Based on research by Vikas Mittal

• According to social psychologists, being biologically male or female is closely linked to what is called “feminine” and “masculine” identity: attitudes, beliefs and learned behaviors that traditionally have been identified as masculine or feminine.
• These “masculine” and “feminine” identities affect charitable giving.
• "When women prioritize morality, they’re more likely to give to strangers and international charities. Men with high moral identity, in contrast, typically give to friends and family or local charities.

The images flood your family’s living room. Parents and toddlers jammed in a motorboat. An elderly man clutching a sodden dog. And, far across the ocean, flimsy huts reduced to smears of wood on the ground. Who turns the TV off? Who dials the relief hotline in the neighboring state? And who pulls out a credit card to help people on the other side of the globe?

It depends a lot on gender: Not just the visible, biological one nature imposes, but a range of behaviors that, if not always interchangeable, are associated with it.

Scholars have devoted considerable attention to why people donate to particular charities — partly because the information is so helpful to charities crafting appeals. The stakes are high: Individual Americans donated $281.86 billion to charities in 2016, according to Giving USA 2017: The Annual Report on Philanthropy for the Year 2016.

According to Rice Business professor Vikas Mittal and coauthors Karen Page Winterich of Pennsylvania State University’s Smeal College of Business and William T. Ross Jr., formerly of Pennsylvania State University’s Department of Marketing, one of the primary forces in these decisions is gender identity. Beyond that, the researchers found, much depends on how much importance a person places on being moral, and whether the potential beneficiaries belong to an in-group or out-group.

To reach their conclusions, Mittal and his colleagues conducted three experiments analyzing gender and moral identities and their impact on donor decisions. The study expanded on several decades of research showing that in-group members are in general more likely to benefit from donor largesse.

First, the researchers established their terms. Moral identity, they wrote, is the importance people place on being a moral person. Gender identity, which closely corresponds to biological sex, describes a set of attitudes, beliefs and learned behaviors traditionally identified as masculine or feminine.

Traditionally, men or people with a masculine gender identity show agentic behavior — that is, a focus on the self, risk seeking and personal achievement. People with a feminine gender identity, by contrast, show more communal behavior, prioritizing relationships, group welfare, risk mitigation and collective achievement.

These characteristics influence charity decisions because they affect how inclusive people are in choosing the beneficiaries of their help. The more willing you are to consider the needs and feelings of strangers, the wider is your “circle of moral regard.” Women already tend toward communal behavior; those who in addition have high levels of moral identity will have an even broader circle of moral regard, and thus are more willing to give to charities targeted to strangers.

To trace the impact of these characteristics, Mittal and his colleagues asked two groups of undergraduates at a U.S. university to make choices about donating to relief efforts for Hurricane Katrina, which struck New Orleans in 2005, and the devastating Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004. For American undergraduates, Katrina signifies an in-group with victims closer to home, while the Indian Ocean tsunami refers to an out-group.

The surveys were rooted in the fact that Americans donated $4.25 billion to Katrina relief — nearly three times what they donated to tsunami victims. The researchers theorized that the disparity may have reflected donors’ views of fellow Americans in New Orleans as an in-group, and of tsunami victims on the other side of the world as an out-group.

The surveys first assessed respondents’ gender and moral identities, then asked them to decide what portion of a specified sum of money they should keep for themselves and what portion allocate to Katrina or tsunami charities.

In another experiment, an online survey of 233 U.S. adults, respondents chose between hypothetical donations to a fund benefiting victims of terror attacks in London — the in-group — and in Iraq — the out-group. Participants’ responses were assessed according to their biological gender, which the researchers determined is a close proxy for gender identity. This in itself was an important practical finding, since charities can direct appeals to men or women, but have no way to conduct controlled tests for gender or moral identity.

Statistical analysis of all three studies showed consistent results. Donations to the out-groups were linked significantly to strong moral identity and strong feminine gender identity. Among respondents with strong moral identity and strong masculine gender identity, donations to the in-group rose, but out-group donations were weak.

What should charities make of these findings? Appeals to men, the researchers suggested, might try to position their organization as an in-group. Appeals to female donors, on the other hand, might do better if they characterize the initiative as reaching a broader set of beneficiaries.

In an era when gender identity and traditional behavior are become more and more fluid, a few laws of nature and behavior are still useful shorthand in charitable giving. The person with a strong moral sense and a feminine identity — most likely, a woman — is the likeliest to donate the most to the greatest variety of people.

Vikas Mittal is the J. Hugh Liedtke Professor of Marketing and Management at the Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University.

To learn more, please see: Winterich, K. P., Mittal, V., & Ross, W. T. Jr. (2009). Donation behavior toward in-groups and out-groups: The role of gender and moral identity. Journal of Consumer Research, 36(2), 199-214.

Also please see: Mittal, V. (2017). 5 ways nonprofits can engage donors. Marketing News, American Marketing Association.

Based on research by Hajo Adam (former Rice Business professor), William W. Maddux and Adam D. Galinsky

• Living in and adapting to foreign cultures seems to facilitate creativity.
• People who have lived abroad are better able to discover links between ideas and come up with creative solutions to problems.
• Recreating multicultural experiences helps lead to creative breakthroughs.

Can eating good pizza and drinking copious amounts of red wine make you smarter? Likely not. You’ll probably just gain weight and end up hungover. But stick around Rome long enough to not only do as the Romans do, but understand why they do it, and you might end up with a real intellectual advantage.

Those are the findings of a former Rice Business professor Hajo Adam and his co-authors, William W. Maddux and Adam Galinsky. In a series of experiments, the researchers showed that moving abroad and learning a new culture is creatively broadening.

Moving to another country can be a shock. For some people, navigating different belief systems in a strange environment can be downright overwhelming, driving them to cling even more tightly to their own norms. But for those who adapt, the reward may not just be having more fun. It may also include the development of more multifaceted, complex thinking.

Indeed, the researchers note, adapting to a foreign culture demands the same psychological processes as creative thinking. Each time we learn our way around a new culture, we likely see our treasured assumptions challenged, integrate new ideas, make novel connections and glean new insights.

In China, for example, good manners require leaving a bit of food on your plate at the end of the meal; this indicates that the host has been generous. In the U.S., however, the same behavior may be considered rude, signaling that you didn’t like the meal enough to finish it. This nuanced frame of reference — understanding the various meanings possible in one scenario — creates an understanding that there’s more than one way to solve a given problem.

