96: Bukky Oyedeji. How ambience, spatial configuration and aesthetics unlock strategic human capital

Professor Luiz Mesquita has done it all as a businessperson and a scholar. He’s a Brazilian who has lived all around the world, including now in Arizona, where he teaches a course on awakening your entrepreneurial mindset. In this fascinating conversation, he describes the successive deepening over the phases of his career of understanding of what makes businesses contribute to their communities. His landing point is that the strength of our emotional and social connections is right at the center of what makes an organization great. And that’s true of multinationals, family firms, governmental agencies, and entrepreneurial organizations around the world. You build these relationships by doing big things, like traveling the world and starting businesses and trusting people. Luiz sees greatness in bringing passion to the work you do with your closest friends.

Professor Trevor Young-Hyman is a sociologist and professor of business administration who studies democracy within and about hierarchies. He is deeply interested in how the sharing of power across a field of stakeholders can benefit organizations despite the short-term coordination and power-sharing consequences. What he finds in his empirical studies is that organizations overcome the costs over time by learning and adapting, and that residual costs are offset by the benefits of stakeholder investments in the firm. In the end, decentralizing is not so fragile. Your stakeholderslearn and interact in ways that support distributed decisions that are remarkably value-creating.

Professor Carol Kulik is renowned for her scholarly research on workplace excellence. She talks with Anita about how she began her career in thinking about employee-center topics such as job design, employee experience, and motivation. As her interests turned toward understanding the structures that employees create, and how they benefit the employer as wellas the employee, she began to appreciate just how baked-in structural problems could become. Her massive body of workon DEI, the gender pay gap, and mature-age workers have led her to a range of insights on the silver linings that arise as stakeholders demand change. She is now thinking about how AI can be deployed by line managers to reshape jobs to make them even more meaningful for employees and efficient for employers. But getting this right is not assured. We need to focus intently to make this happen.

Professor Amisha Miller studies how our prevailing systems for accelerating entrepreneurs and for making investment decisions leads to bad outcomes, like gender disparities and wasted time and heartbreaking refusals. Our systems arewell-designed, she argues, to support stars. But what about all the rest of us? In this interview, she talks with Anita about how difficult it is for entrepreneurs to implement the advice they receive, for example. At the same time, investors that seek to reduce gender disparities often narrow their attention to so few candidates by category that they can’t discern which candidates may perform best. There are solutions to these problems, argues Amisha, if you understand them fully.

Professor Britta Glennon is a superstar scholar of innovation who focuses specifically on the role of immigration in the development of important insights. Among many other accomplishments, she has testified before the US Senateand cited in Congressional testimony. In this talk with Anita, she describes the massively important and central role of immigrants in driving innovation in the U.S., China, andelsewhere. The knowledge held in the minds of skilled immigrants is so important that, if companies are restrictedin hiring immigrants, they may move their hiring into other countries. The great risk that comes with restrictive immigration policy is that great innovating countries, including especially the US, fall far behind in areas of critical science.