By Claudia Kolker

How can a small, cluttered, seemingly out-of-date business survive in a neighborhood rapidly transitioning from working- to middle- and upper-middle class? Speaking to writer Claudia Kolker, Rice sociologist Stephen Klineberg explains: In its own way, that business reflects the essence of Houston entrepreneurship.

Wedged into a narrow space on Richmond Avenue, a tiny, chaotic shop called Variedades Puebla peddles snacks not easily found in most other stores. On the counter stands an irregular triangle of cheese, transported by hand from Oaxaca; in the refrigerator sits a blood-red hunk of mole, cooked with five kinds of chile. And on a little wooden shelf near the chips, rolled plastic bags hold desiccated brown shards that, on inspection, turn out to be edible crickets.

Almost unbelievably, Variedades Puebla has sold its wares in this spot between Hazard and Woodhead for 23 years. It has survived as townhouses leapt up blocks away; stood firm when Fiesta went dark in the shadow of the lavish new HEB. Segway dealerships, trendy restaurants, and mattress stores have popped up and vanished, but Variedades Puebla has not moved.

It would be easy to imagine that the shop reflects some otherworldly pact to never change. But in fact it represents just the opposite. Variedades Puebla is an example of knowing the right time to change, and knowing just how much change is enough. It's a triumph of Houston entrepreneurship.

Plastered with signs for check cashing, bill paying, remittances, and "Gelatinas de Piña y Naranja $1," Variedades Puebla’s façade gives its first, lively blast of Mexican aesthetic. Inside, every corner echoes the same note of abundance. On the right, under a line of soccer jerseys, shelves are crowded with purple and red-plaid brassieres. The glass counter is packed, above and inside, with watches, wallets, greenery, bags of chopped cactus paddles, and paper-wrapped stacks of tortillas rolled off the belt that morning from a Long Point factory.

Toward the back, an uncovered cardboard carton offers grayish sheets of dried beef; beside it, another box holds a soccer ball swathed in plastic and a sac full of dried chilis. On a shelf near the dried crickets nestle small plastic bags packed with dried shrimp, tiny dried fish for munching, dried cilantro, avocado leaves for tea, and little balls of dried pepper. On the floor, in front of the counter, a crate of onions lies next to a crate of plaid shirts for little boys.

"I've come to pay my electric bill," a burly Mexican man in a blue T-shirt says, approaching the counter. The shop's aisles are so narrow that the man would be hard-pressed to navigate them if he wanted to shop for food. But at Variedades Puebla, services such as utility payments are as much of a draw as the pan dulces and crickets.

Parked behind the counter in a spot crowded with fax machines and other electronics, owner Saul Vivas is a friendly man with an impish, Cantinflas mustache. Originally from Puebla, Mexico, he moved to Houston with his mother when he was 14. For years, they lived in a humble apartment at Welch and Dunlavy. Vivas learned excellent English; went to Lanier Middle School; then, soon after high school, deployed his charm and language skills as a waiter at River Oaks Grill. In 1992, he gathered his savings and struck out on his own, first with a taco truck on Bissonnet, and finally by launching Variedades Puebla – the last part of the name reflecting his heritage, and the first the variety of offerings.

"I wanted to be independent," Vivas says. "I didn't want to rely on a boss.''

The time was the early 1990s, and it was clear what the market would bear: decked with a prominent sign offering "Fashions," Variedades Puebla offered specialized clothes to the recently arrived immigrants from Mexico and Central America who populated the apartments up and down Richmond. These newcomers, Vivas knew, didn't have the money to shop on West Gray or at the Galleria. Plus, he knew what rural immigrants liked: cowboy hats and boots, brown-and-white embroidered belts, and soccer jerseys – stacks of soccer jerseys, with the names of home states and beloved players. The newcomers also craved music from home. Vivas stocked whole aisles of CDs, with lots of Mexican pop, and almost as much from traditional genres such as charro songs.

The store never grew—physically it couldn't—but its location was key to its success. Montrose was gentrifying, but this patch of Richmond remained hard-scrabble: decayed brick buildings and small apartment complexes housed a constant tide of newcomers who washed dishes and bussed tables in area restaurants. Many did without cars.

“There aren’t very many who stay in these apartments,” Vivas says. “They earn money, buy a house, and move. But there are always new people from Mexico – now, more than ever.”

For years, the Fiesta at Alabama and Dunlavy appealed to these shoppers by offering Spanish-speaking attendants and shelf after shelf of chilies, tamale husks, and tamarind candy. Variedades Puebla supplied clothes and music.

But gradually the tides of business changed. "I used to be the only place for the new people from Mexico to buy clothes," Vivas says. "But then it became possible to buy clothes very cheaply from Asian businesses in the Harwin area."

The CD business tanked too. As the Internet blossomed, even the least educated rural immigrants learned how to download songs online, or find links to their familiar music for free. The clothes-and-music business looked dire. Then, auspiciously for Vivas, the Alabama Fiesta closed.

Across the street, a bigger and even more abundant store rose: a wood-paneled HEB, as elegant on the outside as it was chic on the inside. But the dishwashers who lived in the $700 a month complexes on Richmond had little use for chic. They needed ancho chilies and Mexican aspirin. They came to Vivas and asked, could you get hold of those?

He didn't need to be asked many times. In 2012, Vivas transformed his store. Out went most of the clothes. The traditional CDs got nudged to a corner. After two decades, Variedades Puebla is, if anything, now more Mexican than ever: low-key, jumbled, cozy, and jammed with the snacks, sounds, and aromas of another place and time.

"Weight Loss!"
"Diabetes!"
"Energy!"

The handwritten cards trumpet their optimism from a stack of Mexican naturopathic remedies piled on the counter. In front of them stands a plastic jar full of minuscule Chiclet packages. Not as juicy, long lasting, or bold tasting as recent gum innovations, Chiclets nevertheless are unbeatable if you crave a taste of Mexican childhood.

And that, Saul Vivas says, is the reason many of his customers come to Variedades Puebla. The closing of the Fiesta created a demand for more Mexican foods, but Variedades Puebla is not much bigger than a package of Chiclets, so it only offers three or four items, in just one brand, of laundry detergent, canned beans, or corn husks for tamales. Immigrant customers pop in for supplies because they can walk to the store, but they must figure out how to get fresh produce and bulk items somewhere else.

The store’s apparent disorder, Vivas' daughter Monica says one afternoon, isn't really an accident. "My parents aren't trying to forget where they came from," she says from a seat behind the counter. Now a 21-year-old accounting student, she has been hanging around Variedades Puebla since babyhood. "Their store," Monica says, "looks and feels like back there."

Her father agrees. "A lot of our customers just come in to say hello or to be here," he says. "They don't speak English and they feel uneasy in a big store like HEB where they can't communicate. In fact many of them don't even speak Spanish. They're from Guerrero or Oaxaca, and they speak indigenous dialects. I don't speak those languages, but I listen and to try help them. So they feel comfortable here."

