In 2000, MBA candidates Tricia Mitchell-Kim and Jennifer Lange launched the inaugural Women in Leadership Conference (known as WILC) at the Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University. With few female role models in business and even fewer in-class case studies, the two Rice Business students believed that Rice Business should be the site of an event that not only highlighted female leaders but invited them to network in person with students. Ever since, Rice MBA students have passed the WILC planning torch from one class to the next. In 2020, WILC sold out a week in advance, with over 500 attendees and nearly 200 companies represented. Here, MBA student Caroline Yuki Yang describes what she gained at the 2020 gathering.
 
Early on the morning of the WILC conference I was excited and ready. I got up at 4:30 a.m., knocked out my work emails in time for the 7:00 a.m. breakfast, and just before setting out, updated my Facebook status: “Happy Valentine’s Day, ladies. Celebrating with Women in Leadership Conference 20th Anniversary, love yourself, love and protect your dreams.” 

I was right to have been excited. The conference began with a truly extraordinary speaker: corporate CEO and U.S. Marine Corps veteran Ann Fox, who told us about her service experience, including how she was able to save an innocent life due to her different perspective from male colleagues. 
 

With each subsequent speaker, I found myself even more challenged, energized and more focused on my goals. Surrounded by female business leaders, I felt my career dreams had been reignited. In the words of ending keynote speaker Sandy Asch: “I am ready to be bold and roar.” Below are some of the most memorable words, dashed down in my notebook as I listened to these powerful talks. 

Ann Fox, President and CEO at Nine Energy Services: 

• Consider the opinions and thoughts of others, listen to their perspective.
• Become your own keynote, create more keynotes and remember, as the twig you can be flexible and bend, but never broken.
• Do not make people choose between work and their families. 

Sruba De, Vice President of Global Retail Insights & Solutions at MasterCard Advisors:

• Leadership requires three main things: powerful communication, the ability to influence and thriving outside your comfort zone.
• Speak with intention and clarity. Think about what you want people to remember about your words.
• Influence is about convincing others to share your intentional goals.

Tandra Jackson, Vice-Chair of Growth and Strategy at KPMG US: 

• The biggest barrier in my career was my own mindset. You need to shift your mindset to go further. Don’t just focus on what’s working and keeping things the same.
• What I would tell my 21-year-old self is to have a network. Surround yourself with different people. You never know how the dots are going to connect.
• When making difficult decisions, know yourself and know how the decision impacts your ecosystem: business and personal. 

Gigi Lindberg, Vice President, Commercial Relationship Manager at BBVA 

• I sold Turkish wine at Michelin star restaurants and people asked me, “How did I get into these restaurants?” I said, “Talk to the right people.”
• Use Mel Robbin's 5-second rule to center yourself.

Larry Perkins, Associate Vice President, Talent and Diversity, University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center:

• Leadership is a sport. There’s going to be conflict.
• Diversity is a fact. Inclusion is an act.
• Be deliberate and intentional. 

Lynda Clemmons, Vice President, Sustainable Solutions at NRG Energy

• Think about how your message is heard and effectively communicate.

Sandy Asch, CEO of Sandy Asch and author of the best-selling book, Roar:

• To be bold and influence change you must Velcro to your purpose, be radically transparent, respond – don’t react, and embrace your fears and failures. 

I hope my takeaways above will nourish you as much as they have nourished me. In fact, in the months after the conference, something interesting has happened: many of the lessons I gathered there have grown more – rather than less – vivid. In some cases, though I remember the concept, I no longer recalled the speaker or the moment when I heard them. 

So, with apologies and thanks to the participants who shared these ideas, here are paraphrases of three or more of the lessons that have most helped me after my day at WILC:

• Know where you want to go, then communicate to others that that’s where you belong.
• How you respond to people under stress says a lot about leadership; people are watching.
• And finally, maybe the easiest lesson to memorize but the one that may take a lifetime to absorb: there’s no such thing as failure – only feedback. 