But it isn’t enough to book a hotel near the Trevi fountain and expect creative insights to ensue. Past neurological research shows that, for new knowledge to permanently imprint on the brain, we need to pay close attention and undergo repeated exposure to the new stimuli. Adam and his colleagues went a step further: Once multicultural learning experiences occur, they suggest, recreating these experiences should reactivate the cognitive map that led to creative breakthroughs.

To test those ideas, the researchers set up experiments designed to show that mentally recreating multicultural learning experiences enhanced difference types of creativity. Among these were the ability to solve the same problem in multiple ways, noticing underlying associations, and solving problems in a way that ignores typical frames — i.e. thinking outside the box.

In one experiment, all the participants had lived abroad, but only one set was asked to recall and write about something they learned from their contact with a foreign culture. Another set was asked to recall and write about something learned in their own culture. Afterwards, all participants completed a supposedly separate task, completing word fragment pairs. The conceptual challenge was to see whether the subjects could discover more than one match for the same word fragment.

As the researchers had predicted, the subjects who were primed by recalling multicultural experiences came up with more correct matches for the word fragments.

Adam and his colleagues then led experiments looking at the role of what is called “functional learning” in the equation of creativity and foreign experience. Functional learning is the process of learning about the underlying meaning of an observed or learned behavior.

In both studies, the researchers found that only when functional learning was combined with a multicultural context did it lead to more creativity in problem-solving.

In other words, it isn’t enough to fly to Rome, hop on a Vespa and nibble some gnocchi. The real cognitive leaps happen when you stick around long enough to learn what, when and how Romans do all the other things they do in daily life — and what it all means to them.

Hajo Adam is a former assistant professor of management at Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University.

To learn more, please see: Maddux, W. W., Adam, H,. & Galinsky, A. D. (2010). When in Rome… Learn Why the Romans Do What They Do: How Multicultural Learning Experiences Facilitate Creativity. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 36(6) 731-741.

This article originally appeared at the Houston Chronicle. 

Craig Ceccanti probably owes his mom royalties. It was her insistence on a family outing - to a painting class where Ceccanti and his brother augmented their abilities with beer - that spurred a multistate franchise that grosses $35 million annually.

"I can't repay my mom enough for taking me to that stupid painting class," says Ceccanti, co-founder and CEO of Pinot's Palette, a wine and painting company that boasts 140 franchised locations.

Inspiration fermented for five years, however, before Ceccanti began his business masterpiece. Bringing it to fruition, he says, was his experience at Rice University's Jones Graduate School of Business, where he earned an MBA and learned how to turn ideas into reality.

He exemplifies the new generation of Rice Business grads, beneficiaries of a two-decade effort to build a nationally recognized department with a strong entrepreneurial focus. Forward-looking deans got the program accredited in 1998. They built a 167,000-square-foot building and increased enrollment, winning accolades and attracting faculty from other prominent schools.

Once an afterthought at a school better known for undergraduate liberal arts, Rice Business is now a regular on national best-of lists. Over the past decade its alumni have created 240 businesses, raised $4 billion in funding and hired 7,787 employees. More than four out of five of the companies are still open.

Not surprisingly, energy dominates the field, according to the school's recent survey of 400 alumni, with 33 companies raising $3 billion and creating jobs for 4,704 people. But there are also companies in health care, consulting, consumer goods, financial services and other sectors.

This entrepreneurial ecosystem "pleasantly surprised" Dean Peter Rodriguez when he joined the school 15 months ago as the university's first-ever Hispanic dean. One out of every six Rice Business graduates in the past 10 years went on to found a company.

In the coming years, Rodriguez says, a strong entrepreneurship program will be ever important as younger MBA students are less enchanted with the grueling Wall Street lifestyle or the anonymity of working for a global giant.

"What students want from business schools are the options to lead to a career that they will find gratifying," he said in a recent interview.

Launched in 1977

Rice launched its graduate business program in 1977, but it didn't begin to blossom until 1997. Under then-Dean Gil Whitaker's eight-year tenure, the number of graduating students doubled to roughly 240 each year. The school became accredited and established its Executive MBA, a weekend program for working execs.

Also during this time, the Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship was founded. Since debuting the Rice Business Plan Competition in 2001, the annual student startup competition has grown to the richest and largest, hosting graduate students from around the world. Rice Alliance managing director Brad Burke credits it with bolstering the school's entrepreneurial bona fides.

Sean Self, an engineering undergrad in the early 1990s, recalled his friends in the business program saying their money would have been better spent elsewhere. Yet by the time he returned to Rice for his own MBA in 2004, the school had built new facilities and hired new faculty.

Self, who was working for a company that sells surgical products, ultimately used marketing tips taught in the program to help sell that company. A few years later, he opened Nimbic Systems, which makes a device that can protect hospital patients by blowing a gentle stream of air over an incision during surgery to prevent bacteria from entering.

The device has been used in more than 5,000 surgeries. Self expects sales this year of about $400,000.

Around the time Self graduated, Rice Business was in another expansion period. Former Dean Bill Glick, who led the school from 2005 to 2016, boosted the number of graduates to 300 a year.

Much of that growth resulted from the addition of a part-time Professional MBA program in 2006 for workers who want to earn a degree without giving up their job. It now attracts about 180 students a year, and its revenues helped Rice Business add additional faculty. Glick also built a Ph.D. program, which Rodriguez said signaled a stronger seriousness about research.

Among the newer faculty is Yael Hochberg, previously of Northwestern University, whose academic research includes entrepreneurial topics such as venture capital and accelerators.

"There was a long time when nobody at a business school was going to have a professor in entrepreneurship," Rodriguez said. "The view was, entrepreneurs are born not made. This is not an academic discipline. It's a temperament. It's a tolerance for risk. It's a sense of skills that's developed by actually doing this."

That began to change with professors Al Napier and Ed Williams, both recently retired, who were entrepreneurs and tenured faculty members in other fields and most of their teachings came from hands-on experience. Hochberg, in contrast, studies entrepreneurship in more of an academic setting, a further evolution in the faculty skillset.

State programs ranked

Rice Business snagged its first major national recognition in 2010, when it was included on Bloomberg Businessweek's list of best MBA programs.