Chaotic as it seems, Saul Vivas' market embodies Houston-style entrepreneurship, says Rice University sociologist Stephen Klineberg.

"Food is such an important part of immigrant culture, the sense of well-being and belonging, being able to recreate home," Klineberg says. "And adapting to the changing market is so typical of Houston: that can-do spirit, and precisely that idea of figuring out how to make it work."

Even in a community constantly in flux, Vivas' attentiveness has woven strong bonds. "There's one old man who always wears a work shirt, and he treats my brothers and me like we are his own children," Monica says. "So he comes in, he talks to us, he asks how we are. He doesn't have a family of his own here. His wife lives in Mexico, but people just get used to having their families there and sending money to them."

"They're simple people here," agrees Edmundo Hernandez, 49, munching from a bag of chile-lime wheat chips he's just bought. Hernandez lives in Spring Branch, where he works as a graphic designer. But he drives to Montrose once a month to get his hair cut at the Mexican place next door and shop for Mexican snacks at Variedades Puebla. "I want to buy here, because no one looks at you strangely," Hernandez says. "You get accustomed to the service. You feel relaxed."

This story originally appeared on the Montrose Management District website, under the title “Value in Variety: Variedades Puebla Finds Its Niche Bringing Mexico to Montrose.” Photography by Juan Islas. 

By G. Anthony Gorry (1941-2018) and Robert A. Westbrook

This article by Friedkin Professor of Management Tony Gorry and the William Alexander Kirkland Professor of Business Robert A. Westbrook originally appeared in the Fall 2014 issue of the Rice Business Magazine.

In every age, leaders of businesses have encountered obstacles on their paths to success. Often changing circumstances have thwarted previously prepared plans. Then, the work of the mind took precedence over that of the hand. New ways were needed to prosper in changing competitive environments. Sometimes a single, grand conception restored a company to prosperity; other times, it was a number of lesser ideas knitted together fortuitously. Hope for such innovations rested largely on the creativity of executives.

A prominently placed "suggestion box" acknowledged that good ideas might come from workers whose job descriptions said nothing about innovation. Indeed, two decades ago, when the concept of intellectual capital first entered the management literature, journalist Thomas Stewart took it as the "sum of everything everybody in your company knows that gives you a competitive edge in the market place." In this view, what a company knows emerges not just from its leaders, but as well from the experiences, insights and intuitions of a wide range of employees. Everyone is a potential source of innovation.

So in recent years, businesses have launched comprehensive programs to tap the collective brainpower of their employees. Attention is paid to the insights of the worker on the shop floor, the customer representative, the logistic team, which had for long escaped recording and cataloging. Networks linking workers and processes across different companies undergird many recent increases in productivity, rewarding businesses that know what they know — and know it right away.

That we are attached to information technology is readily apparent to even the most casual observer. It permeates our lives and shapes much of our experience of the world. Less apparent are ways in which our intimacy with these machines is changing us.

We might expect, for example, that our growing intimacy with digital machines will swell an electronic suggestion box to foster innovation and promote organizational growth. Perhaps, but we have our doubts.

Wander the hallways of a large business. Look for contributors to our imagined suggestion box. Here's a meeting in the executive suite. See heads bowed as though in contemplation. Perhaps they're pondering strategic challenges facing the company. More likely, they're eyeing their personal digital assistants, checking email, the latest news, Facebook or Twitter. Some may think they're concealing their dalliances in the virtual world. Others, avid users themselves, know what's going on. Their attempts to hide their distractions are often half-hearted.

On the floor below, we pass several employees unwrapping sandwiches for a quick lunch. They plan to review progress on a task force report. Again, heads are bowed. Are they saying grace over their food? More likely, like the executives above, they're turning to smart devices for engagement, tuning out colleagues.

Walking on, we ask our host about the company's recent activities. While she gives us an overview, she too checks her smart phone, almost as if she needed a script for her answers.

She seems distracted. Maybe she's already devoted enough time to us and needs to get on to more important matters.

Sherry Turkle says "talking to each other is perceived as exhausting, and we happily retreat into worlds where we communicate only with machines." Maybe we're exhausting her.

At times, everyone has wished for escape from the here and now. Doodling, gazing out the window, empty-headed nodding or long, pregnant pauses: All are ways to check out of dull, uninspiring encounters. Digital technology, however, has greatly expanded the opportunities for flight. Throughout the organization, as in social life generally, its widespread use has altered the rules of civility. Device at the ready, we put our colleagues and family members firmly on notice that we won't tolerate boredom to the degree that was once expected of us.

Boredom is a cloud to be banished as quickly as possible. Our mobile devices stand ready to suppress even its most wispy beginnings. In lines, at street crossings and in waiting rooms, wherever there might be a break in life's action, shorter and shorter intervals of time now demand filling. Something may have just happened to someone, somewhere. We check and check again. We flee our own thoughts to entertainments fashioned by others. But a flight from boredom can be a flight from creativity, because it is from boredom that new ideas and connections emerge, in the executive suite and on the shop floor.

What of our imagined suggestion box? Its value depends on contribution, assessment and dissemination. First, managers and workers need to volunteer insights regarding their jobs and improving the performance of the business. Next, from those contributions must be selected knowledge and practices that most promise benefits, grand or small. Finally, the chosen innovations must be shared and improvements must be anchored in the ways of the company.

Failure in any of these steps locks creativity within one part of the organization, unrecognized and unexploited by others. Too often then, errors will be repeated; opportunities, lost; and innovations, unrealized. Even strategic opportunities may be foregone.

What of those we've just seen in our walk through the company? Their devotion to machines makes them uneasy in life's slower moments. Those who are uncomfortable with boredom may contribute less to the company's intellectual capital. When we tap the suggestion box, we may find its contents have dwindled.

Although boredom has been a concern of philosophers and scientists for ages, its nature and cause remain elusive. Boredom may arise from an existential perception that life is empty. Psychologists and social scientists have found that commonly and less dramatically, we are bored when we judge an activity unworthy of our attention. Tasks that are too simple allow attention to wander, creating dissatisfaction with the job at hand. For ages, meditative teachings have countered such boredom by avoiding judgment of the worth of activities. For most of us, however, parental advice ran in a different direction: "Find something to do!" But finding too much to do may also induce boredom, because attention is pulled in too many directions. Then we need to step aside, to do less, to reflect.

In the 1800s, Charles Baudelaire confronted a new Paris thrust up in the midst of the old by commercialism. Most startling were the throngs in the streets, the plentitude of the marketplace and the new architecture of the city. How should a thoughtful person manage interactions with such a myriad of people and things? The crowd offered spectacles and enticements, often quite unexpected, as Baudelaire describes in one of his poems. A woman passing by briefly intoxicates him, but he cannot know what path either she or he would follow into the future. She was just one of some many brief experiences: accidental, anonymous and transitory to be encountered in the tumult of the new Paris.

