Jones Journal - Fall 2014

FA LL 2014

beyond the myths of creativity in the workplace PAGE 10

PAGE 16

PAGE 22

PAGE 28

Meetings of the Bored

Breaking Through

Faculty Perspectives

How does our intimacy with technology change us?

A new legacy of female tech CEOs at the Jones School

From M&A's to implementing successful strategic change

R I C E U N I V E R S I T Y, J O N E S G R A D U A T E S C H O O L o f B U S I N E S S

From the Dean Another academic year is underway with new students excited by learning business at Rice and alumni demonstrating principled innovative thought leadership in global communities. Central to this thought leadership is our faculty’s commitment to evidence-based management that challenges and dispels myths about how markets and firms operate. Innovative managerial practices supported by solid empirical evidence produce more effective outcomes. This issue of the Jones Journal highlights faculty research contributions that change business practice — from employee creativity in the workplace to engaging front line managers in strategic change.

Evidence-based management connects research insights to students and their paths to improved management and leadership. This approach differentiates a Rice business education and is a focus of the following article I wrote for Smart Business to educate a broader audience about the value of research-based business education.

Bill Glick, Dean and H. Joe Nelson III Professor of Management

Why MBA candidates gain more from professors engaged in research Professionals and executives pursue business education to create value for themselves, their employer and their community. Graduates make more money and report greater progress in achieving their professional goals, both during their studies and within a short time after completion. The reasons seem clear.

Business education, particularly master’s degrees in business administration programs, provides students with handson applied knowledge and skills in areas such as strategy and entrepreneurship, finance and organizational behavior.

And this acquired knowledge has a positive impact on an organization’s bottom line, making an MBA a highly valued team member.

But at top-tier business schools, MBAs are not only taught by faculty who practice within their field but also by renowned researchers who publish their findings in peer-reviewed academic journals. And this emphasis on scholarly output also positively impacts the MBA. Publishing research in academic journals increases a professor’s capability to deliver classroom content and enhances critical thinking skills for students.

It also enhances the reputation of the school, which translates into wealth creation for graduates. And of course, the research itself influences the manner in which business is conducted, which creates value for both the MBA and business.

The impact on an MBA's education Like a laboratory scientist, a business professor develops an interest in how or why a phenomenon or standard business practice occurs and begins to develop a theory or working hypothesis

before beginning investigation, analyzing data and writing an academic paper illustrating the results.

In business schools, MBA candidates benefit from being taught by professors with a deep knowledge of fundamental business and the professors’ curious mindset and research process.

The scholarly work makes for a more rigorous curriculum and impacts students’ own critical thinking skills. Enhanced critical thinking and evidence-based management become tools in the MBA’s toolbox that aid in becoming a more effective, efficient and valuable leader.

The impact on business practices Concepts born of business research and inquiry also have a direct impact on how businesses operate.

The process is similar to that of medical researchers who study the effect and efficacy of treatment options in clinical trials or how a patient’s mindset affects adoption of a treatment option.

The results of these findings can either challenge or confirm conventional wisdom and influence the decisions practitioners make and how they do their jobs.

The same is true in business. Whether the impact comes from advances in areas such as options pricing, CEO succession planning, change management, optimal pricing or IPO valuations, business research positively impacts practice and outcome.

Academic research cannot be ignored In a paper published in the Journal of Marketing, Debanjan Mitra and Peter N. Golder discovered that “a persistent increase” in published research by academics has a positive impact on a school’s reputation, the quality of the school’s applicants and graduates’ average annual starting salary.

In an increasingly complex and competitive global marketplace, pursuing an MBA at a school that emphasizes its professors’ academic research simply makes business sense.

This article is printed with permission from Smart Business.

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The Starter Dean + H. Joe Nelson III Professor of Management Bill Glick Editor Weezie Mackey Senior Writer M. Yvonne Taylor Creative Director Kevin Palmer Graphic Designer Shatha Hussein Junior Front End Web Designer Wil Dorsey Marketing Coordinator Dolores Thacker Contributing Writers Susan Chadwick Mark Rudkin '08 M. Yvonne Taylor Weezie Mackey Contributing Photographers Troy Fields Jeff Fitlow Printing Chas. P. Young Co.

the global impact of the north american revival Thursday November 13, 2014 Jones Graduate School of Business, McNair Hall Rice University

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The Starter

In this Issue 7

4 The Rundown 28 Faculty Perspectives 30 Resources

Features 10

Beyond the Myths of Creativity in the Workplace Jing Zhou’s research helps firms capture the value of employee creativity to bring about organizational success.

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16

Meetings of the Bored How does our intimacy with technology change us?

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Breaking Through A new legacy of female tech CEOs at the Jones School.

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The Rundown

A round-up of the most exciting news from the Jones School and beyond.

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The Jones School's own A-76 Technologies earned second place in the Rice Business Plan Competition.

Photo courtesty of Rice Alliance.

Rice Alliance named No. 1 university business incubator in the world Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship was named No. 1 among the top university business incubators for the second year in a row by UBI Index, a Swedish research initiative. More than 300 universityaffiliated business incubators in 67 countries were compared in three performance categories: the value to the “ecosystem,� the value to the client (startups) and the attractiveness of the incubation program. In total, more than 60 key performance indexes have been used to compare the incubation programs worldwide.

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"The Rice Alliance is proud to support the educational mission of the university in teaching entrepreneurship while providing mentoring and an entrepreneurial ecosystem for aspiring entrepreneurs throughout the university, throughout Houston and throughout the Texas region to create startups and jobs, and to help build a robust economy," said Brad Burke, managing director of the Rice Alliance. ubiindex.com.

The Rundown

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2 Distinguished Visiting Scholar Professor of Finance Alex Butler was invited to visit the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for a week as a Distinguished Visiting Scholar.

As part of the new program, he presented a research paper, Credit Be Dammed: The Impact of Banking Deregulation on Economic Growth, co-authored with Jones School Ph.D. students Elizabeth Anne Berger, Edwin Hu and Morad Zekhnini. Professor Butler gave a Ph.D.-level lecture to commission economists and staff. During his time, he met individually with about a dozen of the Division of Economic and Risk Analysis (DERA) economists to discuss research and the policy work they do.

Alex Butler teaching a class outside in Woodson Courtyard at McNair Hall.

Recognizing the Best: Jones School Faculty Awards TEACHING AWARDS BRIAN ROUNTREE, Associate Professor of Accounting: Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Business Alumni Award for Excellence in Teaching

3 Zeff earns further distinction Stephen Zeff, Keith Anderson Professor in Business, has been named a corresponding academic of the Royal Academy of Doctors (Real Academia de Doctores de Espa単a) in Spain, the highest distinction bestowed upon foreign members. The Royal Academy of Doctors is a prestigious interdisciplinary organization with 100 years of history.

ROBERT A. WESTBROOK, William Alexander Kirkland Professor of Marketing: MBA for Executives Award for Teaching Excellence JAMES P. WESTON, Professor of Finance: Full-Time MBA Award for Teaching Excellence PRASHANT KALE, Associate Professor of Strategic Management: MBA for Professionals Evening Award for Teaching Excellence BRIAN ROUNTREE, Associate Professor of Accounting: MBA for Professionals Weekend Award for Teaching Excellence

RESEARCH AWARDS KERRY BACK, J. Howard Creekmore Professor of Economics: Research award (for tenured faculty) ERIK DANE, Associate Professor of Management: Research award (for untenured faculty)

PROMOTIONS ERIK DANE: Associate Professor of Management HAIYANG LI: Professor of Management FALL 2014 JONES JOURNAL // 5

The Rundown

Jones School faculty honored across multiple disciplines 5

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Citation of excellence

Selected as one of 40 under 40

Honored by Energy Risk

Yael Hochberg, Ralph S. O'Connor Associate Professor in Entrepreneurship and academic director of Rice Alliance, was chosen as a 2014 Citations of Excellence winner by Emerald Group Publishing.

The award recognized her paper, “Whom you know matters: venture capital networks and investment performance,” which was published and honored in 2011. This year the publishing group commemorated some of the best and most highlycited Citations of Excellence winners. All of the 750 winning papers from the last 15 years were considered, and, of those, Hochberg’s was chosen as one of 35 papers to receive this distinction.

Assistant Professor of Management Hajo Adam was selected by Poets & Quants as one of the world’s 40 best business school professors under the age of 40. His research investigates three streams: the effects of cultural artifacts, such as clothing, on task performance; the effects of cultural backgrounds on decision-making, in particular, the social influence of emotions in negotiations; and the effects of multicultural experiences on creativity and identity.

Adam’s research retains a broad interdisciplinary focus, resulting in collaborations with scholars in organizational behavior, marketing, and social psychology.

To mark 20 years since its launch in 1994, Energy Risk — the premier magazine and website dedicated to risk management and trading in the global commodity markets — honored 20 individuals who have made a tangible contribution to the development of commodity trading and risk management.

