Growing up, Ope Amosu’s elementary school classmates bought his famous “Ope Sauce,” a mixture of ketchup, mayonnaise, mustard, salt and pepper. In high school, he sold chocolate chip cookies that he baked after football and basketball practice.

In college, his frat brothers dubbed him “Chef Homeboy” because of his consistency at the grill. But Amosu, who only dabbled in cooking, never thought he would become a professional chef.

“It wasn’t like I grew up saying I stayed in the kitchen with my mother every day and cooked. I didn’t. I enjoyed being a consumer of food. I enjoyed going to restaurants,” says Amosu, 34. “My family always fellowshipped around food. Food was always a celebratory experience.”

But over time, Amosu’s passion for cooking began to blossom. And his time at Rice Business, where he earned his MBA in 2014, planted new entrepreneurial seeds.

In November, Amosu opened ChopnBlok, a West African restaurant inside the new POST Houston building, which infuses the traditions of his Nigerian upbringing with other African cultures and cuisines. And when Bravo’s “Top Chef” series filmed in Houston this season, featuring a selection of the city’s most celebrated culinary stars, he shared the spotlight with local legends Hugo Ortega, Monica Pope, Chris Williams and Kiran Verma — the ‘godmother of Indian fine dining,’ and the mother of Puja Verma ’12, the director of operations and strategy at Kiran’s.

In a very short time, ChopnBlok’s fast-casual spin on West African cuisine has bubbled to the top of Houston’s rich, diverse culinary scene. “I want this to be a cultural crossroads, where we take West African culture and local communities and bring them together,” says Amosu. “I want people that walk by to know that this is the place to get good food.”

Ingredients

Amosu was born in London, but when he was 2, his parents sent him and his brother to Nigeria to live with their grandparents. Meanwhile, his parents traveled to the United States to determine where they wanted the family to settle down. They finally chose Houston, living in an apartment on the southwest side of the city, which Amosu describes as “Little Nigeria.”

At home, Amosu was surrounded by Nigerian culture. Food also played a central role at his family’s big celebrations. He even traveled back to Nigeria sometimes with his family. But during the day, he went to a private school where, in many of his classes, nobody else looked like him.

“The norms there were also different than the norms in my neighborhood. Reflecting on it, I think a lot of that is obviously what shaped me, but it’s also kind of what made me be able to connect with so many different people, with so many different backgrounds, with so many different walks of life,” says Amosu.

Amosu, who enjoyed playing sports as a child, ended up getting a football scholarship to Truman State University in Missouri. In college, he also joined a fraternity, where he taught himself how to grill. Some of the recipes he developed in college eventually made their way to the menu at ChopnBlok.

Being in rural Missouri also made him miss home more. After graduation, he moved back to Houston and got a job with the signage company Grimco. But he knew that he wanted to further his education and ultimately get an MBA. He set his sights on Rice Business.

Prep Work

Amosu’s entrepreneurial spirit took shape during the MBA program, where entrepreneurship classes were the ones he enjoyed the most. In Al Danto’s new enterprise course, Amosu recalls reading case studies about entrepreneurial journeys, which got his mind whirring. As part of the course, he also interviewed other entrepreneurs, including the Pappas family, who have opened more than 100 restaurants across the U.S. (Evy Pappas ’09 and Eleni Pappas ’19 are both Rice Business alums).

“The whole goal was to say: At the end of my life, what do I want to be known for?” says Amosu. “Then, from a professional standpoint, what types of things would I consider that can also help me achieve that level of fulfillment throughout my career?”

The dream of entrepreneurship stayed with Amosu as he transitioned into his first job after business school. He went to work for General Electric in Philadelphia, where he was responsible for projects all over the world, including the Middle East, Latin America and Southeast Asia. But he grew restless in his position and wanted more from his career. He also wanted to stay connected to his Nigerian heritage.

“As I’m living in these different parts of the world, I keep asking myself like, ‘Man where can I get access to my culture?’ Be it the food, be it the music,” says Amosu.

Amosu moved to Dallas in 2016. One day in January 2017, he traveled to a work conference in Houston and became inspired after coming across an Italian street food kitchen, Piada. He envisioned creating a similar concept, but centered on West African food and drinks. With ideas brimming but no practical experience in fast-casual dining, Amosu decided to work at night as a prep cook at Chipotle to pick up some needed skills. 

