Here’s what current students in our undergraduate, MAcc, Hybrid MBA, MBA@Rice and Ph.D. programs are learning, listening to and taking away from their time at Rice Business. Check out the fall 2025 issue to hear from students in the Full-Time, Executive and Professional MBA programs.

Diana Jue-Rajasingh has been in her McNair Hall office for only three years, since she joined Rice Business as an assistant professor of strategic management, but she uses it to tell a much longer story. “I try to fill my office with things that are from my journey,” she says, gesturing toward the objects and photos that trace the questions that have shaped her work.

Those questions have stayed remarkably consistent. Since her undergraduate and master’s work at MIT, and later in the academic path that brought her to Rice from a Ph.D. at the University of Michigan, Jue-Rajasingh has been interested in a deceptively simple problem: how life-improving products actually make their way to the people they are meant to serve. She describes it as a question of systems, organizations and reaching the “last mile,” a challenge she sees as both essential and overlooked.

One photo in her office helps crystallize that concern: an image she took in South India of clean cook stoves sitting unused in a storehouse, not yet reaching the households they were designed to help. “That’s the photo that started everything,” she says. For Jue-Rajasingh, the sight of unused life-saving tech captures the gap between invention and impact — the problem that has shaped both her scholarship and her own social venture.

Her office reflects the path she’s taken ever since. Awards and recognitions line her shelves, including a Forbes 30 Under 30 nod and the Grinnell Prize, alongside other markers of research, entrepreneurship and undergraduate mentoring at Rice. For Jue-Rajasingh, those honors matter less as accolades than as reminders that the same core question has followed her across different stages of her career.

Another image on the wall represents the stakes of everything she’s done and hopes to do in the future. It’s another photo taken in India. An off-grid barber has just switched on a solar-powered lantern, lighting his small shop, which attracts a new customer. This scene stayed with her because it turns seemingly abstract research interests into something visible and concrete. As she puts it, it was “an economic opportunity just brought on by light.”

That same question continues to shape where her work goes next. Flyers from a recent research project in Nigeria, tied to an experiment on recycling participation, are tacked to her desk board. She recently submitted the paper for peer-review. “Different projects bring me to different places, but I’m still following the same thread — trying to close the gap between what could help people and how to actually reach them.”
 

Learn more about Professor Jue-Rajasingh

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Business magazines promise insight. This issue delivers 10 key takeaways — some surprising, some practical and a few that might change the way you think about business. Happy reading!

1. Education doesn’t stop at the classroom door. Competitions, travel and real-world experiences continue to push students to test ideas beyond the syllabus. 
2. Some of the most important business problems aren’t about invention. They’re about delivery. Faculty member Diana Jue-Rajasingh has spent her career studying a deceptively simple problem: how life-improving products actually make their way to the people they are meant to serve.
3. New technologies can bring anxiety to the classroom. AI is no different — but its real impact may be less about replacing skills and more about redefining them.
4. Gender diversity isn’t all that investors are watching. In startup accelerators, investors engage more when founder and mentor teams are aligned in their gender composition. Looking at either team in isolation misses the relationship dynamics that shape investor interest.
5. AI can boost creativity — but it depends on how you use it. The real differentiator isn’t the technology. It’s whether users have the metacognition to question and refine what AI produces. 
6. Loving your job may not be the virtue we think it is. When passion becomes a moral expectation at work, research suggests it can quietly fuel burnout.
7. Your grocery receipts might one day help determine your credit score. Retail purchasing data could open new lending pathways for millions of people without traditional credit histories.
8. Big institutions run on more than tradition. Behind the spectacle of the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo lies a master class in leadership, logistics and civic scale.
9. Big visions require spaces to support them. From borrowed classrooms to McNair Hall and a new building, the homes of Rice Business mirror the school’s ambitions. 
10. The most valuable business skill is still clear thinking. Markets, technology and industries change, says associate dean of the Virani Undergraduate School of Business Bob Dittmar. The ability to reason through uncertainty endures.

Have a story idea or personal update to share with the community? Reach out to us below.
 

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Contributors

What's one book you would read over and over again, and why?

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Dan Morrell

I am hoping to pick up Faulkner’s “Absalom, Absalom” again as an adult. I expect I will have a different appreciation of it without the pressure of having to write a term paper about it.

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Scott Pett

One of my favorite Houston novels is the dystopian legal thriller “Rule of Capture” by Christopher Brown. It portrays the city as both a real place and a version of itself pushed to a terrifying extreme.

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Helen Huneycutt

Anything by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle! The writing is captivating, the characters are timeless and there’s never a dull moment with Sherlock.