Baudelaire felt the onset of a new kind of boredom induced by an acceleration that threatened to make life just a series of fleeting impressions. He said that of the "squalid zoo of vices" that plagued his time, boredom "is even uglier and fouler than the rest." It would gladly swallow all creation in a yawn. In the face of restless activity and frightening anonymity, the wanderer was always on the lookout for novelty of experience or observation that would penetrate the fog of the teeming crowd and restore him to life. But each new event or encounter, which promised so much, proved just as empty as its predecessors.

Much the same could be said of today, although we more often wander electronic byways rather than cobbled streets. In the burgeoning crowd of cyberspace, we are dissatisfied with our situation and wish to be elsewhere, doing something different. We could turn away from the distractions of our bustling electronic byways, but such a departure seems to demand more energy than we can muster. Even when we take such a break, we may find we've forgotten how to be comfortable with ourselves. Something deep within urges us to rejoin the crowd.

Today's world of tweets bears vestiges of the long trek our ancient ancestors took to become human. Along the way, emotional sensitivity to others was joined by strong curiosity about them, a desire to know what they were thinking, feeling and scheming. Once we became capable of creative reflection, we no longer had to satisfy this desire in actual social situations; we could find pleasure in imagined activities and interactions. In today's fluid electronic arenas for gossip, preening, and posturing, users "strut their stuff" with embellished self-descriptions and accumulations of "friends" from far and wide. Scores and stars announce prowess. These designations would mean little, had evolution not made us so drawn to groups, so sensitive to trappings of rank, and so irresistibly drawn to judge and categorize others. Our brains hunger for participation and status, and our smartphones and tablets stand ever at the ready to feed them. We love these devices, because we were born to love them.

In an old vaudeville act, a man set plates spinning atop a row of poles. Back and forth he hustled from one pole to another, giving each just enough spin to keep its plate from falling. As he attended to one plate, others teetered precariously. Too much attention to one meant disaster for others. Not enough meant that this one would fall. Success depended on giving to each pole just enough attention to keep its plate aloft. As he went, an assistant added new poles and plates, demanding even more speed from him. He had to conduct the remainder of his act on the dead run.

Our plates and poles today are digital messages. Work, home, social networks all clamor for our attention. Proud of our ability to sustain the pace of life in the digital age, we race from email to cell phone to computer screen, spending enough time on each task only to keep it spinning. We even add new poles as we race along.

The two of us, who have been around for a while, no longer make good vaudevillians of the plate spinning kind. The pace has become too swift. We need some proverbial peace and quiet.

But what of the many others, who are unnerved when life slows and not much seems to be happening? It isn't crashing plates they fear. It's spending too much time on one thing when something else might be happening.

They take boredom as a signal to move on, to focus attention on something else. For many, that feeling arises ever more quickly. Students, who once happily watched a five-minute video in class, now get itchy after a minute or so. News stories are compressed. Executives want complex matters reduced to bullet points for quick consideration. Consumers choose movies, restaurants and books on anonymously awarded stars, because who has the time to read up on these subjects? It's so boring.

In today's fast-paced life, we could have the time to read, ponder, investigate and slog along. Absent the sirens of digital technology, perhaps we might do so. Reading makes many uncomfortable, when, for example, long sentences with subordinate clauses run on for more than a line or two, describing situations or putting forth arguments, which well may be central to the subject being written about, but as they proceed, seem to test our powers of concentration, which have been tuned by the terse text of instant messaging where compression of language and perhaps of thought hold sway. A vaudevillian living in a world of hyperlinks and bullet points reads the first of the previous sentence and mutters, "Oh, get on with it!" and jumps to an email or text message that might be more "interesting." We want at most the general idea, to learn just enough, just in time.

Walter Benjamin argued that a story claims a greater place in our memories when the teller allows us to embellish it for ourselves. The more we integrate the story into our own experiences, the greater will be our inclination to repeat it. In the retelling, it may assume new and deeper meanings. This is true not just of stories told by others, but of those we tell ourselves. Tennessee Williams claimed "that life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going? It's really all memory . . . except for each passing moment." Quickly we weave moments of an experience into a story, however brief, which embodies our memory of it. In reminiscence, we return again and again to inspect, edit, and embellish the story. In making plans, we may intertwine a variant of the story with imagined acts in and imagined history of the future. Unless we simply copy someone else's story, we need inspiration to write our own. But the assimilation of a story requires a state of relaxation, which even before the Internet era was becoming rare.

Benjamin said boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. The self-forgetful listener who puts aside the press of life and attends deeply to his memory prepares the nesting area for the dream bird, Benjamin's metaphorical bringer of insight and understanding. In quiet disengagement from the bustle of the world, the dream bird hatches the egg of experience.

Many of us could benefit from this bird's visit, but we need "down time" to welcome it in.

Today, however, our machines are always at our side, to fill that quiet time. We push letters onto a Scrabble board, fight off attacking aliens or draw pictures for another to guess.

Enticements delivered to cell phones demand attention that once would have been devoted to the meeting agenda, the dinner companion, the teacher or even reverie. They rustle the leaves and drive the dream bird away.

Enthusiasm for these simple games underscores our brains' need for engagement and status. Points or promotions, stars or scores assure us of our skill and pats on the back keep us going. If we don't feel competitive, there are other applications that promise tidbits of information as tokens we can collect. What is the current temperature in Paris, the score of the Yankees' game, the change of a stock price from ten minutes ago? We ask these questions, not because their answers are important, but because they can be answered by our digital devices. They give an immediate purpose, however small, to idle time. Each reward is a note in a siren's song that draws us ever deeper into technology's domain.

Digital distractions will proliferate. Many presently inert objects will become interactive. Perhaps our cereal boxes will challenge us to a simple guessing games at breakfast: win points for the next trip to the market by ranking food combinations by calories. Think of all the places that have already been invaded by advertising. To imagine a likely future, think of many of those sites as places for games. Idle moments in which we could reflect on what has happened to us, what we have done, and the interactions we have had with others — those moments will be increasingly filled with imaginative engagements with the virtual. The dream bird will get chased away by a call from a cereal box.

To quarrel with technology is to quarrel with human nature. Our intimacy with machines will increase. So what of boredom? Inherited urges may incline our behavior, but they need not determine it. If, fearing moments with nothing to do, we turn to machines for constant entertainment and engagement, we will lose time for invention. If we don't pause between tasks to reflect on our lives, we may not know where we are or where we are going.

Instead of fleeing seemingly empty moments, we should welcome them in moderation. Indeed, we should create times of solitude in which we plan to do little. Creativity is the residue of time wasted, Albert Einstein supposedly said. But how do we find time for "doing nothing" in our economy of speed and efficiency? When everyone else is working "leaner," isn't it unwise to indulge in reflection that can't be easily monitored or measured? Our quick answer: don't bet everything on the hare; wager a bit on the tortoise. Put aside the machines we love — at least for a time.