Cooking With Gas

He and his wife moved back to Houston in December 2017, and he began learning how to make traditional West African dishes from home cooks, then modifying the traditional recipes in fresh and unique ways. He also began hosting small pop-up dinners in 2018, which soon ballooned to quarterly pop-up dining experiences that drew up to 150 people per night. Attendees would dine on dishes that can now be found at ChopnBlok, such as the Trad, a dish of smoky jollof jambalaya rice, grilled chicken, stewed sweet plantains and peanut-pepper spiced vegetables.

The pop-up dinners gained momentum until the COVID pandemic hit in 2020. Like many business owners, Amosu suddenly had to pivot. He began shipping to customers across the country and finding new ways to market his fare. For example, he partnered with “Insecure” actress and comedian Yvonne Orji to deliver ChopnBlok meals to her fans as a promotion for her HBO Comedy special “Momma, I Made It!” In the special, Orji reflects on being Nigerian-American and shares footage from a trip to Nigeria. Amosu also organized a “Bloktober” event in October 2020, offering ChopnBlok home delivery in Houston and beyond.

Eventually, Amosu got a dream opportunity to open a restaurant inside the high-profile POST Houston development, a mixed-use complex in what was once Houston’s downtown post office, developed by Rice alum Frank Liu.

After a long journey that brought him from late nights at Chipotle to a series of pop-up dinners to an unexpected pandemic pivot, Amosu is finally seeing the fruits of his labor. Since ChopnBlok opened in November, it has been widely acclaimed by critics and Yelp reviewers alike. He hopes the restaurant’s popularity will help make West African culture and food a part of society’s daily routine and celebrated by all. Ultimately, he hopes to expand the restaurant to other locations across country and the world.

“I think this whole story, of how we slowly created our own niche and built a following, paid off,” says Amosu. “At the end of the day, it’s the people that came to our pop-ups, who are excited to see that someone who was going to do something is actually doing it and doing it in a way that they can be proud of.”

ChopnBlok’s most popular dish currently, The Motherland, takes West African staples like black-eyed peas, stewed plantains and suya-spiced vegetables, and merges them with East African coconut curry. Amosu says the dish tells a story of the whole African continent.

His advice for those just starting out on their own entrepreneurial journey is rooted in words from the late rapper Nipsey Hustle.

“One of the things he said on one of his songs is: The difference between him and the next person is he just didn’t quit,” says Amosu. “I’ve gone through every single emotion possible and I continue just to do it.”

There’s this effort to make Houston the Silicon Valley of the South, and I want to be a part of it. I didn’t think I would have access to all those opportunities without a foundation in business principles. The curriculum at Rice Business is so thoughtful and so purposeful — they challenge us at every turn.

Keri Sprung, EMBA ’22

As Texas Heart Institute’s communications director, with 25 years of work experience in medical research, Keri Sprung has worked with giants in medicine throughout her career. “In the Texas Medical Center, you’re surrounded by breathtaking innovations and human greatness — scientists, doctors, surgeons, inventors, policymakers,” she says. “I have amassed a unique and varied perspective over my two decades in the industry, but I was missing the full complement of business principles. There was something I just didn’t know that everyone else in the room knew, and part of it was the ability to execute business strategy to advance the mission and business goals of an organization.” She started taking seminars and online courses to fill the gaps in her knowledge, but it never seemed like enough. About five years ago, she realized that what she really wanted was a full business school curriculum. “There was a hole that I knew I couldn’t really fill by taking classes here and there.”

At Rice Business, she’s been humbled by how much there is to learn and emboldened to recognize how many skills she’s already mastered without being fully aware of it. “You really have to get through the coursework to realize it’s not rocket science, but you certainly cannot cut corners,” she says. “You really do need to study to become a better leader and be mindful and purposeful about how you’re leading at all times. There is an art and a science to leadership; it doesn’t just come naturally.”

When I was looking at MBA programs, I could see that Rice Business had the resources I needed and that they’d make them available to me. There are a huge variety of opportunities to learn here, and I’ve been able to get my hands on some real-world experiences starting in my first semester.

Zachary Green, FTMBA ’23

Becoming an orchestral musician wasn’t part of Zachary Green’s life plan. As an undergrad at Northwestern University, where he double majored in economics and double bass, the latter was essentially a side hustle. He didn’t think he had the chops to pursue it professionally. Practicing six hours a day, however, he kept getting better. “I guess I got a little bit carried away,” he says. At the end of college, he took a gamble. “I thought, ‘I’ll apply to the top conservatories and if I get in, I’ll go for it, and if not, it was fun while it lasted.’” He got into Juilliard. “I couldn’t turn down that opportunity,” he says.