Vince Kaminski, professor in the practice of energy management, made the list as one of the winners of their Lifetime Achievement Award, joining an exclusive club of current and retired industry veterans who have helped shape the evolution of the global commodity and energy markets.

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The Rundown

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New museum chooses EMBA alum as chair

Gray Stream ’13, EMBA alumnus and president of M. Stream Management, has taken on the role of chairman for a $70 million National Hurricane Museum and Science Center. The project was conceived to tell the story of hurricanes and Louisiana’s endangered wetlands but has evolved into much more. With encouragement from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Science Foundation, the board now envisions partnering with national education leaders to create lessons and studies with emphases on STEM education. Learn more at nhmsc.com

Rendering of the National Hurricane Museum and Science Center. Photo courtesy of NHMSC

9 New face in alumni relations Alaina Schuster joined the Jones School’s External Relations team as associate director, alumni relations and annual giving. She has a background in nonprofit development and communications and has held various leadership roles and raised significant funds for organizations with education, health care and arts-based missions. Prior to joining the Jones School, Alaina worked for University of Houston, where she was director of development for the architecture school; then director of the university’s Development Communication and Marketing team. She holds a degree in corporate communications and public affairs, with a concentration in nonprofit management and Spanish, from Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

A Houston native, Alaina serves on the board of Art League Houston.

Joining the effort to boost women’s careers

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The Jones School was added to an elite group of business school sponsors of the Forté Foundation, a national nonprofit consortium designed to help women launch meaningful careers. The foundation was called to action in 2001 by a landmark research study, “Women and the MBA: Gateway to Opportunity,” which looked at why women are underrepresented in leading business schools compared with medical or law schools; the foundation was created to address this inequity and its impact on the business landscape.

“The Rice MBA program is privileged to partner with other top business schools, corporations and nonprofit organizations to support Forté,” said Melissa Blakeslee, interim assistant dean of degree programs and executive director of admissions at the Jones School. “We look forward to actively engaging with women from around the world to further Forte’s important mission and to recruit top talent to the Jones School.”

Sponsor schools are selected on their ability to expand Forté’s reach and impact with key segments of pre-MBA women, provide connections to prospective sponsor companies and enhance the foundation’s ability to reach and impact undergraduate women.

Forté now has 48 member schools in the U.S., Canada and Europe. fortefoundation.org

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The Rundown

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Welcome to the family!

A warm welcome to new faculty joining the Jones School as of July.

ERIC FLOYD Assistant Professor of Accounting Ph.D. University of Chicago, Booth School of Business Research: Understanding the economic causes and consequences of regulation, with an emphasis on financial market and transparency regulation.

PATRICIA NARANJO Assistant Professor of Accounting Ph.D. MIT, Sloan School of Management Research: Investigating the effect of disclosure on capital markets behavior and the economic effects of financial reporting regulation around the world.

BEN LANSFORD Director of the Master of Accounting Program Professor in the Practice of Accounting Ph.D. Penn State, Smeal College of Business

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New associate dean joins the Jones School from Booth The Jones School is pleased to announce that George Andrews has been named the new associate dean of degree programs, leading each of the MBA programs, the CMC and Admissions. He will join the dean's suite October 13.

George served seven years at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business where he was associate dean for evening MBA and weekend MBA programs. At Booth, he led a series of innovative programmatic student recruitment and development initiatives, increasing yield in the evening and weekend programs from 79 to 90 percent.

Prior to Booth, George was executive director of the executive development programs at William E. Simon School of Business at the University of Rochester. He started his career at Procter & Gamble as a section manager and spent the next 16 years in increasingly senior roles at Wyeth Pharmaceuticals and then Bausch & Lomb. George earned his MBA from the William E. Simon School of Business and his Bachelor of Science from Texas A&M.

The Rundown

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Jones School recognizes new scholars

Because competition for top-quality MBA students has increased, scholar programs help the Jones School attract and support these highly qualified candidates. Three new scholarships have debuted this year, and another, in its second year, has grown in stature.

The Crownover Scholars Program, named in honor of former Board of Trustees Chair and current Council of Overseers member, James Crownover ’65, announced its first recipient this year. Jasmine Richards, a Teach For America teacher in HISD since 2010, earned her B.A. in psychological and brain sciences from Dartmouth College. She was selected on the basis of strong academic credentials and traits that Crownover demonstrated at Rice and throughout his career, including aspirational leadership, dedicated community service and personal qualities such as respect for others and humility.

The Jones Partners’ Leadership Scholarship, which recognizes leadership characteristics in full-time Rice MBA candidates, results from the generosity of the Jones Partners — businesses and individuals dedicated to improving connections between the Jones School and the Houston business community. The recipient will participate as a non-voting member of the Jones Partners Board and will be asked, on occasion, to speak publically as an ambassador for

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the Jones Partners. Jessica Sellers, a former field engineer with Schlumberger, is the inaugural recipient. She graduated from Stanford with a B.S. in chemical engineering.

The McNair Scholar Program, established to recognize individuals with academic excellence and inspired leadership as exemplified by Janice and Robert McNair, has named Justin Mintzer as the first McNair Scholar.

The former Sammy the Owl mascot graduated from Rice University with a B.S. in computer and electrical engineering and a Master of Electrical Engineering in computer and electrical engineering.

As part of a greater initiative to recruit and support highly sought-after military veterans, the Jones School launched the Military Scholars Program last year. This year’s recipient is Steven Panagiotou, a Special Forces intelligence sergeant in the U.S. Army who was deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq. He earned a B.S. in business administration from the University of New Hampshire.

Students, faculty and staff explore their mindsets through common reading As part of this year’s common reading selection at the Jones School, entering full-time, professional and executive students joined staff and faculty in the pages of Mindset, The New Psychology of Success, by Stanford professor Carol S. Dweck. The result of research on achievement and success, Dweck’s book details the outcomes of fixed and growth mindsets, and how we can learn to fulfill our potential in all facets of our lives — parenting, business, school and relationships.

The intention of the common reading program is to reflect on the primary foundations of business — economics and psychology — through sharing a book. Brent Smith, senior associate dean of executive education and the only Ph.D. in psychology at the Jones School, led breakout sessions to discuss Mindset as it relates to students and staff. “This book and its principles heavily influenced my leadership classes, both in the MBA program and executive education,” he said.

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BEYOND THE MYTHS OF

IN THE WORKPLACE

Jing Zhou’s research helps firms capture the value of employee creativity to bring about organizational success

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FAC U LT Y RESEARCH SHAPING BUSINESS W I S D O M

WHY IS THE

STUDY OF WORK SO FASCINATING?

Maybe because we think about it, talk about it, bring it home with us and, in extreme cases, marry it. Or maybe it’s that work is our livelihood, our identity, our passion. Where we work, what we do, how we do it and how we like it is not only a constant topic of conversation but a dynamic field of academic research in business schools around the world.

Organizational behavior faculty at the Jones School have advanced theory and published research on several critical topics and, through innovative exercises, cases and assignments, have demonstrated the applications and importance of organizational behavior (OB) in today's dynamic business world. By observing, measuring and dissecting the workplace, OB academics tell the story of this thing we call work — what it means for the organization and the people who work there, and ultimately what value it provides to the practice of management.

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provide it in such a way that is informational. Saying ‘you’re great’ doesn’t help. Providing information was the key thing.”

Discovering creativity in the workplace

C R E AT I V I T Y [kree-ay-tiv-i-tee] N O U N The generation of an idea that is new and useful

( I N O R G A N I Z AT I O N S ) :

Defining creativity

When Jing Zhou entered the Ph.D. program in OB at the University of Illinois, she hoped to identify an emerging and important field of study. “I wanted to make a contribution,” she explains. “When I realized there was a topic called creativity, I thought, wow, this is something I want to learn about. I was personally intrigued.” Back then, in the mid ’90s, her advisor was one of the early researchers of creativity in the field of management, and the timing was perfect for Zhou. “He was starting, the field was starting, and I was starting.” It was the emergent topic for which she had been searching.

In an organizational setting, creativity is the generation of an idea that is new and useful. The creative idea may be concerned with new business models, new products and services, new managerial practices, new ways of improving internal processes, and new ways of delighting customers.

For Zhou, the Houston Endowment Professor of Management, it was employee creativity that caught her attention.

“Employee creativity has been my consistent interest since my dissertation — I’ve had a systematic program of research.

To me, employee creativity was a puzzle. People do research for different reasons. When I started, the reason was simple.

I was interested. I wanted to know the answers.”

From the very beginning, Zhou felt she was on to something.

“My dissertation on creativity was the first of that kind of research. Usually when you do something really new, you do a lab experiment to establish the cause and effect because in the lab you can create a condition and see whether that condition can enhance or inhibit creativity. So that’s what I did.”