More recently, Rice bested some notable local competitors on Bloomberg Businessweek's Best Business Schools 2016 ranking. Its full-time MBA ranked No. 8 compared with Texas A&M (No. 18), University of Texas (No. 21) and University of Houston (No. 75). The U.S. News Best Business Schools 2018 list shuffles that a bit, with UT ranked No. 17, Rice No. 29, A&M No. 38 and UH No. 93.

The growth continues. Rice's MBA programs have 676 students enrolled in the graduating classes of 2018 and 2019 despite other options that are now available locally. Texas A&M's Mays Business School, for instance, has about 95 students enrolled in its Professional MBA program in Houston and about 90 in its Executive MBA program here. About 125 more students are enrolled in a full-time program in College Station.

UH likewise offers MBA programs, with 480 students enrolled, and boasts a large, local campus.

"Our students are able to take advantage of a very large and dedicated business faculty more so than satellite programs that aren't based in Houston," said Dalia Pineda, director of graduate admissions and recruitment for the C.T. Bauer College of Business.

When looking specifically at graduate entrepreneurship programs, U.S. News ranked Rice at No. 11, not far behind No. 9 UT. Rice Business' MBA entrepreneurship program has remained in the list's top 15 since 2011. Princeton Review has placed it in the top 10 since 2010 and currently has it No. 3.

"I think the Jones School is attracting more entrepreneurial minded MBA students than it used to 10 years ago," said Burke, of the Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship. "So more students come to the Jones School because of its reputation in entrepreneurship."

A core discipline

Not all students enroll with entrepreneurial dreams, but many discover an interest at Rice. Graduates like Jay Zeidman and Kevin Green praise the education they received, the fellow students who inspired them and the "amazing network" of business opportunities it provided after the degrees are handed out.

Entrepreneurship will be a pillar for the next decade at Rice Business. Dean Rodriguez would like to see twice as many students start companies immediately after graduating. He wants to make entrepreneurship a core discipline of the MBA program, similar to accounting or finance. Already, 70 percent of all MBA students take a course in entrepreneurship.

Rodriguez also wants to connect more closely with the local startup community, perhaps developing a national expertise in startup funding, venture capital or angel investment networks. Rice Business is planning a student venture fund.

"If they go out of here and they start a company, now they understand how the capital, the investment side, works," Burke said. "And they're better able to solicit and receive capital for their startup because now they understand the other side of the equation."

Ambitious goals

The school also is accumulating success stories. Pinot's Palette started in Montrose with about $15,000 provided by Ceccanti and co-founders Charles and Beth Willis. They painted the walls themselves and used home speakers to provide music. Marketing was trial and error.

"There were many nights, I remember, Charles and Beth would go and sit in class like a customer just so it didn't seem so empty," Ceccanti said.

Business started picking up after Pinot's Palette was mentioned in the online newsletter Tidbits. The founders secured a $100,000 line of credit to open a second location. A man in Katy began hounding them, weekly, to open a franchise store.

In addition to its current 140 franchise locations, 35 more are in the process of opening. It's experimenting with other crafting classes, including an ugly sweater workshop at its Memorial City location in November.

Ceccanti said his goal is for the company to gross $70 million within the next three years and $250 million in the next decade.

"Never in a million years would I have thought that I'd be in a business like this - or owning a business," said Ceccanti, also an adjunct professor at Rice Business and president of Rice Entrepreneurs Organization. "My dreams were to be an IT director of some sort. So it's a bit of a fairy tale for me."

By William M. Arnold 

This article first appeared in the Houston Chronicle. 

With Michael Wirth named as the next CEO of Chevron a few days ago, four of the biggest integrated energy companies are headed by seasoned executives who spent the bulk of their careers in the so-called downstream part of the business. The companies include Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch Shell and Total of France. Downstream usually includes refining and petrochemicals, but some of the executives also worked in pipeline divisions (midstream) or trading. This leadership trend has implications the industry and investors need to keep a close eye on, and understanding what got us here is key.

Over a long period, the focus of these companies was on replacing the reserves produced during the previous year. Wall Street focused on the reserve replacement ratio as a measure of the long-term viability of companies in the industry. It was a traditional but narrow measure of future performance, especially as international contracts shifted from legal ownership of resources to something more like service contracts in which companies were compensated by a formula based mostly on achieving production goals.

For decades, this reserve replacement ratio approach suited the companies because their greatest profit margins were usually earned by producing and selling crude oil. There were substantial technical risks in finding significant resources. Before the recent advances in seismic technology and the shale play, exploration was, in football terms, a passing game. Not every well or pass was successful, but when they were, the team advanced far down the field. Returns on investment for oil exploration could exceed 30 percent, so a few dry wells could be accepted when the fifth or sixth was often even more successful than expected. This motivated entrepreneurs in the industry since the 1860s. But even as the industry matured and consolidated, the "explorers" pretty consistently were risk takers. Their personal styles were usually optimistic - they had to be to get past the dry holes on the path to success. A dry hole meant you were that much closer to a success.

The engineers in refining and petrochemicals were expected to be conservative and risk averse. Things had to work consistently and for a long time, because the alternative was potential human and environmental disaster. They were like a football team grinding out a running game, gaining a few yards on each play.

Adding to the challenge, the downstream business could by cyclical, depending on the price of oil and natural gas, their feedstocks. Depending on the market, downstream returns could be feast or famine even with consistent operations.

The strategy at Royal Dutch Shell from 2004 to 2010 was simply "more upstream, more profitable downstream." More detailed metrics followed, but the drivers were to find "elephant" fields - often defined as more than 500 million barrels of oil - whether in Alaska, the Gulf of Mexico, Central Asia, Russia or Brazil.

The downstream businesses had the unglamorous job of focusing on cost, improving technology and minimizing downtime.

This strategy literally blew up for BP when its Texas City Refinery exploded in 2005, killing 15 and injuring 180. An independent commission lead by former Secretary of State James A. Baker III placed the blame squarely on BP management's decision to cut costs excessively and create unsound risks.

For years, most investors favored integrated oil companies that explored, produced, traded, refined, transported and sold products at retail gas stations. There was portfolio diversification inherent in each company to mitigate volatility. But by 2010, activist investors wanted to build portfolios according to their own risk tolerances, not rely on a company to do it for them. Under this pressure, large companies like ConocoPhillips and Marathon broke up into separate upstream and downstream companies. Many expected this to favor the exploration side of the business, but often the downstream companies turned in better returns.

