But once she got in? Literally no stopping her. She watched the game live while texting with family. She immediately built out her queue of films and TV shows. It’s an example of how adopting new tech, even if intimidating, can be worth your while.

Today, we go over insights into adopting AI technology with Kellogg faculty. Then, Guy Aridor pulls back the curtain on Netflix’s recommendation system.

Automation, answers, and advice. Oh, my.

Business leaders are increasingly asking, how do we drive AI adoption across our organization? Adopting and advocating for any new technology has its pitfalls.

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Luckily, Kellogg professors and AI experts Matt Groh, Julio Ottino, and Brian Uzzi recently sat down for The Insightful Leader Live webinar to offer tips for using these tools more effectively on three levels.

First: automation. Think “set it and forget it” tasks, like scheduling social-media posts or sending email reminders. “AI can just do stuff for you without any supervision. And that’s often what many people think about,” says Groh.

In one success story, Groh points to the way Amazon uses AI for basic coding. “[Coding] would often take, let’s say, 50 days to do certain specific tasks. That goes to five hours [with AI]. And because that happens for many, many employees, they essentially estimate a quarter-billion-dollar annualized savings,” Groh says.

Next up: answers. Yes, AI seemingly can answer any question you throw at it, but you should still verify and reflect on each one. In other words, treat AI as a collaborator that can ideally widen your thinking. When Uzzi was researching a rebuild of his home’s foundation, he kept coming up short when discussing the project with contractors. So Uzzi turned to AI. “I basically gave a lot of textual information to a chatbot, and it came back with a detailed engineering estimate,” he says. “It was pretty close to what the engineer gave me two months later.”

And lastly: advice. Instead of deploying AI to expedite a process or fill in holes, now we can ask AI to help solve problems. But you have to ask the right questions. Take Groh’s research into how managers use AI to help them communicate difficult news, like layoffs. AI gives us a way to rehearse tricky conversations before they happen, while getting feedback to improve, which “can significantly increase people’s ability to communicate such that others feel heard,” Groh says.

For more, you can watch the full webinar or listen to a podcast version at Kellogg Insight.

The lure of Netflix

Like my mom with her adoption of HBO, my four-year old has taken to Netflix like a duck to water. And he’s in love with KPop Demon Hunters, the streamer’s now Academy Award–winning movie of 2025. But what exactly made it such a hit?

Was it the content itself? Or was it Netflix’s algorithm giving the movie a boost?

Guy Aridor developed a mathematical model that disentangles the influence of the platform’s recommendation service from the underlying value of the content. The model helps Netflix determine how many additional viewers different shows and movies attract and offers a data-driven perspective on which recommendation systems help the most.

Unsurprisingly, the current Netflix recommender beat alternatives such as random suggestions that show only the most-popular content. But the current system also performed best on another measure that Netflix values: increasing content diversity, or the overall variety of shows and movies that users watch.

“Research from other streaming platforms shows that more diverse consumption is strongly correlated with good long-run outcomes from a consumer-satisfaction point of view,” Aridor says. “So it’s important that the recommendation system isn’t just inducing people to all watch the same types of titles.”

The model also revealed that proven hits like Emily in Paris and Stranger Things don’t need much additional promotion and that obscure shows and movies don’t connect outside of very specific audiences. Instead, it’s the shows and movies in-between that get a lift from the recommendation system.

Read more in Kellogg Insight.

Blake Goble, marketing manager

Kellogg Insight

If there’s a word of the year for 2026 so far, it’s “uncertainty.” Sure, the same could be said for basically every year this decade. But in the last few months, the uncertainty has only intensified with conflict in the Middle East, worrisome economic data, AI disruptions, and air-travel chaos.

All this uncertainty makes it a stressful time to be a business leader. Today, we hear from Kellogg faculty Matthew Allen and Adam Waytz on dealing with uncertainty—and even embracing it.

Think in decades, not quarters

For many businesses, the future is measured in three-month increments. The quarterly reporting requirement for public companies means prioritizing consistent growth in the near term, lest you suffer a stock dip and a negative narrative shift.

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When your time horizon is that short, there’s little room to let disruptions settle and uncertainty abate. So as the stressful headlines stack up, Allen suggests borrowing the “secret weapon” of family-owned businesses: a long-term perspective.

“The point is not to minimize the importance of a business’s current conditions, especially when faced with pressing challenges,” writes Allen, John L. Ward Clinical Professor of Family Enterprises. “However, it is important to understand how a truly long-term view can help you focus on what matters most—the health and sustainability of your business and family—and use that to navigate the storms of the present more effectively.”

As an extreme example, Allen points to the Lee Kum Kee family, which began as a sauces and condiments merchant 138 years ago. In 2022, the business announced a 1,000-year vision for its portfolio, which today includes real estate, venture capital, and philanthropy.

Even if you’re building a less-ambitious long-term time frame, Allen suggests some essential ingredients. Invest in the future, including facilities, technology, equipment, and especially people. Promote purpose and values, because “focusing on and communicating what you value most will help you make decisions that take both current context and longer-term vision into account, for the benefit of all,” he writes.

Leaders should also consider deeper impacts beyond financial performance and focus on their legacy—what they will leave for future generations and how they hope to be remembered.

“Change and disruption are inevitable, and their pace is only accelerating,” writes Allen. “Taking a truly long-term perspective in these uncertain times will help you and your organization focus on what matters most.”

Read more at Inc., and learn more of Allen’s lessons from family businesses at Kellogg Insight.

The danger of certainty

Artificial intelligence technologies are compounding modern uncertainty by undercutting entire industries and putting many types of jobs at risk of replacement. But generative AI tools such as large language models (LLMs) also promise clarity by serving as “explanation generators,” writes Adam Waytz in Templeton Ideas.

Ask Claude or ChatGPT about medical issues or professional challenges, and it will provide a confident answer—though perhaps one with questionable facts or dubious wisdom. The sense of certainty these AI models provide may ultimately limit people’s intellectual curiosity and humility, proposes Waytz, the Morris and Alice Kaplan Professor of Ethics & Decision in Management.

“As LLMs ensure we rarely have to experience being wrong, uncertain, or baffled, we mistakenly feel we have no reason to doubt our own beliefs,” Waytz writes.

His proposal? People should increase their exposure to magic, which Waytz describes as “events that appear to defy physical or scientific causation.” Doing so can be as simple as resisting the urge to optimize every moment and seeking out experiences that resist easy explanation.

“Activities like taking a walk without a destination, talking to strangers, approaching the day without a to-do list, or intentionally reading books that interest us build more serendipity into our lives and critically remind us of the indeterminacy of the world,” Watyz writes.

Waytz also suggests people reduce their fear of uncertainty, taking inspiration from Zen Buddhism, Taoism, and other sacred and secular traditions.

“Across these traditions, treating ‘not knowing’ as an essential virtue becomes liberating, helping us to accept the limits of our own minds and bolstering our humility,” Waytz writes. “By embracing mystery in the face of technological mastery, we can regain intellectual humility that makes us more open to understanding each other.”

Read more in Templeton Ideas.

See you next week,

Rob Mitchum, editor in chief

Kellogg Insight

She is a case study in “leading up” the chain of command.

This week, Kellogg’s Harry Kraemer tells us how to do that in the corporate world.

Plus, what happens to a customer’s expectations when they’re kept waiting? They might just expect more, creating a vicious cycle of long wait times. We discuss research from Kellogg’s Achal Bassamboo.

Leading when you’re not the boss

Influencing up in an organization is never easy—you might worry you’ll be seen as insubordinate or stepping outside of the established hierarchy. Kraemer says there is a way to finesse your leadership up the chain of command, but you need to lay some groundwork first.