Her dissertation explored the effect of positive or negative external feedback on creativity. “The results showed that managers not only need to give positive feedback, they need to

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Thanks to psychologist Teresa Amabile, evaluating creativity in the field of organizational behavior got an upgrade in 1979. “Before that time,” Zhou said, “People were thinking creativity was something magical happening in our mind, making it hard to measure. Amabile said, ‘Let’s forget about what’s happening in a person’s mind.’” Amabile proposed a reliable way to measure creativity: a panel of judges. “As long as people who are familiar with this domain independently rate an idea as creative and you have several raters, the rates and scores converge in their certain scientific ways,” Zhou added. This method, the Consensus Assessment Technique for evaluating creativity, could be used in behavioral labs from then on. Later, Zhou and coauthors used a reliable measurement instrument in their research into employee creativity in the workplace.

“When I do research, I use the scientific method to find out what we don’t know, and perhaps even challenge the stereotypes about something." That’s socially responsible scholarship. "When I identify a research topic, I need to think about if it’s something people already intuitively know or can I present findings that are counterintuitive?”

During Zhou’s early work, she discovered that even employees who were not creative could become creative. The keys to unlocking their creativity could be found in their environment and in managerial actions. When employees are surrounded by creative co-workers, “I call them creative role models,” says Zhou, and their managers don’t closely monitor them, then they’re given the opportunity to explore and learn from their co-workers. “Even those people can become creative,” she explains. “They’re the ones who benefit the most from this social environment. For me,” she says, “that was a really important finding.”

And it’s a finding that’s important for managers. Managers do not need to go to the labor market to search out the best and brightest to find creative employees,” Zhou explains.

“Organizations may have lots of creative potential on tap. If the environment is right, meaning the right leadership style and the right co-workers surrounding the employee, even for the relatively non-creative employee, their creativity can be nurtured and promoted. So don’t look for creative people externally. Look internally.”

It’s also important to note that though individual differences exist, work environment really matters. Zhou’s research shows that if the work environment does not support creativity, even creative people cannot demonstrate it. Managers must foster environments that support creativity for all of their employees in order to get the creative output they seek.

And why do managers highly value creativity in the first place? In her paper that explores how job dissatisfaction

can lead to creativity, written with colleague Jennifer George, the Mary Gibbs Jones Professor of Management, Zhou explains that employee creativity “is often the starting point for innovation.” Innovation is successfully translating an organization’s creative ideas into something of value, something that can be implemented.

And it’s these two pieces, creativity and innovation in the workplace, which neatly link the majority of Zhou’s research.

A road map for research

After earning her Ph.D. in 1996, Zhou began her career at Mays School of Business at Texas A&M. She joined the Jones School in 2003. “It’s amazing how things have changed since I came,” Zhou says, brimming with enthusiasm. “Being part of a growing business school is huge. Rice, it goes without saying, is a great university, and the Jones School is an exciting place to be professionally.” Being situated in Houston

listening, nurturing and refraining from judging too early.

That’s a key challenge. Until we can address it, I don’t think we can completely channel employee creativity along this total value chain to actually capture the value.”

By teaching executives through executive education or the EMBA, Zhou is reaching an audience of decision makers, which may help address the challenge of changing managers’ mindsets.

Zhou says that EMBA students find two implementable ideas about creativity interesting: “One is that creativity does not happen randomly. I teach methods that help you overcome blocks to creativity. If you master them, you can enhance your ability to think creatively. Two is that employees need to sell or frame their [creative] idea in a way that demonstrates that it fits into the system, rather than disregards it.

“EMBAs find those techniques useful. I also emphasize that usually when the really promising creative ideas first appear,

" If the work environment does not support creativity, even creative people cannot demonstrate it. Managers must foster environments that support creativity for all of their employees in order to get the creative output they seek. " gives her access to the diverse companies that she needs for her fieldwork. “The divergent industries are valuable — traditional and new energy, NASA and the related software outsourcing companies, health care.”

But how does Zhou transfer her creative ideas, her insights and her groundbreaking research into the hands of the leaders of companies who can actually make use of it? “Right now,” said Zhou, “the primary method of disseminating this knowledge is teaching our students.” She teaches an executive MBA (EMBA) elective on creativity and has taught an elective for full-time students on managing creativity.

And the research is garnering notice outside academia as well in popular business magazines such as Huffington Post, Human Resource Executive and Science Daily.

But beyond getting the research into the hands of management, the starting point may in fact be in changing the mindset of organization leadership. “On one hand, managers say they greatly value creativity,” explains Zhou, “but on the other, they do not see themselves as the person who needs to be

they are still raw and may even sound silly and impossible.

And the students agree that managers, as listeners, need to be more sensitive.” Helping these students, who are managers and leaders of companies and organizations recognize the value in listening with sensitivity to their employees’ creative ideas is valuable knowledge Zhou’s research provides them that most leadership training does not address.

Capturing the value

According to Zhou, there are two types of research. “One is looking back. I’m going to find out what organizations have done really well, and I’m going to figure out what theoretical framework can capture that. And then I’m going to chart all exceptional companies. But you’re looking back to find out this manager has done that. It’s descriptive research.

“Creativity research in many ways is prescriptive. A lot of companies have not done this well, but through scientific method we found out if you exhibit this kind of leadership behavior or have that kind of co-worker or create this kind of team, then people’s creativity can be enhanced. This is

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Professor Jing Zhou's approach to evaluating work environments and harnessing creativity

Initial interviews, get to know work flow, understand its relevance.

Measure the work environment. Assess leadership and team configuration. What is needed for the purpose of enhancing creativity?

forward looking. We’re telling managers, if you do it this way, you will be great. This is prescriptive.”

Finding companies she can help does not have as systematic an approach as the research, however. “Sometimes they find me. Sometimes I go find them,” Zhou said. “We need to say, as a school, that we have this knowledge, let’s create a condition where we’ll both win. It’s the socially responsible thing to do.”

When Zhou locates such a company, conducting the research consumes several months, maybe more. Her process is as follows: “Let’s say you agree to do it, you’re the manager.

We first conduct interviews, followed by quantitative methods. We do some initial interviews to get to know the work flow, and what you do to understand its relevance.

We measure the work environment. And then we figure out leadership, team configuration, what do they need for the purpose of enhancing creativity? Those are the initial steps, and then we measure attitudes, behavior, employees’ perception about their leader’s style. Towards the end we also ask managers to evaluate employee creativity. We look at creativity as an outcome, not as your potential but as a behavior measure.”

The methods she uses are always rigorous. “This is like medicine,” Zhou explained. “If I say it will benefit you, the medicine will have gone through the whole FDA process to make sure your conclusion is valid. I’m very confident about the rigorous method used. If we say this creativity will lead to someone’s psychological process and will change her behavior, the method will guarantee it unfolds that way sequentially. We’re confident of the results.”

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Measure attitudes, behavior and employees’ perception about their leader’s style.

Ask managers to evaluate employee creativity. Look at creativity as an outcome, not as potential but as a behavior measure.

Divergent thinking

It doesn’t stop there. Along with her role as associate editor of the Journal of Applied Psychology, Zhou has several research streams in the works. And that’s just the way she likes it: many counterintuitive irons in the fire. One follows uncertainty avoidance. “I wanted to find out if there is any way to make people who want to avoid uncertainty more creative?” The answer from the research results is yes, but as with much of her workplace research, it has to be within the right circumstances.

“We found that employees who were high in uncertainty avoidance actually demonstrated more creativity when their managers were empowering and trustworthy. When you think about it, it makes sense. In an organization, the definition of creativity is both new and useful. It’s not just being unique or bizarre. If a manager empowers me, and I’m high in uncertainty avoidance I probably can use my desire to avoid uncertainty to truly come up with ideas that are useful that can work together with existing systems and know where the true constraints are and what has to stay where it is.”

A second line of research falls under satisfaction. “I need to have happy workers, but sometimes people are unhappy: my workload is too high, I’m frustrated, I’m not making progress, I don’t believe the current system is effective but I can’t do anything about it. We have this culture where we always want to see a happy face, so people fake it.” But her research challenges the notion that only happy employees are valuable. “The people who raise questions and express dissatisfaction may have the potential to be valuable, if they can help the organization identify an existing problem and find a way to fix it.

“The employees who may be saying things managers don’t want to hear may actually truly care about the organization.

And these workers, especially if they are frontline employees, may be the best source to identify problems.”

A third stream of research is creativity in teams. “There is a long-held notion that diversity — however you define it: age, gender, race, creative, non-creative — within a group is valuable. But if you look at empirical results, it’s very mixed.

We did this research to find out if a team’s diversity equals creativity. Diverse teams may have conflict or the people who have ideas that are unusual may not get heard. They may be dysfunctional. We found diversity does not automatically lead to creativity. You need to have transformational leaders to pull the team together and truly leverage the diversity in your team.”

Her latest line of research is the link between employee creativity and firm performance. Employee creativity and the process of capturing it is a crucial micro foundation for organizational success. “We look at financial performance. A long-held assumption is that when you have creative employees the firm will perform better.