When oil prices collapsed in late 2014, the industry was largely blindsided. The boom in previous years created a dynamic of finding oil at almost any cost, whether overseas, the Arctic or the relatively new "shale play" in North Dakota and in West and South Texas. Hail Mary passes became the norm. These were exciting times. The noise level at the Petroleum Club in downtown Houston was deafening. If it meant taking on unprecedented levels of debt, so be it. The big collapse of 1986 and the shorter-lived one in 2008-'09, associated with the nation's financial collapse were seen as the result of dynamics that no longer applied.

In any case, OPEC was expected to solve the problem. The member countries had skin in this game and they had used production cuts to sustain prices. They could deal internally with members who cheated. There was a nagging concern that OPEC might let prices collapse in order to weed out the bothersome but productive small players in the shale play. But that wasn't the prevailing view. Some companies even saw the initial collapse as an opportunity to pick up assets at bargain prices and staff up with professionals laid off by other companies.

But the knives kept dropping for more than two years. Over-indebted companies shed staff, leases and equipment and many took bankruptcy.

For the companies that survived, investors and boards demanded a more conservative approach to protect the balance sheet. This involved technical innovation at the field level, dramatic cost cutting (including what they paid service providers) and unyielding attention to cash flow.

As boards sought new leaders, they considered their track records, skill sets, operational experience and alignment with the new industry realities.

Several majors have shifted leadership to engineers who ran downstream operations. Shell had already made this shift following a grave challenge from the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2004 about its reported global reserves. An "explorer" was replaced by Jeroen van der Veer, who had run the company's petrochemical business. He was succeeded in 2014 by Ben van Beurden, also a downstream executive.

Something similar happened at Total, Exxon and now Chevron. To be sure, these career executives should not be pigeon-holed as technocrats. They have been groomed for years with a variety of assignments so they can build a strategy for their time of leadership. But don't expect too many Hail Mary passes in the next couple of years. Instead, we'll probably see a ground game with increasingly solid returns. Oil prices seem to have become reasonably balanced, in part because of word coming from OPEC about maintaining cuts, and there is a reasonable expectation that prices may rise to a new level in two or three years in response to the massive cuts in investment that took place during the worst of recent times.

As Al Pacino's Tony D'Amato in "Any Given Sunday" tells us, football, like life, is a game of inches. These new leaders are out to win by small inches.

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 Jing Zhou

• Employee creativity is a central — and often overlooked — component of an organization’s success.
• Employee frustration can be channeled into creative problem solving and can provide the impetus for imaginative change under the right leadership.
• Supervisors can foster creativity by giving employees more freedom and refraining from closely monitoring them.

The top brass isn’t always the source for innovative business solutions — in fact, it’s more often the rank and file. But while organizations like to tout the importance of employee creativity in their mission statements, in reality they often ignore it. Sometimes they actively sabotage it.

Consider the department store clerk who knows her customers by name and is familiar with her merchandise. By pairing outfits from the junior and children’s departments for her petite customers, or suggesting staples from the men’s section for a teenager starting his first office job, she can help customers get the look they want — and cultivate repeat business.

On the other hand, if managers reprimand her for stepping outside corporate conventions, she may shut down. She’ll do the bare minimum to avoid criticism. Ultimately, the whole company suffers, not just the employee.

Workers need to see from a fresh perspective in order to meld unrelated products, processes and materials into something new and better, according to Rice Business Professor Jing Zhou. Importantly, workplace creativity doesn’t necessarily mean doing a job in a way it has never been done before. More often, it’s a matter of mixing previously unrelated products or adapting methods used in one kind of task to do another.

In most previous research, scholars have focused on the personal factors that determine imagination and originality. But the pivotal question of employee creativity in workplaces has only been taken seriously in the past decade or so. Researchers now are working to catch up, investigating how to encourage creativity among employees — and why that’s often so hard to do.

There’s a fundamental paradox in this kind of research. On the one hand, organizations depend on standardized practices and routines to ensure efficient operations. On the other, these hidebound systems have the unintended consequence of stunting innovation among workers. The employees become bored and restless.

In a recent paper, Zhou shows that this frustration can actually be tapped as a resource. Handled properly, disgruntled employees can become creative problem solvers. If an organization’s leader is attuned enough to her employee’s dark mood, she can actually help direct that dissatisfaction towards solutions for improving the workplace.

Past research has shown that an unhappy employee tends to respond in several ways. He can quit. He can be loyal, but miserable. Or he can keep his job, but do it badly. Zhou suggests that there is one more alternative: he can turn that dissatisfaction into innovation.

Analyzing a sample of helicopter manufacturing employees, Zhou discovered that employees who reported the strongest negative moods also demonstrated the highest levels of creativity. The workers who were most aware of their own emotions were best able to channel their bad moods into creativity.

If they find themselves in companies that don’t encourage creativity, however, these same employees often simply opt out, expressing their unhappiness through slacking at work. This is a teachable moment for many companies, where supervisors need to recognize and gain skill in reacting to such situations. Especially during tough times, such as financial or organizational crises, employees need the flexibility to respond creatively. Hard times like these, however, are exactly when employers are more likely to crack down and discourage creative thought.

That’s simply self-defeating, Zhou argues. To foster creativity, a leader should instead empower employees by offering developmental feedback and giving them the freedom to deal with hardships in their own way. In fact, managers sometimes manage best by going away. A lack of close supervision, Zhou found, is an important ingredient in worker creativity. Employees who feel they’re being watched and controlled may be afraid to explore new ideas.

Developmental feedback also makes a difference. Giving specific input about performance along with personalized encouragement, Zhou found, helps build a culture of creativity.

Business leaders can empower employees’ creative endeavors in several ways. Managers can express confidence in workers’ abilities, emphasize the importance of their work, and involve them in decision making. Finally, they can reduce or remove the bureaucratic constraints that limit their ability to innovate. Even employees who seem risk-averse often move towards more creative behaviors when they develop real trust in a supervisor.