I hope the ideas I’ve shared will inspire you as much as they inspired me. I encourage you to attend the next WILC.
 

Explore the Rice MBA

Based on research by Vikas Mittal

• Most hospital outreach still relies on untailored – that is, untargeted – communications.
• Rice Business Professor Vikas Mittal shows that tailored, personalized health care marketing works better to convince at-risk patients to get screening for liver cancer.
• Patients of different ages, genders and health statuses respond differently to the same intervention and also to different interventions, meaning outreach shouldn’t be one size fits all.

Amazon is famous for targeted marketing that approaches customers based on their unique needs. Like other successful businesses, such as Netflix, the company taps into machine learning, which uses customer data to understand their behavior.

Hospitals and medical centers rely on marketing too, investing heavily in direct-to-patient outreach to urge at-risk people to get regular screenings. Johns Hopkins Hospital’s cancer center, for example, uses emails, letters, seminars and community events to encourage patients to get screened for potential cancer. The high cost of cancer treatment makes this effort worth it: research shows regular screenings help with early detection, leading to more cost-effective treatments and better prognoses. 

But hospitals can – and must – improve their outcomes much more, by melding this essential outreach with individually tailored communications based on machine-learning insights.

In an award-winning paper, Rice Business Professor Vikas Mittal and colleagues developed new algorithms indicating that targeted, personalized outreach can increase screenings among at-risk patients. “Outreach marketing” –  including sending informational letters and talking to patients about potential barriers to screening – was indeed a powerful motivator for patients to get screened, ultimately lowering health care costs for patient and hospital. But patients with different characteristics, Mittal’s team found, responded differently to marketing interventions. When it came to marketing campaigns for cancer screening prevention, one-size-fits-all outreach efforts were neither effective nor economical. Personalized marketing works better for preventing cancer.

To conduct their research, the researchers randomly divided 1,800 patients at UT Southwestern Medical System at risk for hepatocellular carcinoma – the most common type of primary liver cancer – into three groups – usual care, outreach alone, and patient navigation, which includes help such as follow-up calls, motivational messages and assistance spotting specific barriers. They followed each group to see if patients scheduled an MRI or CT scan within six months, from 6-12 months and from 12-18 months. 

The first group was asked to receive a screening during their doctors’ visits and wasn’t contacted after that. The second group received a one-page letter in the mail, then staff called patients who didn’t schedule a screening. The third group receiving patient navigation got the same treatment as the second group supplemented with phone calls designed to identify potential barriers, which they used to give customized motivational messages encourage coming in for a screening.

The researchers used patient data from medical records, including patients’ age, gender, ethnicity, income, commute time, health status, how often they received healthcare services, whether or not they had insurance and how populated their neighborhoods were.

Following traditional methods, Mittal’s team found that the patients who got a letter and call were 10-20% more likely to complete a screening, while those who got the customized motivational messages were 13-24% more likely to schedule their screening. But this is where traditional medical research stops, without asking a crucial question: Within each group, such as those of the 600 patients receiving patient navigation, could screening rates differ based on patients’ individual characteristics? 

In past research, everyone receiving the same stimulus is presumed to respond the same way. There was no statistical technique to separately estimate the responsiveness of patients with different characteristics. Mittal’s team solved this problem by using a machine learning technique called causal forests.

By using "causal forests" to quantify how each of the three marketing approaches could be applied to different patients, Mittal’s team found, improved returns on the traditional approach by a remarkable 74-96% – or by $1.6 million to $2 million. 

Using traditional methods, physicians would have concluded that every patient should get patient navigation because it was a more intensive marketing approach. The causal forest method showed otherwise: there are small groups of patients with unique characteristics who respond best to specific types of overtures. Minority women in good health who had insurance, visited the doctor often and lived close to clinics in more populated neighborhoods responded especially well to all three types of outreach interventions. Younger patients with long commutes who live in neighborhoods with more public insurance coverage embraced the second type of intervention, outreach alone. And older patients in higher-income neighborhoods favored the patient-navigation approach.