After earning his master’s degree from the New York performing arts conservatory, he earned a coveted spot as a core member in Japan’s Hyogo Performing Arts Center Orchestra. But after three years, he started thinking about what life as a performing musician would entail — and he began to reimagine his career path. That path led him back to his interest in financial planning and analysis, and ultimately to Rice Business. For Green, solving real-world problems in finance poses an intellectual challenge akin to mastering a musical instrument. “I want to work for a company where I can use finances to identify: where are things going wrong, where are we losing money, and how can we avoid that in the future,” he says. “Even though you can’t predict the future, you can account for it in different ways, and you have some idea what might go wrong.”

Most leaders are keen to improve creativity and innovation among their ranks, but few have the time to scour academic journals for fresh ideas. A new book co-edited by Jing Zhou, the Mary Gibbs Jones Professor of Management and Psychology at Rice Business, aims to bridge the gap by gathering leading research on creativity and innovation in one place. Published in 2021, the “Handbook of Research on Creativity and Innovation” compiles some of the most groundbreaking recent findings on creativity for academics and managers alike. We spoke to her about how research on creativity has evolved and what readers will take away from the book.

Rice Business: This is actually the third handbook on creativity and innovation you have co-edited, after the “Handbook of Organizational Creativity” (2008) and “The Oxford Handbook of Creativity, Innovation and Entrepreneurship” (2015). What inspired you to undertake this series of projects?

Jing Zhou: Up until the beginning of the 1990s, most research on creativity and innovation in the workplace focused on R&D and patenting in the tech industry. As their collective knowledge of management and organizational behavior improved, researchers began to go beyond studying ‘Big C’ creativity, referring to radical breakthroughs in technology, to acknowledge the impact of ‘Small C,’ or everyday creativity. They began to consider the value of harvesting creative ideas — defined as ideas that are both new and useful — about products, processes and services from employees. That’s really how the study of workplace creativity burgeoned. By the mid-2000s, the co-editor of the first book, Chris Shalley, and I identified a need to take inventory of all the research that had come out and organize it into something digestible.

How does this third handbook differ from the previous two?

Our 2008 book was the first attempt at summarizing research findings on how to promote employee creativity. The chapters in the book highlighted key things managers could do to increase the creativity of their employees, from giving feedback and goal setting to creating a culture of creativity. The 2015 book, which I co-edited with Chris Shalley and Mike Hitt, was an attempt to connect the dots between research on creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship. A few years ago, my current co-editor, Bess Rouse, and I realized that the time had come to produce a book that accomplishes a few new goals: First, it takes a deeper dive into creativity research than ever before, going into topics that weren’t even on our radar while editing the first two books. Second, it is intended to stimulate new research by pointing out opportunities for growth. Finally, it provides useful insights for anyone looking to spark creativity and innovation in the workplace.  

What new research directions are you hoping to encourage with this handbook?

One of the things we highlighted was the need to combine quantitative with qualitative research to generate better insights. My co-editor, Bess, an associate professor of management and organization at Boston College’s Carroll School of Management, is an expert on qualitative research methods, such as interviewing people in the workplace and observing how they interact while at work, while I focus primarily on quantitative research methods. To create knowledge, both quantitative and qualitative methods are essential. Researchers need to be able to capture phenomena in context, measure creativity and innovation properly, and draw inferences about causality. Our handbook summarizes useful, robust methods for quantitative and qualitative research with the hope that researchers will integrate these methods into their own work and generate more knowledge.

We are also hoping to inspire more research on the receiving side of creativity. After an employee has generated a creative idea, how will their supervisor react? How does that reaction contribute to or impede a culture of creativity and innovation? As a field, we have a lot of interesting questions to answer. And these are just a couple of examples. The book presents plenty of other new research directions as well.

Who are you hoping reads this book?

I hope that researchers, Ph.D. students and anyone interested in creativity and innovation in business will find this book thought-provoking. Ideally, it will serve as a platform for the cross-fertilization of ideas. Another audience I’m hoping to reach is managers. This work is intended, in large part, to encourage them to do more to cultivate both ‘Big C’ and ‘Small C’ creativity on their teams.  

What are some practical takeaways for managers looking to foster creativity and innovation on their teams?

Most managers talk about building a culture of innovation, but when you ask them how they go about boosting employee creativity or you try to dig deeper into what has and hasn’t worked, they can’t provide many specifics. Successful managers, in contrast, will take a systematic approach to enhancing creativity and innovation. Our book offers a number of practical suggestions for doing so.

