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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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By Claudia Feldman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Q: Is this the first PR mishap for United?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Q: Anything that might help?

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

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

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

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

This conversation with Zavyalova has been condensed and edited.

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

By Claudia Feldman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Q: What are your limits?

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

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

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

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

By Claudia Feldman

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

Truth was, she had.

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

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

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

If that sounds like business speak, it is.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Based on research by Arnaud Chevallier (former professor at Rice University)

• When a company’s problem is complex or potentially costly, mapping it out is critical.
• “Idea mapping” is a method of organizing the answers to a key question in a mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive and insightful way.
• Mapping makes space for innovative analysis.

Let’s say you’re in Houston, but you have a meeting in Paris. You could go by air — maybe first class, maybe business. Perhaps it’s smarter to take an ocean liner and then a little boat up the Seine. Should you build a rocket or walk? Maybe Paris should simply remove itself from France and appear on your doorstep.

This exercise is plainly absurd. Yet there’s good reason to dig for all possibilities when solving a problem, argues Arnaud Chevallier, a former Rice University engineering professor, in his book Strategic Thinking in Complex Problem Solving. Analyzing extensive research on idea creation and decision trees, Chevallier argues that a technique called “mapping” forces decision makers to think differently and push the horizon of all that could be possible.

Mapping is worthwhile, Chevallier says, because the obvious solution isn’t always the best one. For a hotel manager fielding constant complaints about a slow elevator, replacing it with a faster one would certainly fix things. But as a solution, it’s expensive. The second most obvious plan, redoing the electronic dispatch algorithm, may be too costly as well. Casting the net wider for ideas can yield something altogether different: in this case, giving hotel guests something to do while they wait by installing TVs and mirrors inside the elevator and outside its doors.

For complex problems, or problems where making the wrong choice can be costly, mapping helps free decision makers from the obvious and allows them to find solutions with added value.

The first rule of mapping, therefore, is to include the obvious. Next, go beyond it. This creates space for innovation, forcing the thinker first to identify divergent explanations, and only then evaluate whether they are worthy alternatives. Cultivating this analytical style, Chevallier writes, can be a powerful tool for finding innovative solutions to key performance issues.

This is because problems have a structure. And while there are any number of mechanisms one can use to map an issue and represent it visually, what’s important is that the representation exposes the problem’s underlying structure. In other words, an image makes clear a problem’s various dimensions, which allows decision makers to better understand it.

To start an issue-mapping journey, decision makers need to consistently ask and answer one of two types of questions: diagnostic (“why?”) or solution-based (“how?”). If the question is diagnostic, the map will only show possible causes. If the question is solution-based, the map’s branches and byways will depict options for “how.”

A map should place these answers in mutually exclusive branches. Two events are mutually exclusive when the occurrence of one precludes the occurrence of another. Using mutually exclusive branches ensures that each solution gets considered just once — there are no overlaps. At the same time, maps should be collectively exhaustive. That is, to the extent possible they should include all outcomes. This forces decision makers to ask, “What other possible reasons could there be for the problem at hand?” That way, each map considers all possible answers exactly once.

Using these two methods forces decision makers to travel beyond cliché and conventional wisdom. But the only way to reach this point, Chevallier says, is to acknowledge each idea in its entirety — yes, even those that prompt laughter. Uncomfortable as it may be to draw, a complete map includes apparently dumb ideas.

By focusing on both mutual exclusivity and collective exhaustion, decision makers can avoid a few notorious pitfalls. First, the process discourages fixating on one particular explanation. And second, it reduces confirmation bias, the pernicious human habit of gathering just the evidence that favors our pre-existing beliefs.

Issue-mapping also helps decision makers examine a problem in detail. Take, for example, an information technology company trying to learn why it can’t turn a profit. While it’s easy to explain the problem with a standard breakdown between costs and revenues, drilling deeper can reveal the real issues.

“Why are the volume of sales too low?” Maybe clients are switching to competitors. But why? Some may do so because what the company offers is inferior. Alternatively, the offering may not be inferior, but clients nonetheless believe that it is. But why is it inferior, or perceived to be so? Is it because of one of the classic four Ps of marketing — price, promotion, place, product itself? If so, each of these issues could be broken down further. Studying problems with this level of relentlessness can unveil critical information that otherwise may be overlooked.

