Haas Faculty

In today’s episode, we chat with award-winning lecturer Holly Schroth who leads classes in Negotiations, Influence, and Communications.

Holly tells us a little about her history and what brought her to Haas nearly three decades ago to teach Negotiations.

She also speaks about what makes a good negotiator, her research on Gen Z negotiations, and leaves listeners with some parting wisdom.

What makes a good negotiation?

“What makes a good negotiation is that both sides walk away satisfied.”

Holly’s definition of negotiation

“My definition is sharing information in order to problem-solve to reach mutually satisfying agreements. I’m not here to talk you into anything, but I’m here to help you think a different way and come to the conclusion yourself that this direction may or may not be best for you.”

How to influence someone in a positive way

“The best way to influence someone positively is to ask good questions to get them to think differently. You have to understand their thinking so that you can work with that and understand if that’s not based on factual information or there’s some other information that could be helpful for the person to understand, and then you can work through it. But if you never find out what someone is thinking or why they hold the position they do, then you really cannot influence the person.”

• Website
• Haas Website
• LinkedIn
• Twitter

Professor Zsolt Katona chats with host Nick Gerwe to share his journey to Haas, research initiatives, and plans for his core Marketing course for this year’s class of EWMBA’s. 

Zsolt is a Professor of Marketing at Haas and strives to introduce and excite each new crop of Weekend MBA students to the world that a Marketing perspective can open. With PhDs in Computer Science and Marketing, Zsolt is a born learner, self-described nerd, and expert in each aspect of Marketing and Business Analytics he dives into. He brings his research and expertise to the classroom to apply Marketing frameworks and analysis to a series of real-world cases, and instill the Marketing intuition necessary for any successful business leader. 

In explaining how he ended up at Haas, Zsolt praised the university’s openness to academic curiosity and “the freedom, the amount of flexibility that Haas offered and being able to do your research the way you want to, and being very independent and in how you operate as a professor. “

In advising incoming students on how to get the most out of his Marketing course, Zsolt explains, “If you are properly prepared for the class, you get so much more out of it than if you don’t read the case” but also recommends they keep their learning goals in context and “that you should not vary about the grades” and instead focus your effort on optimizing their learning, rather than their letter grade.

In this week’s episode, professor Heather Whiteman joins host Ray Guan to talk about all things people analytics (PA). Heather talks about how she became interested in working with data and how she’s spent her career marrying analytics with human capital. We discuss the evolution of data and its effects on PA, including why some data scientists who succeed in the hard sciences fail at PA. Finally, we wrap with why PA is important for all business leaders, and why you should strongly consider adding the PA elective this fall.

On the uses of PA today

“People analytics has become a necessary approach to [measuring] squishy things like knowledge, collaboration, ideas, and goodwill.”

On the danger of not using human judgment in decision-making

“If you build these models, but you don’t think about their consequences…they can have ripple effects and […] affect people’s lives, their livelihoods, their families, opportunities, and outcomes.”

On her PA class

“It is a class that you have to be comfortable being uncertain. People, analytics is not like physics. It’s not like finance. There aren’t right answers. There is data, there is information, and then there’s a lot of understanding context and situation and outcomes.”

• Heather Whiteman contact: Email | LinkedIn | Website
• 5 V’s of Data Science
• Book rec’s: Weapons of Math Destruction | Data Feminism
• People Analytics Class Syllabus (login w/ Haas email)

Professor Gregory La Blanc chats with host, Paulina Lee on his journey to be a lecturer and distinguished teaching fellow at Haas. From attending Montessori school as a boy to studying in multiple subject areas on his way to Haas, Professor La Blanc is a specialist in being a generalist. Hear about his life and teaching philosophies and how MBAs can help change the world. Listen to the end to hear La Blanc’s three mistakes that MBA students most often make! 

On staying curious:

“I think that curiosity is a natural human instinct, which is almost exterminated as you get older…we forget how to learn. And as we get older, we become routinized and so forth. And I think I’ve just been fighting that specialization; fighting that, urge to rinse wash, repeat, for my entire life.”