If there’s one word I’d use for the last decade at Rice Business, it’s growth. We’ve doubled the size of our MBA programs, grown our tenure-track faculty by more than 40%, launched new MBA degree formats for working professionals and the Graduate Certificate in Healthcare Management program, and welcomed a new generation of students through the Virani Undergraduate School of Business. We’ve also crossed a major milestone: More than 10,000 Rice Business alumni are now a part of our global network.

But growth — on its own — was never the point. The real question was always: growth for what?

For me, the answer began with our mission: to create and disseminate knowledge in order to move industries forward and to build innovative leaders to guide them. Growth was also about “right-sizing” Rice Business — we were just too small for such a large city and state so full of opportunities.

The growth we’ve seen is not measured in square footage or enrollment alone. It is measured in the strength of the academic community we build to carry that mission forward. Our work depends on faculty engaging in top-level research, on serious academics and on students who challenge us in new ways.

Undergraduates, for example, have introduced a new center of gravity for the school. They bring a different kind of energy, a different rhythm to the day and a different set of questions about how business connects to the world. Their presence changes the conversations in our classrooms and our hallways. It changes how our graduate students think about mentorship and leadership. It changes how alumni engage when they return and see a fuller academic community in motion.

At Rice, the opportunity is especially powerful: a business major that gives students real depth with MBA-level faculty while still spending two-thirds of their coursework across the university — in engineering, the humanities, the social sciences, architecture, music — wherever their curiosity takes them.

The long-term impact of the undergraduate program will extend far beyond the campus. Over time, it will transform our alumni network, deepen our connections to industry and allow us to compete head-to-head with the very best programs in the country. That kind of momentum doesn’t happen overnight, but it is already underway. Undergraduates are forming the habits and relationships that will define this community for decades to come.

When I look ahead, what I see is not simply a larger school, but a more complete one. A school where undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, alumni, staff and the Houston business community come together in ways that weren’t possible before.

That is growth with purpose. And it is the foundation for everything that comes next.

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Bob Dittmar wanted to be an astrophysicist.

Growing up in Downers Grove, Illinois, near Argonne National Laboratory, he was surrounded by scientists. The Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago was his favorite place. “I knew I wanted to do research,” he says. “I just didn’t know what kind.”

Today, Dittmar is the Houston Endowment Professor of Finance and associate dean of the Virani Undergraduate School of Business at Rice. He holds a Ph.D. in finance from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a B.S. in finance from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. After nearly two decades at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business and earlier faculty work at Indiana University, he arrived in Houston to help build something new: a rigorous undergraduate business program inside one of the country’s most distinctive research universities.

His scholarship focuses on how markets price risk — particularly extreme, low‑probability events. But in conversation, his language shifts away from formulas and toward formation. What really matters, he suggests, is helping students learn to think clearly about uncertainty — about markets, about careers and about themselves.

Q: When did finance replace astrophysics? 
A: It started in middle school. In eighth grade, I joined a stock market competition. We had to pick stocks and track them in the newspaper every morning. There was no internet. I remember running to grab the paper to check prices.

I wish I could say it was skill, but our team won. That probably hooked me. I was maybe 12 years old, and I just became fascinated with trying to understand how markets work.

At the time, I didn’t even know you could do research in finance. I just knew I liked thinking about markets and uncertainty.

Q: Your research focuses on risk. For readers who aren’t finance specialists, how would you explain what you study? 
A: All investments involve uncertainty. Most people focus on the average outcome — what we expect to happen. My research looks at the extremes.

Options markets are useful because they reveal how investors think about future possibilities. When investors pay a lot for protection against severe downturns, that tells you something about how worried they are about extreme events.

I’ve studied what we call tail risk — those unlikely but severe outcomes on the edges of the distribution — and skewness, which simply means whether bad outcomes are perceived as more likely than good ones. It’s really about how people price fear.

Q: What do people misunderstand most about risk? 
A: People are very bad at thinking probabilistically. We anchor on the expected outcome and forget about the range of possibilities.

Most risk measures rely on history — how much something has moved around in the past. But looking forward, uncertainty includes things we haven’t seen yet. Rare events happen more often than we think.

There are known unknowns and unknown unknowns. And there are also things we think we understand but really don’t. That’s why humility matters when we talk about markets.

Q: How does that philosophy shape how you teach undergraduates? 
A: The core finance class I teach is one of those courses I think everyone in the world should take. Present value, diversification, valuation — these aren’t just technical tools. They’re ways of thinking.