Recently, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Matt Richtel reported on a rafting trip taken by five neuroscientists in a remote area of southern Utah. They sought to understand how intense involvement with digital devices changes how we think and behave. Would a retreat into nature reverse any adverse effects?

They went off the grid, leaving laptops and cellphones behind. As days passed, the time of the wilderness supplanted that of the digital world. Conversations were interspersed with periods of silence in the presence the wonders of the surroundings. As the river flowed, says Richtel, so did ideas.

One of the travelers noted that, "the real mental freedom in knowing no one or nothing can interrupt you." We suspect Einstein would have concurred. Benjamin was no scientist, but he would have stood well in that company. Be quiet and wait. Be bored. The dream bird will come.

Think of the future time as a wilderness, and you as its steward. Of course, you'll allocate significant parcels to industry — to activities appropriate to your work and home life. Some of that space, however, should be reserved, much as the Utah backcountry, where the ways of life are slower and less congested. Preservation requires vigilance and determination. Once, for example, vacations meant time away, time without the interruptions of everyday life. Traveling in a car or plane offered shorter versions of the same. Now, like developers falling on pristine land, smartphones and wireless networks have colonized that time. They have bought their way in by feeding our brains' voracious appetites for stimulation.

Writing, printing, the cinema, television and other precursors of our inclusive cyberspace substantially changed how we gather and share what we know. They disrupted long-standing social structures and expectations of personal behavior. While life is not determined by technology, each of the innovations, which now seem a part of the natural world, exacted a price. In dealing with our smart devices, we need to take a stronger negotiating position.

We are paying too much to quell our fear of boredom, too readily yielding our refuges to the rush of the now.

We should protect segments of time, putting smartphones and tablets aside, leaving our desktop computers. Just sitting, walking, gardening, talking with friends: these are but a few ways to enter our own personal wilderness.

When we slow down, we may at first be bored, but soon, we are apt to find much to do. Perhaps the dream bird will come, bringing us a new addition for our organization's suggestion box. Or perhaps something just for us. Even if it doesn't, we are likely to return to the rush of the digital age with a better sense of who we are — and who we want to be.

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

Wherever you weigh in on the hazards of sitting vs. standing all day or alternating between the two, there’s no denying that standing (and also walking) desks are populating offices everywhere, even McNair Hall at the Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University.

An informal poll of faculty at the business school revealed different reasons, from health to height to hoping for increased productivity. Here’s what the research is telling us:

Ben Lansford
Director of the Master of Accounting Program
Professor in the Practice of Accounting

• Neck pain
• All day sitting

“I’m tall (6’4”), so a regular height desk means I have to hunch while I type on my computer. Starting in my Ph.D. program days, I developed pretty bad upper back pain. So I actually use my “standing desk” to raise my computer and keyboard to just the right height for when I’m sitting. It works like a charm. It has completely removed my neck pain!”

Brian Akins
Assistant Professor of Accounting

• Back pain
• All day standing, barefoot with two anti-fatigue mats

“I’m more productive in the afternoon. You can’t fall asleep standing up. I found I was getting a lot more done.”

David De Angelis
Assistant Professor of Finance

• Back pain
• Alternates sitting and standing

“I’ve only been doing it one semester, but I’m moving more and more to standing when I need to think.”

Jefferson Duarte
Associate Professor of Finance and
Gerald D. Hines Associate Professor of Real Estate Finance

• Walking desk, alternates between two desks (walking and sitting) with two computers connected remotely. Speed: 1.1 mph

“I didn’t want to be sitting all the time. At this speed, I can read and write without any problems. It helps a lot with my productivity in the afternoon.”

K. Ramesh
Herbert S. Autrey Professor of Accounting

• Avoid late afternoon lethargy
• Hoping to improve focus

“With just four months of use, can’t be confident in identifying specific positive outcomes, but that won’t stop me! Time seems to fly faster. My productivity has gone up in terms of quantity, but only time will tell about its quality!”

This article originally appeared in the Jones Journal, Spring 2016.

By Claudia Kolker

The look was American Gothic, South of the Border. Flanking a teenager in tiara and leopard-print ball gown, Crescencio Ibarra and wife Anaelda stared fixedly into a camera in San Luis Potosí, Mexico, and invited viewers to their daughter's fifteenth birthday.

More than 1.3 million Facebook users worldwide have since RSVP'd.

The video invitation to Rubi's quinceañera, sometimes called a quince, first surfaced widely last week on YouTube. (Reportedly, Mr. Ibarra hit "public" instead of "private" on Facebook.) In the aftermath, Rubi Ibarra García and her slightly stunned parents have become an unprecedented sensation.

For Mexicans and viewers who know their traditions, Rubi's quince is now an online Vesuvius of memes and absurd video parodies. For U.S. marketers, though, it's something else: a glimpse at what makes the vast, coveted and hard-to-reach Latino market tick.

"It really shows the practical power of cultural literacy," says Utpal Dholakia, a management professor at Rice Business School. "It's why business training needs to give global perspective — and why business schools need diverse students, of all backgrounds, not only Latino. At some point, they're going to be educating each other."

Rubi's video certainly gives plenty to study. As she and her mother (swathed in a salmon-pink poncho that's now a meme of its own) look on stonily, father Crescencio faces the camera from under a cowboy hat to make his offer: At the December 26 party, three bands will perform for the celebration, plus a fourth during the meal. A traditional mass will be said. And, to the amusement of hundreds of thousands of viewers, a "chiva" worth $10,000 pesos will be up for grabs. Depending on the region, this may mean either a live goat, cooked cabrito, or a horse race with a big prize.

Quinces are meant to be blowouts, a young woman's debut in her community. Both in Mexico and parts of the United States, serious quinces eclipse weddings. The quince girl gets a giant pastel hoopskirt; teen ladies- and gentlemen-in-waiting practice dance steps for months; traditions like the Last Doll of childhood, the First High Heel of womanhood, the emotional missive, and first waltz with Daddy ensure torrents of tears.

In the Southwest, it's all so tempting that boys and non-Latinos sometimes get quinces too, with touches such as '40s-style zoot suits, hip-hop deejays, and bouncing low-rider limos.

Even so, the Ibarras hardly meant their invitation to race round the world. They certainly couldn't guess that so many Latinos would count themselves as community. "People are having fun with this because it's such a huge part of the culture to celebrate a 'fifteen' that it's very relatable," says Juan Alanis, former Hispanic corporate communications lead for AT&T, and cofounder of Big Oak Tree Media, a communications firm.