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It helps to start by honing your leadership skills with the people who report to you. Think about how you can support your team and how you’ll integrate input from those whose opinions differ from yours to develop a balanced perspective. These are the foundations of a good leader.

You can also lead in partnership with your peers. They don’t work for you, and you don’t work for them, but teaming up allows you to leverage your respective strengths to further the goals of the organization writ large.

“There’s no competition, no vying for attention from the senior leaders. Instead, you’re focused on finding ways that you and your team can help others, just as you are welcoming help from them,” Kraemer says.

Influencing your higher-ups builds on these strengths.

Let’s say your company is launching a new product in Europe, and senior leaders think the best place to start is the U.K. Your analysis suggests the French market is the stronger option, and you have genuine concerns about leadership’s direction. Before you say anything, you can tap your network of peers for perspective on product launches in Europe.

“This market intelligence may corroborate your boss’s plan, or it could convince you that you need to let your boss know what you’ve learned,” Kraemer says.

If your boss is an approachable person, you can meet to present your analysis and findings. Then you can wait to see what happens. But if your boss is very hierarchical, you can take an indirect approach and ask another senior leader to speak to your boss on your behalf.

Read more in Forbes.

The vicious cycle of long wait times

Whether it’s for a food order or a doctor’s appointment, “as customers wait in a queue, there comes a point when they eventually get so bored or frustrated that they leave,” says Achal Bassamboo, a Kellogg professor of operations.

But fixing the problem isn’t only about adding staff or speeding things up; customer behavior and expectations may also shape whether people join a line in the first place and whether they stick around.

Imagine, for example, a trendy ice-cream parlor with lines out the door. Every customer who gets in line has a certain amount of time they’ll wait before giving up. Those who do make it in the door, however, may feel entitled to celebrate their successful patience.

“When it’s your turn to get ice cream after standing for a long time, you feel that you have earned the right to taste more flavors,” Bassamboo says. “As I make you wait, you change your behavior.”

A series of studies from Bassamboo and colleagues sheds light on this phenomenon and how businesses can use it to optimize wait times.

One of their key findings is that how long customers have to wait for a service—their “patience clock”—is connected to how much time they end up spending on that service—their “service clock.”

Because of these dynamics, there’s often a key inflection point where short, well-behaved queues become unruly long queues—or vice versa.

And businesses should be able to address long waiting times with a relatively simple, temporary fix that gets them back below that crucial tipping point, rather than a major change to the waiting system.

“You can actually bring maybe someone from the back of the store to come and help bring the queue down very quickly so that the wait is reset,” Bassamboo says. “And once the wait is reset, everyone goes back to tasting one or two flavors rather than five flavors.”

Read more in Kellogg Insight.

See you next week,

Laura Pavin, multimedia editor

Kellogg Insight

It was said in jest, to be sure, but the idea that AI is coming for our jobs is a real and pressing concern—not just in Hollywood, but also in the minds of many business leaders today.

There is some good news, however. This week, Kellogg’s Benjamin F. Jones discusses how AI could actually benefit workers, even as it takes over people’s jobs. Plus, research by Kellogg’s Bryan Seegmiller and Dimitris Papanikolaou offers potential strategies that can help workers stay relevant amid the looming AI takeover.

Good news for workers

Faced with the prospect of being displaced, many people might root against AI. And that’s understandable. It’s only natural to assume that the more slowly AI progresses, the greater are our odds of staying competitive—and employed.

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“But, in evaluating AI’s implications for the workforce, it’s misleading to think of AI as simply a replacement for labor,” says Jones, a professor of strategy and co-director of the Ryan Institute on Complexity. “To complete the picture, we need to consider the fuller set of forces that are unleashed when machines automate types of work.”

First, consider how technology affects prices. History has shown time and time again that the better machines get at automating a task, the more it drives prices down for consumers. Computers, for example, have become so incredibly efficient at routine clerical work, from mathematical calculations to telephone operation, that many of the services they provide are now virtually free. That leaves us with a trade-off: as technology gets more productive, it replaces more human work, but it also brings down prices, ultimately benefitting consumers.

The second critical factor is the way new technology reinforces bottlenecks. As AI gets increasingly good at automating certain tasks, it will remain subpar at performing others. As a result, tasks that AI does not or cannot automate will end up receiving a large share of economic value, and the humans who do them will be paid well.

“According to this logic, successful automation does not eliminate the need for human work,” Jones says. “Rather, it shifts the demand for labor, concentrating value and wages in the parts of the economy where human time remains the limiting factor.”

Together, these two factors offer a more-nuanced, if not counterintuitive, perspective of AI’s effect on the labor market. The better AI gets at automating tasks, the lower prices will likely be for those services and the more employers will likely pay for the work that AI does not automate.

In other words, “the labor side of the economy will be far better off economically if AI is much, much better than humans at the jobs it replaces,” Jones says. “So, if AI is going to beat us at a task, let’s hope it beats us by a mile. Then, ironically, labor may yet win.”

Read more in AI Frontiers.

Taking advantage of AI

According to research by Seegmiller, Papanikolaou, and their colleagues, the jobs most at risk of having AI take over their tasks are white-collar occupations.

The researchers analyzed nearly 200 years of data on technological innovations and occupations. They found that, as the use of AI progresses in the workplace, relative demand for white-collar jobs declines, with blue-collar jobs picking up a larger share of workers.

That doesn’t necessarily mean white-collar workers should immediately switch to a profession that is less exposed to AI. But they should zero in on skills that AI can’t yet replace and take advantage of AI to perform better in other parts of their job, says Seegmiller, an assistant professor of finance.

For example, as AI automates some tasks, workers could focus on building skills that require a human touch, such as interpersonal communication, collaboration, and creative thinking.

Workers can also boost their productivity by using AI to perform simpler tasks for them. That might allow workers to “focus on the part where our added value is,” Seegmiller says. “Maybe that’s using these tools to become more productive at generating ideas or seeing the big picture.”

Read more in Kellogg Insight.

See you next week,

Abraham Kim, senior research editor

Kellogg Insight

When I attended the Kellogg Annual Technology Conference last month, the main subject of nearly every panel was, predictably, artificial intelligence. But most of the current excitement seemed to cluster around a particular flavor of AI: agents.

While understanding AI’s various applications can sometimes suffer from hype and exaggeration, agents are easier to grasp. Imagine a fleet of computerized interns, handling the tedious tasks while you spend your time doing more-thoughtful work. It’s appealing.

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This week, Kellogg’s Dashun Wang talks about the great potential—and unexpected challenges—of agentic AI for scientific research. His insights are applicable for business leaders tantalized by this new opportunity as well.

Plus, we look at what one Kellogg professor learned when he pitted his students against AI on a creative task.

Aeroplanes for the mind

Steve Jobs once described the computer as “a bicycle for our mind”—a tool that enables people to travel further and faster with less effort.

In an article for Nature, Wang proposes a different metaphor for agentic AI: aeroplanes for the mind. The change in transportation is meant to reflect the technology’s elevation of both risk and reward.

“[Agents] can speed things up for humans even more than bicycles do, but they are harder to control, and the consequences of mistakes can be huge,” says Wang, Kellogg Chair of Technology and a professor of management and organizations.

Wang highlights several lessons from his team’s construction of SciSciGPT, a suite of AI agents that supports research in the field of the science of science. The model performs many scientific tasks, from statistical analysis to data visualization, much more efficiently than do human researchers.

But with this added efficiency and speed comes a new appreciation for the role of humans in keeping AI accountable and transparent. “Fast science without reflection risks converging on mistakes at scale,” Wang says.