Students today can trade stocks on their phones. They can use Robinhood. They can buy crypto in seconds. But the fundamentals haven’t changed. If you don’t understand what an asset is worth and why, you’re just speculating.

So I’ll use examples like Tesla. I’ll have AI run a valuation under standard assumptions, then stretch those assumptions. The point isn’t to criticize a company. It’s to ask: What would have to be true for this price to make sense?

An asset ought to deliver something of value. Crocs may not be attractive, but they provide utility. When the fictional zombie apocalypse comes, I’d probably rather have canned goods than gold. That instinct — to ask what something really provides — is what I want students to develop.

Q: You’ve said AI is now part of your daily work. How should undergraduates think about it? 
A: I think of AI as an incredibly capable but extremely dense research assistant. It boosts productivity, but it makes mistakes.

AI and humans together are more powerful than either alone — but only if the human understands the fundamentals. If all you can do is pattern recognition or plug numbers into a spreadsheet without understanding what they mean, that’s vulnerable.

Part of undergraduate education now is teaching students how to evaluate AI’s output. Prompting well. Checking assumptions. Understanding where it goes wrong. That’s a new layer on top of traditional finance education.

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Q: What makes undergraduate business education different from MBA education? 
A: Undergraduate education is formative in a different way. These are years when students are still figuring out who they are.

An MBA student often arrives with a career identity already forming. Undergraduates are still exploring. So culture matters enormously.

I tell prospective students that choosing a college isn’t just about rankings. It’s about fit. You’re going to spend four very formative years there. If you choose purely on prestige and ignore culture, you’re missing something important.

Q: How would you describe Rice’s culture compared to other institutions where you’ve taught? 
A: Rice students are competitive, but they’re not cutthroat. They’re collaborative. That matters. Finance has a reputation for being purely competitive. But long‑term success often depends on networks, trust and teamwork.

Q: As associate dean, what are your priorities for the Virani Undergraduate School of Business? 
A: Two things. First, expanding Rice’s national footprint, particularly in finance. We place students very well in Houston and Texas. I’d like to see more placement in New York and on the West Coast.

Placement creates a virtuous cycle. When firms see strong Rice graduates performing well, the reputation builds, and opportunities expand for future students.

Second, building a strong Virani identity. Rice already has a powerful institutional culture. But we want students to feel connected to the school itself. That means co‑ curricular programming, networking initiatives and creating a sense of belonging.

A pure finance person might ask about the return on investment of that. But belonging matters. It strengthens everything else.

Q: What kind of student thrives at Rice Business? 
A: Someone who wants rigor without sacrificing humanity.

If you want an environment where people will do anything to get ahead, this probably isn’t it. That’s not what we’re building.

If you want strong fundamentals, collaboration and faculty who genuinely care about your development, then Rice might be the right place.

At the end of the day, what really matters is that students leave here knowing how to think clearly about uncertain problems. Markets will change. Technology will change. But disciplined reasoning endures.

Check out our podcast interview with Associate Dean Bob Dittmar:

This year, Rice Business will open the doors to a new building next to McNair Hall, adding another landmark to a story that has never been just about square footage.

For more than five decades, the school has grown from a young graduate program with borrowed classrooms into a business school with expanded graduate offerings, a fast-growing undergraduate presence and a broader national profile. Along the way, its physical homes changed, too. Each one marked a different stage in the school’s history — from early experimentation to institutional confidence to the scale the school now requires.

As Rice Business prepares to open the doors of its newest building, join us for a tour of the homes that shaped the school along the way.

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Sewall Hall: Borrowed Rooms, Early Traditions

Before Rice Business had a building of its own, it had borrowed rooms and a new idea.

In its earliest years, the graduate business program operated out of Sewall Hall, where it shared space with the then-new Shepherd School of Music. Today the building houses the university’s Welcome Center and a number of academic departments, including anthropology, psychology and sociology. Even without a dedicated home, the program was beginning to define itself through its curriculum and its ties to Houston’s business community.

Some of the school’s earliest traditions began there. The first investiture ceremony, for example, took place in Sewall 301. Degrees were conferred, hoods were placed and a sense of community began to take shape — even before the school had a front door of its own.

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Herman Brown Hall: The Startup Years

In 1977, the school welcomed its first full class: 55 students taught by a faculty of 10, working out of offices and classrooms in Herman Brown Hall.

These were formative years. The school launched with programs in management and accounting — and soon finance — and set an ambitious goal for itself: to become one of the leading schools of administration in the country. During this period, a major gift from Houston Endowment endowed the school and led to its renaming as the Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Administration.