When a problem is complicated, of course, the danger is that mapping could go on and on. How to know when to stop? Surprisingly, Chevallier warns against immediately defaulting to a tactics such as time limits. When it comes to problem solving, he argues, artificial barriers can build artificial dead ends.

Ideally, Chevallier says, issue-mapping should continue as long as the new details discovered are valuable. The trick, of course, is to reach the far shores of possibility without falling into the claws of paralysis — the dragon that lurks where the map finally gives out.

Arnaud Chevallier is a former associate vice provost and instructor of strategic thinking in the George R. Brown School of Engineering at Rice University

To learn more, please see: Chevallier, A. (2016). Strategic Thinking In Complex Problem Solving, Oxford University Press.

By Allyn West; Photo credit: Ed Schipul

Phoebe Tudor knows how to save a building. With a master’s in historic preservation from Columbia University, Tudor and her husband, Bobby, moved to New Orleans, where she served for four years as the architectural historian for the New Orleans Historic District Landmark Commission.

The philanthropically-minded couple found their way to Houston a few years later. Here, Tudor served on the Archeological and Historical Commission, helped strengthen the city’s preservation ordinance and was instrumental in the formation of a group that restored the 1926 Julia Ideson Building, designed by Ralph Adams Cram as Houston’s Central Library. Led by Tudor and preservationist Minnette Boesel, the Julia Ideson Library Preservation Partners raised the $32 million for the restoration, which included the addition of an archival wing that houses the Houston Metropolitan Research Center.

That’s one place where you can learn the history of a city that is often accused of having “amnesia” as another landmark is torn down, replaced with something new and forgotten. You can study, for example, some of the original blueprints of the Harris County Domed Stadium—or the Astrodome, for short.

And it’s the Astrodome Tudor has her sights on next. “It’s a great asset for Houston,” Tudor says. “It’s one of our biggest icons, honestly, and we’re worried about what’s going to happen next.”

Completed in 1965 in the midst of the Space Race, just a few years after President John F. Kennedy’s famous call to action at Rice University, the Astrodome opened to international wonder. It was the first—and best, many still argue—of its kind. An architectural feat. An engineering marvel. A pinnacle of technology. All the superlatives seemed to apply. Apart from its one-of-a-kind design, the Astrodome played host to important competitions—from the Game of the Century between the University of Houston and UCLA to the Battle of the Sexes between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs—and performances—from Elvis to Selena to Evel Knievel—until the early 2000s, after the Houston Oilers had relocated to Tennessee and the Astros to a new stadium downtown. The Astrodome’s last great moment was in 2005, when it was a temporary shelter for residents who evacuated New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina.

It has been vacant ever since. It is paid for, but it costs Harris County taxpayers about $170,000 a year—most of which covers the electric bill. In 2013, voters failed to approve a bond that would have paid for a $217 million renovation into a convention center. When that vote failed, many feared it was a death knell, and the Astrodome would be demolished, once and for all.

What happened instead was a resurgence of interest and passion around what many others considered one of Houston’s greatest cultural assets. Just one year later, the Astrodome was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Then, in 2017, it became a State of Texas Antiquities Landmark, granting it protection from demolition or unapproved alteration. Beth Wiedower, a senior field officer for the National Trust for Historic Preservation says: "It's not the only piece of our cultural identity, but it is a big piece of our shared cultural story, as Houstonians. And that has big-picture implications of how we define ourselves as a city and how we relate to each other."

Now, explains Wiedower, the conversation has changed. “It’s not, ‘Should we save [the Astrodome]?’” she says, “but what are the mechanics of saving and re-purposing it? How do we go about this?”

This is where Tudor comes in. Answering those questions, she says, “is my passion and my great interest and my professional training.” Teaming up again with Boesel and art historian and curator Judy Nyquist as founding board members and officers, Tudor established the Astrodome Conservancy in 2016. The Conservancy, says Tudor, is “an independent nonprofit.” It has federal 501(c)3 status and an eight-member board, which includes Wiedower. “We are now going down the road to become the official county partner,” Tudor says.

There has never been a shortage of good ideas about what to do with the Astrodome. The Urban Land Institute recommended that it become the centerpiece of a new public park. Architect James Richards proposed that it be stripped to its structural skeleton and wrapped in a several-miles-long hike and bike trail that curlicues up around it. The question, though, always begins and ends with how to pay for it.