Columnist Gustavo Arellano, author of cult favorite "Ask A Mexican!" column in Orange County Weekly, checks off the video's charms. "There's the stoic looks of the mom and Rubi," he says. "There's the clash of culture, millennial versus traditional. The earnestness of the dad. And the innocence of it all: a breath of fresh air in such a cynical world. The laughter that people have isn't necessarily at the family's expense, but rather a feel-good reminder of the truly important things in Mexican culture: a party, a quince, and a loving family."

Celebrities have invited themselves to the fiesta with tweets, posts and videos. Singer Espinoza Paz was one of several who RSVP'd and asked to perform at the party. Actor Gael Bernal Garcia, famous for the movie Y Tu Mamá También, filmed a parody with a clip-art goat looming on a barn roof and comic Piolín, in a tiara, playing Rubi. (Everyone's invited -- "y tu mamá también," Piolín blurts).

Rubi's family has shown up on Mexican morning shows, and the tweets and RSVPs keep on coming. "Another tortilla please," tweeted one wit, over one face in a shot of thousands of people jammed into a plaza.

"Okay, let's go!" tweeted another, over a Photoshopped image of an elongated bus with roof and sides covered by thousands of clinging riders. Destination: "San Luis Potosí."

Corporations are happily crashing the Rubi trend too. Mexican airline Interjet leapt in with a 30 percent discount on flights to San Luis Potosí. Goat not included, small print advises.

But, as one concerned viewer has queried on Facebook, is it okay for Anglos to laugh?

Absolutely, says Alanis, the media consultant. "It's the kind of story that puts a smile on a lot of people's faces just because of the unexpected attention. It's like the My Big Fat Greek Wedding effect. I think we're kind of saying, 'That's part of me. I know that family. I am that family.'"

Arellanos at first is doubtful the humor can travel, then changes his mind: "Maybe good ol' boys can appreciate it, á là Jeff Foxworthy comedy."

And while not every Mexican girl has or even wants a quince, all know the mystique. That's why Gwendolyn Zepeda, Houston's first poet laureate, who didn't get a quince during her own childhood in Houston, threw herself a raucous do-over decades later: "The Quinceañera You Were Too Poor to Have." Guests thronged, wearing tiaras and tulle, to tell about the quinces they missed — or those that went horribly wrong.

Although Rubi's family didn't plan on entertaining 1.3 million guests, Zepeda says, their expansive hospitality instantly rang true for her. "I went to Mexico often as a teenager, and since my parents didn't want me to going to clubs or bars, I was allowed to go to quinces, even when I didn't know the people," she says. "My dad used to say, it's okay for strangers to show up because a) that means it's a good party, and b) you'll contribute when the old lady comes around with a basket or during a dollar dance with the quince girl."

Rubi's quince took off, in other words, because it's full of precise references: funny at a time when many Mexicans feel pummeled; a mirror on intact, familiar habits; and a rowdy group conversation — not a speech. While all this makes it easy for Mexican consumers, businesses and entertainers to join the party, non-Latinos who take the time can learn the moves too.

"The Disney company could easily have stepped in saying, 'We're going to make this quince a true princess experience,' and then sent in a horse and carriage," Alanis says. "It would have translated perfectly."

This article originally appeared online in Gray Matters.

Based on research by Antonio Merlo (former professor and dean at Rice University) and Xun Tang

• Corporate bankruptcies, which allow claimants to negotiate over a bankrupt company's value, are often shrouded in mystery until the deal is finally completed.
• Stochastic bargaining models, which consider the randomness of a set of variables over the time of a negotiation, may shed light on the factors that drive both deal timing and valuation.
• New research shows that interest rates have outsized effects compared to stock prices on the final negotiated value of a bankrupt company.

When a company goes bankrupt, its creditors start fighting. Each has a plan for restructuring the struggling company that best benefits their own interests, aiming to find value in the company above its cash liquidation value.

But bankruptcy negotiations are buffeted by random, complicated factors beyond bickering creditors and the clamor of other claimants. Fluctuations in macroeconomic conditions, such as interest rates and other factors, make themselves felt in the form of up-and-down stock prices. Not only that: Information revealed in private talks between the company and its claimants may affect company value—but be unavailable to the public.

It’s a central paradox for both economists and the public: how to figure out the factors behind the outcome of a deal when you can’t see any of the intermediate steps that led to the deal, only its final value.

To better understand the factors driving bankruptcy negotiations, former and current Rice economists Antonio Merlo and Xun Tang, coauthored a study using a stochastic model. (These are models based on the fact that state variables evolve randomly over time). The researchers found that in creditors’ quest to extract as much extra value as possible from a bankruptcy — a prize the researchers called “cake” — what mattered most were fluctuations in interest rates.

To conduct the study, Merlo and Tang used U.S. Corporate Bankruptcy Data from 1990-1997, to select publicly traded companies that reorganized by 2000, and looked at the 77 companies that provided final reorganization values and their distribution between all claimants. The researchers then overlapped data from three-month Treasury bills and industry stock price indices onto the bankruptcies’ time periods — seemingly random events that closely affect negotiations over company value.

The data showed that changes in interest rates tended to have a larger effect on both the probability of claimants reaching an agreement and the agreement itself being larger. Furthermore, interest rates affected “cake” values regardless of the simultaneous effect of stock prices, while the same cannot be said for stock prices regardless of interest rates.

But interest rates also came to matter more as the deals progressed. The more time claimants took to close a deal, and the more that they needed the cash from the bankruptcy, the more likely they were to want a quick settlement that avoided high interest rates in the capital markets. While there is nothing like a bankruptcy to focus a creditor’s mind, rising interest rates seem to heighten their sense of urgency in a way that even stock prices do not.

Antonio Merlo is the former George A. Peterkin Professor and Chair of the Department of Economics at Rice University.

Xun Tang is associate professor of Economics at Rice University.

To learn more, please see: Merlo, A. & Tang, X. (2012). Identification and Estimation of Stochastic Bargaining Models. Econometrica, 80(4), 1563-1604. 

By Allyn West

This article by Allyn West originally appeared in Rice Business, Fall 2016.

Buffalo Bayou Park feels like a perfect public space. Completed in 2015, the redesign of the park along 2.3 miles of Houston’s primary bayou incorporates 10 miles of hike and bike trails and footpaths, a dog park, public art, gardens, bike and kayak rentals, playgrounds. Visitors can tour an abandoned underground reservoir and eat brunch in a glass-walled restaurant raised on concrete pilings that makes them feel as though they’re up among the trees.

Seeing all the sweating cyclists, the parents drinking coffee and pushing strollers, the pedestrians stopping to take selfies with the skyline as a backdrop, you might not believe that this same park was an afterthought. The bayou had become blocked from view by invasive vegetation and its loved-to-death trails used — especially in the evenings — only by diehards. Large swaths of the park were inaccessible and underutilized.

In 2011, with a comprehensive master plan by SWA Group in hand, Buffalo Bayou Partnership led a $55 million redevelopment, which included a $30 million donation from the Kinder Foundation, that catalyzed its transformation into one of the country’s best urban parks. That’s according to a 2016 USA Today reader poll.