The scale was intimate. Classes were small, faculty offices were close together, and students and professors were building the culture of the school in real time. Herman Brown Hall housed a young program that was still defining what it would become. Over time, it became clear that the school needed a home designed specifically for its teaching, research and community life. That need helped push conversations about a permanent building from aspiration to priority.

It was also during the Herman Brown years that Rice Business began building what would become one of its defining strengths: entrepreneurship education. Professors Ed Williams and Al Napier introduced hands-on entrepreneurship teaching long before most universities offered it.

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Herring Hall: A Home of our Own

When Herring Hall opened in 1984, the school entered a new phase. Funded through a $10 million campaign and additional endowment support, the 50,000-square-foot building was designed by architect César Pelli and gave the school something it had never had before: a facility created specifically for its needs.

For the first time, the school’s classrooms, faculty offices and specialized resources were gathered in one place. Herring included tiered classrooms, a 230-seat auditorium and the Business Information Center, a library devoted to management and accounting.

Important academic changes also took shape during these years. The faculty approved the shift from the Master of Business and Public Management to the MBA, and the school later introduced a joint MBA/Master of Engineering degree in partnership with the School of Engineering.

Herring Hall also became central to the school’s ceremonial life. By the early 1990s, investiture had moved into larger nearby spaces and eventually into Herring’s courtyard, which became a recognizable gathering place for the school community.

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McNair Hall: A Bigger Stage 

The school’s next major leap came in 2002 with the opening of the building that would later be named for Houston entrepreneur and philanthropist Robert L. McNair and his wife, Janice.

At 167,000 square feet, McNair Hall represented far more than an increase in size. It signaled a larger vision for the school’s future, rooted in stronger research capacity, more sophisticated teaching spaces, expanded programs and deeper connections to industry.

The building arrived at a pivotal moment for the school and helped create the conditions for significant growth in the years that followed. With more space came greater ability to recruit faculty, attract students from across the United States and around the world, and broaden the school’s academic portfolio. MBA formats expanded to include the Executive MBA and Professional MBA, while doctoral programs grew alongside the Full-Time MBA.

During this period, Rice Business also strengthened its reputation in entrepreneurship. The Rice Business Plan Competition, launched in 2001 by Rice Alliance, grew into the world’s largest and richest student startup competition. New initiatives followed, including the Veterans Business Battle, launched in 2015, and the H. Albert Napier Rice Launch Challenge, launched in 2018. Rice also opened the Liu Idea Lab for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (Lilie), a campus hub supporting student startups.

Later, under Dean Peter Rodriguez, who joined Rice Business in 2016, the school expanded rapidly. Under the Rice Business name, the school doubled its MBA enrollment, added faculty and launched new programs, including an online MBA, a hybrid MBA and expanded professional and executive MBA formats. It also introduced an undergraduate business major that quickly became one of the university’s most popular programs and eventually evolved into its own academic unit: the Virani Undergraduate School of Business.

McNair Hall gave Rice Business the scale to think bigger. Over time, that success created the conditions for the next step.

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The New Building: Room for What Comes Next

Each move in the school’s history has come at a moment when its ambitions required a different kind of space.

Sewall Hall housed the earliest vision. Herman Brown Hall helped launch the program. Herring Hall gave the school a home designed for itself. McNair Hall supported a broader national and global presence.

Now Rice Business is preparing to open another building beside McNair — one designed for the school it has become.

What makes this moment different is the scale of the school’s life today. Rice Business now serves more students across more programs than ever before, from undergraduates just beginning to imagine careers in business to MBA and doctoral students preparing to lead in complex industries.

In that sense, the new building represents both a continuation and a change. Like the school’s earlier homes, it answers a practical need for space. But it also marks something larger: Rice Business is entering a new chapter with greater reach, greater visibility and a broader community than ever before.

Soon enough, the next generation of students will make the building their own. For now, it joins the story of the places that brought the school to where it is today.

Stay tuned for our next issue, which will include a full photo tour of the new building.

Based on "A Short History of the Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management, Rice University," by Melissa Kean

The annual Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo is the largest event of its kind in the world, and its scale is quickly apparent. Approaching the parking lots surrounding NRG Park, attendees to the nearly monthlong event see the tall Ferris wheels and amusement rides of a massive carnival. Inside the grounds, they’re immediately hit with smells of barbecue and fried delicacies. After climbing the winding entrance ramps, they can settle in to watch a full slate of boisterous competitions and vibrant concerts set on a football field-length dirt floor.