We demonstrate through our research that you really need to have a process of capturing creative ideas in a proactive way to translate into firm performance and your balance sheet.” This research stream diverges from Zhou’s customary approach. “Usually my outcome is creativity,” she explains, “except with this research creativity becomes the antecedent and firm performance becomes the consequence.”

Finally, extending the success of her first book, Handbook of Organizational Creativity, which is an impactful value in the field of workplace creativity, Zhou recently finished editing a second book with two co-authors called the Oxford Handbook of Creativity, Innovation and Entrepreneurship. The book will come out next year and has the potential again to “shape the field in a new way.” The kind of contribution she has wanted to make since entering graduate school.

“Doing creativity research really makes you a better person,” she concludes enthusiastically. “It makes you more creative. It helps you spread positive energy. It makes you confident that there’s always a way to overcome challenges.” For example, Zhou says, “One of the creativity techniques is, when you see a problem don’t just take it as is. Try to redefine the problem: the problem re-definition method. Oftentimes, when you enlarge the problem space if gives you more possibility to solve it.”

“Try it,” she encourages, while sitting in her office, which is stacked with files, papers, journals, books and boxes.

“Have you read the latest research on people with messy desks?” she asks. “It turns out that they are more creative!”

As one of the foremost experts in creativity research, she should know.

Jing Zhou's forthcoming research streams at a glance UNCERTAINTY AVOIDANCE Research challenge: to find out if employees who want to avoid uncertainty can be encouraged to be more creative.

Outcome: employees who were high in uncertainty avoidance actually demonstrated more creativity when their managers were empowering and trustworthy. The employee made use of the desire to avoid uncertainty to come up with new and useful ideas within existing systems while recognizing constraints.

SATISFACTION Research challenge: employees who raise questions and express dissatisfaction may have the potential to be valuable, if they can help the organization identify an existing problem and find a way to fix it.

Outcome: the employees who may be saying things managers don’t want to hear may actually truly care about the organization and be the best source to identify problems.

CREATIVITY IN TEAMS Research challenge: does a team’s diversity, however you define it — age, gender, race, creative, non-creative — equal creativity?

Outcome: Diversity does not automatically lead to creativity. Transformational leaders are still needed to pull a team together and truly leverage its diversity.

EMPLOYEE CREATIVITY AND FIRM PERFORMANCE Research challenge: if an organization has creative employees will the firm perform better?

Outcome: an organization needs to have a process of capturing creative ideas in a proactive way to translate into firm performance and the balance sheet.

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MEETINGS OF THE BORED TO N Y G O R RY & BO B W EST B RO O K

In every age, leaders of businesses have encountered obstacles on their paths to success. Often changing circumstances have thwarted previously prepared plans. Then, the work of the mind took precedence over that of the hand. New ways were needed to prosper in changing competitive environments.

Sometimes a single, grand conception restored a company to prosperity; other times, it was a number of lesser ideas knitted together fortuitously. Hope for such innovations rested largely on the creativity of executives.

So in recent years, businesses have launched comprehensive programs to tap the collective brainpower of their employees. Attention is paid to the insights of the worker on the shop floor, the customer representative, the logistic team, which had for long escaped recording and cataloging. [3] Networks linking workers and processes across different companies undergird many recent increases in productivity, rewarding businesses that know what they know — and know it right away.

A prominently placed "suggestion box" acknowledged that good ideas might come from workers whose job descriptions said nothing about innovation. Indeed, two decades ago, when the concept of intellectual capital first entered the management literature, Stewart took it as the "sum of everything everybody in your company knows that gives you a competitive edge in the market place." [5] In this view, what a company knows emerges not just from its leaders, but as well from the experiences, insights and intuitions of a wide range of employees. Everyone is a potential source of innovation.

That we are attached to information technology is readily apparent to even the most casual observer.

It permeates our lives and shapes much of our experience of the world. Less apparent are ways in which our intimacy with these machines is changing us.

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We might expect, for example, that our growing intimacy with digital machines will swell an electronic suggestion box to foster innovation and promote organizational growth. Perhaps, but we have our doubts.

our colleagues and family members firmly on notice that we won't tolerate boredom to the degree that was once expected of us.

Boredom is a cloud to be banished as quickly as possible. Our mobile devices stand ready to suppress even its most wispy beginnings. In lines, at street crossings and in waiting rooms, wherever there might be a break in life's action, shorter and shorter intervals of time now demand filling. Something may have just happened to someone, somewhere. We check and check again. We flee our own thoughts to entertainments fashioned by others. But a flight from boredom can be a flight from creativity, because it is from boredom that new ideas and connections emerge, in the executive suite and on the shop floor.

Wander the hallways of a large business.

Look for contributors to our imagined suggestion box. Here's a meeting in the executive suite. See heads bowed as though in contemplation. Perhaps they're pondering strategic challenges facing the company. More likely, they're eyeing their personal digital assistants, checking email, the latest news, Facebook or Twitter. Some may think they're concealing their dalliances in the virtual world. Others, avid users themselves, know what's going on. Their attempts to hide their distractions are often half-hearted.

On the floor below, we pass several employees unwrapping sandwiches for a quick lunch. They plan to review progress on a task force report. Again, heads are bowed. Are they saying grace over their food? More likely, like the executives above, they're turning to smart devices for engagement, tuning out colleagues.

Walking on, we ask our host about the company's recent activities. While she gives us an overview, she too checks her smart phone, almost as if she needed a script for her answers.

She seems distracted. Maybe she's already devoted enough time to us and needs to get on to more important matters.

Sherry Turkle says "talking to each other is perceived as exhausting, and we happily retreat into worlds where we communicate only with machines." [6] Maybe we're exhausting her.

At times, everyone has wished for escape from the here and now. Doodling, gazing out the window, empty-headed nodding or long, pregnant pauses: all are ways to check out of dull, uninspiring encounters. Digital technology, however, has greatly expanded the opportunities for flight. Throughout the organization, as in social life generally, its widespread use has altered the rules of civility. Device at the ready, we put

What of our imagined suggestion box? Its value depends on contribution, assessment and dissemination. First, managers and workers need to volunteer insights regarding their jobs and improving the performance of the business.

Next, from those contributions must be selected knowledge and practices that most promise benefits, grand or small.

Finally, the chosen innovations must be shared and improvements must be anchored in the ways of the company.

Failure in any of these steps locks creativity within one part of the organization, unrecognized and unexploited by others.

Too often then, errors will be repeated; opportunities, lost; and innovations, unrealized. Even strategic opportunities may be foregone.

What of those we've just seen in our walk through the company? Their devotion to machines makes them uneasy in life's slower moments. Those who are uncomfortable with boredom may contribute less to the company's intellectual capital. When we tap the suggestion box, we may find its contents have dwindled.

Although boredom has been a concern of philosophers and scientists for ages, its nature and cause remain elusive.

Boredom may arise from an existential perception that life is empty. Psychologists and social scientists have found that commonly and less dramatically, we are bored when we judge an activity unworthy of our attention. Tasks that are too simple allow attention to wander, creating dissatisfaction with the job at hand. For ages, meditative teachings have countered such boredom by avoiding judgment of the worth of activities. For most of us, however, parental advice ran in a different direction: "Find something to do!" But finding too much to do may also induce boredom, because attention is pulled in too many directions. Then we need to step aside, to do less, to reflect.

In the 1800s, Charles Baudelaire confronted a new Paris thrust up in the midst of the old by commercialism. Most startling were the throngs in the streets, the plentitude of the marketplace and the new architecture of the city. How should a thoughtful person manage interactions with such a myriad of people and things? The crowd offered spectacles and enticements, often quite unexpected, as Baudelaire describes in one of his poems. A woman passing by briefly intoxicates FALL 2014 JONES JOURNAL // 17

him, but he cannot know what path either she or he would follow into the future. She was just one of some many brief experiences: accidental, anonymous and transitory to be encountered in the tumult of the new Paris.

Baudelaire felt the onset of a new kind of boredom induced by an acceleration that threatened to make life just a series of fleeting impressions. He said that of the "squalid zoo of vices" that plagued his time, boredom "is even uglier and fouler than the rest." It would gladly swallow all creation in a yawn. [1] In the face of restless activity and frightening anonymity, the wanderer was always on the lookout for novelty of experience or observation that would penetrate the fog of the teeming crowd and restore him to life. But each new event or encounter, which promised so much, proved just as empty as its predecessors.

Much the same could be said of today, although we more often wander electronic byways rather than cobbled streets.

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In the burgeoning crowd of cyberspace, we are dissatisfied with our situation and wish to be elsewhere, doing something different. We could turn away from the distractions of our bustling electronic byways, but such a departure seems to demand more energy than we can muster. Even when we take such a break, we may find we've forgotten how to be comfortable with ourselves. Something deep within urges us to rejoin the crowd.