“When bicycles crash, the consequences are generally localized. Aeroplanes are different: when they crash, it can be catastrophic for everyone on board, often with collateral damage on the ground. That is the difference in scale that we face with AI agents.”

Wang’s recommendation is a “pilot-in-command” model, where the researcher is assisted by a crew of agents. That arrangement is about more than just trust; humans also bring the creative spark that often generates the biggest breakthroughs.

“In the long run, AI’s value will depend not just on how well agents perform but on how differently they ‘think’ from each other. Ultimately, just as our collaborators shape us, sometimes in profound and unexpected ways, so, too, will AI agents as partners in discovery.”

Read more in Nature and Kellogg Insight.

The machine plays the greatest hits

After a recent classroom experiment, Kellogg’s Brian Uzzi reached a similar conclusion to Wang’s.

“Creativity is a very human activity,” Uzzi says. “If you want a competitive advantage that builds on what makes you special, don’t ask a bot what to think; ask a bot how to think.”

Uzzi asked his students to complete a standard creativity test where a person has four minutes to come up with a list of ten words that are as different as possible from one another. They did it themselves first, then asked an AI bot to do it for them.

Though most students predicted they’d lose to the computerized competition, that didn’t happen. The class average matched the bot’s, and a few students beat the AI handily.

The result emphasizes a key limitation of today’s AI models: their tendency to produce unexceptional ideas instead of outliers.

“Human language has around 50,000 words, and that’s where all the separate human perspectives can be so powerful,” Uzzi says. “The machine plays the greatest hits, so to speak, over and over again—and it misses out on those gems.”

That middle-of-the-road approach may work well for some use cases, like when you’re trying to find the answer to a well-studied question. But for creativity and innovation, it’s better to treat AI as more of an advisor than an answer machine.

This framework can help organizations think about how to apply AI for business decisions. A director, for instance, might ask AI how to assess locations for a new factory. The system would outline the key factors to consider, and the director could then add their own knowledge before asking the bot for feedback.

Uzzi calls this kind of back-and-forth “the best kind of collaborative AI work.”

Read more in Kellogg Insight.

See you next week,

Rob Mitchum, editor in chief

Kellogg Insight

After my kid’s swim practice, we always have this dilemma: When do we leave? If he plays with teammates, we run the risk of overstaying and losing critical homework time. If we leave early, he misses out on fun and forming friendships that could last for years to come. Honestly, it can feel as serious as figuring out when to leave a job.

Departing too early carries risks, as does staying too long. So what’s the best way to keep an eye on your career (or my kid’s 50-yard backstroke) and keep everything on track?

This week, Kellogg’s Sanjay Khosla offers tips for getting your exit strategies just right.

Plus, we’ll discuss the power of delay in negotiations, according to eBay.

Clocking out

“Often individuals leave a company when it’s too late,” warns senior fellow and adjunct professor Sanjay Khosla.

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That’s why Khosla contends that people should start eying the exit when their time with a company has reached the equivalent of “5 to 12,” as he likes to say—and not when it’s 5 minutes past. In other words, recognize when a positive experience has peaked and you’re approaching diminishing returns.

Khosla identified three signs that you may have reached “5 to 12” in your current role.

For one, is your professional growth within an organization stalling? Khosla advises looking outside. Consider leaning on a network of people you know and trust—what Khosla calls a “circle of influence,” which could include colleagues and managers from both inside and outside your company.

Next, many people leave companies because they have terrible supervisors. When managers make unreasonable demands and take credit for your work, it can put a career clock at “5 to 12” fast. As hard as it can be to leave a place you may love, getting away from a horrible leader is worth it for the sake of your career growth.

Lastly, don’t risk getting too comfortable. Work that starts off rewarding can sometimes become mundane or even mindless. To grow your career, it is important to recognize when it is time to step out of your comfort zone and get excited about work again.

“Don’t wait for a crisis to force your hand,” Khosla says. “Try and take your career and your own path in your own hands as much as you can, as early as you can.”

Read more at Kellogg Insight.

Negotiation tips from eBay

Whether it’s buying used furniture on Facebook Marketplace or negotiating wages and contracts, bargaining is a fundamental part of doing business. But which strategies work best?

Historically, research has suggested time—or more specifically, how buyers and sellers delay in responding to offers—is a powerful bargaining tool.

Kellogg’s Caio Waisman and coauthors wanted to find out what really happens when buyers and sellers take longer than usual to respond while negotiating the price of a product. To do so, they studied one of the largest and earliest online marketplaces: eBay.

Waisman found that the longer a person took to respond to an offer or counteroffer, the less likely the other side was to continue negotiating. And this decision had different downstream effects for buyers and sellers. The more the seller delayed, the less likely the buyer was to buy the product. In contrast, the more the buyer delayed, the more likely the seller was to agree to sell the product at the buyer’s offered price.

These findings mirror the longstanding theory that delay is a signal of bargaining power. “Showing that people in a large, informal setting delay somewhat consistently with how theory suggests they would—that has value,” Waisman says.

Read more at Kellogg Insight.

Have a great week!

Blake Goble, marketing manager

Kellogg Insight

This week, Kellogg’s Harry Kraemer writes about the connection between values-based leadership and the performances of the U.S. athletes on snow and ice.

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Plus, we take a look at why leaders need to engage with influencer marketing.

Win or lose

Part of the allure of the Olympic games is the fact that athletes train and prepare for years, sacrificing and dedicating themselves to excellence for a single shot at the podium. But whether athletes win a medal or finish below expectations, they still have a lot to teach us about leadership, according to Kraemer, a clinical professor of management and organizations, in Forbes.

Kraemer viewed athletes’ performances—including their post-event interviews—through four lenses: self-reflection, perspective-taking, self-confidence, and humility.

Describing figure skater Ilia Malinin’s reaction to a disappointing long program, which dropped the skater from first to eighth in the final standings, Kraemer writes, “With more time to self-reflect after the Games, he will have the opportunity to master his emotions and come back even stronger. It’s the same for all of us. None of us performs our best every day or in every arena. Only in self-reflection can we ask ourselves, ‘Knowing what I did today, how will I behave tomorrow?’”

Keeping a balanced perspective when emotions are running high is also a key to successful leadership. Kraemer lauds the decision by ice-dancing silver medalists Madison Chock and Evan Bates and their governing body, U.S. Figure Skating, not to appeal the results of their contentious final round.

“With grace under pressure, Chock and Bates gave a gold-medal performance in fostering a balanced perspective that elevates them as values-based leaders in the sporting world.”

Win or lose, the common thread among these Olympians is staying focused on performance to set themselves up for success, even if it isn’t guaranteed, Kraemer says.

“No matter what challenges we face, all we can expect from ourselves is to do the right thing and do the best we can in the time we have.”

Read more in Forbes.

Influencer marketing is here to stay

The rise of social media has changed the landscape for business leaders on many levels. One of the biggest related developments is the prominence of influencer culture—and how it can be harnessed for brand marketing.

“TikTok changed everything,” according to Tim Calkins, a marketing professor at Kellogg. “We’ve lost trust in a lot of the traditional institutions, the traditional media outlets. And when that platform opened up back in 2018, that was the start.”

But it goes beyond TikTok. Calkins points to the segment’s growth—and its ability to more-closely track even niche trends—as reasons leaders should not discount the value of influencer marketing as a tool for developing trust and connection with customers. And since social-media influencers are often drivers of the online conversation, it makes sense for brands to actively engage with them.

“If you don’t, what happens is people are going to talk about your product and your service, but you will not be part of that discussion,” Calkins says. “And when it becomes time to make choices, people are going to be influenced by a world that you’re not in.”