Still, while employee creativity is a key part of business success, many supervisors actively discourage it. Others simply fail to promote innovative thinking. Often, managers view the disruption of standard operating procedures as a threat. To be fair, it’s not always in the firm’s best interest to let all employees channel their inner Isadora Duncans. No one wants a switch operator in a nuclear power plant to direct her creative vision towards altering safety procedures.

Overall, though, employees benefit a company most when they face few bureaucratic hurdles to finding creative solutions to real workplace problems — and when their supervisors understand and encourage that impulse. It takes a nuanced understanding of where innovation and improvisation can help and where it’s less useful, such as in a nuclear power plant. After that, Zhou suggests, managers need to overcome their own anxieties about innovation and learn the value of spotting and encouraging creativity in others.

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 see:

Anderson, N., Potocnik, K., & Zhou, J. (2014) Innovation and Creativity in Organizations: A State of the Science Review, Prospective Commentary and Guiding Framework. Journal of Management, 40(5), 1297-1333.

George, J. M., & Zhou, J. (2002). Understanding when bad moods foster creativity and good ones don’t: The role of context and clarity of feelings. Journal of Applied Psychology, 87(4), 687-697.

Gong, Y., Zhou, J., & Chang, S. (2013). Core Knowledge, Employee Creativity and Firm Performance: The Moderating Role of Riskiness Orientation, Firm Size and Realized Absorptive Capacity. Personnel Psychology, 66(2), 443–482.

Shin, S. J., &  Zhou, J. (2003). Transformational Leadership, Conservation and Creativity: Evidence from Korea. Academy of Management Journal, 46(6), 703-714.

Shin, S. J., & Zhou, J. (2007). When is Educational Specialization Heterogeneity Related to Creativity Research and Development Teams? Transformational Leadership as a Moderator. Journal of Applied Psychology, 92(6), 1709-1721. 

Zhou, J. (2003). When the Presence of Creative Co-Workers is Related to Creativity: The Role of Supervisor Close Monitoring, Developmental Feedback and Creative Personality. Journal of Applied Psychology, 88(3), 413-422.

Zhou, J., & George, J. (2003). Awakening Employee Creativity: The Role of Leader Emotional Intelligence. The Leadership Quarterly, 14, 545-568.

Zhou, J., & George, J. (2001). When Job Dissatisfaction Leads to Creativity: Encouraging the Expression of Voice. Academy of Management Journal, 44(4), 682-696.

By Peter Rodriguez

The momentum of a fantastic year at Rice Business accelerated through the spring and set us on course for an even better fall. Record-busting cohorts of students arrived in the heat of summer alongside preparations for a hybrid-online MBA program and investments all around the school. With the wind at our backs, I couldn’t wait to kick-off a new academic year.

The old caution about life and uncertainty played over and over in my mind during the relentless rains that weekend, “Wanna make God laugh? Tell him about your plans.” All that we lived and witnessed during the storm and after will likely be the story of the year for our city, our university, our school and our communities. The story, however, isn’t that the waters rose, that thousands of lives were upended or that Houston was devastated. The story is the reaction to the storm from the people in it and all who came to help.

Across the region, a few hundred yards meant the difference between families that were high and dry or waist-deep in flood waters, stranded on rooftops and upper floors. Within urban and suburban neighborhoods a few inches of elevation made the difference between safety and upheaval. Those hit hardest face a long road to recovery. Everybody else knows, it could have been them.

The hurricane brought loss and pain to tens of thousands, if not more, and set back many family’s finances for years. There is nothing good at all about Hurricane Harvey. And yet, because of the storm we had the opportunity to recall what matters most to us, and to recall that these are the same things for all of us. Because in a flood aid is inherently local, we have the opportunity to witness what it means to be a good neighbor, friend, colleague, stranger, Houstonian. We have the opportunity to fulfill a noble purpose in service of many we know and more that we don’t. We felt the power in knowing our time and energy bring mercy to those in need and that even the small things we do for each other matter greatly. We have the opportunity to live our values, not simply debate them.

If Harvey succeeded in teaching us an unwanted lesson about humility and our vulnerability to the most basic forces, it also allowed us to genuinely connect with our city and replenish our faith in each other. The ache to find a silver lining in the aftermath of destruction should not eclipse our understanding of how much has been lost and the emotional toll still being felt. But let these lessons continue to drive our heightened compassion and endure far longer than the recovery from this awful storm.

Reading about the remarkable generosity of everyone around us I came upon a short post on social media that seemed to capture a truth made plain by the moment. It seemed a touch maudlin, but, if anything, it understated the prevailing sentiments. It started, "Now more than ever, people need you to give all that you can. Unfortunately, you simply cannot give away what people need most. You can give away food, you can give away clothes, you can give away shelter and you can give away money. But, you can never give love away. It just keeps coming back."

With sincere thanks to all who gave generously, led selflessly and continue to inspire, I’m pleased to write the final Harvey sign-off.

Stay Safe, Stay Connected.

Peter

Peter Rodriguez is a Professor of Strategic Management and the Dean of the Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University.

This letter first appeared in the fall issue of Rice Business Magazine.

Based on research by Douglas A. Schuler and Usha C.V. Haley

• Governments around the world promote the solar power industry with subsidies.
• Different countries have different schemes for subsidizing solar power, some more effective than others. Even within countries, not all solar strategies dovetail each other.
• The different approaches create a range of uncertainties in the market.

In the Spanish region of Aragon, known for livestock, barley and rye, a vast tapestry of solar panels shimmers on the sun-drenched landscape. The panels angle toward the sky in much the same way that sunflowers shift position in nearby fields.

But none of these photovoltaic arrays (the technical term for solar panels) would be there without government intervention. As with many other countries, Spain encourages solar power with subsidies. Around the world, such efforts to push photovoltaic power are more successful in some countries than in others.

To understand how policy shapes the solar power market, Rice Business professor Douglas A. Schuler and colleague Usha C. V. Haley, now at West Virginia University, created a global map of these relationships. In the process, they found a market replete with unintended consequences.

Take Spain’s pell-mell dive into solar energy. In 2007, the Spanish government set such a high rate for feed-in tariffs — payments to households or businesses that generated their own electricity — that it sparked a solar gold rush. When the government restricted the policies the following year, the solar market crashed.

Around the world, the researchers found, policies to promote solar production derive from a maze of strategies and pressures, including subsidies, feed-in tariffs, tax credits and other formulas. The greater the number of elements, of course, the more unpredictable the outcome.