Tudor, Boesel and Nyquist have inverted the path, starting with the same financial model that worked for them on the Julia Ideson Building ad that has become increasingly popular in Houston: the public-private partnership. It's the model that allowed the City of Houston to develop Discovery Green, Buffalo Bayou Park, Bayou Greenways and other public amenities, and Tudor believes it will help Harris County transform the Astrodome. “It’s working,” Tudor says. “It’s been hugely successful.” The strength of the public-private partnership is that it can “take on responsibility for city assets that are underutilized and underappreciated and that need something more than the city can provide.”

It’s too early to say just what that transformation will look like. Though a bill proposed by Texas Senator John Whitmire would require state oversight before Harris County can spend money on the Astrodome, the Harris County Commissioners unanimously approved a $105 million plan to begin bringing it back to life. The floor is set to be raised and a revenue-producing parking garage installed underneath.

Meanwhile, the Astrodome Conservancy is focusing on fundraising and advocacy. The Conservancy hired HR&A Advisors, consultants who are helping with visioning short-term, site-specific art installations and activations. “Then we start to do what conservancies do in these situations,” Tudor says. “They raise private funds. They won’t be taxpayer funds. And they can come from all sorts of sources.”

“I thought it would be terrible, terrible for the city, that the final result would be that it would be torn down. We don’t need to lose the Astrodome," Turdor insists. "We are at a new moment, and it's exciting."

By Claudia Feldman 

The other day David Karohl found himself completely absorbed in a story about a tea shop.

He was sucked in by the descriptions of the indomitable owner who had to sell because of declining health and the customers who ranged from Rice Business professors to yoga devotees to weary hospital staff.

“Things end,” an ICU nurse and tea lover told writer Claudia Kolker. “People die. But I thought (the tea shop) would go on forever.”

But it wasn’t just the poetry in the story by Kolker, Karohl’s dear friend, that grabbed his attention. He had been a regular at the tea shop himself, and he realized that he knew all the characters in the unfolding drama.

He is close to Connie Lacobie, the woman who is now the former tea shop owner. He is a friend and former business associate of Connie’s husband, Kevin Lacobie. And Karohl saw the story because he was scrolling through Rice Business Wisdom on the internet. He is a proud graduate of Rice Business, Class of 2001, and he knows the Rice professors who used to patronize the shop, too.

“Am I the center of the universe?” Karohl joked in a fan letter to his Rice Business friends. “Thanks for the fond memories of ‘all y’all.’ ”

Karohl is founder and president of My Best Plan, a company that helps clients get the best home electricity plans at the cheapest rates. As an entrepreneur, he knows that the sunny side of every business challenge is a lesson in life.

In 2015, as Connie Lacobie was struggling to find a buyer, the moral was this: In business, love isn’t enough. Prospective buyers weren’t interested in Lacobie’s vision of a nurturing community center for the city’s eccentrics. They cared about what was lacking — big profits and an industrial-sized kitchen.

Karohl knows that his intense, even joyous reaction to the Rice Business story might hold some lesson or kernel of business wisdom, too.

Perhaps his jest about being the center of the universe contains an earnest message about the power of networking. “People are generally pleased to find out they have connections to someone else,” he says. “I play squash, and through the game I can get to an amazingly broad number of people.”

Al Danto, a lecturer in management and entrepreneurship at Rice Business and managing partner of The Danto Group, says Karohl is onto something. Business networking, Danto says, is about relationships: whether it’s employees supporting each another, companies knowing their clients to best serve them or businesses working in tandem with other businesses. Increasing research now shows that employees' personal networks – and the networks of their friends – are powerful boosts to innovation.

“To make things happen, it’s critical to connect the dots,” Danto says.

That explains why Karohl greets friends and strangers with a few simple questions. He pries gently to find out what friends or connections they might have in common and if they’d like to pay less for their electricity.

The simple strategy has fed his growing success.

When Karohl opened his business in 2009, he had little more than an idea. Today he has a staff of five full-time employees, and his company’s software has more than 80,000 lines of custom-written code. Over the years, he’s employed more than 20 interns who have gone on to companies including Google, Goldman Sachs and Microsoft.

Rich soil for more networking.

Based on research by Alexander W. Butler and Sinan Goktan

• Startups can profit from partnering with newer venture capital firms.
• Younger venture capital firms have an advantage when analyzing startup companies: They gather information through relationship building and intense study.
• Inexperienced venture capitalists build on their strengths rather than resting on their reputations.