But that same poll ranked another Houston urban park even higher: Discovery Green, designed by Hargreaves Associates, came in fourth. Together, these two parks have helped to change the conversation about the city. As Texas Monthly writer Mimi Swartz quips, “Houston doesn’t look like Houston anymore.”

Once defined primarily by its freeways and parking lots and its “almost sensational lack of convivial public space,” as essayist Philip Lopate griped in the ’80s, Houston is now being celebrated as a national model for its investments in places where people can gather to relax, play and exercise. Charles Birnbaum, president and CEO of Washington, D.C.-based The Cultural Landscape Foundation, which was inspired to hold its annual conference here, writes that Houston is “undergoing a transformation … at a scope and scale unseen in the U.S. in more than a century.”

Consider: The underused Levy Park in Upper Kirby, once come to a few baseball diamonds, is being completely redesigned and reprogrammed with a $15 million investment. On the other side of town, historic Emancipation Park in the Third Ward is getting a $33 million redevelopment, including the construction of community center designed by celebrated African-American architect Phil Freelon. A private group hired landscape architecture firm West 8 to conceive of a master plan for a Houston Botanic Garden. And new master plans have been completed to restore and redesign the 155-acre Houston Arboretum and Nature Center and the 1,500-acre Memorial Park.

“It’s a great time for parks in Houston,” says Anne Olson, president of Buffalo Bayou Partnership. “The appreciation of them has grown over the years, and the business community sees more and more the economic impact that they can have.” Olson points to new residential developments currently under construction that are actively marketing their proximity to Buffalo Bayou Park.

“There’s such intense competition for Millennials,” she says. “Parks and open spaces and trails are just one more amenity that they are attracted to.”

But these parks, open spaces and trails are not cheap. Many cities have parks departments that strain to keep up with the demand, and Houston is no exception. As much as the city has been recognized for its development of these amenities, it has been praised for its innovative ways of paying for them. Adrian Benepe of the Trust for Public Land told the Houston Chronicle: “Houston has become a laboratory of interesting solutions for park building, financing and management.” The predominant solution is the public-private partnership.

The land where Discovery Green is, for example, was purchased by the City of Houston in two transactions in 2002 and 2004 on the recommendations of a pair of private philanthropists. But the park is now managed, programmed and maintained by a separate nonprofit conservancy that raises its own money and has its own staff.

Though some critics have argued that these public-private partnerships can lead to inequity, they do allow certain parks to be chosen, so to speak, so as to be better stewarded by private philanthropy, property tax reinvestment and other focused revenue streams.

There’s no doubt they’re effective: another public- private partnership was formed to lead the way on a project that could be even more transformative for Houston than any single park: Bayou Greenways. Bayou Greenways revisits a plan first developed in Houston in the early 1900s by landscape architect Arthur Comey that called for trails and linear parks along the city’s major bayous. Funded through a $166 million public bond in 2012 and private fundraising — including $50 million more from the Kinder Foundation — work is underway building these trails and transforming more than 3,000 acres of land around Houston’s bayous for use for recreation and mobility.

When the project is completed in 2020, 150 miles of trails will line the bayous, connecting neighborhoods to job and retail centers, parks, transit and more.

Beth White is president of the Houston Parks Board. “Houston is one of the most exciting places in the country right now in terms of investments the city is making in quality of life infrastructure,” she explains. “We’ve been doing all these pieces, and now we have this ability to do all this connective tissue that’s going to take this whole effort to a different level.”

White is excited about the multifaceted social and economic impacts that the Bayou Greenways might have, from improvements in public health to increases in property values to investments in neighborhood parks. She imagines that Bayou Greenways will have an effect on Houston similar to that of other ambitious urban projects like The High Line in New York City or the 606 in Chicago.

Not only will the project spark development, White says, it will transform the way the city “views itself and the way it lives. This will have an impact on people wanting to stay here. The power of visionary systems to make cities livable places cannot be overstated. It’s extraordinary."

It’s dusk at the Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University.

From an outdoor patio, voices, laughter, drift skyward. As darkness falls and the crowd grows, Peter Rodriguez, the school’s new dean, appears. Behind him wait large quantities of champagne, perfect for toasting.

Bloomberg Businessweek has just ranked Rice Business’ full-time MBA program No. 8 in the country, allowing a young Sun Belt business school to shake up a top 10 list that has seen little change for decades.

While all school rankings are somewhat illusory, breaking into the top tier, on this particular list, may be transformative for the small school.

“However flawed these rankings are — and every single one has significant issues associated with them — these lists have a very big impact on a school's reputation and standing,” says John Byrne, who in 1988 created the first regularly published MBA ranking for Businessweek.

Breaking into the magic circle, it turns out, can translate into surprisingly tangible results. A top 10 ranking draws increased and more-qualified applications, heftier donations, and more plentiful corporate recruiters. It encourages minority candidates — underrepresented in business schools nationwide, and courted through recruiting and scholarships — to see the newcomer school as an option.

There’s also a less-tangible aura to such lists. Historically, most of the schools on top 10 lists have simply swapped places in a kind of grad school musical chairs. Rice Business is not only the rare upstart to grab a seat, it’s the youngest. And it has moved into its new spot very fast.

On the Businessweek list, Rice was No. 19 last year, No. 29 in 2010 and not ranked at all in 2006. It topped venerable business programs at Northwestern, the University of Virginia, Columbia and the University of Michigan. Rice even topped Yale, which made its own meteoric jump, from No. 25 in 1990 to No.10 in 2009, on the similar MBA list compiled by U.S. News & World Report.

***

When schools win in this poker game of sorts, they win big. But if they lose, says Byrne, now editor-in-chief of Poets & Quants, the pain can be sharp. Slipping a few percentage points can mean a drop in applications and alumni giving, even threaten the job security of a school’s top leaders.

Before any dean breaks out in hives, though, Byrne offers this advice: “Treat rankings with a big grain of salt. A school's rank on one survey in one year is pretty much meaningless. What's important is a school's rank over time and over multiple rankings. That is how rankings get to the greater truth about where an institution truly stands among its competitors.”

The Rice alumni surveyed this year, accounting for 30 percent of their school’s ranking index score, represented the classes of 2008, 2009 and 2010. The Houston economy seemed recession-proof during those years. Jobs were abundant and salaries stable.

More recently, Houston has been hurt by a struggling energy sector, “which could affect Rice’s scores down the road,” says Lance Lambert, the business school ranking coordinator for Bloomberg Businessweek. “The rankings are really lagging indicators.”

***

Not to worry, says popular culture guru Robert Thompson, who was only mildly surprised when he saw Rice nipping at the heels of the likes of Harvard in the latest Businessweek ranking. .