In general, unsuccessful policies fail for two major reasons, the researchers found. First, it’s chancy trying to predict how government policy will change from one year to the next. And second, it’s even harder to guess how those changes will affect the market.

Some countries offer more certainty than others. Germany, for example, finely tuned its feed-in tariff to dovetail with the European Union’s 2020 goal of 20 percent renewable energy in electricity. Yet uncertainty clouded the German market as well. In 2010, budget constraints and competing interests pushed the country’s solar subsidies down by 9 percent for roof installations and 11 percent for ground-mounted installations.

Elsewhere on the map, China’s ambition for solar power is epic. Government targets for non-fossil fuel use call for 15 percent solar and other renewables by 2020. China also opted against paying private citizens for generating excess electricity, instead promoting solar production on the state level by choosing the lowest bidder. The resulting bids were so low that they effectively priced foreign firms out of the market.

U.S. solar policy, meanwhile, is dogged by inconsistency. States including California, Texas and New Jersey even have their own energy policies. This regulatory confusion is a key reason that Germany, Japan and China have now overtaken America as global leaders in solar production and deployment.

In the United States, as Shell Oil’s former President and CEO John Hofmeister puts it, “energy is politicized.” Just as China bolsters its solar market with production subsidies, the U.S. requires the Defense Department only to buy American. As a result, even the most carefully conceived market strategies can turn into a train wreck if they run into political opposition and regulatory uncertainty.

No matter the country, though, dynamics governing solar policy are byzantine. Consider what happened in Spain, when it belatedly scaled back on feed-in-tariffs.

As it happened, the new policy occurred at the same time that China decided to support the price of polysilicon, a key component of solar panels. As a result, Spanish panel production using polysilicon shot sky high, while demand tanked. Suddenly, Spanish solar panel makers were left with warehouses full of excess inventory. The stock of one of China’s biggest solar firms, Suntech, plunged by 90 percent, and others followed.

So the next time you spy a solar array in Aragon or Amarillo, see it as the fruit of a regulatory ecosystem that’s as delicate as the interplay of soil, sun and water. Those panels are there because of government action, and their fate sways and bends like sunflowers on a summer day.

Douglas A. Schuler is an associate professor of business and public policy at Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University.

To learn more, please see: Haley, U. C. V. & Schuler, D. A. (2011). Government policy and firm strategy in the solar photovoltaic industry. California Management Review, 54(1), 17-38.

Based on research by Wagner Kamakura 

I was editor of Journal of Marketing Research (JMR) between 2000 and 2003, something I had never imagined even as a vague possibility. The first time the notion of editing this prestigious journal came to mind was in 1999, when I was contacted as one of the finalists for the job and asked to prepare a position statement describing my views of marketing as a discipline and the role of JMR in it.

Contrary to most marketing academics at that time, I did not (and still do not) view marketing as a “science.” (A scientist friend told me that you know you are a scientist from the journals you read; if these journals use a qualifier such as “Transportation,” “Political” or “Psychological” before the word “Science” in their titles, then you are not one. According to this friend, scientists read journals named, e.g., Cells, Nature or simply Science).

In the same way that engineering uses physics, math and so on to solve real and practical physical problems, I view marketing as a technology that relies on the social sciences to solve real and practical market and consumer-related problems. In other words, rather than viewing our discipline as a science, I consider it a scientific applied discipline, or “technology.”

This perspective seems to have prevailed among my predecessors in our field, but probably only among a minority in my generation of marketing PhDs. Many marketing Ph.D.s before my cohort were professionals who had a “real job” for a few years, attained an MBA when they realized they were morphing into managers and in the process fell in love with marketing, leading them to pursue a doctorate in the field. Some in my generation, including myself, also followed this path. I believe this evolution from professional to MBA and then marketing PhD (sometimes without the MBA in the middle) led to a bias in favor of “technology” rather than “science” and an emphasis on implementable solutions rather than elegant but sometimes impractical “theories.”

Soon after taking the position at JMR, in any case, I realized that editors are like traffic cops; at best, they can direct (and sometimes control) traffic flow, but drivers (authors) eventually will get to the destination (research topics) of their choice.

As a conscientious traffic controller, I was especially concerned with finding best reviewers for each submitted manuscript. After all, reviewers are the true experts in a manuscript’s subject and methods; they are in the best position to assess the rigor of the research and its contributions.

After working as editor at JMR and associate editor at other marketing journals I’ve come to see anonymous reviewers as the unsung heroes of any academic journal because they, along with authors, are the ones who really set the collective direction of the journal.

Many authors view the editor as the main barrier blocking their papers from publication when, in fact, reviewers are the ones who produce the expert opinions supporting the editor’s decision. Editors have a not-so-flexible quota of articles to publish in each issue. They want to make sure they select the best manuscripts to fill that quota because what gets published during their tenure becomes part of their legacy as editors. Many reviewers take a devil’s advocate view, seeking reasons to reject a manuscript; editors know that their job is to fill each and every issue of their journal with the best possible content.

This experience clarified my views on where I see our discipline heading — and what it needs to continue in the right direction. In my view, academic research in our field is becoming more closely linked to the basic disciplines it usually relies on and less concerned with real and practical marketing problems. My hunch (some might call it an untested “theory”) is that this has something to do with the way our scholars are educated and trained.

It is not uncommon nowadays for marketing doctoral students to come directly from an undergraduate program in psychology or economics without any prior education, training or experience in business or marketing. Another popular route is postdoctoral study immediately after earning a doctorate in the social sciences, also without any prior exposure to marketing.

Because this trend has been in place for more than a decade, authors now have a stronger “science” bias, centered on the basic disciplines they studied in their academic education. Consequently, reviewers and associate editors now tend to have more of a purist view of the basic disciplines. They are more familiar with elegant, stylized theories derived conceptually or mathematically and tested in a student lab; they tend to dislike the ugliness of the real marketplace and the ungainliness of real consumer/market data.

In light of this bias against what is derisively labeled as “empirical” and “applied” research, marketing academics unfortunately have fallen behind other, more pragmatic, disciplines such as computer science, data science and operations management, as well as industry practitioners on many important practical aspects of marketing, such as direct marketing, database marketing, supply chain management, search engine optimization, social network marketing and (shockingly!) marketing analytics, to name just a few.