Next door, a 700,000-square-foot convention center features a full livestock show, where the finest of farm animals (ranging from longhorns to llamas) are shown off by their proud young handlers in competitions tied to the Rodeo’s larger mission: raising scholarship support for Texas youth and education. The Rodeo itself, officially called RODEOHOUSTON, features eight daily events, including, roping, barrel racing and bull riding. Afterward, a star-shaped stage unfolds at the 50-yard line, hosting the likes of Kelly Clarkson, Cardi B and Tim McGraw.

There are petting zoos, history exhibits, a world champion BBQ contest, a calf scramble, the Annual Go Tejano Mariachi Invitational and a professional horse show. “It’s really a giant state fair, if you will,” says Wesley Sinor ’97, the Chairman-Elect of the Board and a longtime volunteer. “There’s something for everyone.”

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And not just for everyone from Texas. Cowboy culture is taking over the country: Travel experience marketplace Tripaneer saw interest in U.S. ranch stays rise 94% in 2024. Post Malone released a country album (“F-1 Trillion”) last year. Ed Sheeran has made two appearances on the Billboard Hot Country Songs charts in recent years and has claimed that making country music is his “end goal.” And the hit TV series “Yellowstone” is attempting to meet consumer demand with its multiple spin-offs.

It helps explain why, in 2026, the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo welcomed 2.6 million people. Its direct economic impact on the Houston region is nearly $330 million.

“That’s on the level of a Houston Super Bowl,” Sinor says with a smile. “And we do it every year.”

Sinor grew up in Pasadena, Texas, which is known for its proximity to an icon of a previous American cowboy renaissance. “Our claim to fame,” he says of his hometown, “is that we grew up a mile from Gilley’s,” the honky-tonk made famous by John Travolta’s 1980 film “Urban Cowboy.”

Sinor was a child during that previous wave of cowboy-culture mainstreaming, and on weekends and holidays, his family drove an hour-and-a-half north to his grandfather’s Santa Gertrudis ranch. He studied mechanical engineering at Texas A&M University before joining his family’s manufacturing business, Sinor Engine Company, an industrial engine rebuilder and service provider, where his father, two brothers, mother and even a cousin all worked. Each managed a specific domain; Sinor focused on engineering, design, manufacturing and operations. “We each had our separate areas of expertise,” he says.

Three years into his post-college role, though, Sinor saw a gap. He knew the technical side of things but wanted to better understand the business side — finance, strategy, even human resources. He enrolled in Rice University’s Professional MBA program, then a three-year track for working professionals, heading to classes after morning shifts at the company. He says the experience was invaluable in helping him navigate technical business discussions. “You start realizing, as you’re sitting in a meeting and they are discussing some finance topic, that, yes, I understand what they’re talking about,” says Sinor. “And I can make good comments on it.”

The family business eventually sold in 2019, giving Sinor more time to pursue a passion he’d been stoking for years. He had started volunteering at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo in 2002, at the suggestion of a friend, eventually joining the Gatekeepers Committee, which helps manage admissions and access to the grounds. “I got on that committee in 2003,” he says, “and then worked my way up.” In his 22 years at the Rodeo, Sinor has served on every one of the organization’s standing committees, including investment, audit and budget. He was chairman of two of those committees and has worked alongside three Chairmen of the Board on the Executive Committee. 

“Having that broad experience of all the different standing committees makes decision-making so much easier,” he says. “You’re not trying to learn something on the fly. You already have a deep understanding.”

His work ranges from approving budgets to green-lighting new technology initiatives to coordinating with the county on security and traffic management. “You’re also the face of the show, so there are lot of public-facing engagements,” says Sinor. “It could be minute by minute that you’re going to different events and either speaking or showing up. You’re working hand-in-hand with the CEO every day. It’s the same as running any large company.”

For his three-year term as Chairman of the Board beginning in 2027, Sinor has a concrete agenda. He wants to secure a long-term lease at NRG Park to protect the Rodeo’s home for future generations, and he is overseeing the growth of the organization’s vocational education program — an initiative that awards half a million dollars annually to trade schools and junior colleges — part of a broader educational mission that this year topped $30 million. The program aims to fill a skills gap that Sinor watched widen over his decades in manufacturing. “I worked with a lot of machinists and mechanics,” he says. “To see that grow would be a great success.”

Ultimately, his goal is straightforward: small improvements, steadily compounded over the long run. “Everything just needs to be a little bit better, every year,” Sinor says.

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Sinor’s goals for RODEOHOUSTON aren’t limited to growth. He also wants to win.