“It’s not like I spit out my coffee,” says Thompson, trustee professor of television and pop culture at Syracuse University. “On one level, the success of a relatively new university in a Sun Belt city might look like a real cultural shift. But it’s not like Rice is chopped liver.”

Thompson says the mystique associated with iconic universities of the Northeast is fading, “depending on how old you are, where you’ve been and what you know,” while schools such as Rice are on the move and catching up. “I think of Rice as one of the hoity-toity, mystique places now,” says Thompson.

The challenge for Rice, most experts agree, is to keep or improve their seat at the rankings table — while remembering that the strength of the program has everything to do with imagination and hard work and little to do with any list.

Sipping their champagne and pinching themselves this fall evening, Rice Business students and professors perhaps are thinking the same thing. “I’m stunned,” says Rodriguez during a short speech in which he repeats the words “thank you” five times.

Rodriguez arrived on campus in July; he tells students he had little to do with the new ranking. Instead, he gives credit to his predecessor, William Glick, and suggests that they all enjoy the festivities, then get back to work.

“We have to do it again,” Rodriguez says. “We have to prove we’re not a blip.”

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

Based on research Jeff Fleming, Barbara Ostdiek and Chris Kirby

• Researchers have long struggled to parse the separate roles of information and human trading activity in causing market price fluctuations.
• Unlike most financial markets, which are affected by a news cycle that follows the flow of the business day, weather-sensitive commodity markets are buffeted by important information flow 24/7.
• Taking advantage of this trait in weather-sensitive markets, researchers have discovered that information plays a big role in price fluctuations.

Market volatility has long perplexed business and economics researchers. According to basic economic principles, prices should reflect available information. Thus, price changes ought to reflect the news. But two complications make it hard to test this idea.

The first difficulty is that much of the news goes unobserved: It doesn’t show up in headlines or even in a tweet. The second is that prices only change when there is trading – and traders trade for many reasons.

In most markets, most news happens during the trading day. As a result, researchers struggle to discern how much price fluctuations are due to the news and how much they’re due to traders over- or under-reacting to the news. And then there’s the question of how much the fluctuations are related to trading activity that’s not linked to the news at all.

Weather-sensitive commodity markets give researchers a chance to make this distinction. In contrast to equities and currencies, weather-sensitive commodities are affected by information that changes randomly over a 24 hour cycle. In addition, the importance of weather news varies across the year. This means researchers can study the changing contribution of information flow throughout the year.

According to groundbreaking research coauthored by Jeff Fleming and Barbara Ostdiek, both finance professors at Rice Business, weather news influences price fluctuations of weather-sensitive commodity markets in ways that can’t be chalked up merely to trading.

Fleming and Ostdiek measured price variations in the corn, soybean, wheat, natural gas and frozen concentrated orange juice markets during the trading day and overnight, when the markets were closed. They then analyzed the overnight share of volatility in comparison to the trading day share of volatility. They found that the share of price fluctuation that took place overnight versus that occurring during the day was much greater than in the U.S. stock market. The finding is consistent with the idea that information about the weather is a substantial factor in moving prices.

The researchers also found that the importance of weather news varies throughout the year. For instance, the weather-sensitive season for wheat runs from March 15, when the crop begins sprouting, to August 31, when 75 percent of the wheat likely has been harvested. Wheat prices are far less sensitive to weather when no crops are in the ground. As a result, the share of volatility occurring overnight falls dramatically in the off-season.

Using traditional equity and currency markets as benchmarks, the researchers found commodity markets depend on weather and their unique news cycles in key ways.

According to past research, stock market returns during the open trading period are more variable than returns from the weekend and overnight. Some researchers have theorized this is because traders are more likely to be informed of, and act on, private information during the day. Other researchers have linked the discrepancy to the large amount of public information that’s at hand when trading is taking place.

In contrast to equity markets, currency markets are open 24/7 and benefit from a never-ending information flow as the news cycle moves around the globe. Compared to stocks, the variability of currency markets during U.S. trading hours is much closer to its variability during non-trading hours. This is consistent with a link between price volatility and information flow.

The takeaway: Irrational trading activity can’t explain these variations, but the unique patterns of the information flow in the different markets can.

Contrary to previous findings, the scholars discovered a strong link between price fluctuations and information flow – a link that can’t be explained by pricing errors or trading activity.

Not only does this information flow affect market volatility, the researchers found it also influences the interactions between different commodities. Returns on corn, wheat and soybean commodities were more strongly connected to each other during the weather-sensitive season – both during the trading day and overnight – which is consistent with the idea that weather information is a primary driver of price fluctuations in weather-sensitive commodity markets.

Jeff Fleming is the Deputy Dean of Academic Affairs and a Fayez Sarofim Vanguard professor in finance at the Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University.

Barbara Ostdiek is the Senior Associate Dean of Degree Programs and associate professor of finance and statistics at the Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University.

To learn more, please see: Fleming, J., Kirby, C. & Ostdiek, B. (2006). Information, trading and volatility: Evidence from weather-sensitive markets. Journal of Finance, 61(6), 2899–2930.

Based on research by Brian Akins, Lynn Li, Jeff Ng and Tjomme Rusticus

• Low levels of competition in the banking industry make it likelier that banks will engage in riskier activities — and, ultimately, collapse.
• States with lower levels of banking industry competition saw greater housing price inflation during the 2007-2008 financial crisis.
• In states with higher levels of competition, housing price fluctuations were mitigated.

When banks become “too big to fail,” does their size empower them to take risks smaller banks wouldn’t? It’s easy for Monday-morning quarterbacks to blame the economic collapse of 2007-2008 on bloated financial institutions who lacked rivals to keep them on their toes. But research co-authored by Brian Akins, a professor at Rice Business, applies classic economic measures of competition to determine whether oversized banks and limited competition played a key role in the building — and bursting — of the housing bubble.

Akins’ research does, in fact, link a lack of competition in the banking industry with riskier bank investments, a higher level of regulatory intervention, and, ultimately, bank failure. It also associates low levels of banking industry competition with housing price inflation and steeper housing price declines during the 2007-2008 financial crisis.

While the results may seem intuitive — especially in hindsight — several economic theories actually predict the opposite. For example, the charter value hypothesis presumes that large banks have correspondingly large charter values, and hence have more to lose in case of failure. The theory predicts that larger banks are therefore motivated to counter the potentially massive potential for failure by engaging in lower-risk activities. An increase in competition, the theory holds, would lower the bank’s charter value and free it to engage in riskier investments.

But this theory’s detractors argue that it ignores the effect of bank competition on borrowers’ behavior. According to a counter theory, as the lending market becomes more concentrated, banks use their market power to charge higher loan rates, leading to an increase in their interest margin. Higher loan rates increase the probability of bankruptcy for borrowers — and the increased likelihood that they’ll default on their loans reduces bank stability.

