. So the demand or need for philanthropic dollars explodes, but there are so many worthy causes and only so many donors.”

Ultimately, Ittelson says, arts groups have to grow, adjust, innovate, and push the boundaries of excellence if they are going to survive.

For better or worse, it’s a lesson the students have had hammered home in their more conventional business classes.

Claudia Feldman is a freelance writer living in Houston and editor of the Last Word, a service that helps people tell their own stories.