The nimble, inexpensive, casual nature of influencer marketing—since you don’t need an agency or a complicated creative brief to get started—can help build trust and responsiveness for a brand’s offerings. The goal is to build content quickly and see what connects with audiences.

“Brands can then watch what’s happening with these different pieces of creative,” Calkins says. “They can see which ones are engaging, which ones have the right message, which ones are communicating the right way. Then brands can put money against and boost the most powerful of these creative ideas.”

Listen to The Insightful Leader podcast from Kellogg Insight.

See you next week,

Fred Schmalz, Business and Art Editor

Kellogg Insight

The fact that about a tenth of the best skaters in the world competing this year turned to the same coach for training speaks volumes about the importance of getting good mentorship —even if it means leaning on someone who cheers on your competition.

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This week, Kellogg’s Ellen Taaffe discusses why giving clear feedback is such a critical responsibility for leaders.

Plus, we hear from a seasoned viticulturist who offers advice to an aspiring winemaker.

Missed conversations

Whether it’s because they are afraid of hurting people’s feelings or of being perceived as too harsh, many leaders hesitate to give clear feedback to their mentees and team, says Taaffe, a clinical associate professor of management and organizations.

While such fears are certainly warranted, they often result in softened, generic messages—and, worse still, missed conversations.

“It may feel easier to give more general feedback, but it does nothing to help people grow, even when the intent is positive,” Taaffe says.

She adds that leaders are more likely to give vague and less-actionable feedback to women than men, leaving women with less access to the kind of concrete information necessary to improve their work and grow their careers. But leaders can buck this trend by committing to clarity when giving feedback.

“[Giving] specific, behavior-based feedback is not unkind,” Taaffe says. “It is one of the most practical ways leaders can support equity and enable real development.”

Read more on LinkedIn.

Letter to a young farmer

Mentorship can come in the form of advice from a supervisor to a team member but also in the sharing of wisdom from older generations to younger ones.

On the blog Salt of Portugal, Kellogg professor of finance Sergio Rebelo shares a letter from a veteran viticulturist to a young farmer offering clear and actionable advice about flourishing in the field of winemaking.

António Magalhães, in his letter, offers step-by-step guidance on how to manage a vineyard effectively—from reducing rain erosion by planting vines on successive, narrow, stepped platforms to planting certain grape varieties that will grow well in the region’s warming climate.

In addition to these practical measures, the mentor underscores core values that are crucial to excelling in their challenging field. As is the case in many professions, achieving success rests on the realization that the work “is a relay race,” he says. “You did not choose your starting point, and you will not see the finish line.”

On the one hand, that means having the humility and initiative to seek out and learn from those who have spent years treading the same path. On the other hand, it means operating in a way that ensures the work thrives far into the future.

Rebelo suggests that these lessons about “patience, humility, and trust in the slow ripening of ideas” could apply to early-career professionals trying to find their way not just in winemaking but across industries.

Read more in Rebelo’s blog.

See you next week,

Abraham Kim, senior research editor

Kellogg Insight

An important part of leadership is making tough decisions. That’s easy enough to understand in the abstract, but harder to execute when you suddenly find yourself in the midst of a tricky dilemma.

This week, we share advice from Kellogg’s Brooke Vuckovic on how to reach ethical decisions in those fraught situations. And we hear from marketing expert Timothy Calkins on the tough calls advertisers need to make before this year’s Super Bowl.

When both sides are right

Many work debates don’t fall neatly into a pattern where one side is clearly right and the other is obviously wrong. In these cases, the leader must make sure values stay centered in the conversation, says Vuckovic.

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“What interests me is when there are ethical and moral issues at play,” says Vuckovic, a clinical professor of leadership at the Kellogg School. “These decisions have implications for the values that the organization espouses, on how their clients or their employees are treated, and on how team members view themselves as agents of this organization.”

One strategy she offers is to reframe a debate between two individuals as a more-abstract tension between ideas—for example, short term versus long term or individual rights versus community responsibilities.

“If you start to describe it as a classic dilemma, it tends to cool things off a little bit,” Vuckovic says. “Those involved aren’t portrayed as loyal or disloyal; they’re simply embodying different types of loyalty.”

After the decision, leaders should be conscious of the “moral remainder”—the people who argued for the option that wasn’t chosen. And if time eventually reveals that a mistake was made, it’s critical to own that error, Vuckovic says.

“Those who can zoom out to constructively engage their team in dialog, connect across the organization to reduce their blind spots, and respond with transparency when they miscalculate can steadily build a reputation as leaders who can handle the thorniest of values-based decisions.”

Read more at Kellogg Insight, and hear Vuckovic talk about morally managing layoffs on The Insightful Leader podcast.

Avoiding a Super Bowl fumble

Marketers face hard decisions of their own this week as they prepare for the advertising event of the year: the Super Bowl.

At roughly $8 million per 30 seconds of air time, delivering a hit commercial during The Big Game is always a high-stakes endeavor. But in 2026, with American audiences anxious about economic stability and conflicts at home and abroad, advertisers walk an even thinner tightrope, writes Kellogg’s Timothy Calkins.

“The challenge for advertisers this year is simple: What is this moment? How is the country feeling? What are the themes that will resonate broadly?” says Calkins, a clinical professor of marketing. “Remember that more than 100 million people will watch the Super Bowl: liberals, conservatives, Republicans, and Democrats.”

While many advertisers will try to steer well clear of controversy, others may go with themes of patriotism and unity that have worked with consumers in the past. But given the current raw emotions, Calkins says that approach could fall flat.

“There is an opportunity to say something relevant and important, but a risk of appearing opportunistic and tone deaf,” Calkins says.

As the clock ticks down to Sunday, Calkins has two pieces of advice for Super Bowl advertisers. First, keep testing.

“Does the spot work in this new environment? Will a silly, funny spot still seem appropriate for such a serious moment? It is a good time to gather feedback from a wide range of people. Revisions might be necessary or even a completely new spot.”

Second, sacrifice the element of surprise and pre-release the ad to gauge public response before the main event.

“If there is a problem, an advertiser wants to figure that out before showing the ad to over 100 million people,” Calkins says. “More time means more options.”

Read more on LinkedIn. And be sure to tune in for the annual Super Bowl Ad Review with Calkins and professor Derek Rucker on February 9.

See you next week,

Rob Mitchum, editor in chief

Kellogg Insight

This week, read what leaders can do to help new teams connect and perform their best—or turn morale around if an established group starts showing metaphorical cracks in the dam.

Plus, finance research shows us how simple nudges can make a meaningful difference.

Smells like team spirit

When a team’s spirit is high, it can foster productivity and heighten performance. Kellogg professor Leigh Thompson offers research-backed strategies to help team leaders cultivate that spark.

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First, she suggests drafting a one-page charter stating your team’s principles. Define goals, assign responsibilities, and explain how everyone will work together. And make sure it’s written by the team, for the team, so that everyone knows what success looks like.

Next, apply greater structure and focus to your meetings. That can help prevent individual members from taking up too much time and draining the team’s energy. Give your team a “line of sight” as well.

“When people see a clear connection between their own ideas and how the team operates, their commitment deepens,” Thompson says.

Connecting individual ideas and operations with “brainwriting” and “speedstorming” can help make this happen. The former consists of every teammate pitching in shared ideas, which offsets dominant voices. The latter involves rotating pairs across teams to build ideas freely in organized fashion.

Thompson also points to the value of healthy conflict. Groupthink can stifle progress, so try to normalize disagreement to boost ideas over personal identity.

Lastly, celebrate wins and mourn losses as a team. Call out milestones and people’s accomplishments. These moments build trust. And if a setback occurs, speak openly. Leaders can ask two short questions to start the process: “What did we expect to happen?” and “What will we do differently next time?”