Today's world of tweets bears vestiges of the long trek our ancient ancestors took to become human. Along the way, emotional sensitivity to others was joined by strong curiosity about them, a desire to know what they were thinking, feeling and scheming. Once we became capable of creative reflection, we no longer had to satisfy this desire in actual social situations; we could find pleasure in imagined activities and interactions. In today's fluid electronic arenas for gossip, preening, and posturing, users "strut their stuff" with

embellished self-descriptions and accumulations of "friends" from far and wide. Scores and stars announce prowess. These designations would mean little, had evolution not made us so drawn to groups, so sensitive to trappings of rank, and so irresistibly drawn to judge and categorize others. Our brains hunger for participation and status, and our smartphones and tablets stand ever at the ready to feed them. We love these devices, because we were born to love them.

In an old vaudeville act, a man set plates spinning atop a row of poles. Back and forth he hustled from one pole to another, giving each just enough spin to keep its plate from falling. As he attended to one plate, others teetered precariously. Too much attention to one meant disaster for others. Not enough meant that this one would fall. Success depended on giving to each pole just enough attention to keep its plate aloft. As he went, an assistant added new poles and plates, demanding even more speed from him. He had to conduct the remainder of his act on the dead run.

Our plates and poles today are digital messages. Work, home, social networks all clamor for our attention. Proud of our ability to sustain the pace of life in the digital age, we race from email to cell phone to computer screen, spending enough time on each task only to keep it spinning. We even add new poles as we race along.

The two of us, who have been around for a while, no longer make good vaudevillians of the plate spinning kind. The pace has become too swift. We need some proverbial peace and quiet.

But what of the many others, who are unnerved when life slows and not much seems to be happening? It isn't crashing plates they fear. It's spending too much time on one thing when something else might be happening.

They take boredom as a signal to move on, to focus attention on something else. For many, that feeling arises ever more quickly. Students, who once happily watched a five-minute video in class, now get itchy after a minute or so. News stories are compressed. Executives want complex matters reduced to bullet points for quick consideration. Consumers choose movies, restaurants and books on anonymously awarded stars, because who has the time to read up on these subjects?

It's so boring.

In today's fast-paced life, we could have the time to read, ponder, investigate and slog along. Absent the sirens of digital technology, perhaps we might do so. Reading makes many uncomfortable, when, for example, long sentences with subordinate clauses run on for more than a line or two, describing situations or putting forth arguments, which well may be central to the subject being written about, but as they proceed, seem to test our powers of concentration, which have been tuned by the terse text of instant messaging where compression of language and perhaps of thought hold sway. A vaudevillian living in a world of hyperlinks and bullet points reads the first of the previous sentence and mutters, "Oh, get on with it!" and jumps to an email or text message that might be more "interesting." We want at most the general idea, to learn just enough, just in time.

"Device at the ready, we put our colleagues and family members firmly on notice that we won't tolerate boredom to the degree that was once expected of us.

Boredom is a cloud to be banished as quickly as possible. " FALL 2014 JONES JOURNAL // 19

Walter Benjamin argued that a story claims a greater place in our memories when the teller allows us to embellish it for ourselves. [2] The more we integrate the story into our own experiences, the greater will be our inclination to repeat it.

In the retelling, it may assume new and deeper meanings. This is true not just of stories told by others, but of those we tell ourselves. Tennessee Williams claimed "that life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going? It's really all memory . . . except for each passing moment." [7] Quickly we weave moments of an experience into a story, however brief, which embodies our memory of it. In reminiscence, we return again and again to inspect, edit, and embellish the story. In making plans, we may intertwine a variant of the story with imagined acts in and imagined history of the future. Unless we simply copy someone else's story, we need inspiration to write our own.

But the assimilation of a story requires a state of relaxation, which even before the Internet era was becoming rare.

Benjamin said boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation.

The self-forgetful listener who puts aside the press of life and attends deeply to his memory prepares the nesting area for the dream bird, Benjamin's metaphorical bringer of insight and understanding. In quiet disengagement from the bustle of the world, the dream bird hatches the egg of experience.

Many of us could benefit from this bird's visit, but we need "down time" to welcome it in.

Today, however, our machines are always at our side, to fill that quiet time. We push letters onto a Scrabble board, fight off attacking aliens or draw pictures for another to guess.

Enticements delivered to cell phones demand attention that once would have been devoted to the meeting agenda, the dinner companion, the teacher or even reverie. They rustle the leaves and drive the dream bird away.

Enthusiasm for these simple games underscores our brains' need for engagement and status. Points or promotions, stars or scores assure us of our skill and pats on the back keep us going. If we don't feel competitive, there are other applications that promise tidbits of information as tokens we can collect.

What is the current temperature in Paris, the score of the Yankees' game, the change of a stock price from ten minutes ago? We ask these questions, not because their answers are important, but because they can be answered by our digital devices. They give an immediate purpose, however small, to idle time. Each reward is a note in a siren's song that draws us ever deeper into technology's domain.

Digital distractions will proliferate. Many presently inert objects will become interactive. Perhaps our cereal boxes will challenge us to a simple guessing games at breakfast: win points for the next trip to the market by ranking food combinations by calories. Think of all the places that have 20 // JONES JOURNAL FALL 2014

already been invaded by advertising. To imagine a likely future, think of many of those sites as places for games. Idle moments in which we could reflect on what has happened to us, what we have done, and the interactions we have had with others — those moments will be increasingly filled with imaginative engagements with the virtual. The dream bird will get chased away by a call from a cereal box.

To quarrel with technology is to quarrel with human nature.

Our intimacy with machines will increase. So what of boredom? Inherited urges may incline our behavior, but they need not determine it. If, fearing moments with nothing to do, we turn to machines for constant entertainment and engagement, we will lose time for invention. If we don't pause between tasks to reflect on our lives, we may not know where we are or where we are going.

Instead of fleeing seemingly empty moments, we should welcome them in moderation. Indeed, we should create times of solitude in which we plan to do little. Creativity is the residue of time wasted, Albert Einstein supposedly said.

Instead of fleeing seemingly empty moments, we should welcome them in moderation. Indeed, we should create times of solitude in which we plan to do little. But how do we find time for "doing nothing" in our economy of speed and efficiency? When everyone else is working "leaner," isn't it unwise to indulge in reflection that can't be easily monitored or measured? Our quick answer: don't bet everything on the hare; wager a bit on the tortoise. Put aside the machines we love — at least for a time.

Recently, Matt Richtel reported on a rafting trip taken by five neuroscientists in a remote area of southern Utah. They sought to understand how intense involvement with digital devices changes how we think and behave. Would a retreat into nature reverse any adverse effects? [4] They went off the grid, leaving laptops and cellphones behind. As days passed, the time of the wilderness supplanted that of the digital world. Conversations were interspersed with periods of silence in the presence the wonders of the surroundings. As the river flowed, says Richtel, so did ideas.

"If, fearing moments with nothing to do, we turn to machines for constant entertainment and engagement, we will lose time for invention. If we don't pause between tasks to reflect on our lives, we may not know where we are or where we are going."

One of the travelers noted that, "the real mental freedom in knowing no one or nothing can interrupt you." We suspect Einstein would have concurred.

Benjamin was no scientist, but he would have stood well in that company.

Be quiet and wait. Be bored. The dream bird will come.

Think of the future time as a wilderness, and you as its steward. Of course, you'll allocate significant parcels to industry — to activities appropriate to your work and home life. Some of that space, however, should be reserved, much as the Utah backcountry, where the ways of life are slower and less congested. Preservation requires vigilance and determination.

Once, for example, vacations meant time away, time without the interruptions of everyday life. Traveling in a car or plane offered shorter versions of the same. Now, like developers falling on pristine land, smartphones and wireless networks have colonized that time. They have bought their way in by feeding our brains' voracious appetites for stimulation.

Writing, printing, the cinema, television and other precursors of our inclusive cyberspace substantially changed how we gather and share what we know.

They disrupted long-standing social structures and expectations of personal behavior. While life is not determined by technology, each of the innovations, which now seem a part of the natural world, exacted a price. In dealing with our smart devices, we need to take a stronger negotiating position.

We are paying too much to quell our fear of boredom, too readily yielding our refuges to the rush of the now.

We should protect segments of time, putting smartphones and tablets aside, leaving our desktop computers. Just sitting, walking, gardening, talking with friends: these are but a few ways to enter our own personal wilderness.

When we slow down, we may at first be bored, but soon, we are apt to find much to do. Perhaps the dream bird will come, bringing us a new addition for our organization's suggestion box.

Or perhaps something just for us. Even if it doesn't, we are likely to return to the rush of the digital age with a better sense of who we are — and who we want to be.