Akins and his colleagues set out to conduct a comprehensive examination of the relationship between banking industry competition and financial stability in the United States — specifically, the impact of competition on individual bank outcomes and on the housing and mortgage market within states.

Their first round of analysis demonstrated that just before the 2008 crisis, more competition was associated with lower interest margins, a less risky portfolio of assets, lower profitability and lower liquidity. During the crisis, more competition was associated with less risk-taking, and, consequently, a lower likelihood of enforcement actions and bank closure.

In a second layer of analysis, the researchers examined the relationship between competition and changes in housing prices before and during the crisis. They found that greater competition led to higher mortgage rejection rates, especially for the highest-risk mortgages. More competition, the authors concluded, seemed to have a disciplinary effect that mitigated the housing price inflation before the crisis and the deflation afterward.

So the Monday-morning quarterbacks are right — and Akins’ study provides the data to prove it. A lack of competition, these results suggest, fueled the hyperinflation of housing prices, their subsequent collapse, and the devastating effects for the U.S. financial system and economy that still linger a decade later.

Brian Akins is an assistant professor of accounting at Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University.

To learn more, please see: Akins, B., Li, L., Ng, J., & Rusticus, T.O. (2014). Bank competition and financial stability: Evidence from the financial crisis. Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, 51(1), 1-28.

By William M. Arnold 

This article by Bill Arnold, the late professor in the practice of energy management at Rice Business, originated as an interview with Pipeline & Gas Journal, November 10, 2016.

Deciphering a political candidate’s policies is never simple. A party’s platform may be used to give voice to supporters (especially the potentially disaffected) rather than reflect a candidate’s real intentions. Candidates can always claim that “circumstances have changed” once they are in office. Of course, it is easier to make a judgment about someone who has held office and built a track record. In the case of Donald Trump it may seem as though we are dealing with a blank sheet.

But maybe not.

In the case of President-elect Trump, his “America First” position and goal of restoring well-paid jobs provide a basis to project his actions in a number of areas. This is not a data-driven approach but is more like the scenario planning that is used widely in the energy industry. What are some plausible energy policies in a Trump administration?

Admittedly, energy was not a prominent point in the presidential debates, because voters are relatively content with low prices for gasoline, natural gas and home heating oil. The producing states may have suffered hundreds of thousands of job losses, but the rest of the country is unsympathetic. Still, energy policy is a crucial part of government, and Trump will bring a new perspective on energy. It will be in sharp contrast to the policies of the Obama administration.

The tools he will have to implement his policies include the Republican majorities in the Senate and House of Representatives. A caveat: This is never as simple as it sounds, given the increasing independence of members of Congress and the bruises inflicted over the past year. At some point there will be pushback.

Presidential appointments will put Trump’s people in senior positions throughout the bureaucracy, and not just at the Cabinet level. Trump’s team will place about 3,500 people across the administration. Several hundred require Senate confirmation, but another 3,000 are discretionary. The latter includes scores of deputy assistant secretaries in every department from defense to agriculture.

Some of Trump’s actions will be part and parcel of broader initiatives. Until being pushed aside recently, Chris Christie quietly led the transition team in consultation with Newt Gingrich and Rudy Giuliani. Undoubtedly they have compiled a long list of Obama executive orders that will be cancelled on day one.

On climate change, Trump’s supporters apparently run from skeptics to deniers. This will have a big impact for the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, the Department of the Interior and the new administration’s response to last December’s Paris Agreement (COP-21). The administration will almost certainly:

• Clean house at EPA and energy, replacing advocates of aggressive climate policies with officials who have an agenda friendlier to fossil fuels.
• Declare an end of the Obama administration’s war on coal. Trump owes Pennsylvania and the region that gave him an Electoral College majority.
• Leave the regulation of fracking with the states.
• Open more public land to energy development.

Trump has advocated that Fortune 100 companies “come back to America” (especially bringing back profits held overseas). One fairly easy step in this process would be to encourage energy companies to invest in energy development in the U.S. instead of overseas. They already are doing that, but Trump could take some credit with supportive policies.

Trump’s political philosophy is unclear. But conservatives in his inner circle will insist that market forces, rather than executive orders and regulatory mandates, determine the allocation of coal, natural gas and nuclear for use in power plants. This is already happening. Cheap and abundant natural gas is forcing coal out of power generation, and nuclear plants are shutting in quick succession because of obsolescence and economics.

Trump’s philosophy will also show itself in his response to the Paris Agreement. Through the substitution of natural gas for coal, CO₂ emissions from U.S. power plants have reached a 20-year low. Energy efficiency and related measures mean improved energy intensity in this country. By contrast, Germany’s CO₂ emissions are increasing despite two decades of focus on renewables. Chancellor Angela Merkel closed about half of her country’s nuclear power plants in response to the disaster at Fukushima, with no ready backup. So Germany resorted to lignite coal.

In a Trump administration U.S. subsidies for wind and solar will be under increased scrutiny, just as costs have come down to sometimes competitive levels. Expect a vibrant debate.

The linkage between Supreme Court nominations and energy policy is most apparent in the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan. The late Justice Antonin Scalia tipped the 5-4 vote to suspend implementation because costs were not adequately considered. It is in limbo now.

President-elect Trump’s clear position on “America First” will translate into a focus on energy security and affordability. Germans and the British pay about two times what we do for electricity and gasoline.

Low cost natural gas has given rise to tens of billions of dollars of investment in the Houston area’s petrochemical and refining industries even as the upstream industry suffers job losses and capital investment cuts.

Pipelines are the literal backbone of the American economy. They link consumers and industry to abundant North American resources. They also enable exports of natural gas and oil, supporting our balance of payments. But they are often resisted by local communities and national organizations. For safety and environmental reasons pipelines are clearly better than rail and trucking to take oil from North Dakota.

Those who try to block pipelines want to “keep it in the ground.” “It” means hydrocarbons. Advocates of this position believe that limiting infrastructure will minimize production and open more opportunities for renewables.

President-elect Trump may support the Keystone XL Pipeline, but that raises the question of whether TransCanada will want to invest now that oil prices are low and the cost of oil sands is still higher than other available sources. Was the opportunity for thousands of jobs missed or deferred?

A complex issue may be gas exports to Mexico — and not only because of other well-known political issues involving Mexico. Exports are big now and pipeline projects will grow in the medium term. This would seem to be uncontroversial for the new administration — more U.S. oil patch jobs, improved balance of payments, etc. But gas exports to Mexico might be viewed negatively if Mexico uses cheap U.S. natural gas for industrial development that competes with the U.S. heartland. There has even been talk about using this gas for LNG export facilities on Mexico’s west coast or Baja California in competition with Corpus Christi and Sabine Pass, Louisiana. This could result in calls for an export tax on natural gas.

Finally, energy will not be at the top of President Trump’s agenda. Pressing issues of national security, terrorism, restoring good jobs and replacing the Affordable Care Act will have his attention.

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