Read more from Thompson at Psyche.

Never underestimate a nudge

Unexpected expenses can cause serious damage. Nearly 40 percent of Americans have less than a month of income saved. A third of Americans have no emergency savings at all. However, help might be an email away.

A recent megastudy of nearly two million bank customers conducted in part by Kellogg’s Dean Karlan explored whether a reminder could make a meaningful difference. Researchers sent a variety of email nudges encouraging customers to save in case of an emergency.

They found that the email reminders increased the likelihood a customer would make a one-time savings deposit in a given month by 0.51 percent. Though the increase in deposits was relatively small on an individual level, it was large relative to the tiny cost of sending messages. Had each of the customers received the team’s top-performing email reminder, the study estimates that they could have collectively saved millions of dollars more over the study’s two-month run.

This look into light-touch interventions offers practical lessons not just for banks but the business community at large. And on a broader societal level, the study reinforces the importance of making saving a habit.

Read more at Kellogg Insight.

Have a great week!

Blake Goble, marketing manager

Kellogg Insight

From food drives to park cleanups to winter-coat donations, there are a lot of ways for us to contribute to our favorite charities. But is our desire to feel like we’re helping undermining our efforts?

This week, we look at new research into the relative effectiveness of cash versus time when considering charitable giving, and we discuss how leaders can encourage their teams to open their wallets in lieu of rolling up their sleeves.

Plus, we look at how to break cycles of misleadership.

Why you should encourage your team to give money over time

When considering where to direct our charitable giving, most of us are interested in getting the most bang for our buck, impact-wise. That often means choosing between making cash donations or volunteering our time to help our favorite causes. But according to research from Kellogg’s Rima Touré-Tillery and a colleague, while people generally prefer to donate their time, the two forms of giving are not equally effective.

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The reason people are more likely to donate their time is that they find it makes them feel as if they are giving more of themselves in the process.

“The result,” Touré-Tillery says, “is that people will choose to donate time instead of money, even if it is objectively less effective in the end.”

In their studies, the researchers tested people’s willingness to donate time and money. They found people were more likely to rate their donation as more impactful the closer they felt to it—and they generally felt their time was more valuable than their money.

“People want to make a difference, but their perception of what makes a difference is often biased,” Toure-Tillery says.

One lesson here for business leaders is that, when encouraging your teams to be generous and donate to their favorite charities, it is important to raise awareness about how they can be most helpful—even if their own feelings may need to take a back seat for the greater good.

Read more at Kellogg Insight.

Understanding the architecture of misleadership

What happens when you come across a problematic leadership style?

Philip Kotler, an emeritus professor of marketing at the Kellogg School, and Christian Sarkar recently wrote about “the architecture of misleadership” and the way a pattern of behavior they call “thugpower” gains traction.

The pair describe “thugpower” as occurring “when leadership stops protecting the common good and starts behaving like a protection racket.”

This kind of misleadership commonly presents as “strong leadership” and gradually evolves toward “an environment where legality is selective, truth is negotiable, and public life becomes stage-managed for intimidation.”

Sarkar and Kotler view this leadership behavior as cyclical—and ultimately destructive of institutions and the flow of knowledge in organizations. Their nine-step cycle, which they present in infographic form, illustrates how thugpower develops—from the personalization of authority to the stifling of criticism to demands for loyalty.

This model has implications for any organization where decisions and culture can be compromised by misleadership.

Read more here.

See you next week,

Fred Schmalz, business and art editor

Kellogg Insight

NASA wants to farm Mars.

The space agency just launched a competition to find ways to produce food on the planet, as it looks to send people there by the 2030s.

But you have to get there first—and it’s a three-year round-trip voyage. That’s a lot of time to spend in a confined space with other people.

Kellogg professors Leslie DeChurch and Noshir Contractor have been studying this challenge with NASA for more than a decade. This week, we examine the critical markers of effective teamwork that they developed for the agency to keep crews from falling apart; they’re applicable to teams on Earth, too.

Plus, we’ll discuss how we can tell a story that reflects the career we want.

An interplanetary handbook for effective teamwork

To help NASA assemble a team that could weather and survive such extreme conditions, DeChurch and Contractor collected a wealth of behavioral data from a dozen Earth-based simulations of long-term space missions that took place in Houston, Texas, and Moscow, Russia, between 2016 and 2020.

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The researchers then created computerized models that produced a set of best practices covering everything from leadership structures to relationship repair, while pointing out five critical markers of effective teamwork.

For example, there’s team viability, which is the ability to work together over and over again. Conflicts are inevitable, but the researchers found that one of the strongest ways to preserve relationships on a long-haul space mission is to pair crew members together to help them simmer down when they are getting on each other’s nerves. In a case where no personnel reshuffling is possible, even pairing the strained teammates on a new shared task can knit the relationship back together.

Leadership dynamics is another critical marker of effective teamwork. The ideal hierarchy, in these types of situations, is one where members can fluidly claim and cede authority.

“Roughly half of the people who join the astronaut corps come through the military, but the other half are scientists,” DeChurch says. “So one of the things that’s important in these space crews is that they let expertise drive who is influential. If I’m the mission commander, but Noshir has the best idea, Noshir steps forward and I step back.”

Read more in Kellogg Insight.

Focus on your story, not your résumé

Suzanne Muchin rues the day people started referring to their careers as “paths.” You know: you start at junior software engineer and work your way up to VP of engineering.

This expectation assumes all factors remain static: your interests, personal growth, and circumstances. Reality is far less linear, so we eventually outgrow the path.

“You do get to this moment where you ask yourself, am I mattering? Is there more?” Muchin says.

Breaking out of this box necessitates telling a new story that reflects the career you want, a strategy that can help align your actions with your interests. To do this, Muchin says, you need to be able to articulate—to yourself—the answer to one key question: What is mine to do?

Crucially, the answer has nothing to do with your title, she says.

“‘What is yours to do?’ has a lot to do with what you would do when you’re not being asked to do it. ‘What is yours to do?’ is the thing that, when you’re not being paid to do it, you do it anyway.”

Muchin’s answer, for example, is that she unleashes ideas that matter, so that they matter to more people. This understanding allowed her to craft a career that, to anyone else, would seem unmoored. At various times, she was a member of the founding team of a national teacher corps, a social-impact brand strategist, and a founder of an incubator for profit-generating impact ventures.

“I was always only one thing to me, and I was actually doing it wherever I went. Whether I was a professor, whether I was an entrepreneur, whether I was on the radio—I was always trying to unleash ideas that matter.”

Hear (or read!) more at Kellogg Insight.

See you next week,

Laura Pavin, multimedia editor

Kellogg Insight

The U.S. incursion into Venezuela is the latest in a series of global conflicts and wars that have marked the 2020s so far. Because of how common such embroilments have become, it’s increasingly critical for leaders to understand their long-term effects on society.

This week, we take a closer look at one area that suffers tremendously both during and in the aftermath of armed conflict: the economy.

Plus, what does it mean to be rational?

War, what is it good for?

While there are past studies that have looked at the impact of war on the economy, most have centered on a narrow number of wars, regions, or years.

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Efraim Benmelech, a Kellogg professor of finance who studies the economics of conflict and national security, sought to widen the scope of this prior work. He and a colleague analyzed 135 wars in the post–World War II era, from 1946 to 2023, and found that they led to severe and persistent negative effects on the economy of all 115 countries entangled in those conflicts—whether they were on the winning or losing side.

On average, real GDP fell by about 13 percent, with no evidence of recovery even a decade after the onset of war. Household consumption declined by about 11 percent. Investment in the countries’ structures, technology, and other areas collapsed, dropping by nearly 14 percent. And there was a significant decline in exports (roughly 13 percent) and imports (roughly 7 percent).