Dr. G. Anthony Gorry is the Friedkin Professor of Management and professor of Computer Science at Rice University where he is also the director of the Center for Technology in Teaching and Learning. He is an adjunct professor of neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine and a director of the W. M. Keck Center for Interdisciplinary Bioscience Training, a collaborative program of six institutions in the Greater Houston area. Dr. Robert A. Westbrook is the William Alexander Kirkland Professor of Business in the Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University. He has been a full-time member of the marketing faculty group in the Jones School since 1989 and is presently the group’s area coordinator.

References

1. Baudelaire, Charles. Les Fleurs du Mal. Trans. Richard Howard. Boston: David R. Godine, 1983.

2. Benjamin, Walter.

Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Schocken, 1969.

3. Gorry, G. Anthony, and Robert A. Westbrook.

"Customers, Knowledge Management, and Intellectual Capital." Knowledge Management Research and Practice 13 (2013). 11: 92-97.

4. Richtel, Matt. "Outdoors and Out of Reach, Studying the Brain." 2010. New York Times. 12/2012. <http://www. nytimes.com/2010/08/16/ technology/16brain. html?pagewanted=all>.

5. Stewart, Thomas.

"Brainpower." 1991.

Forbes. 7/1/2104 <http:// archive.fortune.com/ magazines/fortune/fortune_ archive/1991/06/03/75096/ index.htm>.

6. Turkle, Sherry. "The Flight From Conversation." The New York Times April 12, 2012.

7. Williams, Tennessee. The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore. New York City, Dramatists Play Service, Inc., 1998.

FALL 2014 JONES JOURNAL // 21

BREAKING THROUGH A new legacy of female tech CEOs at the Jones School

BY SUSAN CHADWICK

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A

llison Lami Sawyer went to Space Camp as a girl growing up in small-town Huntsville, Alabama, ignoring the social convention that Space Camp was for boys. In college and graduate school her field was applied physics. She came to the Jones School knowing that she wanted to start a physics-based business, and she did.

There was no women's fencing team when Lauren Thompson went to college in Virginia, so she joined the menâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s team, competing at the national level, despite the initial skepticism of her coach. She always knew she wanted to start a business like her engineering father and grandfathers. Like Sawyer, she found the technology for her new chemical company at Rice, where she chose to study business because of "the people."

Emma Fauss always loved solving problems, building things, and working with her hands. She was an artist who loved math. Her father, an engineer who moved into health care, suggested she look into chemical engineering. Now she's running a medical data technology startup with the management team she assembled while doing her MBA at Rice.

FALL 2014 JONES JOURNAL // 23

These three women, all mutually supportive friends and recent graduates of the Rice MBA program, have chosen to follow their dreams into that most rarified and hazardous of territory: the male-dominated realm of technology startups.

And they have started out exceedingly well.

Breaking into the boys' club

"You have to be better than the guys," says Fauss.

"It's a boys' club," says Yael Hochberg, Ralph S. Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Connor Associate Professor in Entrepreneurship and associate professor of finance at the Jones School and academic director of the Rice Alliance. "The world of venture capital is extremely informal, an extremely male domain. Deals are done over drinks.

It's not a natural situation for men and women. It's extremely challenging to be taken seriously as the female founder of a high growth enterprise."

The numbers for women are daunting.

According to a recent Kaufman Foundation report, only three percent of technology startups are headed by women. In 2014 there were seven female CEOs of technology companies out of the forty-two teams that competed in the Rice Business Plan Competition (RBPC), the world's richest and largest student startup competition, awarding between $1.5 and $3 million each year since 2010.

Seven is the same number of female tech CEOs who competed four years ago.

On top of that, "there's very little safety" to starting your own business, says Hochberg. "You're swinging for the fences. It's a very scary thing to go 24 // JONES JOURNAL FALL 2014

and do. It's like jumping off the side of a building and praying there's going to be a big airbag to bounce you up."

Tom Kraft, director of technology ventures development at the Rice Alliance, says with pride, "Everything [these three women] do is tough. Their struggle is significant." But for Kraft, a serial entrepreneur himself, difficult challenges are necessary and character building, and these women are more likely to succeed because of their experiences. "It's an initiation ritual," he says. And without the experience of having to overcome some difficulty, of facing risks, "my sense is that [you're] not going to be a good entrepreneur."

The Rice Alliance is the sponsor of the RBPC competition and also runs lucrative day-long venture forums three times a year, a sort of business "speed-dating," says Kraft, in which hundreds of venture capitalists, marketers and distributors from all over the world come together with students, non-students, and others pitching their business ideas. Founded in 2000, Rice Alliance is a joint venture between the Jones School, the George R. Brown School of Engineering, and the Wiess School of Natural Sciences, in collaboration with the vice provost and the Office of Research.

The advantage of knowing exactly who you are Sawyer '10 interned for Kraft at the Houston Technology Center and helped start his course, Technology Entrepreneurship Management 734, which both Fauss '13 and Thompson '14 took and used to develop their companies in his class, which is usually about thirty percent women. While all three have had challenges over the years, they have high praise for Kraft and describe him as their mentor. Kraft returns the compliment.

"These women know exactly who they are," Kraft says. "They have an extremely clear self-image, an incredible self-image."

And of course, "these three are exceptionally bright. I don't think they'll be stopped now."

Fauss is CEO of Medical Informatics, a pioneering medical software company she co-founded in 2010 with Craig Rusin, inventor of the software platform that gathers, stores and processes real-time physiological data coming from hospital bedside monitoring devices. Fauss' team had the most successful graduate level plan in the history of the RBPC in 2013. The company secured its initial round of financing and is partnering with Texas Children's Hospital, one of the reasons Fauss came to Rice for her MBA from the University of Virginia, where she met Rusin while doing her doctorate in electrical and computer engineering.

"It's like jumping off the side of a building and praying there's going to be a big airbag to bounce you up."

Sawyer's Houston-based company, Rebellion Photonics, is "creating a new paradigm for safety in oil and gas," says Sawyer. Named the Wall Street Journal startup of the year in 2013 and second-place winner at the RBPC in 2010, among many other recognitions, the company markets a cuttingedge camera for real-time hyperspectral imaging of gas leaks in refineries and on rigs. Rebellion Photonics has tripled in size in the past year and in January received $10.4 million in Series A financing. The technology was invented by Sawyer's co-founder, Robert Kester, who has a doctorate in bioengineering from Rice.

FALL 2014 JONES JOURNAL // 25

MEDICAL INFORMATICS

A-76 TECHNOLOGIES

REBELLION PHOTONICS

While completing her Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering at The University of Virginia, Emma Fauss learned about another Ph.D., Craig Rusin, who created a grid-computing platform for his research. She recognized the opportunity to share this technology with every hospital in the world, and Medical Informatics Corp was founded in 2009. After dubbing the platform Sickbay® – a loose Star Trek reference – Fauss knew that in order to commercialize Sickbay she would need to partner with a hospital to complete product development, form an all-star management team and formalize her business background. Coming to Houston helped take care of all three.

A-76 Technologies was started in 2014 by Lauren Thompson and Tim Aramil while they were students at the Jones School. In the Technology Entrepreneurship course, they were on a team tasked with developing a business plan for a series of corrosion inhibitors invented by Dr. James Tour, a renowned Rice chemistry professor with 100+ patents to his name and who was named as R&D Magazine's "Scientist of the Year" in 2013.

Founded in 2009 by Allison Lami Sawyer and Robert Kester, a Ph.D. in bioengineering from Rice, Rebellion Photonics builds cameras that can spot poisonous and explosive gas leaks on oil rigs and at refineries.

The cameras can detect at least 20 different gases simultaneously and in real time. Rebellion Photonic’s camera is the world's only real-time chemical imaging camera for continuous monitoring of rigs and refineries.

The technology can be used for a variety of groundbreaking chemical imaging products in markets such as defense, biological research, food contamination detection, rig/refinery safety, quality control and forensics.

For five years, the Sickbay platform has been collecting continuous streams of high-resolution physiological data from bedside monitors from across the U.S. Over time, Sickbay has expanded to include data from a variety of EMRs, middleware systems, as well as any type of ancillary device such as ventilators, pulse ox monitors, Transcranial Doppler, near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS), and many others.

Medical Informatics is committed to profoundly improving patient care by empowering clinicians with the most robust and comprehensive data, accessible at their fingertips.

Each application is collaboratively developed by clinicians, engineers, and hospital leaders creating a better experience for patients and clinicians at the point-of-care.

26 // JONES JOURNAL FALL 2014

After developing a business and commercialization plan for A-76, and then winning second place at the Rice Business Plan Competition, the company launched into operations with large-scale production well underway, sales and recently signed a term-sheet for Series A. A-76 is a multi-purpose product that acts as a corrosion inhibitor and lubricant and prevents corrosion in aggressive high salinity on a wide range of metal surfaces including noble metals, nickel, copper, aluminum and all grades of oil field steel. It also lasts longer than competing products and works in extreme environments. Initially targeting the energy industry, A-76 can also be used in marine, aerospace, transportation and consumer uses among others.