A regular competitor in the cutting horse show, the discipline where horses and riders separate a single cow from the herd, he trains once or twice a week at a facility 45 minutes north of Houston, traveling to shows most weekends. In 2013, he won the amateur class championship at the RODEOHOUSTON’s cutting horse competition and is chasing another one. “Houston is kind of our home show,” he says. “Our team loves competing in it. We’re so proud we can do well.” This year, he will ride at least once each day, even as he moves through the packed slate of meetings, public appearances and behind-the-scenes obligations of being chair-elect.

Sinor describes the rides as the culmination of exhaustive effort: With proper instruction, he can put his reining hand down on the neck of his horse and feel it follow its training.

“It is an amazing feeling to have that horse trained to keep that cow separated from the herd,” he says.

Sinor has seen the culture around the sport spread well beyond the region, noting that RODEOHOUSTON even mounted a Western-themed pop-up in New York’s Times Square ahead of the event. “I don’t know if it’s the ‘Yellowstone’ effect, or what,” Sinor says, “but we also saw this with ‘Urban Cowboy’ when it was big. So we’re enjoying it right now.”

To him, though, cowboy culture runs deeper than stylish boots and riding tricks. “It’s about being self-sufficient,” he says. “Overcoming adversity. When you’re out by yourself on a ranch and you’ve got to do everything on your own — that’s pretty much what it means.”

In the days leading up to the 21-day event, Sinor was tracking the schedule of the current Chair of the Board, whom he’ll be shadowing in preparation for his new role, and mapping out his obligations. “It could be multiple engagements a day, especially during the show itself,” he says. Which of the show’s 21 days will be the hardest? Sinor pauses, then cracks a small smile. “I’m pretty sure they’re all the same. They’re all full.”

Not that Sinor is rattled. “I love to get things done,” he says. “But I am also measured and even-keeled.”

Which means that when the event kicks off, and those tens of thousands of fans come streaming into the park, he will be ready to drop the reins and let the training take over.

Based on research by Emily Prinsloo (Rice Business), Irene Scopelliti (University of London), George Loewenstein (Carnegie Mellon), and Joachim Vosgerau (Bocconi University)

Key takeaways: 

• When responding to someone else’s news, we often choose whether to share or hide our own recent success or failure based on how it could potentially make the other person feel. 
• One reason people disclose failure so readily is that a shared setback can make someone feel less alone. 
• People are much more hesitant to introduce their own success after someone else has failed, and when they do, they often soften the news with apology, reassurance or delay.

Picture this: You’ve just received good news at work — a major sale or a glowing review. Eager to share it, you track down a colleague. But as you approach them, ready to celebrate, you pause. They look upset. You ask what happened, and they tell you they’ve just been passed over for a coveted promotion.

Do you still share your win, or keep it to yourself?

Now imagine the reverse: You just lost a major client, and your colleague says they blew an important pitch. Do you share your own failure in commiseration?

Traditional workplace wisdom suggests that people share success to build status and manage impressions. But a new paper co-authored by Emily Prinsloo, assistant professor of marketing at Rice Business, suggests that in everyday conversations, what we disclose often has less to do with ego than with protecting other people’s feelings. This suggests that even ordinary workplace conversations can be shaped by prosocial motives, not just self-presentation.

Why outcome disclosures are about more than who goes first

Sharing a success or setback with someone is not a one-way process. It’s interactive. One person shares first, and the other must decide whether to respond with an outcome of their own.

To understand the unwritten rules of these moments, Prinsloo and her co-authors looked beyond why people initiate disclosure and focused instead on what they call “responsive disclosures”: the split-second decisions we make about whether to reveal a success or setback after someone else has already shared theirs.

“Most research focuses on the person who initially shares an outcome,” Prinsloo says. “But shifting focus to the responder is fascinating because the choice to share or hide our own stories offers a particularly meaningful context for understanding how people manage emotions and relationships through everyday communication.”

Why we share failure more readily than success

To see how these decisions play out, the researchers analyzed nine studies involving more than 8,200 participants across health, career and financial scenarios, including live conversations between strangers.

Across the board, people tended to follow a basic rule of reciprocity, matching what others shared — answering success with success and failure with failure.

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But the data revealed a striking asymmetry. People were more willing to respond to an outcome disclosure with a matching failure than a matching success. When someone reveals a setback, we often share our own to signal solidarity and make that person feel less alone. (One caveat: the setback you share should be in the same area of life. A health story won’t resonate much when someone’s dealing with a money problem.)

Unlike sharing a matching story of disappointment, people expected little emotional benefit from sharing a matching story of success. Likewise, sharing a failure right after someone else’s win was seen as dampening their celebration or shifting attention away from it. The research shows that most people instinctively hold those unrelated stories back to protect the initiator’s feelings. 