In response to these and other fiscal pressures, most countries resorted to issuing more currency, which exacerbated economic stress.

“Wars have been financed mostly through money printing and inflation,” Benmelech says. “And as we all know, inflation has some very adverse consequences for households.”

Indeed, price levels rose by nearly 50 percent on average and remained elevated for years after the start of a war. This not only raised costs and interest rates for people in the country but also further depressed investment.

Collectively, the findings make clear that the economic toll of war extends beyond the immediate costs of battle, leaving deep and lasting scars on the broader economy. Even 10 years after the onset of war, Benmelech says, “everyone seems to be losing.”

Read more in Kellogg Insight.

Different roles, equal value

When you think of a rational person, what comes to mind?

“If I were to ask people for the definition of ‘rational,’ most might say … we’re rational when we are competent and think in a very logical, straightforward, analytical way,” says Tessa Charlesworth, an assistant professor of management and organizations at Kellogg.

But when Charlesworth and her colleague studied how people actually talk about rationality—based on word embeddings of a massive collection of internet text—they realized that this definition only tells part of the story. People in the real world associated “rational” not only with words like logical and analytical, but also with words like responsible and trustworthy—attributing much more emotion to the term than previously expected.

Because it’s such a fundamental trait, the concept of rationality is bound to arise in the workplace, as in when companies discuss their values or the kind of employees to hire. It’s crucial in those moments for leaders to recognize that being rational is about more than just cold hard facts, Charlesworth says.

“The two different definitions of rational have different roles to play in society, but we’re seeing that both can be valued, both are important,” Charlesworth says. “So it’s critical to think about how to ensure that we are framing ourselves, our roles, and our companies in both ways.”

Read more in Kellogg Insight.

See you next week,

Abraham Kim, senior research editor

Kellogg Insight

It’s the last day of 2025, which means it’s time to lock in those resolutions for 2026. Like many of you, I’m hoping to exercise more, eat healthier, and spend more time with friends and family. And if there are any free hours left, I wouldn’t mind dusting off my guitar for the first time in a couple decades.

Yet in the harsh light of my weekly calendar, it’s hard to realize all those ambitions, and many may end up forgotten by February. Fortunately, two Kellogg faculty members offer advice on how to pull off your plan for the new year. Read on for their insights.

Budgeting out your 168 hours

Whether your 2026 resolution is to run a marathon, get a promotion, or learn an instrument, there’s one common challenge, says Harry Kraemer, a clinical professor of management and organizations, in Forbes:

“No matter what your profession is, where you live, how productive you are, or how much you multitask, you face the same time limit as everyone else: 168—the number of hours in a week.”

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So the first step in making an effective resolution is drawing up a budget, Kraemer says—not for money, but for time.

Sketch out how many hours you hope to spend each week on different activities: working, exercising, socializing, reading, sleeping, and so on. Make sure they add up to 168, and trim back if they don’t.

Then for the next few weeks, keep track of how many hours you actually spend on each activity.

“Faced with this reality of how you spend your 168, you may realize that in order to add hours to anything in the grid—for example, taking up meditation or learning a second language—you must subtract from something else,” Kraemer says.

Next, turn your wish list into an action plan. The key here is self-reflection: determining your priorities, setting realistic goals, and finding the support or motivation you need to follow through.

“Your New Year’s resolutions will only be words on paper unless you make them achievable and meaningful,” Kraemer says. “With greater self-awareness of both your priorities and how you currently spend your time, you’ll be able to set resolutions that are far more effective—and help you achieve what matters most to you.”

Leaving room for fun

As you’re filling out that weekly time budget, Kellogg Professor Ellen Taaffe suggests you hold space for an oft-neglected area: fun.

In the latest edition of her Swag-HER! newsletter, Taaffe writes about how “What do you do for fun?” can be an illuminating question when interviewing job candidates. But as the calendar flips over, it can also be a useful question to ask yourself.

“Somewhere along the line, ‘busyness’ became a badge of honor in our culture, a status symbol. The fuller the calendar, the more accomplished we must be … right?” writes Taaffe, a clinical associate professor of management and organizations. “Research tells us otherwise. It probably won’t surprise you to learn that chronic busyness is linked to increased stress, declining cognitive performance, and poorer overall health.”

Conversely, “research shows that those who schedule time for enjoyment and connection report better health and higher levels of life satisfaction—and I want that for myself (and all of you).”

In order to make more room for fun, Taaffe plans to let go of past behaviors, embrace discovery and uncertainty, and take note of what hobbies or activities energize her. And while she doesn’t set resolutions, she annually picks a meaningful word for the year ahead. This year, her word is “light.”

“It feels meaningful on many levels,” writes Taaffe. “I want to feel lighter to make space for more joy. I want to shed more light in service of others on topics that are often in the shadows. I want to lighten up on myself for more care, connection, and fun.”

Happy New Year!

Rob Mitchum, editor in chief

Kellogg Insight

There’s a bottomless pit of questions with which managers are contending while overseeing and implementing AI in a rapidly shifting environment. This week, Kellogg’s Hatim Rahman talks about how slowing down can be a benefit for your AI rollout.

Plus, we try to understand how big companies stay so … big.

Adjusting AI’s speed

As new tools and technology flood firms and upend workflows, leaders must learn to balance competing directives while making AI manageable.

Harvard Business Review interviewed 100 researchers and leaders to provide a framework for navigating common AI-related tensions, such as centralization vs. decentralization and top-down vs. bottom-up change.

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One such tension is the fast vs. slow dilemma. Leaders want to be seen as “doing AI,” and doing it fast has become a sign they’re doing it right. But faster isn’t always better. When leaders move quickly but don’t slow down enough to fix systems or understand new tech, a perilous gap can form between decision and implementation.

For an example, Rahman points to findings from his PhD student Jodie Koh on how AI is being introduced to improve access to medical diagnostics.

Training AI requires thousands upon thousands of ultrasound images. But clinicians are taught to minimize the number of images taken of each patient to save time and money. Imaging departments may lack incentives to implement AI tools, Rahman says, and their technicians may be concerned about performance monitoring, increased workloads, or job cuts. So forcing an abrupt AI transition without addressing these hurdles can doom a new project from the very beginning.

The AI framework suggests protecting “slow mode” instead of taking this fast approach. Build speed bumps like checkpoints, incubation periods, and reflection rituals into creative and strategic work. The key is knowing which parts of the process benefit from fast execution and which require the slow thinking and struggle that enable original ideas to reach their potential.

Read more in Harvard Business Review.

How big businesses get bigger

Economic theory predicts that as firms get bigger, it will be difficult for them to grow even larger.

So how have the Golden Arches of McDonald’s and other industry giants like Starbucks, Procter & Gamble, and Coca-Cola grown so much more quickly than competitors and stayed on top for so long?

Kellogg’s Sara Moreira investigated how these companies came to be so huge compared with other firms in the same product category. Through mathematical modeling and an analysis of the consumer-packaged-goods industry, Moreira found that a key factor propelling firms’ growth is standardization: the degree to which a company reuses components, knowledge, and relationships across different product lines and locations.

Take IKEA, which became famous for using similar parts and materials for various types of furniture. Similarly, Starbucks has relied on tried-and-true formulas for floor plans, menus, and barista training to efficiently open more locations.

As a result, standardization practices like these have become a kind of superpower, allowing fast growth and higher responsiveness to increased demand.

“When knowledge, investments, and inputs are potentially scalable, that can allow the firms to become bigger.” By reusing components and previously successful strategies, “it’s less costly to you,” Moreira says.