In the high-risk world of venture capital investing, successful firms don’t always start big. For venture capital firms that are young and inexperienced, wealth can flow from backing a similarly young company, and patiently building client confidence with financial records and persuasive information.

According to a study coauthored by Alexander W. Butler, a finance professor at the business school, and Sinan Goktan of California State University East Bay, a number of startups have partnered successfully with inexperienced venture capitalists. These newer venture capitalists, Butler and Goktan found, were highly motivated to build the financial backing and advice needed to showcase their startup partner’s potential.

Investors are aware that some well-known companies are nearly guaranteed to deliver profits. But newer companies also have the potential for huge returns if they can escape their lackluster credibility. And newer venture capitalists can be their ticket out. These equally hungry partners are willing use their own resources to build financial profiles that reassure bigger investors. When the heavy hitters join in, it can prompt an initial public offering.

It’s obvious why a startup would welcome that kind of support. But why do young venture capitalists take the risk? It’s because the collaboration benefits them as well, Butler and Goktan explain. The startups provide an important niche for younger venture capitalist firms, which gravitate toward companies that outside investors find hard to evaluate, then roll up their sleeves to build credibility for them.

While experienced venture capitalists judge an investment based on existing financial data, the young venture capitalists tend to be ground-breakers. Their goal is to offer bigger investors–with whom they have often already have relationships–a detailed view of what is going on inside a new company, and to show why those investors should be part of its future.

Younger venture capitalists don’t shrink from new firms that lack hard financial information. For them, a promising startup is an opportunity to be seized. Later involvement from more established venture capitalist firms is part of the plan. When these heavy hitters invest, word spreads that a company has major support and may be the next big thing.

To generate hard information for investors, the newer venture capitalists hustle. They talk with a company’s key people, and they learn what’s going on day to day. When they see fit, they give advice. Because their insights are built on relationships, the closer the venture capitalists are to a company geographically the more efficient the process tends to be.

These findings, Butler and Gotkan note, explain a puzzle. When startups pair with younger venture capitalist firms, the latter often do something that seems uncomfortably self-serving: They rush their startup partners into initial public offerings, a tactic known as “grandstanding.”

These collaborations continue, the researchers say, because the startups and the investment firms know their mutual inexperience has unique benefits for both. While young venture capitalists have incentive to grandstand, they also have a comparative advantage at gleaning crucial financial information. Both investor and investment in these arrangements, in other words, benefit from similar traits. They’re intensely motivated, they take the long view and they’re willing push an idea from dream to blue chip reality.

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

To learn more, please see: Butler, A. W. & Gotkan, M. S. (2013).  On the role of inexperienced venture capitalists in taking companies public. Journal of Corporate Finance, 22, 299-319.

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

• Information technology is redefining customer service.
• Caring for customers has to be more than a phrase: It requires actively empathizing with their experiences.
• Building intellectual capital is as essential to business as stocking the shelves.

Information technology is redefining relationships between companies and customers. Much of the time, technology lets businesses increase the efficiency of their customer service, and gives customers new ways to access goods and services. But as Tony Gorry and Robert A. Westbrook, professors at Rice Business, argue, executives should think beyond measures of efficiency and see technology as a conduit through which customers can contribute intellectual capital to their businesses.

"We care for you," companies like to declare. To reinforce the declaration, they often offer "customer care" in place of what used to be customer service. But what does that mean?

To prosper, a business has to actually deliver on those professions of caring. And it has to deliver along a continuum in which each step is marked by trust and maximum ease for the customer: not just at the moment of sale, but also at delivery, installation, training, maintenance and repurchase.

Everyone knows what happens when a company doesn’t care. Protocols are needlessly complex, rules and conditions are onerous and requests for help are met with indifference.

The proliferation of technology has eased some of these problems and streamlined customer interactions with companies, which have, for example, implemented automatic call distribution, customer relationship management systems, interactive voice response, self-service web portals, multi-channel integration, intelligent call routing, live chat and automated callbacks.

These innovations often convey benefits to customers, who get swifter access to product information and services, quicker procurement and faster reporting of problems. At FedEx, for example, customers can dispatch and follow the course of their parcels online. At USAA and American Express, real-time information helps service representatives speedily answer inquiries and requests for help. At Amazon and many other businesses, information technology makes shopping online simple, easy and even entertaining.