Why people soften or hide success to protect others

So, what happens in the scenario at the beginning of this article: when you have good news and the other person has bad? The researchers find that people are far more willing to admit a failure to a successful colleague than to announce a success to one who had failed. That restraint is highly prosocial. 

And disclosure is not just a choice between speaking and staying quiet. It’s also a matter of framing, tone, and timing based on how they anticipate it will be received. 

To see this in action, one of the studies asked participants to imagine running into an acquaintance at the airport. The participants imagined having received a prestigious job offer, but their acquaintance shares they’d just been rejected for a job. Many participants soften the blow of disclosing their success by writing longer responses, downplaying the offer or attributing it to luck. More than a quarter even misrepresented or concealed their success to spare the other person’s feelings.

Do these protective responses actually help?

Prinsloo, et al. note that good intentions don’t necessarily mean these strategies achieve their aims. Concealing a success could backfire if the other person feels patronized, and sharing a matching failure could be heard as competitive instead of comforting (i.e., “this is about me, not you”). 

Cultural norms may also shape when these patterns appear. But generally speaking, the findings reveal that our responsive disclosures are motivated by empathy for others. It’s a key conversational tool we use every day to preserve harmony and support our peers.

“The next step is understanding when these conversational choices are actually seen as supportive, and when they instead create awkwardness or friction,” Prinsloo says. “Future research can clarify not just why people choose to share or hide their outcomes, but whether those strategies achieve their goals.”

Written by Scott Pett

Prinsloo, et al (2026). “Responses to Outcome Disclosure: People Asymmetrically Disclose or Hide Their Outcomes to Protect Others’ Emotions,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.

For early-stage startups, gaining access to investors is a persistent challenge — one that accelerators like Techstars tackle by pairing founders with mentor teams who can help shape and advance fundraising efforts.

But even within accelerator programs, investor attention remains limited and competitive. To stand out, startups lean on quick indicators of quality and innovation. Gender diversity on founder teams has increasingly served as one of those indicators, often interpreted as a marker of better judgment and broader perspective.

That framing, though, assumes investors can infer a startup’s potential from the founder team in isolation. It brackets out the mentor relationships and the social context that shape how a pitch is developed and received.

Why diversity alone falls short as an investor signal

In accelerator programs, investor engagement is mediated through founder-mentor relationships, which raises a different question: Do cues like gender diversity operate the same way when investor attention depends on interactions between two different teams?

In other words, if mentors help shape the founder-investor relationship, gender diversity on founder teams alone may not carry the same weight.

New research tests this question. Co-authored by Alessandro Piazza of Rice Business and Dana Kanze of Georgetown University, the study analyzes data from 984 startups that participated in Techstars accelerator programs worldwide. By combining investor data with interviews, the researchers examine how gender diversity shapes investor engagement when founders and mentors work as paired teams.

Published in Organization Science, the paper finds that gender diversity on its own does not enhance investor engagement. Instead, the research shows investor engagement improves when founder and mentor teams are aligned in their gender composition — meaning both teams are either gender diverse or male dominated. When gender diversity appears on only one side of the founder-mentor relationship, the investor advantage disappears.

Why founder-mentor alignment matters in accelerators

“A common assumption is that diversity on its own should help teams stand out,” Piazza says. “What we find instead is that diversity matters in context. When founder and mentor teams are aligned, mentorship works better, and that translates into more investor interest and funding success down the line.”

That assumption did not come out of nowhere. Much of this expectation about diversity is rooted in what researchers call a “threshold” view of gender diversity. Decades of organizational research suggest that once teams reach a critical mass of representation, diversity becomes substantive rather than symbolic, improving decision-making in complex environments.

From there, it becomes easy to assume that diverse teams are not only stronger internally but also more financially attractive externally. In accelerator settings, at least, Piazza and Kanze show that this assumption does not hold. Simply reaching a commonly cited diversity threshold on a founder team or mentor team does not on its own lead to greater investor engagement.

Instead, investor interest increases only when founder and mentor teams are aligned in their gender composition. Whether teams are gender diverse or male dominated, alignment between the two sides of the relationship is associated with higher investor engagement.

The advantage, Piazza notes, is not that investors observe or reward alignment directly, but that alignment improves how mentorship works in practice, influencing investor engagement later on.

Where gender diversity delivers its strongest effect

Still, gender diversity does make a difference. The researchers found the strongest boost to investor engagement appears when gender-diverse founder teams are paired with gender-diverse mentor teams.