We wanted to drive home the message that engaging in creativity and innovation should be an integral part of the job for every manager and every employee, whether or not they are listed in a formal job description.

We also encourage managers to view creativity as a social process. In one of our chapters, a top researcher in social networks lays out the process of building a social network that generates creative ideas. Essentially, you need to be purposeful in the way you connect with people and gather diverse perspectives. That’s how you get a broader pool of ideas to connect the dots and spark innovation.

Should we expect a fourth handbook in the future?

Given how quickly the field of creativity and innovation is progressing, I wouldn’t be surprised if we produced another handbook in a few years. And, for managers facing increasing competition in their industries, keeping their knowledge base upgraded and getting better tools to increase creativity and innovation on their teams is only going to become more important with time.   

Carol Shattuck ’82 has spent her career working with mission-driven organizations. So it seems only fitting that she was on a mission of her own when she came to Rice Business to pursue a Master of Business and Public Management degree.

A Houston native, Shattuck began volunteering at local community organizations while still in middle school, and after graduating from Duke University with a degree in psychology and public policy, she spent two years working for nonprofits in Washington, D.C. Her experience there taught her that while nonprofit administrators often earn their positions by virtue of their talent and their passion for the cause, they often lack the training to excel in the executive suite, a problem that Shattuck sums up as “good hearts, but not necessarily good management skills.”

Shattuck wanted to change that — first by acquiring those skills herself, and then by helping others to do the same.

The MBPM program, then in its infancy, helped her with the first step, providing her with a solid grounding in everything from economics to strategic planning — all of which she put to good use at her first job after graduation. As a staff consultant at the Support Center of Houston, a nonprofit dedicated to improving the effectiveness of other nonprofits, Shattuck worked with clients on management issues, organized training sessions for their staff, and otherwise helped them strengthen their institutions.

She did something similar as an assistant vice president at United Way of the Texas Gulf Coast (now the United Way of Greater Houston), where in addition to working on strategic planning and board development for the organization itself, she created the Management Assistance Program. Known today as Nonprofit Connection, the program has for more than 30 years helped the volunteers and professional staff of nonprofit agencies become more effective and efficient at delivering services with limited resources.

All that experience came in handy when Shattuck decided to launch her own consultancy in 1994. She made the move so she could spend more time with her family — she and her husband, David, a professor of engineering at the University of Houston, had a son and daughter in middle school at the time — but she hardly slowed down. Among her various projects, Shattuck helped launch and run Communities Conquering Cancer, a collaborative venture led by St. Luke’s Health and the Kelsey-Seybold Clinic that provided free mammograms and arranged follow-up care for medically underserved women in Houston’s Acres Homes neighborhood.

Shattuck also worked with the Greater Houston Community Foundation, which hired her to consult on a couple of initiatives focused on early childhood education. That experience ultimately led her to become head of the Greater Houston Collaborative for Children, an alliance of foundations devoted to fostering healthy child and family development, in 1998.

Six years later, Shattuck would lead the organization through a merger, shortening its name to Collaborative for Children and broadening its mission to include serving families with young children, improving the quality of early education, and strengthening the system of early childcare. By the time she stepped down as president and CEO in 2018, the organization had become one of the leading nonprofits in the greater Houston area focused on improving the lives of children under 5, with more than 85 personnel and an annual budget in excess of $10 million.

Shattuck’s tenure at the Collaborative coincided with the dissemination of the first rigorous scientific studies to demonstrate the positive impact that early childhood education has over the course of an individual’s life, and she was quick to act on the data. In addition to establishing information and referral services (first a telephone hotline, later an online database) for parents seeking quality childcare in their neighborhoods, Shattuck strengthened the training that the organization offered to parents of young children and worked with state agencies such as the Texas Workforce Commission to close the gap between what the state required of childcare centers and what research indicated was necessary for high-quality childcare.

She also spearheaded an intensive effort to improve access to good early childhood education in underserved neighborhoods. In 2008, for example, Shattuck launched a program called College Bound from Birth in Sunnyside, an historically Black and economically disadvantaged neighborhood south of downtown. The program, which has since expanded to several other neighborhoods, provides everything from professional development for teachers to mentoring services, curriculum development and classroom materials to childcare centers in areas where quality childcare has traditionally been hard to find.

“It was a real joy to be a part of that process,” says Shattuck, who describes the “night and day difference” she and her colleagues saw from year to year in the centers they supported.

Shattuck is heartened by some of the broader societal changes she witnessed during and after her time at the Collaborative, such as growing public awareness of the importance of early childhood education and the prospect of increased federal funding for childcare.