What these businesses all have in common are senior managers who have devoted themselves and their companies to engaging with customers. A drive for excellent customer service, in other words, fueled technological innovation.

But technology can also undermine customer service. A relentless push for efficiency can drive a business to deploy technology in a way that is detrimental to customer relations. A rash of "innovations," aimed mainly at cutting costs, has made many businesses more opaque, leaving customers poorly served and frustrated.

Equally damaging, the scholars say, is how this use of technology has distanced employees from customers. The less contact there is between the two groups, the less authentic empathy the company can show, and the less companies can learn from those who use their goods and services. But if a company truly cares for its customers, its managers and front line employees have to listen to them.

Senior managers can take several steps, Gorry and Westbrook write, to avoid these unfortunate consequences of technology-mediated customer relationships. First: reaffirm the commitment to active, empathetic involvement with customers. Second: understand the effects of the company’s current procedures and systems on customers. And finally: use online social networks such as Facebook to help customers tell their stories and to help workers and managers really hear them.

Managers should think of online platforms as 21st century versions of the door to the general store, through which customers can amble and chat with the proprietor and employees. It’s that kind of interaction, detailed, informative and wide-ranging, that lends credibility when a company pledges, "We care."

The most important vehicle for customers’ input, say Gorry and Westbrook, is storytelling. A lot of the knowledge shared in organizations evades quantification; so does the information offered by customers. Instead, within the workplace, storytelling transfers knowledge.

While our devotion to storytelling has ancient roots, its implications for business are immediate. As face-to-face talking gives way to electronic connection, stories can still play a role in successful customer relations. Stories add detail to maintain the customers’ presence in a company’s imagination as actual human contact recedes. Numbers alone, serving as surrogates for stories, often lack important nuance and context.

A few firms are actively harnessing the power of customer stories. At Ritz-Carlton, senior management holds gatherings in 21 countries so staff can share customer stories and strengthen the company's emotional link with its clients. Harley Davidson executives and bike owners join together for rides, events and community service projects. And Levi Strauss trains thousands of employees to collect customer stories.

The modern company, Gorry and Westbrook note, is increasingly a knowledge business. What it can do depends on what it knows and how it exploits that knowledge. Most companies now understand how much of that knowledge resides in the skills of employees, along with their experiences, insights, intuitions and relationships. But customers, too, are crucial knowledge sources. Insightful businesses should treat them as potential contributors of ideas for improving operations and innovation.

By giving customer stories the same attention they give to narratives from their workers, the professors write, the best companies are building the intellectual capital that is now as important to any business as the products on their shelves.

Tony Gorry was the Friedkin Professor Emeritus of Management

Robert A. Westbrook is the William Alexander Kirkland Professor of Business at Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University

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

Also see: Gorry, G. A. & Westbrook, R. A. (2010). Empathy, technology and customer care. Business Horizons 54, 125-134.

By Mary Lee Grant

Natsuyo Jaeke led her blind elephant into the River Kwai, just shoreward of the cool swift current that moved towards the mountains. The 58-year-old former Seattle banker side-stepped the elephant's feet and trunk, gently prodding her with a stick as she led her up the bank.

"I spent my entire career in banking, but I was one of those people who just wasn't passionate about my job," Jaeke said later. "I realized that what I loved was elephants."

Jaeke is one of a small but growing number of professional women who find working with the world's largest land mammal more rewarding than a traditional business career. Their passion echoes a rising awareness about elephants amid the general public: This winter, outcry against the misuse of elephants led to the recent closing of Ringling Bros. For Jaeke and at least a dozen other women caregivers, aiding elephants is the best use of emotional and management skills they have honed their whole lives.

Perhaps surprisingly, at least one business researcher thinks they're right.

"Sometimes we spend our lives acquiring more resources than we need, as we head in a direction we don't really want," said Scott Sonenshein, a professor at Rice business school and author of the new book Stretch: Unlock the Power of Less and Achieve More than You Ever Imagined. "People get on a career trajectory of moving on to the next thing of what is traditionally successful. It turns out not to be the life they wanted, but they continue to move towards the more impressive title and the bigger office."

As these Western woman mahouts know firsthand, it's possible to discover meaningful new work by simply taking advantage of leisure. Just slightly moving out of the familiar–even attending a conference in a new field–can open new horizons.