The stakes for common marketing practices like “AB testing” could not be higher. In AB testing, marketers run randomized experiments such as showing ads to some people and not to others. If those seeing an ad, on average, buy more, the conclusion is to blanket the market with ads. But AB testing ignores the fundamental idea that customers exposed to an ad might buy differently in response to an ad based on their individual characteristics. In fact, research shows, many customers seeing a non-tailored ad will buy less than those not seeing an ad. 

Personalized marketing can uncover these differences and substantially increase the return on marketing investments in many settings such as retail and ecommerce, services marketing, business-to-business marketing and brand management. Healthcare companies should consider dedicating more resources to machine learning, which can power data-driven patient-centric outreach programs. Because individual health is a civic good, policy makers and organizations need to support these personalized outreach programs. 

As for patients themselves, giving detailed personal data to a doctor or receiving highly personalized, unsolicited phone calls legitimately can seem like an invasion of privacy. But Mittal’s research shows, it measurably has the potential to save your life.  

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

To learn more, please see: Chen, Y.C., Lee, J.Y., Sridhar, S., Mittal, V., McCallister, K., & Singal, A.G. (2020). Improving Cancer Outreach Effectiveness Through Targeting and Economic Assessments: Insights from a Randomized Field Experiment, Journal of Marketing, 84(3), 1-27. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022242920913025.

A mobile app to help prevent veteran suicide is one of the products created by three student startups that claimed the top prizes at this year’s edition of Rice University’s H. Albert Napier Rice Launch Challenge (NRLC).

The first-place winner, rutd: resources united. technology driven., created a platform to deliver mental health resources to veterans – with more than 14,000 resources available. It includes secure chat and document functions to provide support with significantly reduced response time.

The competition featured eight Rice-affiliated startups pitching their businesses to a panel of judges for a shot at equity-free seed funding. Named after Rice professor and entrepreneurship program founder H. Albert Napier, the NRLC is presented by the university’s Liu Idea Lab for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (Lilie).
 

“With the biggest and most diverse field of competitors in the history of the competition, it shows that at Rice and Lilie, you don’t have to choose between being a student and working on your startup. We empower you to do both,” said Kyle Judah, executive director of Lilie. “These founders took advantage of all our resources and opportunities — which is why they had million-dollar partnerships and tens of thousands of users at competition time.”

More than 400 members of the Rice community and Houston’s entrepreneurial ecosystem watched the virtual championships on April 22 as teams delivered five-minute pitches followed by five minutes of questions from judges. This year’s judges included Rice alumni Claire Shorall ’10 (CEO and co-founder of Topknot), Sunit Patel ’85 (chief financial officer, Ibotta), Monica Pal ’84 (founding partner, How Women Invest), Chris Staffel ’17 (managing director, GOOSE Capital) and Brad Husick ’86 (CEO and founder, IdeaSense).

The top three teams that earned a share of $65,000 are:

• rutd: resources united. technology driven. — first place, $27,500: rutd is an enterprise software and mobile application solution connecting veterans and resources, in a single click, to end veteran suicide.
• Green Room — second place, $20,000: Green Room is building tools to power the local live music industry, starting by simplifying payments and tax compliance.
• A440 — third place, $15,000, and the Norman Dresden Leebron Audience Choice Award winner, $2,500: A440 is bringing the creator economy to classical music, helping a centuries-old art form find new life in the modern era.

All competitors received personalized mentoring with experienced entrepreneurs, investors and subject matter experts from across Houston and Rice’s alumni community. They also received coaching on how to deliver pitches as well as help from  the Lilie team refining their ventures and accelerating their progress.

This year’s NRLC was sponsored by Mercury Fund and T-Minus Solutions, with continuing support from the Napier family and the Liu Family Foundation.

To learn more, visit https://lilie.link/nrlc or Lilie’s website, entrepreneurship.rice.edu.