“When gender-diverse teams are aligned, they seem better positioned to realize the benefits of diversity,” Piazza says. “Together, they can draw on broader perspectives and networks without the frictions that tend to surface when founders and mentors are mismatched in terms of gender composition.”

Notably, the study focuses on investor engagement rather than funding outcomes — a distinction that matters, since attention and conversations do not always translate directly into capital.

Even so, the findings open several avenues for future research. Because the analysis centers on accelerator programs, an open question is whether similar alignment effects appear in other settings where internal teams work closely with external partners, such as advisory boards, consultants or strategic alliances. The study also focuses on gender composition at the team level, pointing to future work that could examine how other dimensions of identity or expertise shape dynamics between teams under resource constraints.

More broadly, the study suggests that research on diversity may benefit from looking beyond individual teams to the relationships that shape how work actually gets done — particularly in settings where access to resources depends on coordination and sustained interaction.

It’s well known that faculty at Rice Business go above and beyond. They bring cutting-edge research, real-world business expertise and a deep commitment to mentorship that reinforces how Rice MBA students learn in the classroom and solve problems around them.

Rice Business is home to many stellar professors — a constant flow of national faculty awards and recognition will tell you as much. To hear it from the source, we turn to current MBA students to hear how professors have defined their experience so far.

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Balaji Koka

Balaji Koka is an associate professor in the area of strategic management and academic director of global programming at Rice Business. He joined the school in 2008 and teaches in the Executive MBA and Full-time MBA programs.

“Professor Balaji Koka was an amazing professor to have for one of my first classes at Rice,” says Jose Sagrera ’27, a Full-Time MBA student. “He really set the tone for the rigor and depth of knowledge that was to come throughout the semester.” 
 

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Alan Crane

In addition to his role as an associate professor of finance, Alan Crane serves as the advisor to the dean on curriculum innovation. His teaching interests range from core finance to corporate financial policy and managerial economics.

“Professor Alan Crane has a rare ability to distill complex topics into simple concepts — particularly for students without finance backgrounds — which helped me build a strong foundation I’ve carried throughout my MBA,” full-time student Mauricio Parilli ’26 says. “Core Finance was one of the most challenging classes in the program, but also one of the most important to master.” 

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Marlon Mooijman

Marlon Mooijman is the Jones School Distinguished Assistant Professor of Management (Organizational Behavior) at Rice Business. He brings his expertise on trust, power and ethics to both undergraduate and graduate classrooms.

“Marlon Mooijman’s course gave first-year students a clear understanding of real workplace dynamics and the challenges of leading people,” says Full-Time MBA student Alex Brown ’27. “As MBAs, we will be expected to make difficult decisions, and his focus on organizational behavior builds the awareness needed to do that effectively.” 
 

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Leila Peyravan 

As an assistant professor of accounting, Leila Peyravan draws on her prior experience as a consultant and financial analyst. Her research interests are generally focused on how information quality, in the context of a firm’s financial reporting quality and accounting practices, affects debt and equity markets.

“Professor Leila Peyravan is an assistant professor of accounting at Rice who makes even the most technical concepts feel engaging and accessible,” says Theresa Sibi ’27, a student in the Professional MBA-Weekend program. “Her depth of knowledge and unique ability to make a five-hour class fly by truly made it fun to learn the material.”
 

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Al Danto 

Al Danto is a senior lecturer in entrepreneurship at Rice Business with more than 30 years of experience in the startup, entrepreneurial and acquisition scenes.

“Having collaborated with Professor Al Danto in my Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition class and as co-chair of the 2026 Rice Veterans Business Battle, I’ve come to deeply appreciate his mentorship,” shares Kelvin Searose-Xu ’26, a Full-Time MBA. “He embodies both the spirit of a successful entrepreneur and the principles of servant leadership, truly investing in the success of those he teaches.” 
 

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David Wilson

David Wilson is a lecturer in accounting and the acting director of the Finance Center at Rice Business. His research explores how information affects intraday trading dynamics, with a focus on institutional investors, market intermediation and market quality.

“David Wilson brings an enthusiastic and welcoming presence to the classroom that makes even complex accounting topics more digestible,” says Harrison Nerren ’27, a student in the Professional MBA-Evening program. “He understands that we are MBA students, not accountants, and intentionally breaks down concepts into practical, clear discussions that connect to real-world decision-making.” 

 

The professors highlighted here represent just a small sample of the exceptional professors who make the Rice MBA so transformative. Explore the full curriculum and learn more about how our Rice Business faculty prepare students to navigate complex business challenges and lead in a rapidly changing world.

Continue reading about the impact our faculty make in Rice Business Wisdom.

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