Yet now that she is back running her own consultancy, Shattuck Consulting LLC, for the second time in her career, Shattuck has returned to her roots: She’s focusing on areas that, in her experience, have the greatest impact on a nonprofit’s success — scenario planning (for quick pivots in a fast-changing operating environment), strategic planning, and board of directors development and training. For example, she recently helped develop a strategic plan for the Houston Area Urban League, an organization that provides social services such as housing and workforce training in economically disadvantaged areas across greater Houston.

There are differences, to be sure, between the pre- and post-Collaborative iterations of Shattuck’s consultancy.

On the one hand, the confluence of challenges that mission-driven organizations currently face — an ongoing pandemic, continued economic uncertainty, a national reckoning on race relations — demands a whole new level of nimbleness and flexibility.

On the other, Shattuck now brings to the table 20 years of lessons learned as head of a major nonprofit — lessons she can draw on to help others navigate these troubled times.

Yet some things have remained constant; namely, the rigorous approach to problem-solving that she acquired at Rice, and which helped her not only steer her own organization but also guide others as they have sought to make the world a better place.

“My training at Rice was critical,” she says. “It truly opened the door to the career that I had.”

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What is the ‘social cost of carbon’?

The social cost of carbon, a dollar figure per ton of carbon dioxide released, is factored into the costs and benefits of proposed regulations and purchasing decisions, such as whether the U.S. Postal Service should buy electric- or gasoline-powered trucks, or where to set emissions standards for coal-fired power plants. That extra social cost can tip the scales for whether a regulation’s costs appear to outweigh its benefits.

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Academic research award: smart ideas with real-world impact

[Shrihari Sridhar at the Mays Business School of Texas A&M University, Rice Business Professor Vikas Mittal, and their fellow researchers] analyzed why screening rates for liver cancer were low for high-risk patients, deploying machine-learning techniques to understand the characteristics of those who responded best to different prompts to test, such as letters, emails or personalized telephone calls. That allowed them to recommend targeted approaches that would be more likely to succeed in place of the usual “one size fits all” outreach.

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Fake it 'til you make it: Early-stage investors fall for style over substance

Earlier research from New York University found that our judgments are shaped mainly by our prejudices, and our conclusions are often wrong.

In our personal lives, we miss out on getting to know interesting people. Recently, I wrote about managers overlooking quality job candidates. But investment teams can lose billions of dollars of clients’ money, Rice Business assistant professor Alessandro Piazza, doctoral candidate Brian Chung and Dortmund University’s Daniel Reese found.

Feb. 7, 2022 | Chris Tomlinson

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H-E-B dominates Austin-area grocery stores

Why do so many companies come up short in their strategy planning and implementation? Because their CEOs end up playing the role of firefighter, implementer or counselor. Four years of intensive data analysis conducted by the authors has shown the three roles repeatedly emerge, deflecting from strategy and keeping CEOs from elevating their companies.

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Why hiring takes so long

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David VanHorn, a supply chain expert and professor at Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business, said even if supply chains aren’t global that they are still complex.

“They're kind of like machines with a series of gears,” VanHorn said. “So if one of the interconnected gears breaks down for whatever reason, well, that means everything kind of stops. And yes, you can fix that gear but it still doesn't mean that the other gear, some other gear may not pop up and slow things down.”

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The Bounce Back: This Trio Of MBA Jobs Reports Has A Common Thread

The business schools at three more U.S. universities — Rice, Georgia Tech, and Vanderbilt — have posted employment numbers for their MBA classes of 2021 showing salaries up, placement rates up, and other markers improving dramatically after the pandemic year.

At Rice’s Jones Graduate School of Business, the job offer rate three months post-graduation jumped by 7 percentage points over last year, and the acceptance rate by 3 percentage points; meanwhile Rice Business reported its highest recorded salary in school history.

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What happens if you pick the wrong date on your target-date fund?

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How much is it costing you? On average it’s 4% or 0.2% a year, according to the authors of the paper, Byeong-Je An, an assistant professor of finance at the Nanyang Business School at Nanyang Technological University and Kunal Sachdeva, and an assistant professor of finance with the Graduate School of Business at Rice University.

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Rice MBA students win U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation competition

MBA students from Rice Business won the school’s second straight competition at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation’s MBA Case Competition. This year’s winners — Abhimanyu Bansal, Maya Stine and Nicholas Khater — won a total of $10,000 at the competition, beating 49 other schools from around the globe. This was the first year the competition was opened to international schools.

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