On MBAs as generalists:

“I like of teaching MBAs. Cause what MBAs want is to be like generalists. They want to be the PhDs of common sense. They want to be the integrators. They want to be the people who have the experts working for them. So that they can translate that expertise into something useful and practical. And I think you have to have curiosity if you’re going to be that type of person.”

Sharing some life philosophy:

“Are you living the way you want to live or are you kind of just living? You know, moment to moment without a plan. Are you making your decisions consciously or are you making them unconsciously? And how do you bring those decisions out into the surface and evaluate them in a responsible way.”

• La Blanc’s podcast: Unsiloed
• Beginners by Tom Vanderbilt
• Sensehacking by Charles Spence
• Gastrophysics by Charles Spence
• Adaptive Space by Michael Arena
• Software Engineering Education Company: Qwasar

What happens when you combine the tools of entrepreneurship with the lens of social change? Today, we speak with Alex Budak, co-founder of StartSomeGood, a crowdsourcing platform for social impact initiatives, which has raised over $10 Million USD to fund more than 1,000 different projects across 50 countries using a grassroots community-driven approach.

Currently teaching at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, his courses are aptly named “Becoming A Changemaker” and “The Berkeley Changemaker”.

In this episode, we delve into Alex’s passion behind empowering changemakers and reinventing leadership—emphasizing qualities such as humility, empathy, and how a changemaker mindset requires changemaker action.

On the idea for founding StartSomeGood:

“For so long I had thought that change comes from one or two big organizations like the Red Cross. I realized that actually, changemakers are everywhere in the world and that all of us can lead positive change from where we are just like this. . . . So often you couldn’t raise money until you can prove your impact, but usually couldn’t prove your impact until you had raised money as this terrible catch-22. So we saw an opportunity to democratize the way that we fund social ventures, believing inherently that no one knows better what a community needs than the community itself.”

On being a changemaker:

“So much of change-making is rooted in critical thinking. It’s the ability to identify problems, but I would argue it’s not just to jump right into solving problems. It’s one of the things that I really try to work with my students on—is to kind of sit in the problem, sit in the discomfort that comes with identifying something and not being sure exactly how to solve it. . . . [T]hat allows you to make sure that you’re not just solving a problem, but you’re solving the right problem.”

On network-based leadership:

“The best changemakers will think of themselves through networks, not just as individuals.”

On helping fellow changemakers:

“[We] rolled up our sleeves everywhere from helping them come up with the videos that they would shoot to helping them write their copy. . . . Now, we had a secret weapon, which is that all of the people we worked with were incredibly passionate. They’re change-makers. They wanted to make a difference and that story was latent in them. And so in many ways, our job was just to help pull that story, pull that narrative out of them. . . . Any changemaker who wants to lead that type of positive change—they’re driven. They have a powerful why.”

• LinkedIn
• StartSomeGood

In this episode, we chat with Henry Chesbrough, who coined the term “open innovation.” He is the educational director of the Garwood Center for Corporate Innovation at Berkeley Haas. He earned his BA in economics from Yale University, an MBA from Stanford, and a Ph.D. in business ministry from Berkeley Haas. His research focuses on technology management and innovation strategy. 

Henry talks a little bit about his background from Michigan to Yale, then Harvard to Haas. 

He then explains the term “open innovation,” a distributed innovation process that involves flows of knowledge into and out of organizations. He shares the three cycles that can lead open innovation to closed innovation and its risks and limitations.

“Open innovation is an entry point into the domain of corporate innovation. The idea is that not all smart people work for you. In fact, most smart people work somewhere else. No matter how big you are, no matter how good you are, you can’t do it all alone. It’s better to be open, to collaborate, to share. It can involve bringing in knowledge from the outside for your innovation activities, the outside in, or allowing things you’re not using to go outside for others to use in their innovation. And that would be the inside out.”

“Corporate venture capital can be a very effective tool to innovate. You’ve got to still have a culture inside your own organization because once you find and acquire these things to bring them in, you got to keep the people, and you got to get them to do the new things that extend beyond what they’ve done before. And without that, you get the form but not the substance.”

“Open innovation can be a mechanism to allow you to be more agile, to move more quickly. And you don’t have to do it all yourself, or rather, you seek out collaborations with startups, universities, and other sources. As long as you can move relatively fast, you could get an edge in the marketplace.”