My fear is that this trend will continue, with marketing scholars becoming more committed to the basic disciplines they come from and viewing marketing only as a field to apply and test theories developed elsewhere, leading to what one could call the “Balkanization of marketing.” The consequence of this Balkanization is that other fields, such as business analytics, are already taking over the more pragmatic (and profitable!) aspects of marketing while our “scientists” get distracted away from our discipline.

We must ensure that marketing does not break into isolated subfields of psychology, economics, statistics and so forth, the same way Yugoslavia broke into its many independent (and sometimes antagonistic) parts. To counter this possibility, I hope that JMR and similar publications will continue prioritizing articles that mix the rigor of academic research with true relevance to the realities of the marketplace.

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

To learn more, please see: Kamakura, W. A. (2014). Reflections on my editorship of JMR and beyond. Journal of Marketing Research, 51(1), 131–132.

By Mary Lee Grant

At a small rural hospital in Aransas Pass, a shrimping and tourist town of about 7,000, some patients visited the emergency room twice a day, obtaining insulin and other medications they couldn’t afford to buy themselves. Nurses sometimes pooled their money to pay for patients’ cab fare home.

“It is that kind of place,” said Jen Deselms, a registered nurse who worked in the emergency room at Care Regional Hospital before Hurricane Harvey hit, forcing the facility to shut its doors indefinitely. “We look out for each other and for our community. Not having this hospital will be devastating for the entire area.”

All week, doctors and nurses labored to repair the hospital, which serves about 90,000 in three counties, mopping flooded floors and hammering two-by-fours to patch crumbling walls. In Aransas Pass and the neighboring beachfront towns decimated by Harvey’s first brutal landfall, a tale of two recoveries has emerged. Although these communities are often described as resort towns, tourism overlays a culture of rural poverty here. These are places where shrimpers who haven’t owned boats in years struggle to get by on disability checks. Folks who gave up on the cities cram into waterfront RV parks – many destroyed in the storm – venturing to the coast to flip hamburgers or wait tables in an effort to find their place in the sun and the sand.

According to Scott Sonenshein, a management professor at Rice Business who studies resilience and resourcefulness, Harvey could provide the chance for people and communities to remake themselves.

"It is a chance to start from scratch and do something new," said Sonenshein, author of Stretch: Unlock the Power of Less and Do More than You Ever Imagined. “Research shows that when people are faced with nearly insurmountable odds, they often find completely new and resourceful ways of approaching things and forge completely different paths. Communities can channel the sense of togetherness that comes out of disaster to build something better.”

But in the Coastal Bend, many schools have yet to open their doors and patients will now have to travel at least 20 miles across the Harbor Bridge to Corpus Christi to find medical care, difficult for many in an area with little public transportation.

In nearby Rockport, where retirees show their paintings of shrimp boats and pelicans in art galleries along picturesque Copano Bay and swish condos line the waterfront, virtually nothing remains unscathed. About 80 percent of the buildings in town were damaged, according to federal estimates.

But the path to recovery will vary, said Chuck Shamel, a retired counselor who serves on the executive board of the Good Samaritan, a non-profit that helps the needy with food, bills and transportation.

“The poor will stay and rebuild, because they have nowhere else to go and no way to get out,” he said. “The rich will be back in a few weeks, when the power goes on and the golf courses open.”

The 76 year old moved here to build his dream home with his wife, Betty, a 79-year-old retired teacher, on several wooded acres near the water. Although Harvey damaged their house, he expects insurance to pay most of the costs. He is more concerned with those who have less.

“We are a barbell community, with 20 percent on the upper end and 20 percent on the lower,” Shamel said.

Many moved to the coast hoping for a fresh start among the placid bays and sheltering oak trees, but the reality often is harsher. Jobs are scarce, salaries low and property is expensive.

Ida Jeter, 60, who works cleaning and cooking for nuns at a Catholic shrine, said she is living in her car. The shrine was damaged and many of the nuns are returning to their home base in Wisconsin, so Jeter doesn’t know if she will have a job.

“They kicked me out of my apartment because it was so damaged,” she said, bursting into tears. “I have nowhere to go.”

Unlike much of south and southeast Texas, the poverty here is concentrated in a largely white population. Rockport is about 67 percent white and 24 percent Hispanic, with a sprinkling of blacks and a small but thriving Vietnamese immigrant community originally drawn by the shrimping. Port Aransas is even whiter, with about 89 percent of the population white, 3 percent Hispanic and fewer than a half-percent black or Asian.

Unlike heavily Hispanic south Texas or the Houston area, with its large African-American and multi-hued immigrant population, this is Trump country. In Aransas County, about 74 percent of voters supported Trump. Boarded up windows at a business near Rockport marina are painted with the words, “Bet they blame Trump,” beside an American flag.

Dennis Finner, 50, said he wishes he had seen Trump when the president visited the area.

“I am glad Trump set his feet here,” Finner said. “I wish I had known so I could have seen him, because I like him. Is he doing a good job at helping? I have no idea. I don’t even have a TV anymore.”

For Finner, the self-reliance he so values is eluding him in the wake of Harvey. He doesn’t like depending on government or charity.

“There is nothing like working hard with your hands all your life only to have everything you worked for taken away in a few hours,” Finner said. “I ain’t never taken anything from the government – no handouts or nothing. And now there are people by the side of the road giving out free hamburgers and I’m eating them. It just hurts.”

For many residents, the devastation left in Harvey’s wake is testing a deeply held value of self-reliance. Bill Woods, who was almost killed in a motorcycle accident years ago, now lives with a painful limp, one eye permanently shut and a metal plate in his head. Yet Woods, 60, receives no disability payments.

“All the money I have, I make with my own hard work,” he said.

He mows lawns for a living, but wind blew apart the trailer he uses to haul his equipment. Harvey also tore apart the trailer where he lives, so he is staying with friends.

“At least the government is here,” he said. “I will have to wait and see if I can get a FEMA trailer to live in or some money to buy another trailer.”

Aransas County Sheriff Bill Mills said federal aid has been sufficient, but dealing with the multitude of agencies that have descended on the area to help in very specific ways has demanded great coordination.