Recently, A-76 was named a finalist in the Houston Technology Center’s 2014 Goradia Innovation Prize, which recognizes some of Houston’s hottest startups and awards grants to take these companies to the next stage of development.

Named the Wall Street Journal's Startup of the Year, Rebellion Photonics’ main product is the Gas Cloud Imaging camera for oil and gas safety, which commercializes the unique 'snap-shot' hyperspectral imaging technology (HSI). And HSI has many other applications too.

Rebellion Photonics can offer the scientific community faster, easier and more reliable chemical imaging of liquids, solids and live cell samples. The company also sees great possibilities for snapshot HSI in the areas of defense and surveillance, pathology, consumer goods, forensics, public safety and emissions detection. Snapshot HSI will have the potential to revolutionize these markets and provide them with significantly improved solutions over current technologies.

"After a few years, you develop dragon's skin." having fun driving a tractor, and she thinks the experience has made her better able to communicate, even though potential clients are frequently surprised to see her. Having her brother in the oil and gas business and her father, who has started, grown and sold his own company, as advisors is helpful too, she adds.

Ironically, a cutting-edge technology, creating a new paradigm for safety in the slow-to-change oil and gas field is not an easy sell. Being a woman doing the pitching doesn't make it any easier. How does she handle it? "Persistence," she says bluntly. "'No' just means come back later. When you know you're right, it's easier. And this product is right. After a few years, you develop dragon's skin."

Still, "the social price you pay is very high. But you have to decide whether you are going to be a success. If you don't decide to get over it, it just haunts you."

Thompson is CEO of the newest company, A-76 Technologies, co-founded with Tim Aramil '14 and incorporated only this year. The product is a clean-technology lubricant and corrosion-inhibitor developed by Dr. James Tour, Rice professor of chemistry, nanoengineering and materials and computer sciences.

Like Sawyer and Fauss, Thompson's company scored big money at the RBPC, coming in second in 2014, and travelled to top competitions around the world gathering awards, funds and media attention. The company has signed a term sheet for $2.5 million in Series A financing.

In addition to stringent third-party testing, Thompson tested A-76 herself on some rebar in her garage, and she is confident it's the best product on the market. "We out-perform everything," she says happily.

Though it's useful in agriculture, aerospace, transportation, defense, marine and the oil and gas industries, Thompson is focusing her initial marketing on oil and gas, which means traipsing out to the rigs in the field and talking to "the guy on the ground who is going to be the one to use it."

But she's always hung out with boys, says Thompson, both in school when she was fencing and out at her family ranch

All three women speak of the support they've received from each other, from businesswomen like Houston-based jeweler Emily Armenta â&#x20AC;&#x2122;03 and from professional women's networks like Lean-In Houston. They mentor students for the RBPC. "Just hearing that others go through the same things you go through" is helpful, says Fauss.

In addition to pre-RBPC mentoring from Fauss and her colleagues, most of their own mentoring has come from men, explains Thompson, who reports "really positive experiences" with many of her professors at the Jones School.

"We have received a lot of support from men because what weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re doing is such a male-dominated space, and there just werenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t women mentors around," says Thompson, pointing out that finance, venture capital, technology, science, engineering, the chemical manufacturing and oil and gas industries, business in general, and business school itself, are all male-dominated fields.

The Rice MBA class of 2016 is 32 percent female, and the Jones School is working to increase the number of female students, though the competition for women among business schools is tough.

"I think Rice and the Jones School present very attractive opportunities for women entrepreneurs," Fauss says. In particular, the Jones School offers scholarships to women, and without that kind of financial assistance throughout her educational career, the burden of hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt would have been too great to make that leap off the building and start her own business.

"I would like to see more women entrepreneurs," says Fauss.

"My life has been so much more exciting and interesting than I ever imagined," says Sawyer. "And that all has to do with choosing to do what I wanted rather than what was expected."

FALL 2014 JONES JOURNAL // 27

Faculty Perspectives

Why a decline in number of public firms?

is more uncertainty and in some ways they start from the beginning, but this is probably the most likely option in an industry that has fewer firms that can be acquired.

JJ: What are you currently researching?

Professor of Finance Gustavo Grullon discusses current trends in public markets. He primarily teaches mergers and acquisitions at the Jones School and his research covers a wide range of topics in empirical corporate finance, such as how firms determine their investment, financing and payout policies. His research has been featured in Financial Times, The New York Times and the Washington Post.

JJ: What are some of the trends you see in your research?

GG: Since the mid-’90s, the number of public firms in the U.S. has been declining from around 7500 to less than half that, raising the question: ‘why are we seeing this dramatic decline in the number of public firms?’ One explanation is that there has been a surge in M&A activity over the past two decades, and in some industries we see a huge decline in participants. The other thing happening, and this has been documented in a number of recent papers, is the number of initial public offerings is also declining. Looking back at the ’90s there was a big wave of IPOs, and now we don’t see that as much.

Some argue that this is driven by the increasing importance of private firms, especially after the approval of SarbanesOxley in 2002, which increased the cost of being a public company. However, if you look at the value of public firms relative to GDP or other measures of aggregate production, it’s at extremely high levels. This means it’s unlikely private firms are filling in the gap that public firms are leaving with regard to economic activity.

One of the main findings in my research is that the remaining firms operating in industries where there has been a 28 // JONES JOURNAL FALL 2014

decrease in the number of competitors are becoming more profitable. There are two potential reasons for this: either they are becoming more efficient because they are becoming bigger and can produce economies of scale, or they are generating market power – taking control of markets, and this allows them to charge higher prices to consumers. My research indicates that the second option seems to be what’s happening and because of market power, prices and profit for these fewer firms are going up. This may have huge public policy implications because the government is the one that allows mergers to happen, and now they are seeing that some of these mergers could affect consumers.

JJ: Could a decrease in target companies because of scarcity have an adverse effect on their revenue growth model?

GG: If they become one of the few competitors in their various industries, they could increase profitability by charging higher prices to their customers — essentially take advantage of their competitive position in the market. On the other hand, when there are no longer as many firms available to be acquired, they will need to grow organically. For some firms this is more costly than acquisitions because there

GG: I’m examining the impact of the decline in the number of public firms on their profitability and stock returns. I’m also working on a couple of papers that analyze how and why firms make investment decisions. We are finding that the number of firms doing most of the investment in the U.S. is pretty small, so investment is highly concentrated. For example, the top 100 firms in the U.S. make 60 percent of the aggregate investment.

This is surprising because we think of the U.S. as being a very competitive market. We then find that investment has been extremely concentrated since the 1970s. This has been going on for years and yet no one has looked at the economic consequences of this phenomenon. The research also shows that cash flows of a firm tend to affect investment decisions of large firms.

One theory is that if you are a public firm, your share price should reflect the market expectations of all future growth opportunities and nothing else should matter. Surprisingly, we find that cash flows significantly affect the investment behavior of large and mature firms. One of the main explanations of why cash flow matters is that it’s important for firms that are financially constrained — they likely only invest when they have cash to do so. What we find contradicts this explanation because our results show that the firms that are less financially constrained are the ones more sensitive to cash flows. We try to reconcile this with different theories and find that cash flow is very informative about future growth opportunities. Against common wisdom, stock prices appear to be less informative than cash flow in predicting future growth.

Faculty Perspectives

Looking to Implement Strategic Change?

Engage Your Employees.

People often respond with fear, cautiousness, denial or resistance when faced with a life-threatening illness or job loss. But resilient people seek an understanding beyond themselves and attribute these life changes to the will of a higher power or life’s plan. Doing so allows them to see some greater purpose or meaning in the challenge. They then begin to search for benefits that the challenge might have, for themselves or others.

This new positive narrative, the “silver lining,” often spurs resilient people to engage in actions that help themselves or others to positively adapt to this life-altering change.

change, a growing number of scholars has called for additional research to unpack the mechanisms behind how employees actually respond to change. With an understanding of these mechanisms, Sonenshein and Dholakia theorized that it might it be possible to connect with them to influence positive, engaged, collaborative employee response to change and more effective outcomes of strategic change implementation.

Interpretation of the change plays an important role in how people adapt to it and implement it, and managers are key in influencing employees’ interpretations.

Sonenshein and Dholakia’s research has

communicate with their co-workers and peers, they are more likely to discuss the change’s costs or negative outcomes. Helping employees connect with the purpose and benefits of the change provides them with certain psychological resources — commitment, identification and efficacy — that will inspire to see themselves as successful implementers of change, even going above and beyond to see it through. And continued managerial communication helps employees persist in making sense of and positively implementing the change, increasing the likelihood of success.

"Helping employees connect with the purpose and benefits of the change provides them with certain psychological resources — commitment, identification and efficacy — that will inspire to see themselves as successful."