Read more about mega-firms and growing smaller ones at Kellogg Insight.

Have a great week!

Blake Goble, marketing manager

Kellogg Insight

This week, we hear from Kellogg’s Harry Kraemer about how leaders should rely on their teams and their networks to help them clarify their outlooks.

Plus, we look at how leadership succession plays out for luxury brands.

Cutting through the economic fog

While predicting the future always presents a challenge for business leaders, our current economic context makes forecasting even tougher.

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In a Forbes column, Kraemer offers a three-pronged approach to help leaders navigate the current economic crosswinds.

First, Kraemer recommends CEOs focus on empowering their teams to raise issues and provide advice on potential courses of action.

“During this time of confusion and economic uncertainty, the strength of the team becomes paramount,” he writes. “It’s particularly important for values-based leaders to surround themselves with people who are willing to speak up and, when necessary, respectfully voice their disagreement.”

Next, Kraemer recommends extending this openness to input and feedback beyond the C-suite to include all levels of the organization. Whether it’s sales reps in the field, customer-service team members, or supply-chain managers, those who are closest to the issues at hand likely have the best understanding of how to address them and how changes may impact the broader organization.

“A plan to improve efficiency and profitability in one area could have unintended consequences in another, such as our responsiveness to customers,” he writes.

Finally, effective forecasting also requires leaders to reach out beyond their organization to their own professional network for advice.

“The more uncertain things are, the more important it is to engage with as broad a group as possible,” Kraemer writes. “Whenever I want to explore an issue—from the impact of tariffs to how companies are implementing AI—I ask my network.”

Read more in Forbes.

A hard act to follow

For every new CEO, stepping into the role requires a certain amount of contending with their predecessor’s legacy. A beloved founder—or an unsuccessful one—may complicate their successor’s transition. But in the luxury industry, where the very brand name is often associated with an iconic figure like Georgio Armani or Enzo Ferrari, that shadow is even harder to avoid.

“Luxury brands are based on a particular creative vision,” says Kellogg professor of marketing Gregory Carpenter.

Unlike mass-market brands, which are built around consumer insights, luxury brands rely on the vision of their founder for their success. When that visionary steps aside, the company’s future can suffer unless they find a new creative direction that evolves in the spirit of the founder.

“One of the biggest problems for luxury brands is managing the evolution of their brand,” Carpenter says. “Most sort of run out of gas. … They become like a tribute band of their own.”

Carpenter notes that luxury brands often make one of two mistakes: pursuing growth by broadening their appeal or sticking to the familiar formula that built the brand. The approach luxury brands have found to be more successful involves sticking to the craft that made their brand special and understanding that the brand’s associations can be as powerful as its products.

“Armani’s great genius was to understand the power of celebrity,” Carpenter says. Those associations may make succession easier for the brand if its next director continues cultivating that exclusive community. But that alone won’t guarantee its success.

“The problem for Armani is, how do you find somebody who understands the brand and can create the future for that brand?” he says. “That’s really hard.”

Read more in Kellogg Insight.

See you next week,

Fred Schmalz, business and art editor

Kellogg Insight

Suffice it to say I’ve had to become very familiar with the words “I’m sorry,” though they aren’t always easy to eke out.

Humility is an important quality in a leader. This week, Kellogg’s Mohanbir Sawhney offers a primer on how, when, and why to say you’re sorry—and mean it.

Plus, we delve into research on how much boycotts affect a company’s bottom line.

The art of saying “I’m sorry”

“I’m sorry” can be a consequential phrase. Saying it can leave your ego vulnerable, change your leverage in future disagreements, and disrupt your sense of power.

Even so, it’s important to admit fault when you’re in the wrong. This is especially true for leaders hoping to earn back the trust of colleagues, teams, or customers after a misstep.

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“‘Sorry’ is not a request for instant forgiveness. The goal is not to erase what happened. It is to create conditions where trust can grow again,” Sawhney writes in a post on the topic.

He offers a few pointers for making effective apologies:

First, before offering any context for your mistake—which can be seen as you trying to shirk responsibility—start by acknowledging the hurt your actions caused.

Next, offer relevant repair, which can come in the form of truth, transparency, or restitution. Follow that by making one visible change that the other person can see. When tempers have cooled, circle back with the person to determine whether your actions have been sufficient or if further adjustments are needed.

“Closure is earned by follow-through,” he writes.

Finally, replace the word “but” with a period. “But” blunts the reality of the harm caused. So, instead of saying “I’m sorry I snapped, but I was stressed,” you’ll get more mileage with “I’m sorry I snapped. Here’s what I’ll do differently.”

Read or watch more on LinkedIn.

How effective are boycotts?

If ever there was a time for consumers to influence corporate behavior, it’s the holidays: a period upon which many companies rely to close out the year in the black.

Boycotts are a commonly used tactic for exerting that influence—and are common when reacting to political or social positions the companies or their leaders hold. But how effective are they, really? After all, for every internet campaign a person or group launches to boycott a company, another camp, supportive of that company’s position, may urge their followers to stage a “buycott.”

Business leaders want to understand how social-media outrage affects their bottom line, says

Anna Tuchman, a professor of marketing at Kellogg.

“While there have been a lot of boycotts in the past, there are more buycotts happening now,” she says.

To find out what really happens to consumer behavior—and sales—when a company finds itself in a political social-media storm, Tuchman and coauthors studied the experience of Latin-food purveyor Goya after CEO Robert Unanue made inflammatory remarks about immigration in July 2020.

The comments drew backlash in the form of a boycott, with the hashtags #Goyaway and #BoycottGoya trending on Twitter. Meanwhile, a #BuyGoya and #BuycottGoya countermovement picked up steam.

Tuchman and her coauthors found the buycott effect swamped the boycott action, and sales actually increased. But the impact evaporated in just a few weeks.

It’s a counterintuitive result, Tuchman says. Calls for a boycott often outnumber those voices who offer the company support on social media or in news articles. “In the absence of sales data, you’d think it’s probably catastrophic for the brand.”

Read more at Kellogg Insight.

See you next week,

Laura Pavin, multimedia editor

Kellogg Insight

As you spend your time this holiday weekend with friends and family, football, and maybe just a bit too much food, consider setting aside a morsel of time to reflect on the past year.

What has made you feel thankful? What has made you feel angst? What have you learned about yourself as a person and as a professional? And, if you’re ready to put on your philosopher’s hat, how has your purpose evolved?

To get you in the mood, we hear from Kellogg’s Nicholas Pearce on the importance of reflecting on your purpose as an individual and as a leader.

Plus, we discuss a potential conversation starter about politics and science for your holiday dinner.

Ask the deep questions

Figuring out your current purpose—or, as Pearce refers to it, your life’s work—is no easy feat. But a sound place to start is by asking yourself the fundamental questions, such as, “Who am I? Why am I here? Am I running the right race?”

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“Our life’s work is deeply connected with who we are and why we’re on the planet,” Pearce says in a podcast. “So, we have to start asking the deep questions of purpose and identity in order to get to life’s work.”

According to Pearce, your purpose boils down to what you currently feel most called to do—taking into account your preferences, values, and life situation—and the kind of impact you feel most called to make.

“It’s the work that we cannot not do,” he says, “the work that you are uniquely called to do in this moment and season in your life.”

For leaders, Pearce emphasizes that it’s also critical to inspire that sense of meaning and purpose across your organization.

“As leaders, we have a significant role—not in making purpose for people, but facilitating the realization of the purpose that our people are coming to us with,” he says. “And as organizational leaders, it is incumbent to not ask our people to leave that part of themselves in the parking lot, but rather to bring that part of themselves into the company, into our daily work … to be their authentic, fully present selves.”