“Each agency has one little area that they micromanage, which is good, because they have a lot of expertise in that area,” Mills said. “But we are overwhelmed. We have so much to deal with. The power isn’t even back on, almost every building has been damaged, people are homeless and we are arresting looters. Our schools have been closed indefinitely. Our teachers don’t have jobs. People are trying to clean up with this heat index and stress that is off the charts.”

In Port Aransas, a town of 4,000 that can swell to 70,000 on weekends, the city manager has estimated that every building in town was damaged. A group of friends sat in deck chairs in the parking lot of the Place Motel, whose manager had given them rooms for free after their lodgings were flooded. The men were shirtless in the hot muggy weather; the women wore shorts and, midriff tops with packs of cigarettes tucked into their bras. They were drinking tequila and Jack Daniels straight from bottles they found floating down the street when the liquor store flooded.

Timothy Yoke, 53, who lays tile for a living, rode the storm out, but his apartment was completely flooded. “Of course I will stay,” he said. “I love it here. I love the beach and the weather and the people. Where else would I go?”

In Port Aransas, about 11 percent of the population falls below the poverty line, but 17 percent of those under 18 live in poverty. About 80 percent of the island homes are owned by people from elsewhere, making the town a mix of prosperous out-of-towners and locals who largely depend on jobs serving tourists.

Many part-time residents also dock boats in Port Aransas. At Island Moorings Marina, crane operators worked to remove dozens of boats from the mud and sand.

Rochelle Rackham, 63, slept in her beached sailboat all night. The ocean-going catamaran had broken away from the docks as the storm surge hit and floated onto dry land.

“I have to sleep here because the boat is so valuable and I have thousands of dollars of electronic equipment on it,” said Rackham. “A man came around last night and tried to break in, but I pulled my .38 on him and he ran.”

Rackham, who has sailed solo as far as Turkey and Tunisia on her boat, said she is not sure she will stick with Port Aransas after the storm. “I think it would be simpler just to dock her in Cayman,” she said.

George Brown, a commercial real estate broker who owns an oceanfront RV park, said that even though he lives in San Antonio, Port Aransas is part of who he is. Most of the RVs in his park were destroyed, but he said he will rebuild.

“We used to come down here when I was a kid for the hurricanes,” he said. “Partly to check on our property, but also for the excitement. My parents would bring a generator and hook it up. And we would listen to the rain and wind. Hurricanes are part of living on the coast. I’m not leaving.”

Mary Lee Grant is a political scientist in Kingsville, Texas and a writer for Business Wisdom. A version of this story appeared in the Washington Post.

Based on research by Sharad Borle, Siddharth S. Singh and Dipak C. Jain 

• Contrary to what one might think, customers who stay with a firm longer may not spend more money than those who stay for less time.
• Determining a customer’s spending in a buying relationship will shape how managers commit marketing dollars.
• Longer spells between purchases are linked with greater risk of a customer leaving a firm.

Managers dream of keeping their customers faithful for years. Sooner or later, though, almost all consumers will go elsewhere. That’s why marketing experts scramble to predict how long a customer will stay with a company and how much money she’ll spend on it. In industry parlance, this variable is “customer lifetime value.”

The craving to know why customers stray has inspired a cottage industry in models calculating the “lifetime value” a customer brings to his or her partnership with a seller. Pinpointing when a customer starts doing business with a firm, each purchase she makes and when she quits buying all help marketers hone their efforts to keep her interested.

But customer devotion rarely runs smoothly. Higher spending, for one thing, does not necessarily correlate with longer customer relationship. Curiously, consumers who stay with a company briefly often spend more than those who stay loyal for years. So managers need to differentiate between the length of time a customer buys from them and her “lifetime value” — what she brings to that connection.

To improve companies’ predictive ability, Rice Business professor Sharad Borle and former Rice Business professor Siddharth S. Singh, along with colleague Dipak C. Jain, then of Northwestern University, created a model for predicting and testing customer lifetime value. They define this as the value a customer brings to a firm (generally measured as the revenues from her purchases), minus the firm’s costs to maintain the bond.

Past research on this topic has focused on two specific contexts: contractual and non-contractual. In a non-contractual situation, management doesn’t know exactly when customers quit buying a product, so the moment of a customer’s defection has to be inferred. Contractual situations, on the other hand, allow close monitoring of specific day-to-day factors. In contractual relationships such as automobile associations, membership-based retailers like Costco and membership-based buying relationships such as music and food clubs, managers know exactly when a relationship starts and ends, and every time a customer makes a purchase.

The researchers decided to look at elements of both contractual and non-contractual settings in their study, a scenario that had not been previously analyzed in any depth. First they looked at a membership-based direct marketing company that tracked the dates each customer joined and terminated membership. Then they examined how well different models worked in predicting customer lifetime value.

Their model predicted customers’ likelihood of ending the membership as well as their spending patterns. With this information in hand, the scholars could estimate the lifetime value of each customer every time she made a purchase.

The model proved better at predicting customer lifetime value and in targeting valuable customers than the other models to which they compared it. They also discovered that a customer’s purchase timing, purchase amount and risk of defecting are intertwined, which validated their joint-modeling approach.

To reach their conclusions, the researchers studied two random samples of data, both drawn from the population of all customers who joined a company in one particular year in the late 1990s. These data offered information about all purchases by these customers from the first day of membership to the time the consumers moved on to other pastures.

The first part of the data showed 1,000 past customers and 7,108 purchases. It traced the buying habits of these customers over their entire lifetime with the firm. The second part, consisting of another 500 past customers (a validation sample), was selected for predictive testing and to illustrate the model in action. It looked at the times between purchase, purchase amounts and the total membership lifetime of each customer.

How did loyalty correlate to spending? Not very strongly. A customer who waited longer between purchases was more likely to end her membership, yet a customer who waited longer between purchases also was likely to spend more. There was little difference between the amount of time men and women waited to buy – but when they did make a purchase, women spent less. Men and women were equally likely to end their membership with the firm.

Gauging customer value, clearly, is no simple thing. But good models that predict how and when customers spend remove some of the guesswork. It’s crucial data for any business that needs to know when customers are thinking of bolting — and how to woo them back.

Sharad Borle is an associate professor of marketing at Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University. 

To learn more, please see: Sing, S. S., Borle, S., & Jain, D. C. (2008). Customer lifetime value measurement. Management Science, 54(1), 100-112.