Jones School Distinguished Associate Professor of Management Scott Sonenshein and Professor of Marketing Utpal Dholakia spotted the connections between people facing life changes and employees dealing with strategic change. The two looked to social psychological research on how people manage adverse life events and research on sensemaking to develop and test a theory about how front-line employees overcome the challenges of implementing strategic change.

Managers and researchers have often assumed that employees are simply resistant to change, and though a preponderance of research has emphasized a “resistance lens” when considering employee engagement with

discovered tools managers can use to more effectively engage employees in change implementation. Their framework — the meaning-making change adaption model (MCAM) — features three main components. Managers’ understanding of these and connection with them can help engage their employees in change implementation.

First, by effectively and consistently communicating the company’s vision for the change and its benefits, managers can help employees understand the rationale for it, connect to the greater purpose (strategy worldview) and make sense of it (benefits finding). Managerial communication also reduces the influence of collegial communication about the change, as when employees

Bottom line? Understanding the MCAM can help managers tap into the psychological mechanisms their employees need to become collaborators in implementing strategic change, rather than potential impediments.

Viewing front-line employees as allies in change implementation and beginning with clear communication of the company’s vision for the future are strong first steps.

For more information, see “Explaining Employee Engagement with Strategic Change Implementation: A Meaning-Making Approach,” by Scott Sonenshein and Utpal Dholakia in Organization Science.

FALL 2014 JONES JOURNAL // 29

Resources

Reunion Recap

Events OCTOBER 8

The Jones Graduate School of Business welcomed alumni for the first spring alumni reunion on April 25-26, 2014.

With Reunion Committee Chair Kathy Young ’04 at the leadership helm, volunteer-alumni Committee Members Sandra Bollich ’13, Mark Courtney ’94, Mark Davis ’89, Darren Lincoln ’04, David Martin ’04, Diego Molina ’09 and Patrick Van Pelt ’99 spearheaded planning efforts that resulted in a resoundingly successful first ever spring reunion.

To kick off the weekend of reunion festivities, JGSB alumni from the classes of 1984, 1989, 1994, 1999, 2004, 2009 and 2013 gathered Friday and Saturday evenings at venues around Houston, where happy hour soirees and dinners set the perfect tone for classmates to celebrate. The class of 1984 raised their glasses to their creation of the Class of 1984 Scholarship at the Jones School.

All eyes shifted to content Saturday morning, as intellectual capital took center stage. Rice MBA alumni from all classes visited McNair Hall for executive education sessions by distinguished faculty of the Jones School, including Prashant Kale, associate professor of strategic management, and Mike Grojean, adjunct professor in organizational behavior. A lunch and faculty panel highlighting research in 30 // JONES JOURNAL FALL 2014

the Jones School was moderated by K. Ramesh, Herbert S. Autrey Professor of Accounting and Deputy Dean of Academic Affairs. It featured panelists James Weston, professor of finance; Wagner Kamakura, Jesse H. Jones Professor of Marketing; and Scott Sonenshein, Jones School Distinguished Associate Professor of Management.

The weekend culminated with an especially festive dose of Jones School nostalgia and a Rice MBA signature event: the Partio! More than 600 Rice MBA alumni and their families gathered in McNair Hall’s Woodson Courtyard for a throwback-style party on the patio that set a school record for attendance. Music, games and children’s activities offered something for the little owls, while food, drink and good times were enjoyed by all.

Looking Ahead Building on momentum from a successful inaugural event, planning efforts are underway for the secondannual JGSB Alumni Spring Reunion, to be held April 24-25, 2015. All alumni are invited to participate in reunionweekend festivities, special events are organized for those class years celebrating a reunion year.

The April 2015 reunion will spotlight the classes of 1985, 1990, 1995, 2000, 2005, 2010 and 2014. Additional information and details surrounding the spring 2015 reunion will be released over the coming months.

To check out photos from the reunion, visit business.rice.edu/alumnifb.

Jones Partners Thought Leadership Series

6:00 pm McNair Hall K. Ramesh, Deupty Dean of Academic Affairs and Herbert S. Autrey Professor of Accounting, and Robert “Doug” Lawler, CEO and president of Chesapeake Energy Corporation, will present. business.rice.edu/ jonespartners

NOVEMBER 6

Jones Partners Thought Leadership Series

6:00 pm McNair Hall Yael Hochberg, Ralph S. O'Connor Associate Professor in Entrepreneurship and Academic Director, Rice Alliance, and Elliot S. Weissbluth, CEO of HighTower, will present. business.rice.edu/ jonespartners

NOVEMBER 14

Rice Energy Finance Summit

McNair Hall REFS brings together industry leaders to promote discussions on the most pertinent energy issues. This year, the summit explores the Global Impact of the North American Revival. business.rice.edu/refs

NOVEMBER 17

JGSB Alumni Partio

McNair Hall, Woodson Courtyard Join us for a party on the patio during homecoming weekend. events.rice.edu

Resources

The official Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Business page (Rice MBA) September 9 . Houston, TX

"What do you wish you had taken greater advantage of during your time at the Jones School?" Erin Felton, MBA FT ’16 Like . Comment . Share

Radost Mims ’11 The Jones School has excellent professors — I wish I'd spent more time with them asking questions, bouncing ideas off or discussing opportunities.

September 9 at 3:15pm . Like

Raj Puttaiah ’13 I wish I had spent more time in some of the clubs and tapped into the enormous resource pool.

September 9 at 8:14pm . Like

Diana Hua ’14 Like most MBA students, I went to business school to advance my career, and like some MBA students, I wanted to change industries. However, I wish I had taken the time early on to truly figure out exactly what I wanted — position-wise, industry-wise, even locationwise, both in the short-term and long-term — and the intersection of my skills, interests, and target function's/target industry's needs.

Ask the Alumni The Jones School is a place where students from all backgrounds can gain knowledge from a stellar faculty, but they aren’t the only people students look to for answers. Alumni have a vast amount of knowledge when it comes to navigating the path through business school, so before each issue, we will pose a question from a current student on our alumni group facebook page. Join the group and share your thoughts at business.rice.edu/alumnifb.

I thought two years was a long time to be able to explore. During my first year, it was easy to get overwhelmed and focused on the coursework and dabble in the extracurricular activities; during my second year, I could actually enjoy the coursework and the extracurricular activities. But two years flies by and the greater the change one is seeking, the more preparation that is needed.

In those two years, had I been more precise, I might have been able to acquire skills/connections that would ease the transition I am currently trying to make from utilities to consumer products, from Houston to Los Angeles. I wish I would've taken greater advantage of the JGSB network during my time at JGSB to expedite my exploration process because the more people to bounce ideas and avenues off of, the better. I got to know the people in my Professional Weekend program well, and even some people in the Professional Evening and Full-Time programs, but there were many more people that I didn't get to meet, work with, and just know.

The job search is so much easier when (1) you know more people and (2) you are specific — help people help you.

September 12 at 12:07pm . Like

FALL 2014 JONES JOURNAL // 31

Resources

JGSB Online

business.rice.edu

facebook.com/ricemba twitter.com/ricemba

Check out the detailed bios of all JGSAA 2014-15 officers and board members, including President Jay Hawthorn ’05 and President-Elect Phillip Brown '08. business.rice.edu/jgsaa_board

Did you know? You can see every elective available, register for Executive Education classes, search for alumni and check for upcoming Jones School events online. business.rice.edu

The Jones Corporate Investors Program provide corporations with many ways to become involved with the Jones School, tailoring each contribution to be the most productive and mutually rewarding for both the school and the investor. business.rice.edu/corporate_investors

Jones Partners open doors to partnership among Houston business leaders and Jones School communities. They also present a compelling speaker series, pairing JGSB professors with business leaders. This fall's schedule includes the topic "The Innovator Has No Clothes" with Yael Hochberg, Ralph S. O'Connor Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship, and Elliot S. Weissbluth, CEO, Hightower. business.rice.edu/jonespartners

The Rice MBA admissions blog has program information, admissions tips, Jones School news, as well as student and alumni bloggers sharing their experiences at the Jones School. riceMBAadmissions.com

From OwlSpark Pitch Day to faculty research, student and alumni stories, the homepage hosts a fresh rotation of articles each month. Click on News and Noteworthy to see what you’ve missed in the archives. business.rice.edu

Looking for Class Notes? We’ve moved them to our Facebook page! Join the alumni group, and check out the Class Notes Album to see up-to-the-minute alumni news, including all the baby photos you can handle. business.rice.edu/alumnifb 32 // JONES JOURNAL FALL 2014

Last Look

Mirror, 2011 by Jaume Plensa, Rice University campus. Photo by Jeff Fitlow.

“Never be afraid to sit awhile and think.”

– lorraine hansberry

NONPROFIT ORGANIZATION US POSTAGE

PAID

PERMIT #7549 HOUSTON, TEXAS

P.O. Box 2932 Houston, Texas 77252-2932

RECONNECT REFRESH REUNION

SAVE THE DATE

Spring 2015 April 24-25