• Faculty Profile
• LinkedIn
• Garwood Center for Corporate Innovation
• Open Innovation Results: Going Beyond the Hype and Getting Down to Business

On this episode of the Here@Haas podcast, Dr. Andreea Gorbatai joins Ray to discuss her time at Haas and research in the field of organizational management. We talk about a few experiments that Andreea had participated in, including how Wikipedia found realized which pages were most viewed, and why women raise more money than men in crowdfunding. Finally, Andreea tells us how organizational management has evolved in conjunction with big data, and why it’s already a science versus just a set of soft skills.

On the gender bias in venture capital

“Men and women entrepreneurs are asked different questions and namely, women tend to be asked questions regarding prevention. Like have you thought of what happens if things go bad? Which places the whole response and the discussion in a preemptive, negative, more fearful sphere.”

On the evolution of soft skills

“Soft skills have this reputation of being unscientific or being the leftovers after you do the scienc-y stuff. But the truth is that if you don’t understand how, confirmation bias, for example, factors in how you make estimates, how you estimate numbers in your predictions, it does affect your hard skills.”

On what is needed to successfully manage teams amidst the COVID crisis

“The perfect confluence of having the scientific understanding of what’s going on, and then having the soft skills to be able to show consistency, empathy, in terms of how you communicate as a leader.”

• Andreea Gorbatai (Haas profile)
• Research & papers published
• Don Moore episode

On this week’s episode host, Paulina Lee is joined by Professor Ross Levine. Ross shares how he became an economist, working inside at the World Bank, & his journey to Haas. 

He discusses some of his research (full list available):

• 16:17 – The link between corporate social responsibility and a firm’s resilience during the COVID economic shock
• 25:29 – Changes in banking regulation and its impact on firms and racial discrimination
• 31:47 – If there’s a shock to the competitive environment facing a firm, do they increase or decrease corporate social responsibility?

And shares his passion for his students

“Because the class was so into everything, it made it easy and exciting for me to try to be the best version of it with myself and to give as much as I could to the class.”

• Biography of Winston Churchill
• Biography of Napoleon
• Original Meanings by Jack Rakove

Dr. Rebecca Portnoy joins us today to discuss some of her research in the field of organizational behavior. We touch upon topics such as procedural vs. distributive justice, the toxic tandem, and why Americans are continually disengaged at work. Rebecca then offers perspective on her Haas experience and how it’s been a two-way street of learning & enrichment between herself & the students. Throughout the podcast, we also learn about how food has constantly played a role in Rebecca’s life and career.

On organizational decision-making

“If a process is fair (procedural justice), then people are more willing and likely to be OK with an unfair outcome (distributive justice)”

On the toxic tandem

“When we’re living in that world of pleasing my supervisor or helping my unit reach the organization’s goals, it’s so easy to forget about helping others to get that experience, that sense of control.”

Her perception of students at Haas

“There’s this synergy that happens because of the community of students – they have let their guard down and they’re just willing to be so generous with each other, that I benefit as well.”

• Makanai
• Adam Grant
• Art of Pie (book)
• Office Space (film)
• Boys State (film)

On this episode of Here@Haas, Ray talks with Shachar Kariv, Tel Aviv-native and former Department Chair of Economics at UC Berkeley. We delve into Shachar’s research on social preferences, including the 3 fundamental tradeoffs of decision-making and why Yale law students have such a disproportionate impact on society. Shachar then talks about how his virtual teaching experience and his expectations for the fall. Finally, we wrap with Shachar’s contributions towards X-Lab, a Berkeley social science laboratory, and Capital Enterprises, his own financial services startup.

I would actually argue that all decisions in life large and small, financial or not financial, are basically governed by three trade-offs: “Risk vs. return, today vs. tomorrow, self vs. others”

“There is more heterogeneity in altruism within socio-demographics than across socio-demographics.”

“We live in a democracy but eventually a lot of the decisions are made by elite groups.”

“Kale is just completely overrated. Basically, I’d rather eat grass than kale.”

• Shachar Kariv (faculty profile)
• XLAB
• Capital Preferences
• The Undoing Project