But it takes putting a higher priority on leisure–both individually and as a society. That doesn't seem to come easily. College-educated Americans have less leisure time than they did in the past, and actually spend fewer hours at recreational activities than those with only a high school education.

It was a serious approach to leisure, however, that inspired Jaeke to change her career, her life, and her home. Jaeke, who is Japanese-American, first began to visit Thailand on her vacations, volunteering at elephant sanctuaries.

Jaeke returned several times to Thailand as a tourist to hone her expertise in caring for and training elephants. Then, at a sanctuary called ElephantsWorld in Western Thailand, she fell in love, with a fragile, aging elephant named Lam Dam Duan that seemed to especially need her. Jaeke moved full-time to a nearby village, biking three miles each day to spend her time with the Lam Duan.

Another professional woman at ElephantsWorld already had made a similar choice. Agnes Tammenga, 56, grew up on a farm in the Netherlands. From the time she was a little girl, she dreamed of working with large wildlife, snipping pictures of tigers and elephants out of magazines. Though she married and pursued a career in the fast food industry, Tammenga never abandoned that childhood desire. In 2006, after decades of saving and planning, Tammenga moved to Thailand to help elephants abused by the tourist and logging industries.

Within weeks, she encountered an ailing elephant on a short chain, standing in the sun near the River Kwai. She organized a fundraiser to buy the elephant, whose name was Aun. Then she contacted Thai veterinarian Samart Prasitpon, who, she had heard, had begun to rescue elephants, too. She spoke no Thai, and he spoke no English. But somehow, they managed to launch a foundation.

Renting land in a lush mountain valley near the Burmese border, the pair eventually were able to hire 25 mahouts to tend 26 elephants on 51 acres. Today, hundreds of visitors arrive every month, as well as 100 volunteers every year.

This, too, reflects a little-appreciated ingredient for success both in work and in personal life, Sonenshein says. In our specialized era, it's easy to assume that a Seattle banker or Dutch restaurant worker wouldn't know enough about elephants to contribute much to a wildlife sanctuary. We demand formal qualifications.

Often, that sort of thinking is a mistake.

"We have to ask 'How might someone with other worldviews completely change the ways we think about working with these animals?'" Sonenshein said. "There are significant limitations to being an expert. Part of it is tunnel vision."

In fact, the very improvisation with which Tammenga and Samart achieved their goals — with few resources or even a common language — may have led to greater success, Sonenshein says.

Displacement and challenge can also forge resourcefulness, another ElephantsWorld volunteer found. After graduating with an economics degree from Queen's College in Ontario, Canada, Victoria Duffield planned to go to law school. But she took a break first, traveling through Asia to volunteer at wildlife sanctuaries. When she came to ElephantsWorld, she began training as a mahout.

She soon became smitten with an elderly, blind elephant named Bow and became the elephant's caretaker for three years. Bow needed medical attention and sometimes help during the night, so Duffield moved to a thatched-roof house adjoining the elephant infirmary, sometimes even sleeping beside the elephant.

It took time to gain respect from the young male mahouts, many of whom had learned to ride elephants before they could walk and grew up with elephant stables attached to their houses. But soon, Duffield's hard work and advancing knowledge earned their respect.

"Sometimes I feel like Wendy and the Lost Boys," said Duffield, 27. "They are my brothers, and we play and laugh and joke, and we support each other totally."

When Bow would collapse, as she did occasionally as her health failed, it was all hands on deck to help Duffield get her back on her feet. When Bow died several months ago, the elephant was buried with a full Buddhist ceremony — as are all elephants at the sanctuary. She was covered with blooming flowers and prayed over by chanting monks wafting incense into the hot jungle air.

Duffield found herself a long way from Ontario, Canada. Her life had revolved completely around Bow, and her next step was unclear. But she had found work she loved. She decided to stay on at ElephantsWorld and began to care for another blind elephant, Sri Tong. She is learning elephant foot care and says law school holds not a bit of interest. She plans now to apply to vet school, and perhaps start her own elephant sanctuary.

Mary Lee Grant is a freelance writer with a Ph.D. in comparative border studies. She completed the mahout training program at ElephantsWorld while teaching at the Hanoi University of Mining and Geology in Vietnam. She writes for Rice Business Wisdom. This article originally appeared in Gray Matters.