Listen to more from Pearce in an episode of HBR On Leadership.

Who funds science?

Talking about politics over Thanksgiving may be dangerous territory in some households. But if that’s not the case for you, consider this conversation starter.

There’s a presumption in the U.S. that Democrats generally stand behind science, whereas Republicans tend to be more skeptical of its worth.

Yet after analyzing 40 years of data on federal funding for science research under Republican or Democratic leadership, a team led by Kellogg research assistant professor Alexander Furnas and Dashun Wang, the Kellogg Chair of Technology and a professor of management and organizations, found a different result. In fact, the U.S. government provided more funding for science and research under Republican presidencies or when the Republican party was in control of the House of Representatives.

And Republicans’ greater financial commitment to science was not simply a result of targeted spending for agencies like the Department of Defense. Republican lawmakers in the House of Representatives funneled more money toward science research in the CDC, NASA, NIH, and NSF, for instance, than did Democratic lawmakers. And the proportion of funds that Republicans distributed to different areas of science research was relatively similar to the distribution under Democrats.

The data emphasizes that, despite recent cost-cutting at American scientific agencies, U.S. political parties have typically agreed on science funding as a national priority.

“What’s happening right now is a really strong break from the historically strong bipartisan and robust Republican investment in science that has fueled an incredible amount of innovation and economic growth,” Furnas says. “A departure from that could threaten that prosperity.”

Read more in Kellogg Insight.

See you next week,

Abraham Kim, senior research editor

Kellogg Insight

While the U.S. declined to send a delegation to this month’s COP30 climate summit in Brazil, many of the world’s countries remain committed to lowering carbon emissions. American businesses find themselves stuck in the middle of these competing priorities, wondering what to do with their green initiatives and products.

Today, we feature two recent Kellogg Insight stories about sustainability efforts—where they have fallen short and how consumers feel better than ever about green-product options at the store.

Why “net zero” has fallen short

In times when sustainability was more in political favor, many U.S. companies committed to net-zero goals—an ambitious promise to reduce their carbon emissions dramatically by a target date.

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But when Aaron Yoon, an associate professor of accounting and information management, and colleagues looked at data on environmental initiatives at hundreds of American companies in the 2010s, they found the companies focused mostly on small and short-term solutions.

Across nearly 10,000 projects, the median investment was only $127,000—far short of the millions needed to truly help a company hit its carbon goals. Overall, firms’ total annual investment in emission-reducing projects amounted to less than 1 percent of their previous year’s profit.

“Contrary to popular belief, firms’ emission-reduction initiatives are not focused on the long term,” Yoon says. “It’s generally the very quick-and-dirty type of stuff.”

In fact, about three-quarters of projects fell into the category of energy efficiency in buildings or production, usually related to lighting projects such as LED upgrades. For the most part, these types of projects offered companies affordable and immediate carbon savings and were expected to generate more cash flow.

“From a financial perspective, short-term payback projects are much more attractive, especially given that most CEOs are worried about the next year’s return,” Yoon says.

The researchers found that the optimal mix for companies to reach net zero would be 48 percent short-term and 52 percent long-term projects. But reaching that balance will require more sacrifices from companies, investors, and consumers.

“How much are we willing to forgo? And do we have the right incentives in place to encourage firm managers to take on projects that could lead us to net zero?” Yoon says. “Those are the big questions that we have to ask ourselves.”

Read more at Kellogg Insight.

Green but good

Today, it’s easy to find an eco-friendly alternative to almost every consumer product, from dish soap to toothpaste. For a long time, consumers viewed these green products as a trade-off: better for the environment but lower quality.

Researchers call this phenomenon the “sustainability liability.” But a new paper, coauthored by Kellogg professors Alexander Chernev and Ulf Bockenholt, found that customers may no longer hold this belief.

The researchers presented 3,342 participants with scenarios and questions about ten types of hypothetical products, including mouthwash, all-purpose cleaners, hand sanitizer, and a set of car tires. Some were told the product was eco-friendly, while others were not. Then they were asked to rate each product for perceived effectiveness.

Instead of bias against green products, the research team found negligible differences. Even during the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, consumers showed no preference for standard sanitizers over eco-friendly alternatives.

“The sustainability-liability intuition might not be as strong as one might have thought,” Chernev says.

A second study on what words people associate with terms such as “ecological” and “recycled” found closer associations with positive descriptions, like “efficient” and “reliable,” than with those that imply negative performance, such as “fragile” or “ineffective.”

The findings may calm companies’ concerns about investing in eco-friendly technology and rolling out green products. While individual purchasing decisions might not seem significant, customers’ choices ultimately shape corporate actions. “This is what drives companies’ behavior,” Chernev says.

Read more at Kellogg Insight.

See you next week,

Rob Mitchum, editor in chief
Kellogg Insight

For working families, it’s always a game of choices: attend an 8 a.m. Zoom call or take the kids to school; go out of town for a conference or wait at home for yet another delayed UPS package.

A new study from Kellogg’s Benjamin Friedrich offers a glimpse into the impact behind these kinds of decisions, especially on the careers of working mothers.

This week, we’ll look at the stubbornness of the gender gap and what employees could do to help. Plus, we’ll hear whether every firm needs a chief AI officer.

A game of life

In 2015, women held 37 percent of corporate-manager jobs; by 2024, the number had only increased to 39 percent. Other data suggest that firms are still investing more resources into hiring and promoting men than women for leadership positions.

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Kellogg’s Benjamin Friedrich and coauthors developed a model from 25 years of data on domestic partnerships and employment trajectories to study how household and company decisions drive this persistent phenomenon. Friedrich looked at the choices made by men and women (which career paths to choose, whether to get married, or whether to start a family), the signals that these decisions sent to companies, and how those firms responded.

They found a feedback loop that replicated the real-world gender gap. When women with management potential make the decision to pull back on work, companies put more-available men on the management track instead—even when both are equally qualified. The companies’ decision, in turn, sends a signal back to households that they can best maximize their own collective earning potential by prioritizing a man’s career.

“Not everyone can become a manager, so [firms] need to pick and choose who to invest in,” Friedrich says. “This is an expensive investment that involves high-profile assignments and mentoring, so the firm is thinking about who will provide the highest potential return on that training.”

However, Friedrich’s research identified the potential for two policies to break the cycle: a quota system requiring firms to give an equal number of men and women management positions and a mandatory parental-leave policy.

Read more at Kellogg Insight.

Need a chief AI officer?

Since ChatGPT’s debut, businesses have raced to adopt artificial intelligence into workflows and understand AI expertise in leadership. Enter the chief AI officer, or CAIO. But does every firm need one? Former head of AI at Uber and current Kellogg professor Birju Shah says it depends.

“A majority of businesses all the way up to the Fortune 500 need to either train or change their current executives to gain AI capability, but that doesn’t necessarily mean creating a chief AI officer position,” Shah says. There are three questions to check if a CAIO’s needed, he suggests.

First, do you have a million customers? “If you have under a million-customer scale, it’s easier and cheaper just to have humans handle it. If you’re over a million-customer scale, things get more nuanced,” says Shah.

Second, are you offering the same products to everyone or moving into personalization? If the answer’s the latter, AI will be fundamental. Consider Netflix’s ascent to gold-standard status for understanding consumers with machine-learning-based recommendations.

Third, do you have the resources and expertise in place to implement AI? Shah recommends having people already in place with math skills, bioinformatics backgrounds, and other qualities that could support the CAIO.

Surpassed these thresholds? Congratulations, and best of luck on the search. Now, figure out how to structure the role and how to optimize AI investments long term with Shah at Kellogg Insight.

Have a great week!

Blake Goble, marketing manager
Kellogg Insight